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.