Further down the road

Two years ago today, I was literally celebrating the opening of a new (short) road directly connecting my area to the rest of Hamilton. Two years later, I’m still happy the road finally opened—and yet…

In late 2019, when my brother-in-law and I stopped at a realtor open home to check out what’s now my house, the agent told me about the road that would be built “soon”, and how it would have a small commercial area with some shops. It was, in fact, one of the reasons I bought this house.

The fact it actually took three-and-a-half years for the road to finally open isn’t the agent’s fault, obviously, nor did she in any way promise it’d be open any sooner—though she also didn’t stress that the construction hadn’t even started yet, let alone that at the time of the open home it wasn’t even scheduled. In late 2019, we were all blissfully unaware of Covid and all the disruption that would cause to—well, everything, really.

It’s now two years after that road finally opened, and it’s also now some five-and-a-half years since I moved into my house. I’m still glad for the easy connection to anywhere in Hamilton I might want to drive to, and it really has been a huge improvement to the quality of my daily life. But the story stalled yet again.

The commercial area still hasn’t been started, and there haven’t been any signs whatsoever that it’s even a glimmer in a developer’s eye. Meanwhile, traffic has continually become heavier, especially around rush hours (in late afternoon, for example, I sometimes have to wait several minutes for cars to pass through the roundabout at the entrance/exit to my neighbourhood that I use, including to get to that road. That’s because, first, in the two years since the road opened, a lot of new houses have been built in the two developments close to the one I live in, and because people living even further away have realised using the new road is much faster for them, too.

Even with the increased traffic, it’s apparently not enough to attract developers, but there’s more to it. New Zealand’s economy has been in terrible shape for a couple years now, with high interest rates, rising construction costs, and a shortage of tradespeople, many of whom have moved to Australia for better pay and opportunities. Add it all up, and there was no way the commercial area could have been started, let alone finished.

The missing commercial area, then, is disappointing, but not surprising. The same could be said for the fact that this entire part of the city still has no public parks: A large open are for sports is supposed to built between our development and the next one down the road—some day. I’m not a sports person—clearly—but even I can see how having an open area like that would be a good thing. With no public parks, and no benches (aside from a bus shelter), this area is far from pedestrian-friendly, unlike older parts of the city (and in this case, “older” could mean less than ten years older).

Even so, despite the delays in starting to build the commercial area and the public park, the opening of the road has helped us all to drive to the rest of Hamilton much more easily. However, the optimism I shared on my personal Facebook two years ago, that I would “feel a part of the city, not adjacent to it”, didn’t actually happen—I felt able to get to the rest of the city, absolutely, but with so much still not begun, let alone completed (also including the final phase of the development I live in), I still feel at least somewhat set apart from the rest of the city. On the other other hand, I feel far more connected to the rest of the city here than I felt at our last house in Auckland, which is something.

All up, then, the road has definitely made things better for everyone who uses it, maybe me especially. Progress is progress, after all.