Urban designer Stuart Houghton has set himself a personal project of coming up with 100 ideas for improving Auckland at the rate of one a day. He is Tweeting them here: @HoughtonSd
Discussing this project with Stuart he said that “I see the city is getting better and better and growing up fast, but everywhere I look as I move about the city I am struck by ideas big and small for how Auckland could be improved. I see this as a positive thing.”
We agree.
In this task he has been inspired by Jan Gehl the Danish urbanist who famously said:
“How nice it is to wake up each morning in a city that is a little bit better than it was before”
1 Transforming the Motorway Ring
I had to start my 100 ideas with this one; my urban design master’s thesis from 2009. The starting point was sitting in London panning across Auckland in Google Earth with my tutor, and his simple observation on the wastefulness of such a huge area of otherwise high value land being taken up exclusively by the motorways.
The project basically asks: Wouldn’t it be great if rather than a massive barrier that shackles the city centre, the CMJ was actually a positive shaping force, becoming an urban and social connector?
I proposed retaining but reducing the capacity of the motorway lanes, and through a combination of tunnelling and capping enable other uses to take place over the motorway. This could join with the waterfront to create a continuous ring of public space. Along with the historical north-south Queen Street axis, these could become three major public space armatures around which the city grows and develops for the next 100 years.
This might seem far out. But it needn’t be a grand vision. In many ways, projects like the Grafton Gully Cycleway are already grafting new uses to the motorway ring. Potential projects like the Nelson St off ramp, and the idea of a Grafton Gully Boulevard as posted by Kent and Nick a few weeks back can all work towards this.
Processing...
If this is #1 I’d hate to see the other 99.
My hope is the remaining 99 include less focus on buzz words and more focus on what actually matters to people.
What about simply capping the gully?
http://inhabitat.com/hamburg-is-building-a-giant-green-roof-cover-over-sections-of-the-a7-motorway/laermschutz-a7/
So Auckland could ultimately get a green ring too? Linear parks are old hat – the ring is the thing. 😉
http://hamiltonurbanblog.co.nz/projects/hamilton-green-ring-project/
Have any engineers out there looked at capping parts of the CMJ? Is it feasible? At all affordable?
It’s perfectly feasible, has been done in plenty of cities around the world. Affordable, that’s relative. At the point where the cost of capping per m2 is lower than the value of the the resulting land per m2 it becomes affordable for a commercial development. I doubt building a big park there would ever be affordable, with high capital costs and no return.
There are some complications however, cap more than a short section and you effectively have a full tunnel, you need ventilation and exhaust systems, fire control, emergency exits etc. Then you have the ongoing operating costs of all this, plus the maintenance of the structure itself.
The largest complication is getting everyone to agree that we will never expand or modify the CMJ again. Even if we have no such plans and don’t want to anyway, a lot of people will want to keep the option open. Certainly no one planning a harbour crossing will turn around and say that the CMJ can be boxed in and set in stone. I’m sure they all have ideas of how they’ll have to ‘relieve’ the new harbour crossing bottleneck through the CBD.
This is probably our only chance of getting a central city circuit or hill climb track back in the CBD so naturally I am hugely in favour.
Great idea! I think of projects like this almost every time I run past the central part of spaghetti junction. In particular, there has to be a safe way to make some of this space into great rockclimbing walls.
For the downtown part: I think planning should focus on reducing traffic through downtown, not facilitating it. One way to do this would be to facilitate traffic from the west to the east of downtown and vice versa using the motorway. For this, we need to have a way to connect the Nelson St or Fanshawe St motorway entrances to Port, and a way to get to Nelson St from Port.
Capping over and providing some extra parks and public space would be a great use of the motorway land. Some commercial/residential buildings could help to offset some of the cost.
Definitely inspirational and clearly long term sort of plan.
Rock climbing would be great! There should be some holds and clips put up for the victoria park flyover structure going up the pillar and upside down along the ceiling.
