Update: 25-05-2023 – I never got a response from Greater Auckland regarding this.

I will declare that I’m only a mere (curious) member of joe public, with little in the way of any Urban planning experience, however, with so much controversy over bus lane enforcement, Retro-fitting light rail, and removal of on-street parking in Auckland. An idea that came to my mind is…

Would it or would it not be an easier idea to build high rise apartments at the likes of the empty / unbuilt greenfield sites of Albany and Drury where frequent and high capacity separated public transport links already exist (provided the ground at such sites are actually able to take high rise apartments)

Some of benefits (should this be able to be pulled off) I potentially see as a layman include…

• Facilities such as shopping, medical, recreational, etc being within walking distance, allowing households to conduct most of the day to day household necessities within the local vicinity reducing the reliance on cars and allow households to reduce the number of cars they subsequently need to maintain.
• If you need to go elsewhere in Auckland, you have a ready to go Train station or Bus-way station nearby where fast and frequent services exist.
• As a starting point to ultimately curbing our current rate of sprawl across productive food producing farmland.

It’s just I see so much opposition to the current aims of Auckland Transport and Greater Auckland (Advocacy organization) and their plans extolled frankly on paper just seems so disruptive and unsettling to people’s existing living arrangements and livelihoods. To boot, the risks of retrofitting new initiatives to existing established neighbourhoods such as light rail just seem fraught with huge cost over-runs as we’ve seen with the Auckland City Rail Link (or Loop) depending on what they call it these days.

I’ve sent the Greater Auckland blog people the above idea via their contact form with them hopefully coming back to me for my own edification as a member of the public with their feedback along with their rebuttals of why they feel the general idea is not better than their current aspirations. Currently awaiting their response.

With this idea penned, I totally understand there will undoubtably be cons to my idea above and I invite people who may be more versed in urban planning than I, to actually come and “roast this post” as it were and present some arguments against the idea (road blocks and problems) which I’ve undoubtably missed.