Weekly Roundup 29-November-2024

It’s another Friday and we’re almost in the final month of the year and the Pohutukawa’s are starting to blossom. Here’s some of the stories that have caught our attention this week.

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This week in Greater Auckland

• On Monday longtime reader Mr Plod had some suggestions for AT after travelling to Auckland and using public transport.
• On Tuesday Matt asked what should happen with AT, and the other CCO’s, under Wayne Browns reforms.
• On Wednesday Matt crunched the numbers on NZTA’s push for PT fare increases and service cuts.
• On Thursday Pippa Coom encouraged us all to love our berms, and submit to AT on ongoing consultation!

Greening a city by trading parking for trees

Paris is pushing to reach it’s climate goals, and deal with urban heat waves by replacing parking with trees.

Paris has already received much international attention for the steps it has taken to reduce carbon emissions in recent years, especially in the decade since Mayor Anne Hidalgo took office. Under the heading “Faster, Fairer, More Local,” this new plan pledges to extend that progress, delivering a city that’s greener, more resilient against extreme weather, more pedestrian-friendly — and freer of cars.

To reach this goal, Paris promises to establish 300 hectares of new green space by 2030, with 10% in place by 2026. Removing parking spaces will be a major component of this. For example, the many curbside spots that flank streets can be replaced with relative ease by lines of trees planted in beds that also aid stormwater absorption.The creation of “oasis squares” in each of Paris’ 20 arrondissements will add other green areas where trees and shade structures such as gazebos offer residents respite from the sun and help lower surrounding air temperatures.

New South Wales creates pre-approved designs to fast track housing

The NSW government recently approved five designs for fast tracking terrace and apartment building.

Five winning terrace and apartment designs will be pre-approved in a new NSW government “pattern book” in a bid to fast-track housing development in the state.

The designs were selected from more than 200 in the state government’s Pattern Book Design Competition, submitted by architects from Australia and around the world.

…..

Prof Philip Oldfield, the head of UNSW Built Environment, said that natural shade, light and ventilation were the consistent themes across the winning designs.

“If you look at housing that is sometimes built, we see a lot of curtain wall and a lot of glass,” Oldfield said, compared to the winning designs which utilise a “really nice balance between glazing and views, shade and opacity”.

NZ Study shows serial speeders have higher risk of crashing

In a recent study of driver data between 2017-2019, Dr Darren Walton and Dr Ross Hendy indicates that drivers who speed are at greater risk of crashing – and we potentially lack appropriate enforcement

Tougher fines and measures may be needed to crack down on serial speeders, say researchers who’ve revealed a troubling link between tickets and road crashes.

Their just-published analysis suggests drivers ticketed for speeding are nearly three times more likely to be in a crash – with that risk compounding as they rack up more fines.

[…]

After sorting drivers into groups based on their ticket count and their most excessive speeding, they found a strong link between high-speed violations and the likelihood of future crashes. Those who piled up more than four fines over two years faced the steepest increase, with roughly one in 10 being involved in a crash where they were at fault. That stood in stark contrast to the overall crash rate of 1.2% for all drivers over the period – suggesting those repeat offenders could be targeted with more interventions.

[…]

In fact, the data indicated a driver with just two speeding tickets had a comparable crash risk to a driver with a blood-alcohol level of 0.08 – a criminal offence in most jurisdictions.

Another city benefiting from Vision Zero

Concerted effort in Poland has led to the redesigning of Warsaw’s streets, including implementation of speed calming measures such as raised crossings and speed bumps, resulting in a significant drop in road deaths.

Warsaw is on course to celebrate a major achievement this year: The Polish capital is due to record the lowest rate of death on its roads since it started collecting statistics in the 1980s. Reflecting the city’s avowed commitment to Vision Zero — the safety strategy formulated in 1990s Sweden that aims to eliminate all traffic fatalities and severe injuries — the number of road deaths in Warsaw has dropped by 55% in the last 10 years.

It’s a startling reversal for this city of 2 million, which was once known as one of the deadliest in Europe for both drivers and pedestrians. In 1991 — the worst year on record for traffic safety — 314 people were killed on Warsaw’s streets; 2023 saw the death toll drop to just 29, with 11 of those pedestrians. When population density is taken into account, Warsaw’s streets are now markedly safer than those of most of the European Union, with just 15 deaths per million residents.

[…]

Still, the dramatic drop reveals the effectiveness of recent efforts to improve safety, which included local measures like upgrading crosswalks as well as new national regulations that force motorists to assume more legal responsibility for their own driving.

Auckland gets a tree for Christmas

Great article by Madeleine Chapman in The Spinoff about how, despite the negative headlines, it turns out Aucklanders do like nice things!

When it got just dark enough, the tree lit up. At first, only a small portion of it turned on and I shrivelled up inside thinking that was it. Then a moment later it burst into rainbow light and everyone oohed and aahed and held their phones up to capture it. What’s not to love about a giant tree filled with pretty lights? People took photos and ate ice creams and some woman had a massive bag of popcorn that I suddenly craved. Next year, I’m sure they’ll add food carts selling hot chocolates and candy canes to the lighting festivities because that’s really all it was missing.

