It should be a fairly easy one to guess. Perhaps the better question is “how could we let this happen?” This intersection should be the focal point for a great town centre, but instead we have 10 lane wide roads, surrounded by more roads and then a bunch of carparks.
Until we stop building this kind of crap, I fear we will struggle to make Auckland a better city.
Processing...
I couldn’t find Wally anywhere there 🙂
Except for the wally who designed it.
I bet this still gets congested…. Using cars like they do out there wastes everyones time, money, and takes up a massive amount of space in the process.
The good news is that when someone eventually sorts all this out in the future, 90% of the land is effectively unused, so a complete reconfiguration with, for example, a massive train station at a flexible location and a huge amount of development could be done with little disruption or cost (assuming they don’t start stacking the cars in parking buildings to free up some land)
Looking at that I’m guessing the corner of Te Irirangi and Te Rakau Dr’s in Botany?
And its not really where’s Wally, more where’s the buildings?
When I first drove there in 1998, it was all paddocks, and the roads were narrow two lane ones with the odd farm house along the way. Since then, some 50,000 people have moved in to those paddocks (the size of a provincial city) without any alternative to roads.
The sad fact is that their are people out there who would think this was totally awesome. I once spoke to a colleague who lived in the CBD of all places who would get into her car and drive to a suburban shopping centre (sometimes as far away as Botany) because she didn’t like walking the 200 metres or so to Queen Street. Needless to say I am glad to have the income to live in an inner suburb.
Why do I wonder if she was rather rotund?
That is seriously the height of laziness.
Strangely no. She was quite happy to use the gym in her building. She just didn’t like walking outside.
Try and go shopping there on a Saturday and you have to factor in an extra half hour to negotiate traffic signals, queues and everyone’s favourite weekend pastime – hunting for the one remaining car parking space. Then once you’re out of the car (after circling the car park 4 times) you get to play AVOID BEING KILLED (advanced level players should take 2 toddlers with them) by errant drivers or traffic fumes on your intrepid adventure to the safety of the mall.
As Botany Town Centre’s website says: “easily accessible by car”!
Mmmh, beautiful 😉 9-lane roads (plus wide flush medians), fast speedy free left turns, huge open verges…
Okay, yes, some people would think it would be a lot more beautiful with a light rail line instead of the two centre lanes each. But that’s just not going to work, because Aucklanders like to drive cars.
I ride through there occasionally to get elsewhere (mainly the road out to Whitford/Maraetai) as even though its shocking its safer to ride on than Pakuranga Highway will ever be.
Just as a FYI the turn lanes on Te Irirangi coming from Pakuranga (lefthand side of pic) turning into Botany Rd are at least controlled by lights although non of the other free turn lanes have any form of signalling except the usual give way.
Albany “Mega-centre” except they haven’t bothered with footpaths.
My initial thought for “where is this” was that it might be Dallas or somewhere similar. But then a closer look showed the cars driving on the left hand side of the road. I had to read the comments to find the answer.
I’ve never shopped there. Do people walk from shop to shop across the traffic no mans land, or do they drive? It is a brutal looking place.
I guess we can be thankful that only East Auckland and parts of the North Shore are this bad… At least we don’t live in Phoenix, Arizona…
Is it Botany, or Albany, or Manukau or Westgate or Sylvia Park (where is the park exactly?)… the outskirts of the airport even?
Jezza, I don’t think Auckland has escaped too lightly. Sure it’s no Phoenix but this disease has spread throughout the city.
It is Botany Town Centre, but your’re right Nick that it could be any of those other places.
It happened because when it was built there was little or no PT and MCC just issued a resource consent based on the developers’ wishes. If they had declined the consent it would have involved very expensive litigation, paid for by the ratepayers.
“As Botany Town Centre’s website says: “easily accessible by car”!”
Yeah right – you just end up driving around in ever decreasing circles trying to find a park!
Thats what happens when ‘town planning’ is reduced to ‘assisting property developers to make as much money as they can while the taxpayer picks up the tab for infrstructure and sevices’.
Yay neo-liberalism!
@Nick, large areas of the isthmus, out west and south around train stations, Onehunga and on the North Shore isthmus are still very PT and walkable friendly… Post peak oil I think we can expect population and PT to focus on these areas and some of the disasterous subirbs reverting back to farming with many of these roads hopefully removed…
Places like Las Vegas and Phoenix even some Australian cities which are totally based on trucking, piping or transmitting huge amounts of power food, gas and water via cheap fuel prices are ****ed… On that count we can consider ourselves lucky…
Assuming a “CRASH” peak fuel scenario lasting multiple years or decades, the ones who are really in trouble in the mid term will be the lower middle class (in the short term, the poor suffer the worst, of course – nothing new here).
In the mid term however, the poor will, if absolutely needed, pull up stakes (they normally don’t own any housing) and go where the jobs are in range of walking cycling or public transport. The rich can do the same (probably city pads will rise meteorically in price) – or they can still drive.
The ones in the middle in the suburbs whose equity is tied up in a house which is suddenly worth half – because it is not economically in range of work and play and services – those are the ones that will suffer worst. Like in the US housing boom, though for different reasons.
