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Manners Street – bus lanes will be wider, so the footpaths will be narrower
Wellington.Scoop
A week ago we commented that the Wellington City Council is running a misleading campaign promoting its plan to reopen Manners Street for bus traffic. Today, it seems the council hasn’t been telling the truth.
The council’s urban development and transport director says “6.5 metres is the standard we use for bus lanes.” But council documents have been pretending this isn’t so. They claim the bus lanes planned for Manners Street would be only 6 metres wide.
The error is reported in this morning’s Dominion Post, which seems anxious to downplay the seriousness of the issue by calling it a “hiccup”.
The council is downplaying it too. “If you are being picky, then the figures in the consultation document aren’t exact,” says the council officer, dismissively. The council has been using a false measurement to persuade Wellingtonians to support the changes in Manners Street. And it’s “picky” to point this out?
The council’s high-profile campaign has included a drawing of Manners Street showing impossibly-wide footpaths on either side of impossibly-narrow bus lanes. The drawing is the centre of the big posters in bus stops, though it has been amended from the original (at the top of this article) to remove some pedestrians running across the street.
But today the council admits the footpaths will have to be narrower – only 4.75 metres instead of 5 metres – to make more room for buses. And its opponents claim that even this figure may be wrong because it doesn’t take bus wing mirrors into account.
The Dominion Post allocates the last paragraph of its report by briefly acknowledging that the proposal faces considerable opposition: 4730 members on a Facebook page, and more than 3300 signatures on two petitions.
Councilors have been ignoring the opposition all year. The needs of buses take first place for them.
It was the same only one month ago:
the council wasn’t telling the truth
The amateurs went out again last night and measured out 4.75 meter footpaths on either side of Manners Mall as proposed by Greg Campbell in the Dompost. To our surprise, this left only 5.8 metres for the buslane which according to the council’s urban design and transport director is meant to be a standard 6.5 metres. There are 2 shortfalls to report: the first already observed by the amateurs, and the second, as pointed out several times to the council, Manners Mall is only 15.3 meters wide not 16 meters as reported in their publications.
Total shortfall 1.4 metres
Our measurements for footpaths on either side of Manners Mall/street allowing for a 6.5 metre buslane come in at 4.05 metres, not 5 meters as advertised in the council material. Is this what we should expect to get from a “special consultative process” and the urban design and transport director whose job it is to be “picky” at this stage, when opponents maintain Manners Mall is too narrow for buses and pedestrians.
The amateurs also believe bus measurements are on average 2.8 meters + 0.5 meters for bus-wing mirrors is 3.3 x 2 = 6.6 meters.
Regulations for safe passing distances between buses exist and are not catered for anywhere in the consultation as yet, including the safety gap needed between pedestrians traveling north and south on either side of buses traversing the Mall at 140 per hour at peaktime.
At this rate we will be lucky to get 3 meters for footpaths which is not wide enough for the large pedestrian counts, lunchtime 5781, afternoon 4892. It is a disaster waiting to happen. The City is Ours has asked councilors for an independent measurement of Manners Mall in the public interest and for their information before they make that fatal decision on the 11th of December.