Mike Hosking on Auckland traffic: A city deliberately wrecked by incompetence, ideological madness

COMMENT:

If you need evidence that Auckland is systematically, ideologically, and deliberately being wrecked, you only have to look at the results of a global family friendly survey - and see the local Mayor's reaction to it.

Auckland came in 94th out of 145 cities and Phil Goff was surprised. Maybe he wasn't surprised, maybe he just had to act surprised otherwise if he didn't, he'd just be embarrassed given he's over seeing it all.

The mess that is the country's biggest city is now being played out nationally given the media has latched onto the carnage, and one of the local MPs, Nikki Kaye, has decided to make it a cause.

However she damaged her credibility almost immediately by stating that it was going to be awesome when it was all done. Is it? Really? What makes her think that?

Some of it will be. It beggars belief that you can spend billions and not end up with something that's a bit better than what you started with.

But a lot of it is waste. A lot of it is cycle lanes and bus lanes which aren't useful, aren't used - and are increasingly at the route of the dysfunction.

Like most cities in the country the roads are not big to start with, and by the time you slice them up and pretend you can have a whole lot of extra space for specific vehicles at specific times, you are, in fact, defying simple physics.

And this is being done by stealth. Locally where I live, a two-lane major road once fully functioning and useful, is now a mess because one lane was made into a bus lane or T3 lane.

It was a T3 lane from 7 till 9 each morning, then one day the sign changed to 7am till 10am, then 7am till 11am. The fact there are next to no buses is not what this is about. What this is about is making life in a car so fraught we give up. But the trouble here is we haven't - and we won't.

They then added the new sign 7am till 11am, and 11am until 3pm on Saturdays and Sundays. And so it will go, in a year it'll be 24/7.

As a result of these little moves, there's daily chaos and some poor chap from the council stands on the footpath every day with a video camera looking to catch people breaking the ever-changing rules.

It's a war.

This story is repeated all over town. Downtown Auckland is a farce, it's clogged, choked, backed up, and frequented by an increasingly frustrated and angry, not to mention late, group of people just trying to get through a day.

The reality of cities is we don't take buses unless we have a simple A to B journey. And the vast majority of us don't. We have work, school, university, sport, kids, and appointments.

In a large, geographically spread out metropolis, life is all over the place and there isn't a bus, train, or e-scooter than can tackle the task that a car can.

And as the frustration grows so does the inefficiency, and the fury. So when asked whether it's a decent place to live, what other possible answer are you expecting?

In contrast we have Christchurch. It's getting good press, projects are finished, and open affordable housing. Yes, it has issues to deal with, but it seems a model you might get a positive family friendly answer to.

Auckland? It's a living experiment of incompetence and ideological madness.