As people started trickling away with their sleepy children, I turned back to look at the tree again. I would soon join hundreds of others in the walk back up Queen Street, stopping at a surprisingly bustling late night convenience store for a little treat before busing home. But for that moment, I was simply looking at the pretty lights on the massive Christmas tree and enjoying the sounds of other people doing the same.

Some stats on Te Huia

SO it's 7,516 saved car trips, totalling 977,080km last month alone, or 167 tonnes of CO2 for the month or more than 2,000 tonnes a year. Also saves about 1 DSI crash per 2 months or 6 per year;w/ an average social cost of $1,100,000 per DSI, NZ saves at least $6.6 million in social costs alone.

— Tim Welch (@twelch.bsky.social) 2024-11-25T07:03:58.312Z

Auckland’s treasure map for Māori tourism

An upcoming website by Tātaki Auckland Unlimited will highlight for visitors the many Māori businesses and experiences in Auckland.

Auckland may not be what you first think of when it comes to burgeoning Māori tourism, yet that could be about to change with the impending launch of a website highlighting the city’s cultural treasures.

Māori have lived in and around Auckland for 1000 years. In that time, they’ve built businesses worth $6 billion a year, including tourist experiences, says Helen Te Hira, director of Māori outcomes at Tātaki Auckland Unlimited.

Problem is, nothing linked them all and few tourists knew of them. Overseas travelers seeking a Māori experience tended to whizz past Auckland, to the likes of Rotorua.

“Tāmaki Makaurau is the gateway to the rest of the country, but you can live in the city and not understand that for more 1000 years Māori, of various iwi and hapū, have made this place our home,” Te Hira says.

“Auckland has the world’s biggest Māori population, but there’s an uneven awareness and all we’re trying to do is make it much more accessible to the overseas visitor who wants, and can see all the offerings in the global market.

Tuesday sees the launch of an online platform showcasing Māori-owned tourism businesses, called Treasures of Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland.

New York City is dismantling their outdoor dining scene

Streets were changed to save the restaurant scene during covid, but new rules have led to the dismantling of many outdoor dining spaces in NYC.

Four years after in-street dining gave desperate restaurants a way to hang on and New Yorkers a way to hang out, the very last of the Covid-era dining sheds are truly, finally, really disappearing.

The structures varied from simple lean-tos banged together out of a few hundred dollars’ worth of lumber to small, lovingly detailed odes to verdigris Beaux-Arts winter gardens, sleek Streamline Moderne luncheonettes and sunset-pink Old Havana arcades.

They came to have almost as many meanings as architectural styles. To some urbanists, they were a bold experiment in rethinking public space. To others, they were an eyesore. Restaurateurs saw them as an economic lifeline. Opponents saw a land grab.

Dining inside a popular spot, you could believe New York had embraced al fresco culture like Rome and Buenos Aires. Walking past an empty one at night, you might conclude that the city was throwing a permanent picnic for the rats.

It was never meant to last, at least not in the form it took during the depths of the pandemic. The city’s street-and-sidewalk dining program, called Open Restaurants, used an emergency executive order to allow restaurants to sidestep many existing laws and regulations about safety, parking, accessibility and fees.

Once the emergency ended, permanent rules were written after much wrangling between Mayor Eric Adams, the City Council, a herd of bureaucracies and the restaurant business. The guidelines are now far more stringent: Fully enclosed structures aren’t allowed, for instance, and many setups will have to be scaled back to a smaller footprint.

Almost there with CRL construction!

Article by David Long in Stuff looking at the many finished projects, such as Te Hā Noa, Waimahara, and Elliot Street, as well as peoples experiences with construction in the City Centre.

Hills says the underpass and improvements to Myers Park ticks several boxes.

“A lot of the works are about investing in spaces so that they are brighter, more interesting and safer,” he said.

“The Myers Park project is about that too. This was often quite a dark space, a space that did feel a little unloved, but it’s an important connection to the early childhood centres, the kindergartens, the kids’ playground and the huge number of residents that live around this area.

“This is about bringing people through and up into the city centre as well. So we will see the city become safer because it has better lighting, better seating, more trees and more places to dwell.

Related, Seven Sharp took a look at the rebuilding of the stone wall along Albert St

I still wish they could have made the old toilet entrance into an additional entrance to the station – technically it will be but only to access some of the mechanical plant under the road.

Street survival simulator in bike-laneless Ontario?

Recently the provincial government voted to remove bike lanes in Ontario, Canada. This online game was made in response as a protest as a entirely accurate way to simulate the new Toronto.

Experience cycling between certain death and probable death in this totally accurate street survival simulator. Life without bike lanes? Thanks Doug

Dutch office workers swap leather shoes for trainers in ‘versneakering’

Due to the prominance of cycling in the Netherlands, and driven by Covid, it’s become far more normal to come into work in sneakers or trainers, than the classic suit and leather shoe.

“It started four years ago [with Covid] when people no longer needed to go to work,” Van Lier’s chief executive, Christina van Spaendonck, told NPO Radio 1. “People started buying more sneakers. You see them worn under a suit and they are ever more acceptable on the work floor.”

“We are primarily data-driven, so if you see that sneakers are doing well, you buy in more … and we are seeing a trend towards both more dressy shoes and more dressy trainers.”

Thanks to widespread adoption of cycling, and the problems of cycling in a suit and leather shoes, the Netherlands has long embraced less formal business dress than London.

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