Straight from city council A personal view, by Councillor Steve Morris

Predictions about the future are bound to be wrong; as Robert Frost once said: 'The afternoon knows what the morning never suspected”. Nonetheless, I'll venture to predict three key changes I believe the city will experience over the next 30 years.

We're predicted to grow to 190,000 but we're running out of land; what gives?

The city will have to be denser.

It's hard to achieve as there is always resistance to change.

Only if plan changes increase existing residents' property values, create a more pleasant environment and are communicated both well and early will people support change. That's a conversation council needs to have with the community sooner rather than later. Electric vehicles will increase traffic. With the price of both electric cars and solar energy coming down, I wouldn't want to own a petrol station as a long-term investment. We're planning for more bus lanes around the city but I don't think we've considered that as the car fleet moves electric the costs of owning, fuelling and maintaining cars will come down, making it cheaper to travel and increasing traffic. We still need more investment in roads.

The port's future is going to be more reliant on community goodwill than economics.

As our population grows and automation increases the percentage of the city's pay packet that comes from the port reduces and the less tolerant the community will be of the negative impacts of the port. Complaints will be more common about trucks, containers, and dust.

Memories of old Pilot Bay extending toward Matapihi will fade but the community will start demanding more of their waterfront back.