In a similar vein to the post I made a couple of days ago, Brian Rudman has written an excellent article in today’s Herald about how little Auckland seems to care about its pedestrians:
What about the walkers? A few days ago, the blueprint for the Auckland Transport Agency was unveiled. This is the $1 billion-a-year organisation that will preside over the new Super City’s roads, footpaths and public transport networks.
The document contains three pages of charts and lists, itemising involvement in everything from road maintenance and parking enforcement to railway station surveillance and rolling stock asset management. But there’s not a word about pedestrians.
Given that practically every one of us, if only for the quick dash down the road at lunchtime for a sandwich, is a walker, it’s a glaring omission. But perhaps not unexpected, given the new master-plan seems covered in the DNA of the very traffic engineers who, over the past 50 years, have made Auckland the car-centred hellhole it is.
I could not agree more. Come on, we need to do better than this!
Processing...
It simple, cheap and would massively add to the attractiveness of the CBD… So of course we don’t do it… Ha Ha…
Returning to live in Auckland following seven years in Seattle it was incredibly disappointing to find the disdain that pedestrians are treated with here in Auckland in comparison. It seems a sad indictment that the US makes New Zealand look regressive with respect to the ability to walk around our cities.
Does Auckland City Council have a dedicated staff member who has responsibility for maintaining and improving pedestrian access within the city? If not, why not? Surely this would be (as noted above) relatively cheap and high payoff – the ‘low hanging fruit’ of traffic planning in the city?