The Hated Pedestrian

Today Leila and I ventured out to Wairau Park, on Auckland’s North Shore, to get a TV cabinet. We’ve been in our new place now for about five weeks, but up until now the TV has lived on a cardboard box and the DVD player has been on the kitchen bench! Not a particularly good state of affairs, so we set off to the home of big-box retail: Auckland’s North Shore.

Wairau Park is a strange beast. There’s not really a park anywhere to be seen, unless you count the stormwater pond that someone has tried really hard to turn into something resembling a natural lake. It sits alongside the Northern Motorway, squeezed between the motorway and Wairau Road. I remember in the late 1980s and early 1990s the area developing into the kind of place you only ever went when your parents were looking for some piece of new furniture – even if that somehow managed to happen fairly frequently. Looking at the place now, it seems to have not really had much of a plan in the way it developed, especially as the main access from the motorway is a one-way lane and was added years after most of the area was built. Anyway, there’s an aerial photo of the area shown below:

Now the interesting thing here to note is that while there is definitely a mass of parking provided, there is no giant carpark. Everything is spread out around the place, with each big box store pretty much taking care of their own parking needs. The place is pretty much off the radar with regards to public transport (even though the Sunnynook busway station isn’t very far away at all on the other side of the motorway) so it’s built around the car.

I’m fairly used to such situations though. Go to any shopping mall and you realise the amount of floorspace in the mall is probably barely half the amount of floor space taken up by the parking areas surrounding the mall. So effectively when you buy something at a mall the rent-portion of the price you pay is as much paying for car-parking (whether or not you drove there) as it is for the shop itself. But leaving aside that for a minute, at least when you got to a mall you only have to park once. The insides of malls are actually pretty pedestrian friendly – obviously as there are no cars inside malls (for now). Compare this with a place like Wairau Park, which actually forces you to head back to your car after each shop, pull out of the parking space you were in, drive 50m up the road and parking again outside the next store. Leila and I tried to avoid such stupidity, by parking at the Harvey Norman (near bottom of picture) and wandering all the way up to Freedom Furniture and Forehomes (where we eventually found a very nice TV cabinet, FYI). With barely a footpath in many places, and definitely no assistance for pedestrians trying to fight their way across the busy roads and many entrances and exits from stores, the place most definitely had a “Cars Welcome, Pedestrians Fuck off” feel about it. Eventually I had to run back to the car and get it, so we could squeeze the TV cabinet in the back.

Looking at the way Wairau Park is layed out now, it’s clear that it’s too far gone and there’s no way it could ever be fixed. Planners of big-box retail areas seem to have somewhat learned from their mistakes, and more recent retail areas that are somewhat similar, like the Albany Megacentre just up the road, have a main communal parking area and then at least make an attempt to provide for pedestrians to visit more than one store each time they get out of their cars. But unfortunately their pedestrian friendliness still leaves an awful lot to be desired. The roundabouts of the future Albany Town Centre do not feel pedestrian friendly in any way at all. The street layout is a bizarre mix of circles and semi-circles which does nothing but confuse people, and the one half-decent thing that has been done around Albany – the busway and its station – are located in the middle of nowhere. One almost has to beat a path cross-country to get from the bus station to the mall.

But, I guess at least it’s not as bad as Wairau Park. What low standards we have.