City Hall’s battling to come up with a masterplan for the area that doesn’t add to traffic congestion on the route into Queenstown, particularly at the Shotover Bridge.
Of 506 public submissions on the plan produced by a consortium of consultants, 86% wereopposed to or concerned about it.
Many believed adding 2400 high-density dwellings at Ladies Mile would increase congestion, and public transport and walking and cycling routes weren’t the answer.
As Graeme Rodwell put it: "To expect this huge volume of new residents to use a bus or ride a bike is pure fantasy.
"Biking down here for work reasons in our climate is totally unrealistic."
And Travis Sydney said: "Literally no one believes you will be able to meet your public transport goals and, as a consequence, traffic will grind to a halt.
"You are naive to draw assumptions from other parts of New Zealand and offshore and apply them to Queenstown."
The draft masterplan’s due to go to the council for signing off on July 29, but mayor Jim Boult’s indicated to Mountain Scene that’s not a deadline for finding a solution.
"While council will decide what council will decide, in my view nothing physical will take place until we see a solution to the traffic issue."
Meantime he’s concerned about the next move from Ladies Mile landowners.
"I get worried individual landowners will decide they’re not going to wait for the process any longer and just go ahead and do their own thing and we’ll end up with a mish-mash of various development proposals that caused us to consider a masterplan in the first place."
