So I’ve been think­ing about Bond Street for a while. I’ll cred­it Coun­cil­lor Ian McKin­non for show­ing me what’s wrong with it. I happened to be speak­ing to him at a morn­ing tea break after giv­ing an oral present­a­tion to a coun­cil sub-com­mit­tee. He showed me a series of pho­tos that had been giv­en to him: of Man­ners Street to the south and Mer­cer Street to the north, both look­ing groomed and civ­il­ised, and of Bond Street, lined with tax­is and lack­ing any sort of urb­an amen­ity. I believe we can do bet­ter than this.

Coun­cil is cur­rently plan­ning changes to the area. Sub­mis­sions are open on Traffic Res­ol­u­tion TR70-12 (PDF). The rationale for the change is reas­on­ably strong – 7 repor­ted crashes at the inter­sec­tion of Bond and Wil­lis Streets since 2010. The basic pro­pos­al is also reas­on­able – clos­ing the inter­sec­tion and mak­ing the west sec­tion of Bond Street into a cul-de-sac.

Current and proposed layouts for Bond Street

The pro­pos­al is fairly straight-for­ward. It moves the taxi rank from Bond Street to Mer­cer Street to handle the clos­ure of the inter­sec­tion and juggles around the remain­ing park­ing alloc­a­tions between the two streets. There is a net increase of 3 load­ing zone parks, so the pro­ject is rev­en­ue-neut­ral for park­ing. Noth­ing sur­pris­ing. There isn’t much extra space avail­able to add fur­ther park­ing spaces. A few nearby build­ings have under­ground park­ing that requires clear access. Rub­bish and ser­vice vehicles need adequate space to man­euver as well. It looks very much like a traffic engin­eer­’s pro­pos­al. What’s miss­ing is any sort of urb­an amen­ity or con­text.

Instead of max­im­ising park­ing, we should be max­im­ising amen­ity. Here’s why:

That’s a list of just the food and drink estab­lish­ments on this sec­tion of Bond Street. Vic­tor­ia St cafe and Mojo both have out­door tables on the foot­path dur­ing the day. Fork & Brew­er and Love­locks have bal­conies. Bond Street can be a vibrant area of the city, both dur­ing the day and into the even­ing. The busi­nesses have provided des­tin­a­tions, but the street is set up in a way that forces people inside. I spent a few days after work watch­ing the ped­es­tri­an activ­ity. Num­bers were quite low and very few people stopped on the street. Look­ing down the line of cars, it’s easy to see why. There’s no reas­on to stop unless one of the busi­nesses is already your des­tin­a­tion.

I think we should make Bond Street a shared space. Not like lower Cuba Street – which is really just a nar­row park­ing lot – but like Wood­ward Street. Most people don’t think of Wood­ward Street as a shared space, which is exactly why it’s the mod­el that we need to adhere to. Vehicles can move through there when they need to, but ped­es­tri­ans rule the space. Wood­ward Street is safe and it works very well.

Why do we actu­ally need park­ing spaces on Bond Street? Taxi rank over­flow was block­ing any real use of the pay-and-dis­play park­ing spots and the rank needs to be moved to close the Bond and Wil­lis inter­sec­tion, so I don’t see a plaus­ible argu­ment for cur­rent park­ing rev­en­ue. For load­ing zone activ­ity, lines don’t need to be drawn in expli­citly. We cer­tainly don’t have park­ing lines on Wood­ward Street and the early-hour load­ing zone use of Cuba Mall works without lines of any sort. The only argu­ment for drawn park­ing spaces is for dip­lo­mat­ic park­ing. The coun­cil pro­pos­al moves those parks to the north side of the street, in front of Trade Aid. I think that loc­a­tion is fine, assum­ing there’s an oblig­a­tion to keep­ing the dip­lo­mat­ic park­ing. It’s on the shaded side of the street and leaves the sunny space for people and activ­it­ies.

This is roughly what I’d aim for:

Indication of area used as a shared space

Why ques­tion the motor­cycles? Well, I don’t have a strong opin­ion as to where they should go. Don’t get me wrong, I think that motor­cycle park­ing is import­ant, but I think that the loc­a­tion does­n’t have to be spe­cified just yet. The smal­ler park­ing foot­print makes the alloc­a­tion a bit more flex­ible. I’ve drawn in some space, but it’s prob­ably not the best space for it.

This idea is not without risks. There is a sub­stan­tial amount of covered park­ing hid­den with­in the nearby build­ings. Drivers com­ing out onto Bond Street would have to be pedantic­ally cau­tious at all hours of the day. This may stress patience at peak demand. Addi­tion­ally, I don’t expect that coun­cil­lors would be par­tic­u­larly agree­able to the remov­al of sev­en paid car parks, rel­at­ive to their pro­pos­al, or four car parks cur­rently on Bond Street, regard­less of rev­en­ue pro­jec­tions. I would argue that the bene­fit to the busi­nesses should take pri­or­ity and also that a pro­ject like this is aligned to the Wel­ling­ton 2040 Strategy.

So how do we fund it? The simple answer is to keep it cheap. I don’t know how coun­cil intends to block vehicle access between Bond and Wil­lis Streets. They’ll do what they do. The rest of the pro­posed park­ing changes are just paint and signs. So let’s start there. Obvi­ously, paint isn’t going to stop a car from hit­ting a bank of tables, so the last ele­ment would be some­thing like con­crete park­ing blocks or heavy plant­ers to act as guides. When the eco­nomy is bet­ter, we can worry about mak­ing things pretty. For now, call it a bit of tac­tic­al urb­an­ism.

Con­sulta­tion is open until Octo­ber 26, so there’s not much time. I’m sub­mit­ting basic­ally this post and if there’s a chance to speak dir­ectly to coun­cil, I’ll hap­pily take the time. I believe in good spaces. Bond Street has the poten­tial, but needs our help.