One of the most unfortunate consequences of bad urban design is that there is a loss of “eyes on the street” and a concomitant reduction in safety and security. Basically, if there are more people walking around, then the safer people will feel and the more willing they are to walk (holding other factors constant).
You would, then, expect that the NZ Police would be keen to ensure that their own activities do not unintentionally create urban wastelands that increase opportunities for “opportunistic” crime. Unfortunately that is exactly what they seem to be doing in Auckland.
In my opinion, three of Auckland’s ugliest urban wastelands are directly attributable to the activities of the NZ Police. These include the stations on Mayoral Drive and Fort Streets, as well as the heavy vehicle check point on Beach Road (this, incidentally, seems to me to be a prime example of wasteful public sector spending – why does such a low-value activity need to occupy such a high-value site?).
All three of these sites:
- Fail to engage with the street (through, for example, supporting street level retail activities);
- Make no effort to support/encourage pedestrian activity (through for example promoting visibility); and
- Are generally ugly and reduce the degree to which people will linger/enjoy a location (see barbed wire below).
I think it’s a real shame that the good work of the NZ Police does not extend very far when it comes to creating urban areas that are inherently safe and secure. After all, initiatives like installing CCTV cameras are an ambulance at the bottom of the cliff when it comes to preventing crime and/or road accidents.
I suspect we would be vastly better off working towards urban areas that were inherently safe. And one of the best ways to do that is to create enjoyable pedestrian environments.
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I guess that while it is a low value activity I guess that the site at the bottom of the strand is only placed where it is due to being one of the few spots in the city where many large trucks converge.
As for Fort St, it never seems that bad as there is plenty of other things around there that are generating pedestrian traffic, the only real issue I have with that one is that they their park police cars on the shared space but I guess that adds a level of security in itself as at least it is visible unlike the central police station where they are all hidden away.
They have to park the cars somewhere, and I’m told that Fort St doesn’t have much internal parking. The cars being on the street also makes it much quicker to respond than coming up the very steep internal ramp, and safer than the blind approach to the footpath that the angle requires. If ever you pass it while the roller door is up, you’ll see what I mean.
Re police cars parking on Fort Street: why not reserve some on-street spaces on Shortland Street?
Re roller door – that in itself is an ugly mother.
They have on-street space on Fort Street. What’s the benefit to moving them to Shortland Street? It also means further to walk with someone who’s in custody if they can only park on Shortland Street. There’s no rear or side entrance to the station, only the front and roller doors.
And, yes, that roller door is ugly. But what can you do?
Get some mean graffiti on it g. That’ll make it a beauty
If they are parking in the shared space they obviously need some more!
And your solution is to move all their parking around to the back of the building?
Sorry, your desire to protect us from the visual ravages of the police is just getting silly. They have a job to do, one where time matters. Putting the cars onto Shortland Street is the better part of another minute in them getting underway.
Note that I did not raise the issue of police cars parking on Fort Street (I don’t think it is an issue); I just suggested a potential solution to someone who did consider it an issue.
The Beach Rd Police site is actually the site where in the mid-late 1800s Maori traders would bring horticultural foodstuffs (corn, potatoes, cabbage etc) to sell to the European settlers of Auckland. Eventually a kind of trading building was built, but the land itself was considered Maori ‘owned’ land.
Over time, trading moved elsewhere, and the site reverted to Crown ownership (although I understand that there are assertions that the site still is owned by Ngati Whatua). Over the years, the Crown presumably used it for different purposes, and today the Police use it. I also suspect that the land itself forms part of Treaty settlements between the Crown and Ngati Whatua.
The remnant spirit of the site still exists today; up on the hill above the railway tracks is an apartment building that is owned by a Maori Trust. I presume this building was built in return for Crown taking ‘ownership’ of the site.
I’m thankful that the Police are using the site for it preserves in some respects (spatial layout) the original use of the site. I’m also glad that the site was not sold off – had it been done so, given our pathetic urban design efforts (thanks Auckland City Council) we likely would have wound up with a design straight from the heart of a money grubbing developer; cheap, nasty, tacky, and anti-human.
I’m not averse to historical preservation, but a big concrete pad surrounded by barbed wire does not seem to have much historical value. Suggesting that the “remnant spirit of the site still exists” because the Maori Trust owns a 1960s modernist apartment building 200m up the road is waxing lyrical to say the least.
It’s an eyesore that should be put to better use.
