Retailers will benefit from a ban on private cars in Auckland's CBD, says one of the designers behind a trial to do just that.
A concept image of what Queen St could look like without cars. Photo: Supplied / Auckland council
Auckland councillors have voted to trial the plan next year.
It will make Queen St inaccessible to all vehicles except for buses, delivery vehicles and rubbish trucks.
Auckland Design Office general manager Ludo Campbell-Reid said retailers had already benefitted from banning carparking in other parts of downtown Auckland.
"And where we have in many cases with the local downtown programme, we've provided a series of shared spaces where we removed all carparking and actually retail hospitality went up by 440 percent, that's not a small amount of increased revenue."
Ludo Campbell-Reid said more people were going into the CBD without using private transport, so it was about reorganising the CBD to reflect that.