Here’s another great Auckland Conversations event coming up on Wednesday 14 November. Hank Dittmar CEO of the Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment will be talking about sustainable cities and design. Mr. Dittmar has been the Chief Executive of The Prince’s Foundation since January 2005. Previous to that he served as Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Congress for the New Urbanism and as Executive Director of the Surface Transportation Policy Project both based in the United States. Much of his professional work has been centred around the role of land use and transportation in creating liveable communities.

Currently his work at the Prince’s Foundation seems to be focused around neighbourhood design and architectural innovation. Yesterday, HRH, The Prince of Wales, and Mr. Dittmar presented an interesting new suburban retrofit model for the City of Melbourne. According to the Prince’s Foundation website the model:

…offers a sustainable alternative to the current suburban development found in many of Melbourne’s surrounding areas. The model shows an existing low density suburb with one house per plot on one half, transformed to be greener and reflect contemporary living with three houses per plot based upon an updating of the popular Melbourne terraced house. The aim was to create a place that is more environmentally friendly, healthier and less car-dependent, whilst enhancing a sense of community amongst its residents and updating historic forms to reflect contemporary living.

Suburban retrofit model for Melbourne, photo and project Prince’s Foundation.

I’m sure whether he talks about transportation or neighbourhood design he will have a lot of valuable advice for Auckland. The event is free, but please RSVP (aucklandconversations (at) aucklandcouncil.govt.nz) so the event planners have an idea of how many people to expect.

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97 comments

  1. Now that’s an image that I can visualise in Auckland’s suburbs. It’s just missing a cycle path. We do not need 10 storey towers in the ‘burbs.

        1. If we ripped that nine-lane (!) road right out and replaced it with a North-West Rail Line, we’d have even more space.

        2. Erp, that was supposed to link to Ian McKinnon Dr at the top of Dominion Rd. There the road sits on an 60-80m wide motorway corridor for a motorway that will never happen, where as it only needs about 25m for a multi lane arterial.

  2. How does placing small closely spaced compact townhouses with no parking make a place less car dependent. In effect it is just forcing a choice as to if people can own a car or not.

    A recent example in Auckland is Hobsonville Point where if you want to get one of the “first home buyer” houses you have to spend $450k for a house on the edge of the city were you have to park on a small narrow street.

    1. And the problem with that is……? Not forcing anyone. There is plenty of housing stock with oodles of parking. If a developer wishes to take a chance on providing less room for car parking then it is their risk surely? With Hobsonville Point as an example, there does not seem to be any lack of interest in the available houses.

    2. Where does it say anything about parking or no parking? It doesn’t either way, and I’d assume they have allowed for rear access parking like the Melbourne terraces they cite as a model. Most of the old ones have been retrofitted with laneway vehicular access to the rear, while the new ones are built like that.

      Hobsonville point seems to be the same, just looking at the website the ones that don’t have a garage visible on the front say they have “rear lane access”.

    3. I was just looking at the model they have there where appears to suggest nobody has a garage.

      For Hobsonville Point, when I was looking at buying a place there you only got the option for an out door concrete pad to park your car on, unless you were wanting to spend over $750k on a large 3/4 bedroom house.

        1. The problem is when it costs you $300k to get a garage, so people just end up parking all over the street.

        2. It’s funny how providing people the choice not to buy a house with a garage is ridding people of choice, yet building only houses with garages and not providing any other options suddenly is providing choice. To be honest this comment box person is sounding an awful lot like some called “sandle’ who recently got banned on CBT.

        3. Most of Ponsonby has no off-street parking and yet this is one of THE most desirable places in Auckland to live, so much so that people who can’t afford to live there are being forced to move further and further out and thereby be forced to buy more land than they want and more carparks than they want or need. The usual outcome being they then need to buy several cars because the suburb is so car-oriented. That doesn’t sound like choice to me. I’m going to stick to my innercity apartment which comes with no parking, which I’m more than happy about. Less land in my unit title = less rates and more money to spend on things I actually want. Parking for my bike is free BTW.

