Fixing Flat Bush?

Manukau City Council seem to have finally come to the realisation that creating a massive area of auto-dependent sprawl out in a far corner of Auckland, miles from any railway lines, motorways or high-frequency bus routes, might not be the smartest idea. Particularly, there seems to be a realisation that the way Flat Bush has developed so far, as a confusing maze of cul-de-sacs, has helped create the beginnings of the most extraordinarily soulless and depressing suburb.

This “realisation” is made clear in the Stage Two Masterplan for Flat Bush. This new Master Plan (whole 72 page, 15 MB document here, summary here) picks up on many of the points I made about street patterns in a recent blog post, and perhaps its biggest suggestion is the move away from the pattern of curved arterials with local roads made up of highly complex and confusing little streets.

Here’s an example of the street network in an existing part of Flat Bush:

Someone living here is only ever going to use their car to get around and undertake most of their daily activities. What a mess.

Fortunately, the Masterplan does involve quite a significant shift away from this type of street network, as shown below:

The areas in grey are those which exist already, while the orange streets show the newly proposed, far more “gridded” street network. This is a huge step in the right direction.

The advantages of a grid-style street network (in a planning sense rather than a transport sense for now) are around the flexibility that is offered to the kind of building typology you end up creating. On the messy cul-de-sac system you have every lot ending up a different size and shape, and that is only really suitable for single-detached housing. With a gridded system, you can have apartments, townhouses, semi-detached and fully detached housing types all using the same type of street network. This offers long-term flexibility benefits, as over time areas that firstly develop at a lower density have the opportunity to increase their densities without having to bulldoze entire neighbourhoods and restructure street networks.

This flexibility is shown in the picture below:

So there are certainly some very good steps forward that this Master Plan encompasses. I now have a little bit of hope that Flat Bush won’t turn into yet another complete and utter sprawled mess, like most of the development that has occurred around the edges of Auckland in the past 30 years. However, there are still some huge problems with Flat Bush, and they are almost completely summed up by the question “but how about its connections with the rest of Auckland?”

Flat Bush is still on the very southeast corner of Auckland. It is still going to be around 40,000 people living nowhere near any motorways, railway lines, high frequency bus services or anything. It is still a hugely isolated place, and in the same way that AMETI ignores the “elephant in the room” of a Rapid Transit Network link between Panmure and the southeast suburbs, Flat Bush’s Master Plan does exactly the same – completely ignoring how the area is going to be provided with rapid transit connections to Auckland’s CBD to the north and Manukau City centre to the south. There are some brief mentions of “light rail down Te Irirangi Drive”, but the potential locations of a train station, how feeder buses to that station might work, how the issue could be addressed in the short-to-medium term and so forth are completely ignored.

This ignorance of “how are we going to link Flat Bush with rapid transit” has already had some seriously bad outcomes for the design of the place. It appears most logical that eventually our most likely rapid transit line will run down the middle of Te Irirangi Drive – in the form of some sort of rail, or a busway (I would just like to state again that simple bus lanes are NOT rapid transit), but the intersection of Ormiston Road and Te Irirangi Drive (the most likely place for a train station) has been cut off from the rest of Flat Bush by a huge new school and the developing Barry Curtis Park. So anyone living in Flat Bush and hoping to walk to the train station is in for a pretty long hike – at least 1 km from the town centre to where a station might go. Gee that was smart – not! I’m also a bit concerned that the Master Plan potentially calls for local streets to be made wider. I’m a massive fan of making local roads as narrow as practically possible (isn’t John Street in Ponsonby fantastic because of its narrowness?) to slow cars down and create more of a sense of intimacy. So wider streets would be a worry to me.

Overall, the Master Plan is a step in the right direction, with a shift to a gridded street network in particular being an utterly crucial change to at least give Flat Bush a chance of avoiding becoming another soulless area of sprawl. However, I am still frustrated that very little thought seems to have gone into how people might access other parts of Auckland from Flat Bush without having to use their cars. Specifically, it would seem that once again the Panmure-Botany-Manukau southeast RTN corridor is being completely an utterly ignored. If we don’t develop our urban areas around the existing and proposed rapid transit systems, then I struggle to think how we’re ever going to become less auto-dependent. At the very least an indicative station location, some mention of possible bus routes to that station, and some sort of “transit-oriented development” analysis would add tremendously to this Master Plan.

I guess this is what happens when you don’t integrate transport and land-use thinking. We can look forward to much more of transport and land-use planning ignoring each other in the upcoming Super City structure I imagine.

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