From Plan To Action

Press, Volume CV, Issue 31016, 23 March 1966, Page 18

From Plan To Action

Planners sometimes make mistakes; but their errors are unlikely to be as uncomfortable as those inevitably incurred by not attempting to plan at all. Indeed, in the older and more populous countries it is acknowledged that virtually the only valid complaint against town planning is that it has been too little and too late; vast sums could have been saved by planning and acting in good time. Yet Christchurch still has a few citizens who would leave the problems of 1980 to be dealt with in 1980. Fortunately the more sensible majority on the City Council have recognised the growing urgency of the need to put the city’s master transport plan into effect without further delay; already six of the 20 years it was intended to provide for have passed with little or nothing done to meet the problems that are already becoming oppressive.

The plan was prepared after a survey of unexampled thoroughness; it has been approved, with minor modifications, by perhaps the world’s foremost authority on town and traffic planning. Still, quite obviously, it will not satisfy everyone and it is bound to inconvenience some. Those who suffer inconvenience or hardship are entitled to fair compensation; and it would be an ungenerous community that grudged such recompense. The Christchurch City Council has rhown its determination to make the regretted but necessary incursion into the city’s jealously-guarded parkland as inoffensive as sensitive landscaping can ensure. The Regional Planning Authority should lose no opportunity of keeping the public informed about its progress and Its problems—and how it proposes to overcome its problems. Models of the modified motorway across the corner of Hagley Park, showing the land taken for the road and the area reclaimed for the park, together with the associated landscaping schemes, would no doubt reassure many of those whose misgivings persist. This is a plan in which every citizen of metropolitan Christchurch has a vital stake. The only real alternative to it is drift; and that would be costly and unpleasant in the lifetime of present citizens, nothing less than disastrous for their successors.