Taupo Urban Structure Plan - Taupo District Council

4.1.2.1 Summary
In summary the urban form issues are as follows:
♦ Compact Urban Form
- Maintaining a compact urban form around Taupo Town Centre is a
clear aspiration of both Council and the community.
- Uncoordinated rural residential-development on the urban fringes of
Taupo and the emergence of satellite centres such as Kinloch
provides a challenge to maintaining compact urban form.
♦ Timing and Funding of Infrastructure
- Fragmentation of residential development has the potential to cause a
lag between Council’s provision of services and infrastructure behind
the community’s needs.
- Lack of coordination in the timing between land-use and the provision
of services and infrastructure also makes it difficult for Council to
assess whether new development is meeting the true costs of growth.
4.1.3 Role of Key Infrastructure
4.1.3.1 Eastern Taupo Arterial and Western Arterials
The formal designation of the ETA to the east of Taupo Town Centre gives
more certainty to Taupo’s urban form, having the potential to act as a distinct
urban fence, diverting unrelated State Highway traffic from lakeside properties
and the CBD, containing urban sprawl, and buffering existing and future
residential areas from industrial and geothermal development activities.
The influence of the ETA on the reorientation of Taupo to its lakefront is a
significant transformation representing one of the largest State Highway
diversions ever undertaken in New Zealand, and reinforces Taupo’s assertion
of its position as a national and international destination.
Existing and proposed future arterial roads to the west of Taupo Town Centre
would play a similar role to the ETA. There is growing concern in the
community that the amenity and character of the west has the potential to be
eroded by the sprawl of rural-residential development and the intensification
of existing urban areas, particularly Acacia Bay and Kinloch.
In this context the arterial roads can act in two ways firstly, as an artery for
ribbon development which follows and establishes alongside such roads (for
example current residential development pursuing Mapara Road and Poihipi
Road). Secondly, as an urban fence, retaining the amenity and character of
the countryside to the north-west, and restricting the bulk of development to
existing urban areas. However, the later initiative can only be put into effect
through the development of a Council policy position in terms of distributing
growth in the west between rural-residential development and grafting onto
and intensifying existing urban areas.
The connection between the ETA and existing and proposed future western
arterial roads also becomes important in terms of shaping growth to the north
of Taupo Town Centre. The proposal for a second Waikato River crossing
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