Opinion - How to unsnarl our roads for good.

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Fast forward 10 years…

Wellington City, 2021. Population, 219,364. I’m 48 years old and it’s a lovely spring day.

I leave my house in Aro Valley and walk down towards Webb Street. It’s a lovely old villa. I’ve had it for a few years and it’s been a huge labour of love. To renew the foundations. To strengthen it against our more frequent tornadoes. To replace the corrugated iron roof with photovoltaic tiles. To install the wind turbine. To insulate it for heat – and sound (Aro Valley is as rowdy with student parties as it ever was when I was at Victoria).

My Aunt used to tell me not to waste my time and money doing it up and to buy myself a more appropriately sized and easier to maintain apartment in town. But some things are worth more than money and, well, they’re not building houses like this anymore.

But I couldn’t have done it had New Zealand not built the smart energy grid 10 years ago. That enabled householders to install their own solar and wind power so that they could earn money from the grid rather than pouring money into it.

I get on the Cuba Street tram at the intersection with Webb Street. It’s for tourists really, but I still love taking it the whole way down Cuba Street to the Town Hall. It’s only been running a couple of years, although the tram itself is over 100 years old, beautifully restored.

Cuba Street itself has just gotten better and better since it was fully pedestrianised, and a local ordnance put in place to ensure that all new buildings or restorations replicated historical buildings along this street. Some people consider it ‘twee’, but, with the rest of the downtown so changed and modernised, it’s nice to have at least one district that reminds us of our past.

It’s chock full of people, too. There are far more student hostels downtown than there were even ten years ago. They mingle with the funky, brash inventors and entrepreneurs from the new wave of clean-tech start-ups based in Wellington. They partner up with our big public energy companies to scale up our solar, wind and wave technologies and new energy-saving consumer products and sell them to the rest of the world. They like it here in Wellington because the city has methodically and consistently worked at being, in the words of the late, great Sir Paul Callaghan, “a place where talent wants to live.”

At James Smith’s Corner I change to the light rail, a much more contemporary vehicle than the tourist tram, capable of carrying several times as many passengers. It’s also crowded – since the oil price shocks of 2015-16, far fewer people travel by car. The second-hand electric vehicle market hasn’t yet got to the point where private cars are affordable by most.

I take the light-rail as far as The Embassy, the Southern Hemisphere’s first full-size holo-cine. I stroll down towards Oriental Parade. It is a great pity that the Parade itself is cut off from the view of the ocean. But the architects did as good a job of a sea-wall as one can, I suppose. With the sea-wall forming their back wall, rows of small bookshops, galleries, cafés and recycling boutiques face inwards to the Parade. The ‘roof’ is a grassed walk and cycleway which stretches the whole way round the Bays to Miramar.

Sea levels, of course, haven’t actually risen all that far yet, only a few centimetres since the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet - but Wellingtonians built the sea-wall after Cyclone Gabriel in 2017, when a sea swell destroyed much of the waterfront, including a number of historic buildings that are only now being rebuilt. Better to be prepared than not.

I walk round to the Band Rotunda. I sit and look out at my city, where I was born and grew up. Like so many New Zealanders, in my youth I travelled, lived and worked overseas for many years. But I chose to come home a little over 10 years ago. I may be biased, but of all the cities in the world, in 2021 Wellington is still my favourite. I am sure it will be in the future, too.