They’re eating up the footpath on Lambton Quay. Wellington’s main shopping street looks like a movie set for The Day After Tomorrow, except it looked this way yesterday, does today, will tomorrow and ever more. Amen. There are large diggers, men resting on shovels, great chasms in the ground, and lots of noise of loud machines breaking concrete and scaring the pigeons in the park.
Apparently, this is all in the cause of widening the footpath. Perhaps Wellingtonian’s have become fatter people? Perhaps we are breeding more? Perhaps more people are moving to live here? Because I’ve never thought that Wellington’s streets were crowded like, well, most other cities in the world. You can walk respectably down the street without either losing all sense of your personal space or standing so close to someone that if you stood any closer to them you should probably move in together or have a cold shower.
But, evidently, we need wider streets. And the price we pay for wider streets is long-term disruption. Crossing the road becomes a perilous task, dodging these diggers, workmen and especially the holes in the ground. It’s probably safer to walk down the airport runway – the worst that can happen there is you’ll be collected by a passing plane. On Lambton Quay you might get taken out by a giant digger.
And pity those who actually have to drive on these streets. There will be cars that will simply disappear, swallowed by the crevices that are now such a common feature on Wellington’s streets. Our streets are pock-marked as an adolescent’s face. If your car doesn’t have decent suspension you might be joining your friends who were picked up by the passing plane on the runway, flying through the sky. Not terribly helpful for one’s carbon footprint, but if you can’t fly, and you can’t drive and you can’t walk, because you might just fall down a hole, then what can you do? It really will be the end of the road.