        4. Ahh and there you have it, although you were trying to be negative an condescending you actually raise a good point. More and more people who want to own a car and park it somewhere safe are being forced to live further out of the city in places with poor PT leaving them with little choice but to drive. So in effect by not providing the option for parking as a standard we are actually increasing car dependence.

          The fact that Ponsonby is desirable has little to do with the fact there are some, not most or all, houses there without parking, It is more the fact that it is right next to the CBD. Similar to Pariati Drive, it’s not full of multi-million dollar houses because it provides parking but more that it has a view of the harbour.

          In regards to less rates, your actually mistaken here as the more the city has to pay for people to park on the road as well as providing security for high density areas with valuables laying around for people to take the more the rates go up.

          And yes I am Sandle, who got banned because I wasn’t anti car ownership.

        5. You completely missed my point. I stated that people want to live in places like Ponsonby for the very reason that they DON”T need to own a car. Instead because these areas are so desirable and hence increasingly more expensive, they are being forced out into the suburbs which are so car-dependent they are then forced to own a car. That’s not choice. If more housing was provided in these innercity areas that would satisfy a large percentage of those who fail to find housing, and not forcing them to pay for the construction of a carpark would also leave them 30,000 better off.

          Anyway, that’s the last I’m going to say, no one is ever going to change you mind or help you get rid of the chip on your shoulder that you have about car-users supposedly being persecuted in Auckland through not enough provision of road space or car parking.

      1. Why go all the way to Hobsonville then? A quick search of trademe has given numerous possibilities of properties with parking / garaging etc all at much less than $750k.

        1. What do you mean all the way? People may very well work out there and want their kids to go to the new schools that are opening. They may also be wanting a new house in a community focused area.

        2. So if you are going to live in Hobsonville Point with it’s walkways and cycle path where schools, work and shops are close, why exactly is the car parking so important? Save yourself $300k and have a healthier, happier life. For those occasions when you need to to get about, you’ll have some change left over for a taxi.

        3. So when I want to head out to woodhill to go mountain biking I should get a taxi? And I should also get a taxi when I want to head or surfing or take my kayak some where? I think you’re forgetting that New Zealand is one of the most expensive places around to get taxis and that they don’t come with special equipment to carry peoples oversized personal items.

    4. Those are terraced houses not town houses, town houses are detached and probably would have a garage for the car. The scale of those houses don’t actually look small I mean they look like family homes. Houses these days are going atleast 20% over GV for example in Mt Wellington a block of land that could be subdivided into 3 being sold on auction turned down an offer of $900k which is crazy when the realestate agents were picking in the 600s.

      1. In an Auckland context town houses are terraced houses. There are a few folk who list their small houses as town houses but in general town houses in Auckland a multi-level with shared walls with the place next door.

        1. I disagree Comment Box. Town houses are by definition standalone houses, usually multi-storey, on small sites in or close to the city (I know, I live in one). Then there are apartments, duplexes, quads and terraces. And finally, there’s the suburban Kiwi Quarter Acre (which is seldom that large these days). There, fixed it for you.

    5. Anyway, going back to the question I asked about “how does this make the place less car dependant”. It seems nobody knows the answer, but we have established that people love on-street parking for some reason and despise garages.

      1. How does what make Hobsonville less car dependent? Removing minimum parking requirements?

        That’s not the point of removing minimum parking requirements at all – the point of getting rid of them is to stop a regulation that basically throttles intensification. The point is to give people choice about how much parking they want to provide – not to force them to provide more parking than they want to.

        In terms of parking maximums, I’m not sure whether they have been applied in Hobsonville, but the main purpose they seem to have is as a way of limiting traffic congestion by discouraging people from driving to certain areas. For example, the city centre which has fairly limited access points and good PT alternatives, having parking maximums will encourage the use of those alternatives and also helps to remove a somewhat “sticky” market for parking where it’s being provided more out of tradition than out of actual need (remembering that far fewer people are commuting by car to the city centre each day than a decade ago).

        I’d also watch you don’t fall into the trap of trolling Riggles/Sandle/Comment Box.

