Smart Cities & Waka Kotahi - Gutting the Heart of Community.

Is it time for a bird's eye view of what really is happening to impact small business in Tauranga - when proposed stress from future increased population levels might be exaggerated?

I focus on technology and policy, and the failure to consider open-ended systems. I keep waiting for people to talk about what we are witnessing in Tauranga, but I haven’t really seen discussion in the legacy media that reflects the breadth of what is really happening here - and the anger I have seen expressed by people privately.

Resilient communities require local publicly owned ‘market’ squares that are also public spaces. Where locally owned small business can come and go, and come and stay. Where we can buy services and products and food that are affordable and … promote well-being. And critically - spaces where people can congregate in times of crisis, in times of celebration, and in times of controversy. Where we can gossip, swap recipes, chat about our lives – but also barter, complain, debate and arrive at solutions.

Combined policies are eroding these spaces.

I question that Tauranga City is an example of blinkered Smart Growth cultures that that write such subtle stuff out of policy. From what I have observed, Tauranga City do not seem to care about these issues. Their focus is different.

But it’s not just Smart Growth cultures, the problems I discuss here have been amplified by narrowly contrived central government climate emergency slush funding that doesn’t take into account such issues either. The New Zealand Transport Agency/Waka Kotahi’s so-called important ‘Transport Choices’ programme and the slush fund called CERF more closely resembles a proxy dictator, from the way it has designed its funding scopes.

The planning doesn’t grasp how important it is to ensure that retail spaces must be affordable so that small business can be created and thrive. The double standard is that policies declare that we will all walk to local services and shops - but there is no care to ensure that these spaces can affordably nurture local enterprise.

Now we’re seeing the brutality of these policies in real time. They’ve resulted in Tauranga residents wasting millions of hours of lost time and lost productivity.

Perhaps the greatest burden from Tauranga’s current trajectory has been carried by small business. The big retail players really don’t care. Amazon has just come to New Zealand, and the big supermarkets, malls and big hardware and the Warehouse always have their own privately held free carparks.

Your local shopping mall cannot be considered a ‘public square’. Shopping malls are private spaces. Large groups need approval to congregate. Politics and debate may not be waged here. You cannot conduct political campaigning without approval. Hypothetically, if a political candidate was arguing for changing policy to support domestically owned business, in our shopping mall where the majority of chain stores are not owned by Kiwis, would they be permitted to do this?

We need our town squares and meeting places to be locally and publicly owned.

Unfinished roadworks in Tauranga are not just a sign of ignorance or stupidity, they’re actively malevolent.

The start and stop projects everywhere show a lack of respect, or consideration for the busy-ness of local people, and an absolute disregard for small and medium-sized businesses. It’s an outrage.

Work hasn’t been contained to prioritise traffic flows and access to small business. The initial job of replacing waste-water pipes was acceptable, but this game that is being played with the citizens of Tauranga is Machiavellian.

TAURANGA

Tauranga residents are familiar with the stupid concentration of orange traffic cones, unseen anywhere in the world to that same density. It’s apparently, safe.

(I’ve just returned from travelling across two states in the USA, in Spain and Portugal – I never saw any road project which resembled the idiotic quantity of road-cones festering along Cameron Road.)

Small business, and public retail areas are the lifeblood of communities and their being killed by rounds of overlapping and nasty policies.

Tauranga’s dead city centre has been nailed by a complex mix of high rents, interest rate, postage and rent surges, development and infrastructure maintenance, and COVID-19 policies which pivoted people to online shopping and a drift to shopping malls. Long beloved businesses that had withstood decades of ordinary economic up-and-downturns, have gone. The large chain stores have decamped to the privately managed shopping malls.

None of the policies for new cycle-ways along Cameron Road have considered the combinatory effects of these financial stressors on top of the loss of patronage to small to medium sized business. Small guys can’t absorb the ups and downs like bigger commercial chains might.

Cameron Road in Tauranga received a $45 million funding boost for stage 1, from 2020 to the end of 2023 is intended to futureproof the Te Papa peninsula which Cameron Road sits on.

Through consultation on the Te Papa Spatial Plan, the community have said they want safe open spaces, tree lined streets, pedestrian-friendly, walkable neighbourhoods, and more housing and transport choice.