This has all been developed in the last ten years.
http://maps.google.co.nz/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=ti+rakau,+manukau&sll=-41.244772,172.617188&sspn=48.032577,78.662109&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Ti+Rakau+Dr,+Manukau&ll=-36.929448,174.91347&spn=0.003143,0.004801&t=k&z=18
What is going to happen with Flat Bush when the eventually start with the development? Absolutely no planning, PT should form the central part of any planning. We have no visionaries in this city.
Flat Bush, that’s almost even worse because they’ve taken so long and done so many reports and studies, yet they’re still going to screw it up. The main road through it (Ormiston Road) is another super-wide highway that will encourage people to drive at high speed right through what should be a nice walkable town centre. Furthermore, for some reason the road engineers have put in silly little twists and bends along Ormiston Road seemingly to encourage drivers to test the reaction of their car’s steering as they zoom along it.
That’s so funny, they plan a super wide high capacity arterial that screams out “drive through me as fast as you can”, then someone feels compelled to put in little bends to try and slow people down again.
“Funny” in a depressing way 🙂 Manukau City Council is the reason why we should have national guidance on town planning, so clueless idiots can’t screw up acres and acres of land like they have in Dannemora – Flatbush.
Ah! How do I get my password back on the Better Transport forums!?
The answer in phpBB help isn’t useful because there is no forgotten password link.
Email cam[at]bettertransport.org.nz
Thanks.
George – on the positive side, those ridiculously wide road corridors do make it easy to put them on a diet and punch through cycleways and light rail once we get a courageous mayor.
Light rail is not good enough, we need a full railway service. Try getting to and from a match at Eden Park using PT from Botany. Brings back the question, how many beers can I drink and stay under the limited? 🙂 This is not a joke but rather the sad reality.
What seems to have happened is because East Auckland does not have a railway line (or a motorway for that matter) all its arterial roads “need” immensely high vehicle capacities, and that’s seen to outweigh all other considerations. It is an urban planning disgrace, but exactly what happens if you don’t plan forward and give people alternatives to driving their cars everywhere.
Wow, I did not realise we had such problems in New Zealand; I know we tend to plan for the car, but this shows how bad the situation really is. Its funny, we are well aware of the problem, yet things like this seem to keep popping up. If we keep creating these “efficient,” car oriented environments, how can we possibly expect the general public to use public transport
There are places like this on the outskirts of most cities though. It’s unfortunate but clearly there is a market for this sort of development otherwise they wouldn’t get the retailers and customers.
I don’t think people living out there necessarily want to be wedded to the car, however, if you can’t afford a house in Ponsonby you don’t have many choices except out in the suburbs.
The situation is just going to get worse now that developers only have to apply for permission for a generic plan and can then build 50 million of the same places. Why develop for the area when it will cost more.
I think that it mainly comes down to managing the demand and supply of such developments. Retailers will locate where ever they can if they percieve a market to exist, be it through locating near a customer base, or through being attractive in terms of accessability. The majority of customers will go to which ever place they percieve to be the most convenient for them, whether they live or work nearby, or they have ease of access. As such, out of centre retail development (which will keep occurring so long as there is viable land available) needs to be carefully managed to ensure that situations, like the above, do not continue to arise.
Yes somehow the rules need to be tweaked to provide an incentive for retailers to locate in town centres. Good planning rules have a bit of carrot and a bit of stick in order to achieve the best outcomes.
I struggle to find either in evidence here.
Even if you accept that cars were the only option, there is no excuse to waste that amount of land on at grade carparking. They should have been required to at least do it in a compact way – either in multi storey parking buildings or in basement parking under the building footprints.
BTW Jarbury, I nabbed your picture for an article I have had accepted for the September addition of Planning Quarterly. Can you tell me the source (hope you don’t mind!).
Its straight off Google Maps.
http://maps.google.co.nz/maps?hl=en&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=5+Russett+Grove,+Henderson,+Waitakere+0612&ll=-36.929727,174.914623&spn=0.003443,0.008256&t=k&z=18
Yeah Matt’s right it’s just a screen capture of google maps. I look forward to reading the article!
Thanks, the editor said it was a bit of “a rant”, but he’d put it in anyways 😛
@ Scott M: If you just zoom out from the existing picture, you will notice the bad “planning” of the whole area. It is as if X number of people had a piece of land and said, “Ah, this is great. I’m going to build a few shops and my own parking for my customers only”. Botany Town Centre might have won a Design award, but as a whole the area just does not work. A good example is Redpaths that was located next to Shell, you would only go to the shop if you planned for it. No through traffic or people just walking past the shop – good luck to the new tenants.
As mentioned earlier, hopefully they will get it right with Flat Bush, but I don’t hold my breath.
I grew up there. The friends / family still living out that way wish they had faster PT into the city for social occasions. Taxi’s from the city to east is so costly. A train link between GI and Manukau would be so good! A different option is a link to Sylvia Park station across Mt Wellington over the estuary to East Tamaki to the southern end of the Botany car park would work to.