Beach Road isn’t a vehicle licensing centre (the sign notwithstanding), it’s a weigh station and the Auckland base for the Commercial Vehicle Investigation Unit (CVIU, or “God Squad”), the writers-out of the highest-value roadside tickets issued in NZ ($128k on a single ticket). Given that the area around Beach Road probably gets the highest concentration of heavy vehicles in the country, it’s a perfectly sensible place to have a weigh station. Where else in the central city would you put it? It’s not like that part of the CBD is traditionally a pedestrian-friendly, high-rental area, and a premises that deals with heavy vehicles should be located conveniently to routes that are heavily utilised by said vehicles. It also needs to be large, because it has to handle multiple A- and B-trains simultaneously.
The form of police stations is frequently dictated by their function (the need to keep naughty people inside, and keep secure evidence and other police property), and in the case of both Fort St and Auckland Central they are older buildings where there was little care paid to nice design. Both of them, however, fit into the surroundings. They’re not inordinately out of place with the buildings around them. And why aren’t you calling out all the high-rise buildings around Auckland Central? It’s in the middle of blocks of high-rise apartment buildings and hotels, none of which are terribly appealing.
If you want a real monstrosity you should check out the Rotorua Central Police Station, which occupies most of an entire block. At least Auckland Central is constructed so that its footprint is minimal.
KiwiRail and SKM (across the road) would probably disagree with the claim that it’s not a “high-rental” area. The land is worth $3.6 million alone, so has an opportunity cost of about $400,000 per year.
Re: form being defined by function – I don’t think the two are mutually exclusive. The new hospital parking building on Grafton Road, for example, has an active frontage at ground level.
Interesting about the land value, but what would the actual cost be of finding an equally-suitable location elsewhere in the vicinity?
Yes, the parking building does have an active street frontage, but a) it was designed to have one, b) it doesn’t have particular security needs that aren’t necessarily compatible with shared occupancy, and c) it’s a parking building.
Can you find me a police station (actual station, not community constable’s office) anywhere in the country that is part of a mixed-use building that shares space with anyone that’s not part of the criminal justice apparatus? Even the new Manukau station is stand-alone, despite being on a site that’s shared with the District Court.
The police building on Fort Street is shared with a dairy on the ground floor and commercial offices up stairs.
Kinda, but not quite what I had in mind. I was thinking an office or retail strip sharing a frontage with the station, which is where the complaint that Fort St doesn’t integrate with the surrounding area is going.
And are you sure they’re not separate buildings? I thought the one with the dairy in it was a distinct construction from the police station.
The point is that the Police obviously can share a building with other activities, because they do it already.
The key issue with the Fort Street building is that two complete sides of the building are inactive. I’m suggesting that the Police should take a lead role in ensuring that the buildings that they occupy are not configured in this way. It does not usually cost that much to knock out some windows and create a door for a mini shop etc (they could even restrict when the shop was open to serve a passive surveillance function).
In saying that, I’m aware that many of these buildings have legacy “issues” that the Police would probably be more sensitive to today if they were able to make decisions about where to locate. But I wanted to shine a slightly controversial light on the topic, because I think it’s important.
The comment earlier about the Police Station in Rotorua suggests that the issue is not restricted to Auckland and nor is it limited to older buildings. It seems that even purpose designed Police facilities have their issues.
Doing much of anything with with Fort St would be a problem, because it’s not a very big building. Trying to take out any of the ground-floor space would be challenging, especially right on the corner since that’s where the front office area is located.
New police stations generally do look a lot nicer (the new Manukau station looks pretty awesome, IMO), but I don’t see anything changing about Fort St without it being completely rebuilt because it is an operational police station.
Police HQ on Molesworth St shares its building with the Indian High Commission. Which seems strange for what should be a highly secure facility.
That’s very odd. You’re right about it being a very secure building. There will be rooms in there that’re used for handling material classified Secret and Top Secret. India’s not exactly an ally, even if it’s part of the Commonwealth.
It isn’t India that is particularly the problem. Any shared use means that access control has to be to each floor rather than the building as a whole, and that is inherently less secure in my opinion. Ministry of Health used to have a floor in the same building when they were one of my customers. I think the Police were trying to remove other tenants as their leases expired, but I wonder who ever thought it was a good idea in the first place.
The building was always full of Indian folks getting passports renewed and doing all the normal consular activities.
If you want a secure single-tenant building then you typically either have to build it to your current requirements then expand in to another building if you grow, and that is less than ideal. Or you build bigger than you need and lease the extra space until you need it. But what is the cost of building bigger than you need and leaving the extra space unoccupied until it is needed? Not the opportunity cost of the potential leases, but the cost of pouring the concrete for extra floors? You wouldn’t need to fit these spaces out with carpets, or even electricity and plumbing necessarily.