Correct me if I am wrong, but it appears the funding scope was captured. The focus was on reducing reliance on cars and support mode shift to walking, cycling and public transport, predominantly funded by the $305 million Transport Choices package. Small business was out of scope.

Consequently, Cameron Road pavements were widened to an idiotic extent, then widened even further by a wide bike lane. But the true tragedy concerned - and continues to concern, the removal of quick and accessible short term parking spaces where local residents can park and shop, commune, get services, and pick up and drop off.

Remember, the bloated footpaths and fat cycle-ways on Cameron Road do not continue the minute riders get off that Road – to go down arterial roads. So it’s unlikely bike use by families will substantially increase.

I’ve run some numbers, and I believe the urgency to remove car parking spaces in the Tauranga city region is misplaced, when the forecasted intensification (population density) does not seem as existential as is portrayed (see below).

The road closures, traffic delays and removal of parking have sabotaged local business.

From small tech companies who are 80% down, to gift boutiques with turnover that is 50% down, large concrete barriers, safety fencing, posts and traffic cones, in addition to lost carparks and barriers to access has created a chilling effect on patronage.

Apparently over 400 off-street parks have been lost in Tauranga in the last decade. Restaurants that are already struggling because of increased living costs and post-COVID blues, would further suffer from the closure of a waterfront carpark. Even less Tauranga people would risk coming to the city centre. Recently, a group of retailers were only granted 5 minutes to talk about what is an existential threat to them, to the oh-so-busy Commissioners and the muted chief executives.

What I observe in policy is a failure to prioritise retail streets and meeting places of people which can be accessed easily by car. The bloated pavements/foot paths along Cameron Road might be suitable for Auckland city centre, which houses 12,000 people per square kilometre, instead of on average, a city of under 2,000 people living per square kilometre, that from what I can calculate, will only increase to some 3,000 people in the next 30 years.

It’s killing small business, and I don’t think the Commissioners or planners give a shit. In fact a group of small long term retailers in Cameron Road were allegedly told by Stephen Selwood

‘What we (retailers) have to work out is whether we can survive in the new streetscape.’

And maybe it’s incorrect hearsay, but I hear our much-loved hardware shop at Bethlehem commercial centre was asked to go because they didn’t fit the vibe either.

Apparently, the streetscape is more important than long-beloved small local businesses. Another owner of a small service store, which services sewing machines, told me of his failure to get planning consultants to listen to his appeals to maintain parking out the front of his business. Sewing machines are relatively heavy, and often older people sew, bringing the sewing machines in for service. But his appeals were dismissed. The old people can lug the sewing machine from the carpark a little distance away. He has since moved.

While $100 million was allocated, there’s no millions being spent on making local shopping strips future proof so that small local businesses might thrive. No investment in local indoor community exercise and sports centres to ensure they are well serviced and affordable over the next 30 years, or improving the quality of carparking to facilitate small businesses and local trade.

This is the irony. The whole wellbeing narrative infers people walk locally for services. But for services to be local, the land and rent has to be affordable and accessible. Without such policy, the only buggers that will survive are shitty, out-of-town owned chain-stores that cut-quality and often, end up exploiting staff financially.

The money is tumbling in because of New Zealand Transport Agency/Waka Kotahi’s (NZTA) financial largess, because of the scope - they’re calling the shots.

NZTA control the Climate Change Policy for Land Transport Infrastructure Activities. But of course they don’t take into account issues like sustaining and protecting locally owned businesses, family life, and protecting local public spaces in urban spaces, including car-parking where people can gather.

Nor does the government’s Adapt and thrive: Building a climate-resilient New Zealand. That’s not their focus. I’m a big fan of reducing particulate emissions and increasing efficient affordable public transport. But this is different.

TE PUKE

It seems that Te Puke residents may have been watching Tauranga’s suffering closely. A Western Bay of Plenty District Council survey determined that 72% of respondents said no to funding of a million for a Te Puke project, because they were concerned that ‘loss of parking on the streets and that the 4.2km long cycleway would make school drop off and pick up harder.’

