Cars, motorways and carparks

There’s some drama in the Point Chevalier community this week. I think I mentioned previously that there’s a population explosion of young families at present and that the local primary school is overflowing with pupils. The kindy is right next to the primary school and is actually leasing the land it occupies from the school. The school needs to expand and build new classrooms and they have plans in place to build on their existing carpark. The Auckland city council however requires that schools have a minimum number of parking spaces which means the school needs to find some land from somewhere else. So they’re reclaiming the kindy land for you guessed it, a *carpark*!

Parents of kindy kids are naturally up in arms about it and have already started plans to either halt the closure of the kindy or find new premises. It won’t affect Daniel because they don’t plan to reclaim the land until mid-year next year and Daniel will have started school by then. The kindy is terrific though so it would be a shame to see it closed, especially for a carpark, and it currently has a full roll of 90 children as well as a waiting list of 160 so it’s anyone’s guess where all those children will have to go. Land is frightfully expensive in Point Chevalier and there’s very little available so it’s not so easy to just go and find a spot somewhere else.

Auckland is a city for cars. There are roads and motorways winding in and out of the suburbs in a kind of spaghetti mess. The traffic is bad too. Don’t they realise that you can keep building roads and motorways but the traffic doesn’t go away? It only gets worse. The real solution is an extensive network of pedestrian walkways, bikeways, tramways, rail and buses. Bikes are my favourite mode of transport but I’d be very reluctant to cycle in Auckland. I read that for every dollar spent on cycling infrastructure, you get a return of at least $3 or $4 dollars. So what’s stopping them? The Mayor of Portland – cycling capital of America – is quoted as saying they spent on their bike infrastructure the equivalent of what they would normally spend on one mile of highway. It seems like a no-brainer to me.