I have got great news for Aucklanders - and if you’re not in Auckland, great news for you too, because what happens in Auckland tends to eventually happen in other cities around this country.

Auckland City Council has finally proposed breaking up their ‘urban design team’. This is the team actively ruining people’s days with stupid ideas.

They were the team that stuck planter boxes in car parks on High Street to stop cars from parking there to make it more pedestrian friendly. 

They’re also the team agitating to take cars out of Queen Street. 

Good riddance to that team. Never want to see them put back together again. 

Councils should stop trying to use teams like this to force funky urban designs on people. Just the mere fact that it’s the council coming up with funky ideas rather than it organically happening means they’re not funky and they’re probably unnecessary.

I’ve seen this happen before. It happened in wellington when I was living there full time. The council cordoned off lower Tory Street, which comes off Courtenay Place. They stuck some wooden benches and planters all around the place, painted the street in bright colours, and thought people would use it. 

People didn’t use it because lower Tory Street is a wind tunnel, and what it actually did instead was start hurting businesses because cars struggled to get to them. 

I’m not a fan of council trying to muck around much with cities. Leave it to private enterprise to come up with good ideas.

Britomart, the rooftop dining area above the new Westfield in Newmarket, cool eateries that’ve popped up post-quake in Christchurch, anywhere that’s cool around this country.

Mostly, it’s a private business doing something people that like. Not a council painting things bright, forcing cars off the road, and then thinking we’ll love it. 

The thing I love is them ditching the idea.