An enlightening interview with Councillor Andy Wichers is a must listen. Wichers (personal opinion) explained that the community wanted cycle and walkways. However the Climate Emergency Response Fund (CERF) prioritises reduction of emissions, reduced car use. The CERF constraints, or funding conditions required that the main roads would be narrowed, and car parking would be reduced in the main streets, out the front of businesses and houses. Council staff believed that this was a way of dealing with congestion in the future (and reducing the numbers of cars).

There was no flexibility in the funding scope. In addition, an earlier quote for the cycleway of $2.4 million had escalated, perhaps due to landscaping and safety infrastructure to $6.75 million.

It is interesting that the earliest messaging to Te Puke residents was that the cycleway project was exciting and happening, until residents and councillors stepped back and engaged on the issues and considered what the risks and benefits might be.

NEW PLYMOUTH

It’s not just the Western Bay of Plenty. In New Plymouth the Climate Emergency Response Fund also directed millions for cycleways on state highways – remember, the cycleway funding concerns the main streets where small businesses reside.

New Plymouth District Council was advised up to 500 car parks would be removed, and despite people baulking, the $17 million plan was expanded to remove 826 car parks that would be lost for a new cycle way. Consultation lasted a week. Councillors were advised that plans couldn’t be altered.

Later in another interview New Plymouth District Councillor Murray Chong explained that the cost would be $2 million for the plan design, and $15 million for development, three areas would be developed, each costing $5 million. Councillors were then told that only one section - a 1/3 of the original work - would be developed for that original $15 million. At least this reduced car park losses.

Chong further explained how budgets in New Plymouth for cycleways had blown out with cycleway designs over-engineered, which resulted in elevated costs, not only for the design, but the installation. Chong noted that if cycling increased by 20%, as forecast, the increase in use would still be 1% of car use.

Chong asked NZTA was what ratio of safety or emissions were prioritised, NZTA stated

‘it was all about emissions’.

Safety wasn’t a consideration. NZTA funding seems to require that their consultants develop the plan, and their design consultants are then paid out of the council allocation.

It isn’t just Tauranga, Te Puke or New Plymouth. Shop owners in Wellington are concerned that Wellington’s ‘Let’s Get Wellington Moving’ plans will result in the same disproportionate burden on retailers around Lambton Quay.

SMART GROWTH

Long before the Jetsons, we’ve been fascinated by the perfectly working digital city of the future. With the digital advancements predicting in the 1990s our world would become less physical and more virtual. The basis of smart cities are to enable electronic methods and sensors to collect data. So it’s not surprising that once digital technology ramped up we’d link intelligence to technology. Out of this Smart Communities, Smart Growth, and Smart Cities were born. Wikipedia states that

Smart cities are defined as smart both in the ways in which their governments harness technology as well as in how they monitor, analyze, plan, and govern the city.

The language of smart cities and smart growth is intriguing to navigate. Because the ideology and culture underpinning the notion of advanced cities presumes that monitoring (surveillance) will enable response. By integrating information and communication technology to a multiplicity of devices (the internet of things) – this then optimises the efficiency of city operations and services, including optimising resource use and consumption.

But where does social life fit in? Where does the life of a busy mother with three young kids? A carer of the disabled or elderly? Where is the town square where people can discuss what the purpose of the monitoring is for, so that the monitoring does not become invasive, and lead to abuse?

Where does small business fit in? Can small business, particularly retail, afford to conduct business for a five-year period in public spaces?

What happens when towns are not gridlike, or are built around an estuary, and require complex transportation to get from A to B to C?

Is it more efficient for planners and experts just to liaise across New Zealand with large sophisticated chain stores than ensure local affordable retail space for small business? How does ‘healthy’ translate into affordable and community oriented?

Smart Growth  was developed in 1996. There are six goals:

1. Neighbourhood livability

2. Better access/less traffic

3. Enabling pre-existing cities, suburbs, and towns to thrive

4. Shared benefits

5. Lower costs/lower taxes

6. Preserving open space

And six principles:

§  Mix land uses.

§  Take advantage of compact building design.

§  Create a range of housing opportunities and choices.

§  Create walkable neighborhoods.

§  Foster distinctive, attractive communities with a strong sense of place.

