A reader of this blog sent in a link to a really interesting and useful (and somewhat quirky) video on London’s unfinished motorways. I found myself, when watching the first few minutes of the video, somewhat annoyed that it seemed to be repeating many of the same old assumptions about building motorways – but in the end it offers a really helpful and insightful look at the need to find a balance between getting people around a city while not destroying the quality of that city.
Unfortunately in Auckland we didn’t care as much about our inner-city. The two aerial photographs below show Newton in 1959 and today:
Whilst Auckland is now far too dependent on its spaghetti junction to ever remove it, it really would have been nice to have found a different way of enabling people to travel around the city without destroying such a huge area of what would now probably be an incredibly funky inner-city suburb.
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Great Post!
Perhaps suburbs should have a published F.I. (funkiness index) to help the NZTA when it is planning on which suburbs to destroy. Paraparaumu has a funkiness of 0.05 (just a little funky) so the Sandhills Motorway won’t be much of a shame.
What’s interesting too is that nearly all the housing that wasn’t actually buried under the motorway, seems to have been knocked down and replaced with tatty commercial buildings. Did the National Roads Board knock down all of them for good measure?
Yes Chris, it was a programme with an aesthetic drive: ‘slum clearance’…. this is still the value system behind Hide/Joyce et al’s latest plan; a loathing of the city, all things urban or cosmopolitan. It is a provincial/suburban mindset…. from the BBQ and Beemer set. All of Freeman’s Bay was to to be flattened, the bits still there are only the result of revolt by a few along with the [happy] slowness of the project due to the general poverty of the country at the time.
Brilliant! Comedy and transport planning converging into a single presentation. Who would have thought!?
Maybe the upcoming City of Cars 4 should take the comedic angle as well.
City of Cars 4! That’s been a long time in the making…
Unfinished London Part 1 is also worth a watch
I lived in the London for about 7 years and I would have to say that one of the worst things about the city is the transport (both public and private). I have lived in the South East (Bromley), West London (Ealing) as we as the North (Cricklewood / Willesden Green and a few other places. My work meant that I had to regularly travel (trains, tubes, road) all over the city (central and suburbs) and along the M4 and M40. As well as towards the north (Barnet all the way to Leads). What is obvious is that until recently there has been a large scale under investment in both public and private transport. The trains and tubes have of late had a reasonable amount spent on it and some of the worst aspects of it have improved (e.g old Northern Line Trains). The fact is however for most of the greater city trains and tubes are not much good (and are never likely to be) the grossly inadequate roading network then is a major issue. The is especially apparent if you need to travel across as opposed to into (or out of) the city. Some of the decisions that have been made to discontinue 6 lane roads and and force them through 2 lane suburban streets are just crazy (e.g. Northern circular to Hanger lane) The south circular is a joke and effectively isolates the whole south (especially the south east) of the city. This has real economic and societal impacts. I’m not saying that the sort of plan outlined in the video is idea (or practical) however London would massively benefit from a sensibly targeted investment in roading infrastructure especially, but not limited to the south e.g. link from Croydon to M25. There would be a strong case in some areas to look at building the roads underground. Equally city wide road pricing would make sense to mitigate displacement issues. All of this should be combined with a coordinated effort to improve roading for Buses that in large part of the city transport far more people than trains of tubes) As indicated in the video there are always trade offs however in the case of London the balance has been clearly wrong for large parts of the city. It can be done on a more sensible basis, just look at Paris, Madrid, plus pretty much any German city