Stuart’s 100 continues:
5: A Traffic-Free Queen Street for Christmas
What if Queen Street stayed closed to traffic after the Christmas Parade?
Every year for one Saturday in November Queen Street is closed to traffic for one of Auckland’s greatest traditions, the Christmas Parade. Wouldn’t it be great if we started a new tradition: keep the street closed to traffic for the rest of the day?!
Queen Street as the crowd disperses just after the Christmas Parade, 2013
Why would you want to chase away 100,000 + people as soon as the parade is over? Encouraging them to stay a while could be a great boost for city centre retailers to promote Christmas shopping in the city. It could also be a quick win to pilot future changes to Queen Street.
Traffic Free Christmas Shopping Day Oxford St London.
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As a colleague of mine would say “Why wouldn’t you?”. Great idea Stuart. Lets do it this year and keep doing it every year thereafter.
Best idea so far, by a golden mile
So obvious. If you’ve got a captive audience, keep them there.
Great idea, and have a Christmas market down the middle if the street, it would be awesome!
I’d support this if there were an uninterrupted bus lane all the way along Albert Street. As it is right now, the increased car traffic that closing Queen St would divert means that buses going through the downtown area would be seriously delayed.
That’s an untested assumption. Let’s test it!
As Jeanette Sadik-Khan told us recently – try it. If it doesn’t work, try something else next time. Should we not try it just because it might not work? What if you’re wrong, Logan.
Great idea. Make it so AT
This is a great idea and if it works do it the next Sunday and the next until Christmas as only a prat would want to go joy riding his car down Queen St on a Sunday afternoon on the run up to Christmas. Always after the parade the buses eventually sort themselves out but AT may find that they will have to schedule more buses though.
Awesome idea, and should be a no-brainer huh!
And maybe also a bus exhibition like the one in Regent Street a few weeks back – http://www.regentstreetonline.com/Events/2014-on-Regent-Street.aspx
Make it an all day event, high light being the parade, add in markets, carnival at Queens Wharf, close high st as well, AT as like sports events, free bus and train. Let the CBD show it’s not all $2 shops, and have its own “Parade Day Sales”
+1 for this idea. Where can we submit on this to the council?
This is easily the best idea thus far.
Maybe there is some hope for this list after all.
This is a good idea. But are all 100 going to be about the city?
Always after the parade the buses eventually sort themselves out but AT may find that they will have to schedule more buses though. Christmas as only a prat would want to go joyriding his car down Queen St on a Sunday afternoon on the run-up to Christmas.
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