§  Preserve open space, farmland, natural beauty, and critical environmental areas.

§  Strengthen and direct development towards existing communities.

§  Provide a variety of transportation choices.

§  Make development decisions predictable, fair, and cost effective.

§  Encourage community and stakeholder collaboration in development decisions.

Increasing housing density is essential. My early days were spent in the old suburbs of Melbourne, where houses built from the late 1860s to the 1960s would be interjected by a block of flats that might house 6-12 units. It was healthy to have houses where there was space for trees and gardens, and then flats that were great living for students, young people and downsizers. Parks were within a 10-15 minute journey.

But well-meaning initiatives like this, once inserted in policy, can be instrumentalised, where all the long-term social and health-based concerns are written out of policy, while just basic logistics and infrastructure concerns are retained. The care gets lost even if the words promise care and well-being.

A SNAPSHOT OF NZ POLICY

The 2019 Planning for successful cities: A discussion document on a proposed National Policy Statement on Urban Development provides an example of growth priorities, and the agenda in this document was to

·       improve housing affordability

·       improve housing choice

·       improve access to the things people need including work and education

·       reduce emissions

·       foster quality built environments.

The focus here is on investing and enabling infrastructure, focussing on transportation, schools and hospitals, and setting aside areas of special value.

The National Policy Statement on Urban Development 2020 (Updated May 2022) produced these objectives:

Objective 1: New Zealand has well-functioning urban environments that enable all people and communities to provide for their social, economic, and cultural wellbeing, and for their health and safety, now and into the future.

Objective 2: Planning decisions improve housing affordability by supporting competitive land and development markets.

Objective 3: Regional policy statements and district plans enable more people to live in, and more businesses and community services to be located in, areas of an urban environment in which one or more of the following apply:

a)     the area is in or near a centre zone or other area with many employment opportunities

b)    the area is well-serviced by existing or planned public transport

c)     there is high demand for housing or for business land in the area, relative to other areas within the urban environment.

Objective 4: New Zealand’s urban environments, including their amenity values, develop and change over time in response to the diverse and changing needs of people, communities, and future generations.

Objective 5: Planning decisions relating to urban environments, and FDSs, take into account the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi (Te Tiriti o Waitangi).

Objective 6: Local authority decisions on urban development that affect urban environments are:

a)     integrated with infrastructure planning and funding decisions; and

b)    strategic over the medium term and long term; and

c)     responsive, particularly in relation to proposals that would supply significant development capacity.

Objective 7: Local authorities have robust and frequently updated information about their urban environments and use it to inform planning decisions.

Objective 8: New Zealand’s urban environments:

a)     support reductions in greenhouse gas emissions; and

b)    are resilient to the current and future effects of climate change.

These objectives fail to address some practical realities that are required in order to, I guess, protect our quality of life and achieve

social, economic, and cultural wellbeing, and for their health and safety, now and into the future.

But distinctive attractive communities are historically dependent on thriving small businesses, and public spaces and access and parking. They’re dependent on everyone accessing affordable healthy food, and exercise facilities that cater to all socio-economic strata. Our policies don’t take such issues into account.

Shopping malls with chain stores don’t cut it.

SMART GROWTH & POPULATION DENSITY IN THE BAY OF PLENTY

Launched in 2000, the Bay of Plenty’s Smart Growth vision is that Western Bay will be a ‘a great place to live, learn, work and play’.

The SmartGrowth partnership is made up of Bay of Plenty Regional Council, Tauranga City Council, Western Bay of Plenty District Council, tāngata whenua and central government. SmartGrowth engages with groups, businesses, and organisations to help us build a framework for future planning and growth. We’ve partnered together to achieve better shared outcomes for our sub-region.

SmartGrowth emphasises healthy communities, but there’s no policy consideration to ensure that houses and retail spaces remain affordable for local people. This is because such policies would be centrally operated.

Everybody in Tauranga knows that the costs of implementing and sustaining a public transport have outstripped council capacity and that central government has failed to step in.

As such, the projected increase in population growth - how this impacts public transport - may be marginal in comparison to the stress driven by the prior two decades of growth.

