[!ai]
Advocates for a transport system safe enough for a fourteen-year-old girl to navigate independently, emphasizing choice and reconnection with outdoor spaces. Her priorities include reinstating the Albany Street cycleway, supporting the Coastal Communities Cycle Connection to address historically neglected northern communities, and envisions removing traffic from the Octagon while potentially introducing an electric tram along a pedestrianised George Street.
We need to ensure we have choices. Like Cr. Alexa Forbes, who said this at the recent “Transport Dreams” event, I’d like to see a system that takes a fourteen-year-old girl as its target audience: if it is safe for her to get around our city independently, without needing to be ferried by her parents, then it should work for most people. We need to reconnect with the outdoors and improve the connections from A to B around our home, work and play areas by making biking and walking routes safer and more attractive: identifying areas that are unsafe and improving those as priorities, particular in the more car-dominated areas and oft-neglected suburbs. I’d like to see a bus loop that is more frequent and electrified between central city and the tertiary institutions in particular.
-
The Albany Street cycleway link must be urgently reinstated.
-
Support for the proposed Coastal Communities Cycle Connection, as northern communities have historically been neglected. Emily Cooper identified this in her submission on the 9-year plan:
“At the weekend, residents in the communities north of Dunedin are effectively cut off from the city and from each other, unless they have a car. Visitors to Dunedin are also unable to access the north coast using alternative modes of transport such as via a safe cycling route or using public transport. There is no weekend or evening bus service for the 5640 residents on the north coast bus route (Census 2018 figures). Compare that to the extensive cycling, walking and bus options available to the 3579 residents of the Otago Peninsula, for example.” -
Continuing to support the Dunedin Tunnels Trail and Otago Harbour Cycle Loop (shared pathways) projects.
Having lived for over a decade in Paris where al-fresco dining, even in the busy inner-city, is simply expected and cycleways now abound, I would love to see Dunedin take a leaf out of its book. I’d love to see the George Street upgrade extended, and the traffic removed from the Octagon. Where the cars now cut through the centre, I’d love to see an electric tram one day that ran the length of an otherwise pedestrianised George Street!
Otherwise, extra green space would be wonderful, and would include foraging plants where appropriate, like in Invercargill. We need to make people want to be outdoors, and we must think of our tamariki and mokopuna and design our cities around them, not cars. In terms of access for the elderly and disabled, safety concerns must be paramount, seating abundant, and parks and public transport must always have accessible ramp options!
Ka mihi nui,
Anna Knight