“This might seem far out. But it needn’t be a grand vision”
One of the reasons I bought 2010 Landscape Magazine was to have a record of these images,
There are some Ring Diagrams that go with these images, which show the idea at its most basic.
looking forward to seeing more of this.
My first reaction was that this would be impractical in terms of the quantity of concrete required. But a rough estimate of 3800m x 100m x 1m thick gives about 400k cubic meters, once you allow for some columns. That’s less than half the amount of concrete in the Clyde Dam. It’d need to be a much more serious structure if you were going to build on it.
Another idea for reclaiming some motorway… If the government builds the harbour tunnel, joins it up to the CMJ, and turns the Harbour Bridge in to a very long city center feeder, then is there an opportunity to narrow the current motorway through St Marys Bay? Build on some of it, and turn the rest in to a linear park. Reduce the 5 lanes each way to 2 each way, and also extend this over the Harbour Bridge. Then you could use the clip-ons for buses and bicycles.
Yes obi, the harbour tunnel *could* start right back before Wellington St, St Marys bay could become a four lane sort of Tamaki Dr west, they Vic Park tunnel could be reconfigured to one lane each way, the Vic Park Viaduct be torn down, and the corridor between Vic Park and Wellington turned into a park or redeveloped with new cross streets and buildings.
However they won’t do that. It would make the project especially poor on benefits: no capacity gain, no ‘network resiliance’. It would be a case of spending five billion dollars to move traffic from the bridge to the tunnel so you can wind down the bridge massively. Which minister of Transport is going to sign off on that? They’ll want to keep all the existing links open, and all eight lanes on the bridge through to town. The traffic modelling will only produce benefits with lots of extra lanes (even if they only go to town).
That’s the main problem with the project, you’re either spending billions to do little for the state highways but flood the CBD with cars, or you’re spending billions to do little for the state highways and not flood the CBD with cars either.
If the CMJ joins the tunnel, then I don’t see any choice other than to reduce lanes over the Harbour Bridge and through SMB. You can’t funnel 5 lanes of traffic on to Fanshawe Street.
That may be what you and I think, but it’s not the official line. They have to keep those lanes open otherwise there will be no modelled traffic benefits.
If you look at the latest set of plans for the options investigated by NZTA, they all kept all eight lanes open on the bridge, and furthermore propose a second Vic Park tunnel (yes another, in addition to the harbour tunnel proper) to have six lanes total through to Cook St. One lane each way to Fanshawe and a cook each is identified as a bus lane (from a single shared lane on the bridge), but overall they are still suggesting the peak direction of the bridge will have one bus lane plus four general traffic lanes exclusively funnelling traffic to Fanshawe and Cook St.
Across the board that means the same number of lanes through to the CMJ, and a tripling of lanes to downtown. Hence the fundamental stupidity of the scheme, it doesn’t actually do what people assume it does. If we want to get more commuters into town at peak times there are several much cheaper, easier and less invasive ways to do it.
Capping the CMJ will be cheaper than road tunnels across the harbour.
Better still would be to just cantilever lightweight structure off the existing bridges like K Rd, and Upper Queen St and activate them like the Ponte Vecchio…make them no longer wind swept dull gaps in the built fabric. But certainly cap between Grafton and Wellesley Sts; this looks viable and valuable.
I agree that t makes more sense to cap a few key sections of the CBD ring motorway, rather than the whole thing. How lightweight do these have to be? I imagined a concrete deck topped by enough soil to support a grassy park with some trees and a small cafe or two. But could this be done with metal work only?
If anywhere needs a connector, it is the city and the Domain. In a practical sense, we could vastly improve the pedestrian connections and flow on either side, creating a safer and more pleasant space.
Kudos to Stuart, be interesting to see what he does to the North Shore.
Would be great if students could turn them into case studies.
Could they be self-funding?
Is the theoretical practical?
Is the practical popular?