The lack of a regular, trustable, affordable, networked public transport system has been compounded by other challenges, including the geography of this region, and the dispersed businesses. People often live in vastly different areas from where they work, where they might go for a doctors or other visit, and where they shop. This is not likely to change.

The Te Papa Spatial Plan is intended to future proof the Tauranga peninsula, along Cameron Road for the next thirty years.

I wonder if the Te Papa Spatial Plan Te Mahere ā-Takiwā o Te Papa 2020 – 2050, at all considered that the increased population density should not make too much of a difference?

In 2018 the peninsula housed 14% of the population, by 2050 this is predicted to increase slightly to 17.3% of the population, which is predicted to total some 35,200. Over 1070 hectares, or 10.7 square kilometres,

Tauranga’s population is projected to increase from 121,00 today, by 80,000 to 2063.

The peninsula’s population density is estimated to reach an average of under 2,000 per square kilometre in the next 30 years. Yes, Cameron Road is a general route, but in my mind, the population density forecast for 2050 cannot reasonably justify the removal of parking and the burden this places on small business.   

Te Papa Peninsula includes the suburbs of Tauranga, Tauranga South, Gate Pa, Parkvale Merivale and Greerton, an area of 1100 hectares. Tauranga City Council expect another 50,000 people to live in this region in the next 30 years.

NB: There is a discrepancy in total geographic size. Suburbs that comprise Te Papa and Individual suburb and total city data sourced from Wikipedia covers a larger region, arrive at appro 14.9 km2. The Te Papa Spatial Plan concerns an area of 10.7 km2 P.9. Presumably some of these suburbs extend beyond the Te Papa peninsula, which covers a smaller land area.

As a benchmark, let’s consider Melbourne’s population density in the 2006 census. Every suburb I moved through – inner Melbourne had a population density level of between 6,000 and 2,000.

This was achieved without removing car parking spaces and destroying quick and easy access in town streets. It was achieved through developing solid, dependable basic transport infrastructure and ensuring every shopping centre had cheap affordable spaces for car parking for shoppers for not more than 2 hours. And it was achieved by encouraging the development of low-level housing units, that would ordinarily cover no more than 2 original quarter acre blocks (2,000 sq m), four stories high with ample room for trees and plantings in the front, street facing section in every block of the city.

From what seems to be proposed, Tauranga’s total density will still be under 2,000, while Te Papa’s sit at around 3,000 by 2050.

I want to believe the Transport System Plan will step in and deliver a public transport system commensurate with Tauranga’s population and geographic challenges.

As a final note, yes, the traffic shemozzles along Cameron Road and at Mount Maunganui has been vastly compounded by roadworks. The traffic shemozzle from Omokoroa into Tauranga has been amplified by central governments flip flopping on funding.

But instead of central government appropriating finance (or drawing from the magical CERF fund) secondary legislation – an Order in Council - has been developed to impose an up to $500 million, 30 year levy which will add to the local debt burden. A Special Purpose Vehicle which will be owned by Crown Infrastructure Partners..

‘has secured debt finance from Westpac and Bank of New Zealand.’

And now NZTA declare congestion charges are necessary in Tauranga, a town with a relatively low population density. NZTA really do not want to scrutinise the failure of sequential central government Transport Ministers to actually make allowance on the terrible stress on Tauranga, the main jumping off point for families escaping from Auckland’s high property prices.

NZTA claim that without a congestion charge there would be ‘economic catastrophe and terrible wellbeing for communities’ - this shows just how reluctant NZTA are to scrutinise their own belly button and the failure of Transport Ministers.

Cameron Road just doesn’t make sense to me. Maybe it’s just me. Council decisions and the NZTA consistently denude the peninsula of carparking, and the new initiative to remove more carparks in downtown Tauranga is continuing this trend.

I worry that we not only erode spaces for community gathering, but that this impacts our potential to autonomously protect our quality of life. When it is harder to access places where we congregate, chat, and sometimes protest, and where small Kiwi-owned businesses seek our patronage either for a lingering coffee or a quick purchase  – our main streets - how do we come together when government over-step their boundaries, when they over-reach and/or abuse their powers.

Am I wrong? Am I right? Am I overly cautious? What is ‘true’ here?