Like Chuck, Bradles has suggested to me that I might write a bit about the proposed motorway extension (the “bypass”) in my homebase of Wellington, in the context of the upcoming local body election there.
There’s a website called Heartbeat that looks at the election with a bypass focus. If you’re in Welly, check it out.
I’m heartily opposed to the bypass. There are so many reasons why I almost don’t know where to start.
I think the biggest thing that gets me is the blindness evident in those demanding such a massive change to the city’s infrastructure. To the bypass backers, the only choice is between a Wellington that is backward, clogged and inefficient, and a Wellington that is forward-thinking, free-flowing and efficient.
They seem blind to the fact that a more fundamental choice is embodied in the bypass project – a choice between one kind of Wellington and another.
In my head, from a distance, I understand Wellington in terms of its three streets – Lambton Quay, Courtenay Place, and Cuba Street. They all reach out (more or less) from a central core in Manners Mall. They embody three different aspects of Wellington.
Lambton Quay is the seat of the city’s productivity, its economic strength, its political significance. It is, if you’ll indulge a clumsy metaphor, the city’s mind.
Courtenay Place is the seat of the city’s nightlife, its theatres, its nighttime. It is the city’s body.
Cuba Street is the seat of the city’s creative energy, its endless innovation, its diversity. It is the city’s soul.
Wellington is a city with a rare balance, and of a size where that balance is felt. It is a city where that balance is embedded in the streets themselves – these are concrete symbols of what Wellington is. It is the balance that makes Wellingtonians feel at home.
The bypass will impact on Cuba Street. It will carve a symbolic wall through Cuba Street itself and cut it off from the extensions of the Cuba-Street-idea – places like Aro Valley, Brooklyn. It will have a huge effect on the city.
Now, I’m not saying that the bypass will definitely change everything or will definitely be the tipping point. There’s no way for us to know that. But it will cause significant change, of that we can be certain. If it comes to pass, Wellington will not feel the same. The balance will be shifted. If worst comes to worst, the balance will be completely upset.
This is, in itself, a huge and important reason to oppose the bypass.
But that’s not the reason I’m getting at here.
The reason you should vote anti-bypass councillors is this: those who support the bypass don’t understand any of what I’ve said above.
It isn’t even that they do understand but think differently. They simply don’t get it.
A city is more than its component parts. A city is also the relationship between everything within it. It is the ideas we hold about it. It is the way we move through it. It is the way we see it when we are part of it. It is the way we remember it when we are on the far side of the globe. A city is a network of ideas, it is an impossibly complex system, it is a bubble always, always bursting.
A city is more than its component parts. This is hard fact. This is how our brains work. This is how we see and believe and know the world. Things connect. This is what it is to be a human being.
Any person who cannot understand that a city is an idea more than a place should not be trusted with its care. Those who support the bypass fail to understand this. Do not support them.
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And on a less cod-lyrical note, what the hell is it with that stupid pro-bypass argument that it will save thousands of work hours each year or whatever, by making sure workers get into work a few minutes earlier each day?
This is *absurd*. It’s the dumbest thing I’ve heard in the whole bypass argument. Dumb, dumb, dumb.
Workers who get in a few minutes earlier are gonna spend a few more minutes checking email, having a coffee, going out for lunch, and leaving a few minutes earlier to boot. I mean, hello? Human beings, remember?
7 thoughts on “The Bypass”
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There is an argument which suggests that creating the bypass will help “pedestrianise” Wellington, taking “through-city” traffic out from the central city (esp. Jervois, which, according to Mayor Kelly, will be “boulevarded” when the bypass is complete, whatever the heck that means).
Yeah, I’ve heard that argument. Assuming it hasn’t changed in the last two years, I don’t buy it. But then it gets technical.
There’s a lot of layers to this thing. I’m being a bit of a rabble-rousing populist above by helpfully eliding all of these layers. Do you notice how I’m playing personality politics, too? It’s like I’m Karl friggin’ Rove, but a hippy.
