Sat­urday is your last oppor­tun­ity to make your voice heard on the future of…no, I’m not talk­ing about the elec­tions, but about some­thing more spe­cif­ic to Wel­ling­ton. In a very con­densed con­sulta­tion pro­cess, WCC is seek­ing your input on the pro­posed trans­form­a­tion of three blocks Vic­tor­ia St, between Dix­on and Abel Smith streets.

Victoria St - Volunteers Corner - artist's impression

And that would be where I would link to the offi­cial con­sulta­tion doc­u­ments, except there aren’t any. Offi­cially, the con­sulta­tion takes the form of “com­munity open days” this week, and by open “days” they mean 2- to 4‑hour ses­sions. The only remain­ing times to see the full-sized plans and talk to the pro­ject team are 5–7pm tonight, 12–2pm tomor­row, and 10am-2pm on Sat­urday. And then Sat­urday is the dead­line for feed­back. What’s more, the pro­ject inform­a­tion space is nowhere near Vic­tor­ia St, but on the corner of Tarana­ki and Buckle St.

Why’s that? Because the Coun­cil is col­lab­or­at­ing with the Memori­al Park Alli­ance to design and con­struct the pro­ject, so they’re using the Park’s pro­ject office for the dis­plays. The col­lab­or­a­tion should provide expert­ise and resources to ensure that more gets done than if the Coun­cil did it on their own, but it also means that the time frames are ridicu­lously tight, appar­ently driv­en by arbit­rary dead­lines such as ends of fin­an­cial years. While plans to improve Vic­tor­ia St were sig­nalled and con­sul­ted on as part of the wider Wel­ling­ton 2040 and Cent­ral City Frame­work stud­ies, and the pro­ject was announced and dis­cussed last month (see art­icles on Stuff and Scoop), there’s now a much more detailed and defin­it­ive concept plan which the pub­lic get only a week to digest and dis­cuss.

That’s if they get to see it. Appar­ently, there was not enough time to put the bro­chure on the WCC web site, and it would’ve been inap­pro­pri­ate to put it on the Memori­al Park Alli­ance site, since it’s hos­ted by NZTA and this isn’t a NZTA pro­ject. So you have to go and find a hard copy. Luck­ily the Cyc­ling Advoc­ates’ Net­work have already pos­ted a scanned ver­sion of the bro­chure, and since that’s the only way to see an actu­al plans, I’ve pos­ted the plans as an image below. Because it’s 2014, and the right way to con­sult in a digit­al age is to make people schlep up to Buckle St or rely on scanned ver­sions of a print bro­chure.

Victoria St transformation plans

It’s hard to see at this scale (click for a lar­ger ver­sion), and there’s noth­ing to show where the kerb lines are chan­ging, but here are the points that stand out for me:

  • Volun­teer Corner will be recon­figured to make it more access­ible, and to remove the stu­pid nar­row strip between the plant­ers and parked cars.
  • The slip lane beside the Left Bank west­ern entrance will be recon­figured, cre­at­ing some new ped­es­tri­an space. Angle park­ing will remain between Left Bank and Ghuznee St, but there’s poten­tial for fur­ther redevel­op­ment on that site.
  • The east side between Ghuznee and Vivi­an streets will be sub­stan­tially altered, with the slip lane and park­ing at the south end being turned into a new pub­lic space. This seems like an odd place for one at the moment, but there’s a resource con­sent for 300 new apart­ments on the mar­ket site, so this could become a much more pop­u­lated part of town in the medi­um term.
  • While the plans show a south­bound cycle lane for the north­ern­most block, the Cyc­ling Advoc­ates’ Net­work aren’t happy with the lack of prop­er, pro­tec­ted cycle lanes.
  • Over­all, there will be wider foot­paths, more street trees and what looks like much high­er qual­ity mater­i­als than WCC can usu­ally afford.
  • Approx­im­ately 30 car parks will go over­all, to allow for the improved pub­lic spaces.

In gen­er­al, these are some really pos­it­ive changes. Com­bined with private devel­op­ments that could bring over a thou­sand new res­id­ents and a new cre­at­ive cam­pus to these few blocks, this could truly trans­form a messy, vehicle-ori­ented, poor excuse for a street into a lively and pleas­ant part of the city. It even mit­ig­ates some of the awful, ped­es­tri­an-hos­tile changes that NZTA have been stealth­ily inflict­ing on this part of Te Aro. But is it good enough? Per­son­ally, I’m going to sug­gest the fol­low­ing:

  • Con­sider a ped­es­tri­an cross­ing halfway between Dix­on and Ghuznee streets, to con­nect the Left Bank with the ped­es­tri­an lane­way that’s pro­posed as part of the redevel­op­ment of the Gor­don Har­ris and Ware­house Sta­tion­ery sites.
  • Look care­fully at the phas­ing of lights. These have been adjus­ted in favour of cars over the last few years, mak­ing some of the inter­sec­tions much more frus­trat­ing and dan­ger­ous for ped­es­tri­ans, and that bal­ance needs to change.
  • While it’s good to make pub­lic spaces more usable for people, it would be a shame to lose some of the well-estab­lished trees. Make sure that the best of exist­ing veget­a­tion is retained and incor­por­ated into the new streets­cape.

I encour­age you to make the most of the ridicu­lously lim­ited time frame, and help make the future Vic­tor­ia St as good as it pos­sibly can be. Maybe you could com­bine a trip to the polling booth with some time at the pro­ject dis­play, which is at 175 Tarana­ki St, then email info@memorialpark.co.nz to let them know what you think.