GETTING AROUND

I more often than not travel down to Auckland and back by bus nowadays, only taking the car if I need to carry something heavy. This is great for relaxation, cost saving and to avoid what is becoming a dangerous stretch of road particularly as being an old geezer my reactions aren't as fast as they used to be.

The problem is that I live a half hour from town and the bus depot and there isn't a public bus service out to where I live.

I listened to an interesting article on Nine To Noon on National Radio this morning.


For the past century, the car has dominated our cities, shaping the streets, roads and urban spaces that surround them. Enter the AV or automated vehicle. But according to design guru, Allison Arieff AVs won't be enough to fix these problems - and could even make them worse. She says that's because we need to be designing for people not cars. She talks to Kathryn Ryan about how good design can change all our lives. Allison Arieff is currently the editorial director of the urban planning and policy think tank, the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association and edits its publication, The Urbanist. She is also a columnist for The New York Times, and teaches at UC Berkeley. She is being brought to New Zealand by the NZ Institute of Architects, to present the Sir Ian Athfield Memorial Lecture in Auckland, Wellington and Queenstown for the Festival of Architecture which runs from 14th -23rd September. She teaches in the College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley.

You can listen to it here: TRAFFIC WOES

With some other people I've been pushing for council and government funding for safe walkways and cycleways in our semi-rural area and it looks like things are moving in this direction but a bus or shuttle service from the Heads to Whangarei would be most welcome and might take some of the problem drivers off the road.

When I'm in Auckland I walk or, if it's raining use the bus or train service. I'd walk around Whangarei as well if there was a suitable way of getting there. We have a wharf-strength jetty at the end of our street so some kind of ferry would be ideal. Apparently one operated from there a couple of decades ago taking college kids across the harbour into school. As usually happens this was replaced by a bus service and parents driving their kids to school that has added to pollution, road wear and traffic problems. 

Other places around Auckland could benefit from more use of ferries (like in Sydney*)  and in Wellington an increased Days Bay/Eastbourne service would I'm sure get well used and help decrease the pressure on the Hutt Road (even though Robert thinks that building wharves and jetties there is solely for the benefit of the wealthy and privileged classes).

If this country doesn't sort out its traffic problems we could see a return to drastic measures like the Carless Days scheme of the 1970s.

CARLESS DAYS

* Manley Ferry joke.

Visitor to Circular Quay in Sydney: "Excuse me I'm looking for the Manley Ferry"

Person that he asked: " Here I am" (said in a very deep voice)

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