We chose to do our drawing on the theme of transport. This theme is of great concern to us.The town of Auckland is such a thin strip of land surrounded by water that there is in fact very little space allocated for roads.
Auckland is a very spread-out town, so we understand why adults prefer to travel about by car, because the distances are fairly long. Nevertheless, due to the traffic congestion it takes a long time for us to get to school, for our parents to get to work. This time could be spent together, with our family...
The backdrop to our drawing represents our environment. We used the idea of linking jigsaw puzzle pieces because we would like our town on the North Shore to have better transport links with Auckland city. The two towns are separated by a harbour, and there is currently a large harbour bridge linking the two together. Cars have a long way to travel in order to get from one town to the other because of the traffic. We think that these two towns should be linked by a better transport system. This new transport system would considerably reduce travel time.
The first piece of the puzzle in our drawing represents a recently developed transport system, the "Park and Ride" stations and bus-way that we have today. The Park and Ride has made a huge difference to the traffic problem by letting people park their cars there and continue their journey by bus. Since the introduction of this system, traveling around our town is much easier.
The second piece of the puzzle depicts our own idea for progress: we have imagined a monorail system - underground and / or overhead - that would supplement the existing transport networks and lead to congestion being relieved in our town centre. This monorail would be electric or hydraulic, because we also want to do everything possible to make energy savings.
We are totally aware of the fact that this project would require large amounts of money, but if we do nothing, there will be more and more traffic jams and pollution. Our town will no longer be a good place to live...
