Traffic in the future

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32734, 11 October 1971, Page 12

Traffic in the future

The vote of Christchurch electors on Saturday means a delay, unfortunate but not disastrous, in the execution of an important part of the Christchurch master traffic plan. Fortunately it will not impede other, possibly more urgent, construction projects under the plan designed to give the city an efficient and convenient road system capable of handling its traffic of the 1980 s and beyond. Until last Saturday Christchurch had a complete plan, approved by local and national planning and reading authorities. If effect is given to the Labour Party’s election policy the city will now have only a partial plan. It wifi need time and trouble, and probably a good deal of money, to examine the possible alternative means of filling in this blank area in the transport map without any real assurance that any of the possible alternatives will be satisfactory.

It is important that the delay should be used to good purpose, and that nothing should be done in the meantime to make it difficult or impossible for the city to reach, as its final solution of this problem, the best solution. Probably the new City Council would find it impossible to develop Harper Avenue as part of an alternative motorway without first repealing or amending the Christchurch City Reserves Bill; and obviously the National Roads Board subsidies which have been approved for the Hagley Park and Salisbury Street motorway will not automatically be transferred to a substitute; the board will want to be assured that the large sums of taxpayers’ money involved in a four-to-one subsidy are used to the best advantage. In short, the board will insist, quite reasonably, that any Government funds it grants should be spent on works that will best meet the transport needs of the city. The Regional Planning Authority will no doubt be asked by the new City Council to reappraise alternatives to the north-west motorway. But no-one, least of all the new Mayor and councillors, can be really hopeful of a satisfactory solution emerging from this source when successive Regional Planners and their staffs and consultants have failed to find the alternative to the park motorway that all have sought with an eagerness bordering on desperation. The Regional Planning Authority or the City Council might look for salvation in the commissioning of an eminent overseas planning authority; but when one of the most eminent of these authorities. Professor C. D. Buchanan, has already tried and failed it is clear that this is a far from promising recourse. Christchurch has now voted down the most logical, efficient, and economical plan that has yet been offered, and has done so for reasons that have little or nothing to do with town planning or traffic engineering. Its citizens might now face the choice of doing nothing while traffic congestion worsens in this part of the city or of doing something, at their own expense, that will be both more costly and less effective. Clearly the former course is to be preferred for the time being. For it cannot be many years before it becomes quite clear that the Hagley Park road, sensitively and imaginatively engineered and landscaped, is not only the best planning solution of the city s traffic problem but by far the best environmental solution also. It is sad that this vital fact was lost sight of not only in the recent election campaign but in the years of ineffective debate that preceded it.