The street causing most grief to Aucklanders

Brian from New Lynn

Is there any place in Auckland more likely to make people angry than Quay St? In the last few weeks I've been shouted at by four different people about it. The roadworks are interminable. No one gets told anything. They're just digging holes and filling them in again. Who asked for this anyway? Mostly, it comes down to one thing: why does it now take so long to drive across town? I went down to ask Auckland Transport (AT) about all this, and we did a walk around. The construction work on Quay St itself is an AT project, but the big Commercial Bay retail/office development, a private venture, is also highly disruptive. Ports of Auckland (POAL) is building a new multideck "car-handling facility" at the head of Bledisloe Wharf and the Auckland Design Office, a council agency, has a hand in things too. New hotels and other high-rise buildings are under construction, and the CRL is massively disruptive all down Albert St and especially at the intersection with Customs St. It's a problem, for sure. But it's a good problem. Auckland is booming: growing the economy, fixing infrastructure problems, making itself a better city. And it's not just Auckland. This is the condition of living in any thriving city now: road cones are with us always. Quay St was reduced to two lanes just after Christmas. It was done with a non-notifiable consent, which angered some of the affected parties. But it's hard to blame AT, if you ask me. They needed to get moving, because the America's Cup in early 2021 imposes a real deadline on all construction in the area, the seawall work needed to be done anyway, and any other approach would have caused extensive delays. That's what happens with the city's development projects. Some companies and groups of individuals have genuine fears for their own livelihood or wellbeing, and they lodge objections. That's good. It's what should happen. But others get in on the act too. Some of them simply want to stuff up the work. Others are after leverage: they want something out of it. Perhaps a payoff so they go away. Perhaps a special thing built for them as part of the project. If they're a developer, perhaps they want council support for their own project somewhere else, in return for withdrawing their objection to this one. It's a failure of vision, of courage, of leadership. And the crowds for the America's Cup are coming.
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