      2. What I’m wanting to know is how poor parking at home makes for a less car dependant society. The only way I can think of is that it makes it so you no longer have the option to own a car. I hardly think taking away people freedoms is the most ideal way to go about solving traffic issues. Certainly if someone buys a house that has a garage yet they don’t have a car they are rewarded with a massive storage area which is what quite a few people do but at least they have the option for either themselves or someone else that lives in that house in the future.

        In regards to the CBD having limited access points and good PT, you really need to see how that works for the folks at Hobsonville Point before saying it helps reduce car dependency or not. Given Hobsonville Point has a new ferry service and some new bus routes from what I’m told they appear to have done their part but if other developments choose to just provide next to no parking along with no PT then they are doing little to aid the situation.

        In regards to trolling, it’s rather hard to mention any topic that doesn’t gang up on car ownership without making people rowdy as as it seem most people are anti car ownership. However given this is not a reflection of society in general such topics are worth discussing constructively.

        1. You’ve lost me Comment Box – arguing in circles about something that is not a problem. The answer seems to me that if people want a house with a a garage then they buy it, if they don’t they don’t. End of story?

        2. Well if they gave people an option they would do that, however given there is a housing shortage and they are making all these new places with poor parking provisions people have little choice.

          As for arguing in circles I don’t know what your on about there, I’m just saying that providing poor parking in new developments does not fix car dependency issues.That’s been my line the entire time.

        3. And providing lots of parking in new developments doesn’t fix car dependency issues either, in fact I’d say it makes it all the more harder to do.

  3. In a city that has a housing shortage not giving people options is a real issue. Take into account here I am not suggesting that anyone that owns a car is legally required to drive it as much as physically possible and prohibited from using PT.

    The times I have been to Hobsonville point there have been cars parked all over the street which takes away from the fortune that has been spent on landscaping the place.

    1. I would argue that in a city with a housing affordability problem, giving people housing options that don’t require land for parking or floor area of the dwelling for garages would be a good idea.

      You must admit that there is a relationship between owning a car and how much you use it, and the number of cars per houshold and how many km’s the household clocks up a year.

      The times you’ve been to Hobsonville Point sound like the times I’ve been to Grey Lynn, or Parnell, or Otara, or Browns Bay, or Mangere, or Paratai Dr.
      In fact I can’t think of one suburb that doesn’t have cars parked all over the street, including the historic ones that have zero off street parking and the brand new ones that have three car garages and big driveways.

      1. Well obviously there is a relationship between car ownership and how much you drive, it would be rather daft to suggest otherwise.

        I think it’s just short sighted and poor planning to build new places with poor parking provisions, I’m not suggesting that there should be a minimum of 3 car parks per bedroom but more one garage park for every two bedrooms.

        As for Grey Lynn, or Parnell, or Otara, or Browns Bay, or Mangere, or Paratai Dr, I don’t know what events were on the days you drove there but they certainly don’t have cars parked in every possible spot on the average day, unlike at Hobsonville Point.

        1. Why do we need to require parking? Surely people know how much parking they need/want before they move into a place and can judge for themselves?

          You seem to be of the opinion that everyone wants parking, irrespective of whether they have a car. That’s not the case – I do not have a car and therefore see no need for parking. Hence I do not want my accommodation to come bundled with parking. It’s not like we specify the number of bedrooms or toilets a house must have – so why do we need to specify the number of car-parks? To do so is taking away options for people like me.

          Like earlier comments have noted, if you want parking you are free to rent somewhere that has it. And if you’re prepared to pay for it then the market will enable you to access even more.

          I think it’s time you stopped trying to argue your point (still not sure what it is) and instead went away and had a good hard think/read about the issues. Because what you are saying does not seem to make any sense.

        2. A little off topic, but we do of course specify how many toilets a house must have – it has to have at least one. That’s fair enough though, since almost everyone uses them, and everyone who doesn’t needs care from someone who does. Not everyone needs a parking space.

