Gateway to Seaview

My trips to and from work each day take me passed the Hutt Park roundabout. It’s reasonably big, but very easy to overlook. But when you pay attention, you’ll find that there appears to be a footpath around it, not that there’s any reasonable way to get over to the island. It’s landscaped, but only barely.

Once you’re up there, it feels much smaller than it is. There are also a few little details, like the number of service accesses dotted around.

We have a number of spaces like this that need to exist, but really can’t be much more than they are. Could you imagine trying to put a pedestrian crossing of any sort across this layout? There’s only a section a few meters long that is single lane, which is hard enough to get across with the amount of heavy traffic heading around to Port Road.

So we’re left with little dead spaces, albeit with a bit of landscaping to keep it from looking overly bleak. It will remain a little annoying urge to claim the space for public use, but without realistic opportunity. It’s anti-public space.

With that in mind, turn your mind to the dead space between Kent and Cambridge Terraces. There’s something that could be fixed with some pedestrian-friendly changes and a well-placed kiosk or two. It just needs to be considered a bit of a blank slate.