Clutch your pearls. Newcastle council and the state government want to build on park land as part of their colossal redevelopment strategy for Broadmeadow and flanking areas.
But they would build on only a little land that we'd recognise as park - some that's underused and really should be accommodating a lot of homes. In fact, the plan may be missing a chance to reassign a bit more open land near Broadmeadow station for housing.
With this Broadmeadow Place Strategy, the council and state government have produced a scheme that excellently provides for more people in a vastly underdeveloped inner-urban area. But they also have awful transportation ideas, including reducing Belford and Tudor streets to a single crawling traffic lane each way.
So it's an anti-car plan. But what else can we expect from an anti-car council and anti-car state agencies?
The headline numbers are 20,000 homes and 40,000 residents - four times the population of Cameron Park, whose residential area covers 6 square kilometres.
The 40,000 will be in a zone from Turton and Kings roads to the railway and along the Belford-Tudor corridor to the city centre. The area is about 3 square kilometres and includes large spaces for sport and recreation.
Think of how much bush or farm land we'll be sparing from development by intensively using this part of the inner city.
The heart of the redevelopment zone is around Broadmeadow station. Making better use of the station, which one day may be a high-speed rail stop, is a major objective.
It is ridiculous that so much space on the western side of the station has always been so lightly used. Yet maybe that turns out to be a good thing: if it had been rezoned for high density 20 years ago, it might be filling up now with modest little blocks of flats.
There's nothing modest about what the council and state want in there. Right near the station, on the sites of such present features as the basketball stadium, old tennis courts and Police Citizens Youth Club, buildings are supposed to be up to 30 storeys tall.
Just quietly, some would be on what's now 5000 square metres of park next to the club. That sounds like a lot, but it's a drop in the ocean of open space that's between the railway and Turton Road. And the site, hardly used now, could accommodate 500 residents who'd have the convenience of living about 150 metres from a station.
More open space around the show ground, zoned for public recreation like a park but not exactly used as one, will take buildings of about nine floors, with 20 storeys on Broadmeadow Road. People there will be within 500 metres of the station.
Most of those areas are state land. The plan calls for at least 30 per cent of homes on it to be classified as affordable - reserved for discounted rental to people of modest means.
A mistake may be preservation of about 45,000 square metres of open space north of the tennis courts, including Magic Park. That land is only 200-400 metres from the station. It would be good to sell it for residential redevelopment, with the proceeds used to create a similarly sized park elsewhere. How about buying some of the Molycop site at Mayfield West?
But the planners want the Magic Park area for detaining floodwater, and maybe no other space can be used. In fact, they have paid a lot of attention to coping with heavy rain in the Broadmeadow Place Strategy. One of their ideas is to raise parts of Griffiths and Lambton roads.
Splendid main-road access is in fact one of the great strengths of the redevelopment zone - though that's the last thing the council and state agencies want to emphasise. Of course their planning document goes on and on about active transportation, which means lots of cycleways.
The council and state want to cripple at least one main road connecting to the site. As expected, the plan calls for eventually running a tramline along Belford and Tudor streets to Newcastle Interchange.
And, as expected, this would mean turning a valuable four-lane road into a two-lane obstacle course, almost certainly limited to 30-40 kmh.
Are they out of their cotton-pickin' minds? Do they really think that Novocastrians will welcome this?
Just about everyone here except a small anti-car minority will think we'd be better off without the tram extension. "Just give us buses instead," most would say.
Planners rejected, or didn't consider, three backstreet alternatives for trams from the interchange to Broadmeadow. A line on Cleary Street, good for heading ultimately to Wallsend, should have been in the plan. Another on Denison Street to eventually go to John Hunter Hospital should have been in there, too.
If we can't have two tramlines to Broadmeadow, then give us just one along Lindsay Street.
The plan does have something to say about Denison and Lindsay streets. It designates them for cycleways. But of course it does.
Not satisfied with their intended destruction of the Belford-Tudor route for cars, the council and state government reckon further tramline extensions could run westwards along Lambton and Griffiths roads. Madness.
Eventual redevelopment of the UGL (Goninan) site is in there, too. Now, on that site we have a former coal railway path that could accommodate a fast and unobtrusive main road from McDonald Jones Stadium to Industrial Drive. The road could then connect to a harbour tunnel from Elizabeth Street to Stockton, as will be affordable one day, and on to Nelson Bay.
So the grand Broadmeadow plan should obviously reserve the old rail corridor for the road. And obviously it doesn't.
The council and state government want to put a park on the corridor, instead of adding green space elsewhere on the site.
And they want to run a cycleway along the corridor, too.
But of course they do.