    2. I was more just questioning the claim of reduced car dependency, it seems to be a catch phrase that developers like to use to justify building houses with poor parking provisions.

      In reality have poor parking provisions just limits the market size and off loads the demand onto the local roads resulting in people parking on the footpath and such.

      The real way to reduce car dependency is to provide desirable alternatives, not to force people to either park on the street or buy a house somewhere else.

      1. I really don’t see what the issue is with having to park on the street. I’m from Holland, and everyone in the higher density areas of the city parks their car(s) on the street. The cities there are far nicer to be in that Auckland to be honest, from an Urban Design perspective. And again, if you really hate having to walk an extra 5 metres from your car to your house, you can go somewhere else. A lot of people don’t mind parking their car on the street, and it’s certainly not a felony designing developments like that. As long as the streets are designed for it, which they are, there isn’t any problem.

        1. I’ll remember that next time a cyclist gets killed due to someone getting out of their car parked on the side of the street or when a child gets crushed between two parked cars.
          I’m sure the grass berms with muddy tyre ruts and all the vandalized dirty cars also look great from an Urban Design point of view, far better than having ugly trees and planted berms.

        2. I suggest you do some research on what the parking in the Netherlands is like. What you are assuming is rubbish. The cyclist / pedestrian won’t get killed because they will be riding / walking about in a 30 km/h area where cars don’t have the right of way.

        3. Last time I looked there didn’t seem to be this problem in places like Ponsonby where there is often no off street parking and yet there was a house nearby me that had a double garage (which I had seen was empty a few times), space on the driveway for another two cars and plenty of space on the street yet they parked one car in the driveway and one on the grass as far away from the driveway as possible. It isn’t the absence of parking that is the problem but the individual.

        4. One of my brothers lives in Ponsonby and a couple of years ago converted the garage out the back of his property into a studio [fully consented] so now the household’s two cars are on the street, their neighbour has no offstreet either. World has not ended. Not everyone over-invests in rapidly depreciating metal that then they obsess about storing. Of course they also walk and cycle a fair bit as they’re in a neighbour built before the car spaced everything out so drastically.

        5. The main cause of young child pedestrian-vehicular deaths is being run over in their own driveway, usually by one of their parents.

        6. Funny thing is once you don’t have to deal with driveways at all, street parking becomes a lot more regular and civilised, not to mention plentiful.

        7. This almost goes back to the ‘slow down’ thread from earlier but seriously, how hard should this be?

        8. Great to see some pics of a community that most likely has a completely different social system from New Zealand.

          I take it you tried to look around NZ for some examples to support your case for on-street parking but couldn’t find any?

        9. What about Ponsonby? most of the properties have their own carparks and the ones that don’t the people park all over the street.

          What is trolling got to do with it when it comes to asking the question of how does providing poor parking solve car dependence?

        10. Comment Box, Pim explicitly mentioned Holland and how on street parking can be designed to be safe and convenient. I gave these examples as you commented clearly without having a clue about the situation over there – not much use giving you NZ examples then, however apt they might be.

          Regarding cultural differences, we’re talking about transformations and with a shift away from car-centric urban and transport design invariably come cultural changes. What better places to look for inspiration and to learn from than places like Holland and other countries that have already succesfully undergone such transformations?

        11. The examples you gave did not show any safe design, one of them had a stream in the middle of the road which if it were in NZ would have resulted in a few deaths by now.

          In terms of society and cultural differences I was not talking about the way people get to work, I was more talking about how in NZ if you leave your car parked on the side of the street it will not only get hit by another car at some point but it will also get broken into.

        1. Looking at that I would much rather go for a walk down Camegie Cress, even though the area is probably worth about a 3rd the value of O’Neil St it actually looks a nicer place to be outside. The person going for a walk on street view seems to agree.

        2. O’Neill Street looks like a pretty lousy place for kids (or anyone else) to walk in. The footpaths are pathetically tiny and littered with badly positioned power poles. What little footpath space there is has been used up with cars illegally parked on it. Unless there’s a real effort to make drivers give way to pedestrians, my main concern is keeping out the way of cars entirely.