I appreciate Dave’s reminder that those who support the bypass have reasons to do so that, to a certain way of thinking, make sense. Given the many events unfolding both globally and locally it does not seem uncommon at this time to feel alienated by arguements that promote binaries and in doing so, miscomprehension. Perhaps understanding would benefit judgement by paving its way.
In the instance of Wellington City and the nature of its imminent change, it is significant that members of our current city council can so easily equate the city centre with its central business district. The emptyness at the heart of modern western culture seems founded on a similar misconception. Often, it is the uneasy mix of the social and the economic that are blamed for this. Though we often speak of these concepts in the same breath, experience suggests that their estrangement is more the reality. It is a shame that in public discourse reference to what is personally significant – our relationships with friends, family, community and the environment in which this takes place – are considered abstract in terms of the economic and legal context on which this discourse is conventionally based.
Its interesting Morgue that in your characterisation of Wellington City you write of your experience of the Cuba Street district as the soul of the City. This, and the sum of what you write, brings to mind a favourite poem. Its called Epipsychidion. Its a word usually translated as ‘soul outside of my soul’ or, ‘soul of my soul’. Significantly its a poem not about finance, or even society, its at once less abstract and more immediate than that, at least in my experience. Its a poem about a relationship, about love. Much of what I appreciate in the anti-bypass campaign, which has at times appeared as dogmatic and merely rhetorical as its opposition, is its appeal to an idea of community. Much like the poem, this is the thing that caught my attention. The thing that convinces you not with words but with the truth of your own experience. Relationship is fundamental to my experience of life. Ideas and activities that recognise this I give to, not only because I want to and not necessarily because I must, but because it’s natural to. If I understand correctly, than I find at the heart of the bypass initiative what are primarily economic concerns. I’ll make my judgement accordingly.
I’m firmly against the bypass and I agree with you about the fact that it will carve Cuba St in half. That said it won’t carve it in half much more than Vivian Street does already. I think the traffic on Vivian Street ends up flowing the other way (Traffic doesn’t go through Guznee which may or may not be pedestrianised) and then there is a main road being put in that leads from the motorway up Willis and round toward the Basin.
Wierdly the bypass does exactly that – it bypasses the city. People seem to think it will stop congestion but when you have a tunnel with only one lane leading into the city I can’t see how that is so. People are naive if they believe adding more roads lessens congestion. The only thing this road is doing is pushing the main roads away from the centre of the city and driving them through a bunch of othet peoples houses. It means that getting to the airport will be more direct in a not really very direct kind of way. It means that people coming into town from the Newtown, Miramar, Island Bay areas will be still go the same way down to the Terrace (where people work) because the bypass is really only trying to link the motorway to the Hutt with the Western side of the city.
It is stupid and pointless.
The Wellington City Council doesn’t want people to go shopping in town either. Parking is now $4 an hour on all the street parking and all the parking buildings have been sold to money grubbing corporations who charge about $3 an hour on the weekends.
The people in charge of the city are all backwards thinking. You are right they don’t understand any of what you have said. They don’t realise that the city is the people, not the infrastructure.
It hardly needs to be said that the mayor is married to a developer.
More than anything else, I blame the total f**king apathy that everyone seems to have towards local body politics – which have a FAR more direct impact on your day to day living than national politics. Everyone currently assumes that there is no credible alternative to Kerry Prendegast.
All it would take is someone with an ounce each of backbone, common sense and charisma to stand for Mayor and she’d be gone. But everyone ignores local politics, even as we’re bitching and moaning about the effects of it.
This reminds I should go away and complete my voting forms!
*Sigh*
From here there is nothing I can do.
I am against the bypass for all the reasons listed above. Basically it’s a stupid idea. All those cities that throught in the 70’s and 80’s ‘we need more roads’ are now once again thinking ‘we need more roads’ so lets find some other solution.
Wellington is in the same boat as LA, NY, Tokyo and a dozen or more other cities were some time ago, just on a smaller scale. The funny thing is that the pro pundits point to these cities as triumphs of the ‘bypass idea’.
I am resigned to Wellington being a very different place when I get back in a little under two years, every time I have left it’s changed. And every time it has gotten better.
I don’t hold mnuch hope for the latter at the moment.