The Sun 42 WYNDHAM STREET, AUCKLAND MONDAY, AUGUST 5, 1929 SOLVING THE TRAFFIC PROBLEM

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 733, 5 August 1929, Page 8

The Sun 42 WYNDHAM STREET, AUCKLAND MONDAY, AUGUST 5, 1929 SOLVING THE TRAFFIC PROBLEM

HEROIC measures are required to relieve Auckland of its traffic congestion, and the proposals advanced by the technical group of the Town-Planning Association are of that character. Being heroic, they are also costly. The total cost of the scheme announced today will be sufficient to defer its completion for many years, and to keep the interested local bodies bargaining for a still longer period. But these disadvantages cannot obscure the fact that the longer the task is delayed, the more expensive it will become. Local bodies in the past have contented themselves with tinkering with the problem, and the tinkering policy has done no good at all. If it has relieved traffic at one place, it has aggravated the congestion at another. The problem has to be studied and solved on a broad scale or not at all. Twentieth century generations owe a lot to the past, hut the obligation is not all on one side. If the problem of planning had been attempted at the beginning of this century, when the first dim realisation that Auckland was, after all, not such a wonderfully laid-out city was beginning to penetrate the perceptions of local administrators, it could have been solved for the barest fraction of the cost that will he involved today. Had some heroic effort been made then, this generation could have looked back on its immediate predecessor with real gratitude. But the motor-car had not then altered the whole traffic scheme of the community. If the City Council and the other local bodies perceived flaws in the urban layout, they at least saw no pressing need to correct them. Since the war the position has altered. Every year has added to the serious nature of the congestion, and has demonstrated the necessity for a drastic rearrangement of the traffic routes. If the past has shirked its obligations, the present generation has no shadow of an excuse for doing so. The last vestige of an excuse for procrastination disappears with the presentation of the committee’s report, which gives the interested local bodies what they have long required—a tangible scheme in which all the main issues are dealt with. The scheme may not be perfect, but it furnishes a ground for practical discussion. One of its minor faults seems to be a tendency to create diagonal, and hence dangerous, intersections in the vicinity of Newmarket, and to so absorb property that many of the sections facing the new roads will he of extremely awkward shape. The primary task of the committee was to do something to relieve Broadway, a “bottle-neck” of the most pronounced type. Curiously enough, its best contribution to this problem is a route that does not come within miles of Broadway. Nevertheless, the route it has devised from Quay Street to Panmure is an eminently practical highway combining the merits of direct access with the factor that a minimum of new construction is required. A great deal of intermediate residential land will he tapped by this road, while in addition it will serve a large rural area, the growing needs of summer traffic to southern beaches, and even arteria distance traffic, linking up with the Great South Road at Otahuhu or Papatoetoe. At Newmarket itself the plan to relieve Broadwa? of its burden is of the heroic type. One at least of the new roads can hardly be formed for many years, as it is dependent on tin reduction of the present railway junction yards to a suburbar station of comparative unimportance. And this cannot come, if it comes at all, until the Morningside tunnel has been completed. There appears to he a danger that, while the increasing volume of Great Sotith Road traffic will he diverted from Broadway, most of it will return to that thoroughfare farther on, thus providing between Dilworth Avenue and Market Road the very factors that have helped to make Broadway such a congested shopping centre. This, too. may he unavoidable. The Remuera traffic will not traverse this section, and Gillies Avenue will be a by-pass to the west. If the remaining traffic converts part of the Great Soaith Road into a business thoroughfare lined with shops, this will only be another inexorable sequel of progress. The committee’s other recommendations are of fairly obvious character, hut when the complete plan is discussed among local bodies, as it certainly should be without delay, we should like to see some reference to a road across the Arch Hill Gully further west than Belgium Street.