KEY POINTS:
It's time Auckland Mayor Dick Hubbard called in the spy hunters to sweep city hall for a cell of al Qaeda operatives. A few in-house saboteurs would help explain the chaos that is Queen St at the moment.
I gave the bureaucrats the benefit of the doubt a
couple of years ago when they came up with a dastardly plot to gridlock the whole region's road system by racing V8 cars around inner city Victoria Park for four days at a time. Ever forgiving, I put it down to too much petrol-sniffing in their youth.
But now they've come up with an even more fiendish plan to throttle the city centre - and this time they've succeeded.
If Mayor Dick doesn't mount a quick counter-attack, Auckland's golden mile will remain a no-go zone for another year. And by then, all the new nikau palms and Chinese bluestone in the world might not be enough to entice the shoppers back.
Of course the bureaucrats are blaming the motorists for the snarl-up. They say any smart driver should have got the message the first time they got trapped trying to drive through the streetscape renovations and given Queen St a wide berth. The flaw in that expectation is that successful aversion therapy depends on the patient experiencing a short sharp shock. But for most Auckland drivers, the recent Queen St jams are nothing out of the ordinary.
The city's transport manager, Dr Stephen Rainbow, is now threatening to intensify the aversion treatment over the next week with scary things like flashing lights and loud radio advertising. In his home town of Wellington, such tactics might be enough to frighten the pants off everyone. But up here, he's going to need cattle prods or police Taser guns to get the message home - or else his final solution weapon, a total ban on private vehicles in Queen St.
That's what the bus drivers, whose timetables have been fouled up by the traffic snarls, favour. So, surprisingly, do the vast majority of respondents on the nzherald.co.nz website when I checked yesterday afternoon. As the chaos the bureaucrats are promising will continue for 12 months, they have a point.
Until the renovations started, I was for letting everyone use Queen St. As a pedestrian, it was easy enough to duck across without much problem, and when I did drive down, the flow was better than, say, Ponsonby Road.
But now we have a year to experiment, so why not ban cars for a while and see what happens. Whatever does, it can't be any worse than we're now stuck with. Maybe it might mean making Albert St one way going north to match neighbouring Hobson St's flow south to the motorway junctions. Whatever, I'm sure the boffins could come up with something.
Freeing Queen St for buses and taxis only might even encourage greater use of public transport. Of course having shocked people out of their cars, Dr Rainbow would be smart to offer a reward in the form of, say, free bus rides up and down Queen St for the year of inconvenience.
Mind you, all he might need to do is promote the bargain central city bus fare of 50c, that all bus companies offer - but don't advertise - on all but the Link buses, for travel anywhere within the area bounded more or less by Spaghetti Junction, the Victoria Park flyover and Grafton Gully.
And while we're on the subject of Queen St, when is someone in authority going to admit their attempt to appease the critics by retaining remnants of the existing volcanic-red paving slabs in little enclaves alongside the large slabs of bluestone, hasn't worked.
Not the piece in Queen St just down from Aotea Square anyway. The two paving materials don't match in size, colour or texture, and the result suggests the city ran out of money or bluestone before the job was completed.
We're saddled with the bluestone now. Little inserts of ye olde red concrete won't change that. All they do is ruin the clean lines the proponents of bluestone were aiming for. I'm not a fan of bluestone, but better the total look than the mix and match compromise going down now.