        3. Yes, tiny and unsightly footpaths and power poles are annoying. But parked cars that slow down traffic and form a buffer between moving vehicles and footpath are much safer to walk than a piece of road that looks nice but that allows people to drive 60 and that don’t have proper crossing provisions to match. Now, call me odd but I’d rather have a safe street where you have to dodge a power pole every now and then than an unsafe one that ticks all the aesthetics boxes. If you want to go for a leisurely stroll, t’s not like there’s no abundance of parks in Auckland.

        4. I walk O’Neill St several times a week generally right up the middle of the ‘carriageway’ because it is perfectly safe to do so. There are very few car movements and when there are they’re always <20kph, because they have to be. So it is a very safe environment for humans and a slightly frustrating one for cars use. The small houses there sell around 1-2m mark and it is easy to see why with all the vitality and amenity of Ponsonby Rd at the top. Served frequently by new green buses heading into the city one way and K'rd, Hospitals, and Newmarket the other.

          Of course it doesn't suit everyone but then there are plenty of widely spaced houses with lavish garaging and driveways in the dull and distant suburbs if that's your priority.

        5. OrangeKiwi: I don’t care how it looks – I mean that the power poles are positioned so you have to walk in the roadway to get around them. Even on the parts where there aren’t power poles or cars parked on the footpath, it still doesn’t look wide enough for an adult and a child to walk side by side. The cars aren’t a buffer if there’s no room to walk on the footpath side of them.

          Patrick: I haven’t had reason to walk along O’Neill Street ever, so I’m going by how it looks in Street View. I’ll give it a try sometime – if you’re right it does sound nice. I would really like to see some Auckland drivers who show the slightest regard for pedestrians, or an Auckland street that can keep traffic to under 20 km/h. But at 5.5m (from Google Earth) the roadway doesn’t look much narrower than a lot of streets that see cars travelling much faster – like mine at 6.0m, or even Carnegie Cres at about 6.2m.

          If you think I want giant garages and driveways you’re barking up the wrong tree. If I had kids I’d want to keep them well away from any cars at all times, impossible though that is. O’Neill Street looks like it would be a lovely walk if it were pedestrianised and the cars were sent packing to Tauranga or somewhere else far, far away. Back in the real world, at least Carnegie Cres has a footpath to walk on where you’re a bit safer from the cars.

          How about these, though maybe without the drunks or tourists:
          http://goo.gl/maps/ihw9l
          http://goo.gl/maps/vkNBJ
          http://goo.gl/maps/4XnZ1
          http://goo.gl/maps/dZC6H
          http://goo.gl/maps/DEyfw
          http://goo.gl/maps/2slD0
          http://goo.gl/maps/J688C

          (I’m aware some of these do have cars from time to time, but they generally keep to not much over walking pace.)

        6. Steve Google is a great tool for understanding land use and place value, as is a helicopter, but nothing beats walking. Believe me this is a very safe street because it is hard to drive on. Hard to drive: Great to live. Simple.

        7. I still stand by my comments on how on street parking could aid pedestrian safety. O’Neill Street admittedly is a bad example when it comes to footpath width. However, it is still a relatively safe environment for people. Of course everyone would like to keep their kids safe, but with such a car-centric and car-saturated environment relative safety seems to be the highest achievable short term goal and O’Neill St still seems to fit this picture better than the average suburban street.

          Steve D, I got thrown off by the word ‘littered’ – sorry for that.

        8. Orange Kiwi – I lived in O’Neill Street for a couple of years. It really isnt a very nice street but only because of the parking. It would have been preferable for there to be no parking at all on the street as there were often cars parked on the footpath on the wrong side. The parking rules never seem to have been enforced.

          In saying that, I still really support the development of housing without minimum parking requirements.

          It is a constant amusment to me that neolibs/neocons love to invoke the market as long as the market is slanted in favour of what they want. If the market started to want dense developments with no parking there is suddenly a cry of “but my freedom!!” as from Comment Box.

