Who am I?

I'm 29 years old, born in Invercargill (we all make mistakes when we're young¹), and raised in Wellington, where I have lived most of my life. I've spent the last 12 years working in IT and telecommunications. (Yeah, I'm a bit of a nerd.) I have a passion for architecture and urban design, and I've travelled and worked around the world.

There are no pretenses about me. I have a lot of traits that are contraindicated for politics, such as honesty and integrity. I'm an open minded critical thinker, preferring to think things through and examine them from all sides without jumping to conclusions. And I'm able to change my mind in light of evidence.

If you like what I say below (and elsewhere) then maybe you can nudge your friends in this direction. (Since I've not littered the city with flyers, it will be pretty much up to your word of mouth if you think I'm a good change.)

If you want to find out more, or have questions, pop on over to my blog and post a comment.

Why am I running?

I love Wellington, but I'm not so happy with the lack of vision, lack of long term thinking, lack of fiscal responsibility, and the just so-so quality of our urban development. So I'm putting my hand up to do something about it.

You might detect a trend with me, long term this, long term that. It worries me that this trend isn't universal amongst our councillors and candidates. It's not overzealous parking wardens that future generations will look back on and lament that we messed up.

¹ Please, no emails from Tim Shadbolt or anyone else down that way crying foul, I'm joking, Invercargill is great.²

² Not really.

Top 5 Issues

1. Development of Pipitea and the rail yards. It took decades of battling to put in place a half decent framework for the Waterfront, but there is no such framework or master plan guiding the development of Pipitea and the rail yards further north. This will be Wellington's biggest area of completely new developments over the next few decades. The recent completion of a hideous office park here (Harbour Quays) has already put us behind the ball. Without quick action from the Council to put in place a proper long term master plan, we will lose our only opportunity for a well considered expansion of the city, and we won't like the mess of cheap big box retail and office park buildings we will end up with.
2. The abysmal planning of State Highway 1. The lack of a proper long term plan has left us with the flawed Inner City Bypass and now threatens to give us a flyover at the Basin Reserve. These very expensive "improvements" offer negligible benefits, and the ad-hoc planning of this route is building us into a corner, from where we will never be able to realise the end goal that most Wellingtonians want: a tunnel under Te Aro. We need to be less compromising with Central Government and NZTA, and present an proper long term plan for State Highway 1 in the city.
3. Public transport and cycling. Public transport is congested. We have over 250 busses, each carrying 50 passengers, all trying to traverse our Golden Mile during peak hour, and amazingly they’re forced to fight for space with single occupant cars. It is going to get much worse in the decades to come as we need to triple the capacity of our public transport system in response to growth. This leaves only one choice: Light Rail. We need to recognise this and properly plan for it so that when money is spent on projects like Manners Mall it is ready for the future. But our Council is refusing to see beyond just what's happening today when it comes to transport. And how is it that our Council finds it so easy to run roughshod over public feedback and spend $11 million on a major reconstruction of Manners Mall, but it's too scared to simply close Courtenay Place to cars during peak hours for 1/100th the cost (some measly paint and a few signs)? Regarding cycling, it's a no brainer. You simply shouldn't have to risk your life to ride a bike in Wellington. We need to make cycling safer and more attractive.
4. Quality of developments. It's far too rare that I hear someone praising the quality our new buildings (particularly apartments). Why do we think that's acceptable? Why aren't we being bolder about raising standards? These buildings have a long lifespan, they will be with us for over half a century, and with the massive intensification coming to our city there are a lot of them to come. Let's recognise the critical role the built environment has in our quality of life and be bolder about requiring world class buildings.
5. Planning for growth. Wellington City is set to absorb the majority of the region's growth as people come to enjoy our wonderful urban living, with over 100,000 new residents by 2050 under medium projections, and possibly twice that depending on how successful our city becomes.* But our city won't continue to be a great place to live if we fail to recognise and properly plan for all of these new residents. We need to decide on population targets, where we will house them, and then properly plan our infrastructure to suit. The reality is some land needs to be purchased as it becomes available (and before it is built on) so that we can widen some roads, build new lanes, parks, playgrounds, and squares, etc. Our already congested public transport will have to find a way to triple its capacity along the growth spine. Our water and waste infrastructure will need to be sized to cope. And so on.
   
   * Some predict considerably more under scenarios where climate change brings about a large influx of migrants.

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