We keep sprawling out while failing to protect needed future transport corridors. This is unusual for a city in a developed nation.

Look at the area East of the Tamaki River. Endless sprawl without either a grade separated transit (busway or rail) spine or a motorway spine.

Instead we have endless traffic light infested arterials. Worse, traffic lights that do not seem to be optimised to keep platoons of vehicles flowing smoothly in either direction

Even Worse, many of those newer developments such as Flat Bush and Ormiston aren’t any where near a bus service, so what are residents / households who move into the area going to do? Buy a fleet of cars adding ever more cars into an already deeply constrained Auckland wide roading network. Once household travel patterns becomes establish it is then very hard to reverse. This basically guarantees we will be stuck in a cycle of car dependency and abject congestion as a city for the foreseeable future.

It is clear (unlike cities in other developed countries) we have not learned from our past mistakes and this is personally the bit I find hardest to reconcile.

Of course once the concrete is laid down, it is often very difficult and costly to fix it later on especially if we haven’t reserved any corridors. Look at the Eastern Busway. We ended up having to acquire and demolish houses at huge cost. — I for one am going to say up front this project isn’t going to be the saviour of East Auckland as we believe it is going to be. Too many “at-grade” intersections, unlike the Northern Busway.

As an ordinary rate-paying resident, I’m at a total loss at what I can do. I’ve submitted my views where I can to the Council, AT and other government agencies involved both during consultations and outside of it but feel like I’m being stonewalled. I’m surprised transport advocates whether they are pro-PT or Pro-car haven’t also spotted this and kicked up a fuss.