          The system has been slanted so long in favour of roads and cars that it is now just gospel that it must reflect what people want. But maybe it doesnt and we should give the market a chnace to figure that out. The best one I have seen is someone suggesting pro-PT people are elitist while pro-car/roads is somehow more egalitarian. Crazy stuff.

  4. “Mr. Dittmar has been the Chief Executive of The Prince’s Foundation since January 2005.”

    In which case he’s had seven years to find out that the Prince himself lives in a palace, owns a country estate, stands to inherit several other palaces and country homes, and drives a Bentley. Hardly the poster boy for sustainable urban living.

    1. Yes, I’ve always thought it a little funny that a prince who inherited personal ownership of a large chunk of Great Britain, collects copious rents and pays no tax would be the figurehead for sustainable development… but hey, there are only so many polo clubs and grouse hunting parties one can be the patron of, right?

      1. Ever been to Poundbury, the prince of Wales’ own private development just outside Dorchester? Aside from really tacky, bad, soul-less revival architecture, the whole thing has been designed around the car. Vast wide avenues of tarmac providing parallel parking, etc. One of the ugliest, unliveable things I’ve ever seen in my life, bizarrely located in one of the most beautiful rural landscapes which, of course, it destroys. Actually, come to think of it, just the thing that Riggles seems to espouse!

        1. I’ve not seen it in person, but I was in the UK when they started building the place and was following the architectural debates in the media. A friend was from Dorset and we spend plenty of time in the countryside there. Her family lived in Poole, which isn’t too far from Dorchester.

          Apart from his enormous hypocrisy, I have a problem with Prince Charles’ odd views on architecture. I like many styles and a lot of modern architecture really excites me. On the other hand, he seems to think the UK should be stuck in the 18th century and we should all live in classical mini-palaces or something. I think there is a place for architectural think tanks. They’d just have more credibility if they weren’t patronised by a man who has a butler to squeeze his tooth paste on to his brush, and who actually lived in a “three homes per plot” townhouse.

  5. Comment Box – Just because you want a house with a big garage doesn’t mean that everyone wants or needs one. The point is that we need a range of diverse dwellings and we already have a heap of stock of the stand alone house with plenty of car parking variety. Creating housing that is different from that will allow those who are living in those larger properties but who would prefer something else to do that.

    1. That completely misses the question I asked.

      Also if I was to be looking for a house just a garage will do, it does not need to be large. And as we know, pretty every single household in the country has at least one car, if it’s not going to be parked on their property that means it need to be parked on the street which means we all pay for the persons carpark rather than just the person with the car.

      1. ‘pretty every single household in the country has at least one car…’

        Yes but probably not in the inner suburbs, which are the very places where the landscape and development opportunities are most damaged by having excessive minimum offstreet parking requirements. We should not overgeneralise about the planning issues of a large and diverse city.

        ‘…if it’s not going to be parked on their property that means it need to be parked on the street which means we all pay for the persons carpark rather than just the person with the car.’

        In some areas that does no harm as on street parking acts as traffic calming and puts to some use areas of asphalt that would have no other use (the opportunitty cost is zero).

        I’m always amused by how right wing libertarians who hate public transport (because it’s communal) and love cars (because they’re private), are simultaneously happy to impose draconian restrictions on people’s private property rights by forcing them to have a certain amount of off street car storage which they might not choose for themselves. They never seems to realise the intellectual incoherence of this. (this is a general comment, I’m not suggesting you’re one of them).

      2. Balderdash Comment Box. Approximately 10% of households don’t own cars. Moreover, many of these people are concentrated in certain suburbs, which the level of non-vehicle ownership is much higher.

        Fully support what John Smith said. And if too many people park on street then just charge them for it.

        1. That sounds near unbelievable that 10% of households in NZ don’t have a car, are you including student dorms in this as well?

        2. No the census definition of household doesn’t include student dormitories. It’s also defined in terms of access to a car, not necessarily owning one that is based at the dwelling either.

        3. The figure is more like 8% Nationally (7% in Auckland) and decreasing. The %’s of households with access to 2-3 cars are also increasing significantly combined with the increasing population/households = lots of cars on the roads.