And would NOT have had that active ground level uses had it not been for the active intervention of Ludo Campbell Reid and his team in the old Auckland City Council. Had Ludo not worked with the hospital we would have the most ugliest carpark ever providing the full stop to the viewshaft from Grafton Bridge.
Lol, typical. I’m just writing something up about the university, maybe the hospital can be the next public sector target.
Looking forward to reading that!
Gotta go with Matt, Beach Rd is THE perfect place for truck weighing due precisely to it’s location.
Some beautification around the Beach Rd and Stanley St sides wouldn’t go amiss- a hedge, a stoa or a colonnade, a mural, many inexpensive treatments to choose from.
I agree Geoff – if that is the best/only location then surely it could be reconfigured to provide a more attractive if not active road frontage. After all the trucks don’t need to turn around on-site, then can drive in off Stanley and exit out the back, or vice versa. So could the site not be split in two: Retail/commercial along Beach Road frontage and heavy vehicle blah blah along the south end of the site.
I laugh so hard at your God Squad description of the CVIU….pack of tossers, they are….
Its been great the last 2 weeks….Drury Weigh Station has been closed, meanwhile the trucking industry just keeps trucking….
Not my nickname, but one I heard from someone in the industry. Clearly someone who holds them in rather more regard than do you.
I think it’s probably a self appointed nickname….
God Squad was a name given way back as there was a high percentage of staff with ties to religion.
Stanley street site is used by police (CVIU) but is actually an NZTA site, just like the site at Drury is NZTA and used by Police. If you have questions then just ask, as all this banter is fun but facts seem to be blurred.
I used to live in this area, it was very rarely used, looked derelict most of the time. Adding that to the dangerous and clumsy road layout down there with the dodgy intersections, no one ever walks down there. It’s a spot with potential, not to mention saving wasteful public spending.
Again, where would you put the CVIU base? It has to be somewhere, and the weigh station has to have a lot of space. If you move it, you need to find somewhere else that’s convenient to large numbers of heavy vehicles, which pretty much means having it near POAL. So, where?
It’s really nice to talk theoretically about how great it would be to put the land to better use, stop paying money for the site (though I’m sure the Police pay SFA anyway), etc etc, but there is a reality of its existence: law enforcement. All the dreams of unicorns and rainbows cannot change the objective need to have a weigh station near POAL.
I walk down there :). But yes I agree, it has huge potential. It’s on the natural walking line for most of Parnell to the city centre. I see a lot of people regularly walking that route, along the Beach Road frontage.
I would go further: High-speed free left turns off a major arterial road in a busy pedestrian route are not just clumsy, they are downright dangerous.
I’m surprised Transit/NZTA safety audits don’t pick up on this sort of issue. They seem to focus solely on safety for vehicles, not pedestrians and cyclists.
What about moving it to Onehunga or somewhere near the Southern Motorway – I’m sure there are just as many trucks there as close to the Ports of Auckland.
I lived next door for a while and there is hardly ever any stuff going on.
You could potentially put it along Church St, I suppose, but the concentration of vehicles will be much, much lower. Most container movements within Auckland are related to POAL in some way, so having the base right on the nearest motorway access route means that the number of trucks that pass through when a blitz is on is significant.
The difficulty with putting it on the motorway is getting trucks to enter and exit safely, and signalling them to enter in the first place. With a station that’s on an urban road it’s perfectly feasible for officers to stand on the side of the street and wave the trucks in as they’re coming down the road. That is, in fact, precisely what they do.
Oh, and there is a weigh station on Neilson St, outside the container yard.
I’m pretty sure the reason for the general dereliction around Beach Rd/Stanley St is the fact that whole area is earmarked for a motorway trench, the currently mothballed Grafton Gully Stage 3. No point in building there or otherwise improving the land if it will all be demolished and dug up. I assumed it was all owned by NZTA anyway.
Yup you are right Nick. NZTA have huge land holdings in Grafton Gully for that project which I doubt will ever happen. I guess future proofing has its downsides after all.
Ahhh … Grafton Gully. The motorway project that went about 500m too far and in the process forsake swathes of valuable land as well as the city’s pedestrian connection to the Domain – and that was just stage 2. Does anyone know whether stage 3 will fix or repeat these mistakes?
Could fix them by putting motorway in a trench. But at such a high cost that I doubt it will happen. Decades more ‘designation blight’ seems likely to me.
Forget tunnels, that will never happen. What about downgrading Stanley Street to a boulevard with a raised central median with trees? The area is extremely sterile.
