Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
a motorway network. A single public transit authority was also rejected. The 'critical juncture'
was made, largely reflecting the 'progressive' transport planning views of the time, and the
pathway towards motorisation commenced.
The progress to motorisation was rapid. By 1963, public transit's share had fallen to only
22 per cent, less than half that of 9 years previously. This change in travel behaviour is instructive
in highlighting how important the chosen policy approach can be to the resulting travel
behaviours, and perhaps also how the dominant views of the time can also become so difficult
to move away from, as they become embedded in the city culture and widespread beliefs,
namely that car ownership is important to living in Auckland. McLuhan writes in the context
of the US, but the message is important also for cities such as Auckland:
With the coming of the horse-drawn bus and streetcar, towns developed housing that was
no longer within site of the shop or factory [. . .] the railroad next took over the development
of the suburbs, with housing kept within walking distance of the railroad stop. Shops and
hotels around the railroad gave some concentration and form to the suburb. The automobile,
followed by the airplane, dissolved this grouping and ended the pedestrian, or human,
scale of the suburb. Lewis Mumford contends that the car turned the suburban housewife
into a full time chauffeur. Certainly the transformations of the wheel as expediter of tasks,
and architect of ever-new human relations, is far from finished, but its shaping power is
waning in the electric age of information, and that fact makes us more aware of its
characteristic form as now tending to the archaic.
(McLuhan, 1964, pp. 196-197)
Figure 7.3
Auckland
, 1853 (w/c on paper)
Source
: Hatton, W. (fl. 1853)/Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa/The Bridgeman Art Library.
