The misguided whim of ‘reclaiming the streets’
Barcelona is a great city and I’m sure the visiting Barcelona urban ecologist, Salvador Rueda, is a great guy. He’s the brains behind Barcelona’s superblocks, which have reconfigured vast tracts of the city into 600 metres by 600 metre people-centric neighbourhood blocks, curbing car movements to little more than fleeting pick-ups and drop-offs.
But I’m struggling to understand the applicability of these Catalonian superblocks to Christchurch. Greater Barcelona is home to 6 million residents and plays host to 10m tourists annually.
Such a high-density metropolis, with one of Europe’s least affordable rental housing markets, is hardly a useful reference point for enhancing urban living in Christchurch.
The subsequent theory of Christchurch crafting a superblock bounded by the Avon River to the west and Manchester St to the east, stretching from Armagh
St to Lichfield St, is not just fanciful, but it would mark a gross betrayal of the An Accessible City plan, post-quake.
Unsurprisingly, Salvador Rueda swooned over the experimental makeover of Gloucester St as “magnificent” and “gorgeous”. Public consultation on the $1.4m Meet Me in Gloucester trial closes next week.
Forgive my cynicism, but was it just a coincidence that Friday’s Morning People street party was staged just 10 days out from the end of the official trial, as a calculated ploy to try to embellish the council’s consultation exercise with a late flood of positive submissions?
The event was sponsored by the everso-benevolent ratepayer and the council’s senior engagement advisor, Hannah Ballantyne, freely admitted to The Press that it “would be sending a survey out to party attendees to get feedback”.
Credit where’s its due – even though it was a paid-for council event, Friday’s street party is the only time I have noticed any true spirit rear its head in Gloucester St since this trial commenced in December.
However, Christchurch isn’t exactly short of agreeable public spaces for morning raves, without needing to shut down a street. We have more than 1100 parks and reserves, let alone the numerous public haunts throughout the city centre, from City Mall and Cathedral Square to Evolution Square and The Commons (which continues to look like a dishevelled gypsy camp, 13 years after the quakes.)
Given that, where is the need for Christchurch to roll over to this trending whim of “adaptive urbanism” and “reclaiming the streets”? Ninety per cent of the capital costs for the Meet Me in Gloucester trial were met by the New Zealand Transport Agency’s Streets for People programme. That $30m fund has been exhausted and the new Government won’t be renewing it.
But alongside the Gloucester St experiment, another $1m in capital costs has been sprayed like confetti on a cluster of streets in Aranui, to make them more people-friendly and safer for cyclists and pedestrians.
Prior to this roll-out, emphatic community opposition torpedoed the council’s desires to rip out 109 roadside car parks for a cycleway on Breezes Rd. And this feisty neighbourhood will certainly make its views known on the latest makeover, focused around Hampshire St. Consultation commences next week.
Over the weekend, I took a drive around the Aranui streets caught up in this caper, where an overdose of traffic-calming measures has turned the neighbourhood into a million-dollar obstacle course.
Painted planter boxes have been plonked outside the shops to deter people from parking on the footpath. A battery of bollards and speed humps has been rolled out across the neighbourhood, including extending out the footpaths, resulting in absurdly tight corner-turning.
Frankly, I have no issue with speed humps on quiet, narrow suburban roads – but they have no place on main roads, which is what the new Government is pleasingly defunding.
The most bewildering instalment is the sequence of bollards that has blocked people from parking in the dedicated parking bays alongside Wainoni Park. That’s arousing universal ridicule.
Burwood ward councillor Kelly Barber, says some elements of the trial are “demeaning to local residents”, treating them like drongos – particularly the bollards.
Burwood ward community board member Greg Mitchell concurs, describing the Wainoni Park bollards as “a horrible option” and he’s equally concerned about the dangerously tight corner-turning.
Targeted, tactical traffic-calming measures are fine. But frittering over $1m on a temporary “streets for people” trial is profligate folly.
Mike Yardley is a Christchurch-based writer on current affairs and travel