I think building along the uni side of Stanley St would make a big difference but that’s where your designation blight comes in. NZTA simply aren’t going to let development happen there because they are protecting the route for a motorway that will never happen.
Anyone have any renders or plans of what GG Stage 3 looks like?
Just thinking about it this could be even worse for the area if built, it might be a case of swapping a couple of run down buildings and an open lot for a traffic filled trench in the ground, perhaps with a huge set of ramps up to Beach Rd. It could end up looking much like the area around Wellington St if they plan to do what I assume they plan to do.
I guess the ideal outcome would be a cut and cover tunnel right to the port/Quay St, with Stanley St reduced to a minor arterial with the boulevard treatment and some nice planting, the whole area developed through from the Unis to Carlaw Park, and the proposed decking over between Wellesley St and Grafton Rd (hello city campus sports fields!)… but of course there is the question of cost.
There are some ideas in the city centre master plan, but I don’t think any detailed designs have been undertaken yet.
In terms of urban design, yeah it’d be good to get the motorway in a trench or tunnel – to get all that heavy vehicle traffic out of the system. But the cost of doing so is unlikely to be viable.
Is this the same NZTA that got into 180 million spots of bother lately?
Maybe they need to sell some land to pay their debts. Hmmm
I’m no expert on this, but I would have thought that you could have worked with POAL to enforce weight restrictions on-site (POAL should know, after all, how much weight is coming and going on every truck).
Also, I’d suspect that splitting locations to the north and south of Auckland would enable you to intercept heavy vehicles destined for POAL or eleswhere.
Are the economies of scale in policing so great that two or even three sites would be inefficient? Surely land elsewhere could be leased for at least one-third of the price as the central city.
It’s not just about what the weight is on the truck, it’s about what RUC weight has been purchased, what the vehicle’s licensed Gross Vehicle Mass and Gross Combination Mass are (which may be greater than the RUC weight), and the need for the scales to be operated by the enforcement agency if there’s to be a prosecution.
There may be scope to make things more streamlined, using RFID to track the truck’s status with GVM/GCM and RUC and then having electronic reporting of entry/exit weights at the port, but right now that’s not legal. It also would need consideration of what to do to tackle an overweight vehicle. An enforcement officer can order the vehicle to be unloaded, but nobody else can. If this all went digital, there would need to be provision for the port to have a warranted officer (as opposed to a full constable) present to order trucks to unload, and issue tickets for being over-weight. No enforcement officer, no checking.
The weigh station also checks on log books, which cannot be handled by a digital weight-checking system. It needs a person, currently also an enforcement officer. If we’re going to warrant someone to handle the over-weight trucks we could surely warrant them to check log books, but now we’re starting to give them so much enforcement power that we may as well use constables since we probably want to give them the power to arrest people who won’t comply. It’s not as simple as it sounds to just have it done by scales at the port.
I’m sure it’s not as simple as it sounds – but I think it’s worth exploring whether we could reallocate the functions currently undertaken on Beach Road to somewhere else on Auckland’s periphery where land was not so valuable.
And with the proposed developments in RUC (more GPS-based RUC) I wonder whether we will need these types of check points in the future, i.e. RUC will become much easier to monitor/enforce.
GPS doesn’t tell you how much the truck is carrying, though, and RUC is purchased based on weight as well as distance. The $128k ticket I mentioned earlier was written out to a truckie who was carrying more weight than was allowed on the RUC. Given that RUC is to compensate for weight-related damage, enforcing the purchased weights is a very important activity.
I’ve always wondered what the point of that station on Fort Street is. The last time I needed Police assistance was late at night 3am ish and my friend had been hit by some thugs. We found the police station closed. Surely the busiest time would be after 10pm but we couldn’t find a cop anywhere. I’d cut that station and provide a police kiosk, Japan style, closer to Britomart/the Viaduct. If someone needs to be detained overnight they already have to take them to Auckland central.
Sadly that was my experience too! I agree, a couple of police kiosks around the city centre would probably be far more effective way of discouraging offending. But it is possible that Fort Street serves functions that we are not privy too.
What I wanted to get across in the post is the fact that the status quo is not acceptable. All I can hope is that people in power already know about these issues and are working to rectify them over time.
Also, I should point out that the Police are certainly not the only public sector culprit when it comes to poor urban design: Tomorrow’s follow up post is on the university :).
The universtiy surely you mean the universities. Akoranga campus of AUT is definately one of the worst offenders. Absolutely no street activation along more than a kilometre of road. Also Massey in Albany which is the most auto-centric campus in the city.