        4. That’s going back to the 2006 census however, trends have changed a lot since then. Go back to 2006 on new vehicles, kilometres travelled, petrol consumed and it all trends up, but since then it’s all trended down. I await the next census results with much anticipation.

        5. I think Ponsonby News quote about 90% of Ponsonby households having access to car so whilst slightly higher than the National average not massively different.

          Car access is more closely correlated to income than anything else to be honest.

  6. sounds like the main event has already happened! shame I missed it…it makes very entertaining reading.

    by the way, as entertaining as the debate has been, it feels a little spurious. every house in Hobsonville Point has at least one off street parking space, with every house with 3 beds or more having at least 2 off street parking spaces. The terrace houses have rear lane access to double garages. The difference between this emerging environment and the classic late twentieth century developments is not that there is no parking, its that there is not a large driveway capable of accommodating 4 or 5 cars. Consequently the houses are closer to the street and closer together, making far more efficient use of land, helping to create the intensity of people required to sustain other forms of transport (inlcuding the ferry). Admittedly this results in an environment that looks far more intense and less spacious, but still has everything people require from home – except excessive space around the dwelling (which can often be relatively useless space).

  7. By building homes on smaller sections with less space dedicated to car parking the residential density increases. This makes providing quality PT easier and more cost effective. Therefore the community depicted above in the model becomes less car dependant due to access to good PT.

    But I have a feeling you already knew this and would like to argue the point….

    1. I do agree that increased density make PT services more viable to operate, although I know others would disagree say that some of the best PT systems in the world are in cities with lower densities than Auckland already.

      But there you have it though, providing quality PT makes a place less car dependent, As to if a car is parked on the street, on a driveway, in car port or in a garage makes next to no difference for the location in question. However providing poor quality car parking does drive away people who care about their cars and insurance premiums, potentially to locations that don’t have quality PT services increasing car dependence.

  8. I can easily believe that 10% of NZ households dont have access to a car, the suburb I live in would probably be higher than that.

  9. The power poles in O’Neill St really aren’t as much of an impediment as they appear. Most are places on the inner or outer edge of the footpath. Also it’s a one-way street, which helps when walking – and means that even less space is needed for cars. The big problem, as you have noticed is the cars parked on the footpath. In many cases entirely blocking the footpath. This is becoming more common in the area as people get bigger cars and are worried that they’ll get sideswiped. The council should be more pro-active about fining drivers who block footpaths. If the council or residents of the street are really worried that it’s too narrow, then make it parking on one side only (although the one-way nature of the street means it’s probably not necessary). Several streets in Ponsonby used to have that rule years ago, but it seems to have disappeared.

    1. I used to get a bit grumpy with pavement parkers but now I just occupy the roadspace when walking, all good. The parked cars are informal self applying traffic calming devices installed randomly at no cost to ratepayers. Perfect.

      1. They would calm traffic better on the road, not on the footpath. O’Neill St is ok because it’s possible to safely walk on the road. Some other streets around there are not (high volume of cars, with impatient drivers). I’ve seen parents with small children or prams (reasonable sized prams, not those huge off-road or twin ones) forced onto the road by cars blocking the footpath.
        It’s an overreaction by the car-owners anyway. I’ve only once seen cars in Ponsonby be sideswiped, and that was some nutcase driver who would have hit cars even if they were right up on the footpath (I think he also drove into a building).

        1. Liz of course you are right. Off the foot path is best. It is just drivers being selfish about their valuable possession and thoughtless about others; namely pedestrians, especially those with prams!

          An extremely drunk driver once ricocheted down my [previous] street in Grey Lynn like he was in a pinball machine; he managed to hit every second car scoring my two neighbours left and right and the one opposite but neatly missing mine! No amount of road width would have helped this goon.

  10. Thanks GTP….. I appreciate the Stats, turns out my suburb is both well educated, high earning and relativly low access to a motor vehicle. Shows that access to a motor vehicle shouldnt nessesarily be used to calculate deprivation in NZ.

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