Wellington.Scoop: I Saved A Zombie Today

I Saved A Zombie Today

I saved a zombie from certain destruction today.

The zombie was shambling mindlessly towards the intersection, head down, thumbs twitching, straight into the path of the bus that gave no indication of stopping. As the zombie stepped off the pavement, passers-by began to turn in alarm as the oncoming bus swung around the corner, aimed directly at the shambling figure. I lunged forward, grabbed the zombie’s coat and pulled him backwards onto the sidewalk.

“Whatjadothatfor?” he grunted at me, and went back to his texting.

Wellington’s CBD has one of the worst rates of pedestrian deaths and injuries per square kilometre in New Zealand. One reason is our high number of pedestrians in the central city; another is the predilection of zombies to wander the length of Lambton Quay absorbed in the glow of their cellphone screens. In a bad year, we’ll kill up to three pedestrians and put another 100 in hospital, at enormous economic cost to our city.

But another reason is our persistent refusal to treat pedestrians as though they actually mattered. It’s a truism of transport planning that we count people in cars and buses and trucks, and pretend that their movement across the city has economic value. But it’s apparently Wellington City Council policy to exclude pedestrians from the same calculations. According to this logic, taking a taxi to a meeting has economic value; walking or biking to the same meeting doesn’t.

In turn, this means the primary goal of transport planning in the CBD seems to be to keep the low-value pedestrians out of the way of the high-value traffic. This logic underlies everything from the phasing of traffic lights to the engineering of intersections, and the effect is that – despite our high pedestrian numbers – Wellington can be a remarkably unfriendly city to walk around.

For instance, if you walk southwards on Jervois Quay you’ll eventually come to the Wakefield/Taranaki intersection, jutting like the prow of a ship into the oncoming traffic. As a pedestrian, you have no safe way to cross either of these streets unless you’re suddenly gifted a pair of wings. So every workday you’ll see harried pedestrians dashing through the cars and weaving between stopped vehicles. This is not a sport best enjoyed by the elderly, the infirm, or anyone else without pin-sharp reflexes and a strong constitution.

It’s also evident in the Council’s approach to Manners Mall. The original proposal was to remove the Mall and not replace it with any equivalent pedestrian space – instead, Council officers recommended extra car parking for all those economically essential cars. Yet even drivers park and become pedestrians, and it’s those pedestrians that walk into shops and spend money. Cars have never been observed doing this on their own.

So it’s time for the Council to start treating all Wellingtonians equally. Irrespective of whether we drive, walk, bus, skateboard, bike or zoom around in our electric wheelchairs, we deserve to have our time and our mobility (and our lives) valued equally. And if Council officers were to update their thinking and their policies, perhaps they might avoid a repeat of the Manners Mall debacle.

Who know, we might even save some zombies from an untimely end.

Kent Duston is the convener of the Save The Basin Reserve Campaign, a member of the Mt Victoria Residents Association, and he walks to work most days.

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