Very good point – but no, just looking at the UoA at the moment.
Fort Street is the base for Downtown patrol units, and those units operate on all shifts.
Many police stations close to the public at night – Newmarket, Manurewa, Onehunga – but are still the base for patrols. There’s nobody at the front desk, but officers and cars operate from the station on all shifts. Kiosks don’t provide office space, holding cells, locker space and changing rooms, a gun safe…
A police station is much, much more than just someone standing at a desk to interact with the public.
Has anyone noticed this before?
http://maps.google.co.nz/maps?q=albany&hl=en&ll=-36.722489,174.706679&spn=0.001767,0.004128&hnear=Albany,+Auckland&gl=nz&t=h&z=19&vpsrc=6
That seems like and excessive amount of parking for two low rise buildings!
It is a very old photo, go for a drive out there and have a look, I suspect your point will the change to there not being enough parking.
Ahhh… I was just looking around Albany and noticed it and thought it looked weird. To be honest I avoid the place like the plague now I don’t live on the Shore anymore.
JamesB,
the photograph lies, there are three or four levels to that building, probably ten shops around that central plaza including Avanti Plus and a Mitre 10 Mega underneath
That Fort Street police building has to be about the ugliest building in Auckland and, as others have said, never seems to be open when you need it. The only time I’ve needed it was when my cellphone got stolen on the day of the Santa Parade back in 2010 and it was shut.
Along with the empty site next to it, the police building really ruins this corner of Auckland which should be awesome. I would love to see a comprehensive redevelopment of both sites with something that is much more fitting of the area. A police kiosk that is manned 24/7 would be really useful in the area.
If the adjacent site was turned into something other than a carpark, part of it could be made into a replacement, aesthetically-pleasing police station while the corner was redeveloped into a nicer retail operation.
I cannot see the police closing down the Fort Street station for a lesser presence, though. There are some analyst functions based in the station, for example, which would have to be transferred to the crowded Central station. Plus, as I point out above, a kiosk cannot replace all the other things that a police station provides. I agree that the station probably does need a 24 hour watch desk, but that doesn’t require any change to the building.
The parking lot was granted renewal of resource consent late last year. This is how parking buildings get built.
Way to reinforce the shared space, Auckland Council :/
My understanding is that the resource consent is for a very large office tower.
I thought that too, but the site is owned by the same company which owns most of the vacant lots around Auckland’s CBD so I think it’s unlikely anything will happen there soon.
The original plans from a couple of years ago was were a large office complex with a through link between the streets – it fell through due to the WFC. Nothing since then and it’s owned by Dae Ju who own the Victoria street carpark off Elliot Street. I hope the two shared spaces will encourage them to design something that interfaces with these two streets, and I’m sure the Urban Design Panel will be making sure that happens too.
If you look up, when you poke your head inside the station, and then go around to the other side to the convenience/sushi store and look up, you’ll see a series of ceiling decorations – heavy and 70s style but not offensive.
The police station and the convenience store are located in the former National Bank branch space – the spaces were the public areas where you waited for a teller. This also explains the high ceilings.
Great post, Stu, have long loathed that Parnell wire encampment… all part of the endless violation of Grafton valley. But hey I’m going to wind a few here by saying that I really like that seventies Nat Bank building with its crazy stepped levels… but that’s just personal taste. However the demolishing of the Star building next door and its replacement with an at grade parking lot has been a disaster for the area. Still were it to be replaced by a fantastic example of 21st century architecture- especially one without floor after floor of car parking, all could be saved. Two things that any new building must do on this site are 1. Fill the site properly to link up the ‘cliff face’ of buildings on Fort and Shortland Sts and 2. be open and active at ground level to both of these Sts. such a great site, hope it doesn’t get fucked up, especially as this area is so reviving… especially at the imperial building down Fort Lane:
I do wonder how much a pleasant street frontage next to the police station would change peoples’ perspective of it. Right now it’s an ugly front and a slab side, separated from anything else by the parking lot, and that makes the starkness of its construction very apparent.
Some street art on the Jean Batten side of the building would do wonders to brighten it up.
Interesting article and point about the eyes on the street. Few weeks ago I went past the police station on Mayoral Drive and saw a car window smashed in across the road from the station in the car park there. The criminals must live in fear of the police vigilance.
Unitec is pretty auto-centric too. Free parking and ACRES and ACRES of it and the most spread out campus you can imagine.
Text on Tuesday:
“The 1930 service from Waikanae to Wellington is running 15 minutes late due to police delaying buses at the weigh station.
Regards,
Tranz Metro”