What if… Dunedin no longer needed so much petrol?

17 comments on “What if… Dunedin no longer needed so much petrol? ”

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1. roy cartland 1

   22 April 2022 at 10:39 am

   Why do tourists flock to Venice, Paris, Queenstown? Walkability of the centre is surely a factor. People like walking when given a decent space to do it; no one likes crossing roads every 2 mins, breathing fumes and listening to roaring traffic. Why not a thousand Venices instead of a few massive cities?
   • weka 1.1

     22 April 2022 at 11:07 am

     Looking at the amount of debate about public holidays in the past few days I’d say time is a barrier. Or perceptions of time. NZers overwork. How many feel they need their car simply because they think it gives them more time?
   • Populuxe1 1.2

     22 April 2022 at 12:00 pm

     You can have massive cities that are walkable – New York, Berlin and London for example, and Paris too for that matter. Notice that they also all have extensive underground rail. Venice is basically a stagnating museum on life support crumbling into its lagoon – probably not the best example of a viable community. In my experience tourists don't really go to Queenstown for Queenstown, they go for things like winter sports or as a hub to explore the lake district.
     • roy cartland 1.2.1

       22 April 2022 at 2:56 pm

       Good points. It would be interesting to know whether the carbon cost of keeping Venice alive outweighs any savings in having no cars (but those awful vaporetti etc).

       @Weka, it's a wider debate around getting back one's time then? People value outdoor time – remember all those memes about what we do in lockdown vs normal (everyone goes out to the park during lockdown, sits on their phone in normal). I like the concept of the neighbourhood, or what I suppose the village was in those older cities.
       • weka 1.2.1.1

         22 April 2022 at 4:31 pm

         yep, and working close to home but also being able to get one's groceries and essentials close to home = less carbon emissions and more time. It's both a perception thing, but also how society organises. We're not there yet.
         • Craig H 1.2.1.1.1

           22 April 2022 at 9:35 pm

           Annoyingly, this was once how society was organised and it's not even that long ago – local schools, local shops and services (e.g. GP clinics), often local jobs and a lot less driving required.
           • weka 1.2.1.1.1.1

             23 April 2022 at 9:03 am

             it's good it's still within living memory of quite a few people, that makes it easier to change it again.
     • alwyn 1.2.2

       22 April 2022 at 7:05 pm

       "Paris too for that matter. Notice that they also all have extensive underground rail".

       That isn't really true of Paris. It is certainly a tourist image of the city but people visiting don't go anywhere near most of the city, except for travelling to or from the airports.

       Paris is a city of about 12 million people. About 2 million live in the area within the Peripherique, which is a ring road. That area is all that tourists see. It is the 20 arrondissements that you hear about in the guidebooks. It is only a small fraction of the area of the city and it is the only part of the city served by the Metro, the (mostly) underground rail. The Metro does not cover any of the rest of the city. There are some limited trains that do but I would think most travel in that part of the city would be bus services.

       If you visit Paris you will never visit the banlieue where the majority of the population live. Neither do the people who live in the central part of the city to be honest. You might pass through to go to Versailles but that is about it.

       However it is there. It certainly isn't catered for by underground, cheap, convenient and frequent Metro services though.
       • Populuxe1 1.2.2.1

         24 April 2022 at 3:44 pm

         I don't know when you were last in Paris, but the Metro goes all the way to Marie de Saint-Ouen and Bagneux these days, and vastly busier than you suggest according to the rapport d’activité for 2019.
2. Heather Grimwood 2

   22 April 2022 at 12:00 pm

   Sounds like Utopia! and in big scheme of things not a costly change, the greatest necessary change being a fast embracing of such creative energy.

   One factor I've long thought sensible is the use of ferries across the Otago harbour as operated in my Grandparents' time, meaning Peninsula dwellers arrived in city virtually at their places of work.

