Andrew Dickens: No white knight coming to fix Auckland gridlock

Aucklanders have to embrace density. Photo / Greg Bowker

Opinion

My family is the sort of family the Auckland Council loves.

In 1992 we bought our first house. A two-bedroom townhouse in Freeman's Bay which no-one wanted at the time but is now the Holy Grail for first time buyers and empty nesters.

We bought it, rather than a three-bedroom in the suburbs, because we made the vow to get a property within 5kms of where we work.

Since then we've bought and sold three more times but always around the area.

So for the past 30 years we've rarely taken a car to work.

We bike and bus and on nice days we walk.

We take up no parking space in the CBD. Our cars last forever because they're only used in the weekend.

Auckland, for us, is a truly liveable city. Traffic chaos? What traffic chaos.

But occasionally we experience what the majority of Aucklanders live with every day.

Recently I took my mother from Ponsonby to Remuera for a doctor's appointment at 4.15pm.

What off peak is a 15-minute journey was an hour long slog.

Leaving the motorway for the backstreets I found all the rat runs also clogged. The trip home at 5pm took near enough an hour and a half.

Looking at the drivers of the cars I saw one occupant after one occupant.

And were they all the immigrants we blame our woes on?

Nope. Take the buses and trains or walk the pavements and that's where you'll find those guys.

I saw a lot of Mums with kids in the back seat and Dads in suits.

For a while now I have commented that many live in Auckland the way they always have.

When I was growing up you could leave home, drive anywhere you like, find a car park and do your thing.

Those days are gone and they will never come back.

We built motorways that were too small.

We've finished and improved them and neglected to build busways.

We built a woefully inadequate bridge.

We're about to open a tunnel that will be congested immediately.

We built a state of the art train station but it had only two lines in and none out.

We're building a train exit but when we finish the CRL it will be at capacity from Day One.

We're building suburbs at the fringes with no public transport and road access that is already jammed.

We built all this to preserve the old Auckland way of life but failed to look at the future.

They were cheap solutions and we were OK with that because we didn't want our rates and taxes to go up.

There's no white knight coming to save us from the congested hell we've created.

So if we can't change the city then we're going to have to change ourselves.

Aucklanders have to embrace density.

We have to live near where we work so the days of living on the Shore and working in Penrose are gone.

Our workplaces have to gravitate to where we live which means more office capacity in places like Albany, Takapuna, New Lynn, Otahuhu, Pakuranga, Manukau and Papakura.

Poor Auckland is already accepting this which is why train usage is increasing exponentially and double decker buses are popping up everywhere.

Now it's time for the middle class and up to take a look at the way they live and come up with an answer to their lifestyle needs that doesn't include traffic chaos.

Buy an e-bike. Let the kids walk to school. Plan your journeys and keep away from rush hour

It sounds impossible but it will happen.

After all, if 25,000 can take a train to Adele then we're finally starting to think about how we can help rather than blaming the Council and Government for all our ills.