   An advantage too would be if housing on Peninsula flourished, maybe relieving some of South Dunedin's flooding predicament and certainly saving the urban sprawl over valuable fertile land of the Taieri Plain, though much of it also eventually likely to become inundated through rising sea levels.
   • weka 2.1

     22 April 2022 at 12:39 pm

     The Bay road won't survive sea level rise, ferries make sense on multiple levels.

     Housing and forest regeneration for the Peninsula I think. A good mix. There's good growing land on the north side too, so food forests and market gardens for the locals.

     Not sure how much of the Taieri will be lost to sea level rise, but agree we should be protecting fertile land. Maybe marshland agriculture? Lots of South Dunedin too.
     • DB Brown 2.1.1

       22 April 2022 at 6:20 pm

       Scattered thoughts:

       Tidal lagoons for multiple uses could be feasible, if all of an area is to be inundated shaping of the area before the event may be worth the effort, then let the water in instead of passively waiting for it to claim a place.

       Study of aboriginal and aztec designs for aquaculture and agriculture will pay dividends. Let some wetlands revert to wetlands, farm the edges with chinampas.

       Let tidal ingress fill large shallow areas where photosynthesis fuels aquatic food chains. Create natural fish farms, anchorage, recreation, aesthetics… and make power via turbines embedded in seawalls.

       If a place is clearly not going to be habitable given current circumstances, it might be abandoned, but it might examined for potential 'land' use changes.
       • weka 2.1.1.1

         23 April 2022 at 9:03 am

         Very very good! Hadn't thought about land management and intervention to take advantage of sea level rise before.
3. Populuxe1 3

   22 April 2022 at 12:34 pm

   Similar things have been tried many many times since the nineteenth century. The two main problems are that (1) it requires ideological continuity of government to pull off, and (2) rational planning assumes people are naturally rational and cooperative rather than sentimental and independent.

   Unless you abolish democracy to keep National and its fellow travelers out of government forever; forcibly redistribute people to balance out economic, social, and demographic disparities; and somehow restrict freedom of movement between wards, there's not much to prevent it turning into a patchwork of ghettos, capital flight, gentrification and feudal villages the moment a destabilising influence inevitably enters the mix.

   Most of the criticisms of the Garden City movement apply here as well. It doesn't address the problem of population growth as well as urban densification does. The young, single and childless will leave in droves because they don't want to live in a cross between Nappy Valley and Twilight Acres. And as we saw with Christchurch, incentivising people to stay within their suburbs just causes a rapid decline in the inner city that is very difficult to reverse.
   • weka 3.1

     22 April 2022 at 12:47 pm

     Chch was a mess post-quake when it could have been the exemplar of what I explored in the post. It has little general relevancy in this conversation as an example, apart from the creative initiatives that people did despite National et al.

     One of the points of the post was to show what can be done without central government leading. It requires continuity of local government perhaps.

     It's very easy to see what is wrong and what won't work. That won't help use find the solutions if that's all we do. The left is very good at that. We also need to get good at imagining how things might work out. When we can see a good future ourselves, we can more easily convince other people.
4. Grafton Gully 4

   22 April 2022 at 5:35 pm

   I was studying in Dunedin in the 1960s and me and my friends did not have cars, we got about on foot and I don't remember using a bus either, but probably did. We walked to lectures and to pubs and to Joe Tui's for fish and chips all hours and to parties Saturday night or along George Street Friday night. No student loan and a choice of jobs in the summer holidays certainly made me feel hopeful and trusting. I remember thinking I should write down the rhymes of children playing on the street after school in Grange Street, but somehow it would have spoilt it. There can't have been many car owners in Grange street at that time. Our flat had no garage that's for sure and a wetback stove to cook with and heat the water, coal fired. And currant bushes, gooseberries and strawberries in the little backyard. Funny how when you get older the earlier memories are the most vivid.
5. Scud 5

   22 April 2022 at 7:45 pm

   Well at least all those double rail track would be relaid after they were ripped up in the early 80's when the last communter train ran in 81 or 82.

   Could see inter-regional & communter trains running in Dunedin again, just need to relaid the rails & new Station infrastructure rebuilt?

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