The Street and the Car

Look at the street. Bunting across the road. Cars angle-parked on both sides. The Pacific Hotel anchoring the far end. Sutcliffe's Music Shop. The EMI Music Centre. The Bank of New Zealand and the Bank of New South Wales facing each other across the first block. A cyclist moving through the middle of it all.

This is Heretaunga Street West in the 1970s at its fullest expression... a street built for cars, filled with cars, organised entirely around the assumption that everyone arriving had driven there and would drive home. The angle parking. The wide road. The shops that assumed you could carry your purchases to a vehicle ten metres away rather than walk them home.

It took thirty years to get here. In 1950 you still needed a ration book to buy petrol.

The Rebuild. Almost No Cars.

This is the 300 West block in the 1930s... the Art Deco facades still new, the mortar still clean, the street almost empty. A handful of cars and a bicycle. West End Dairy on the right. The electric tram lines not yet fully removed. The city has just rebuilt itself and the street is wider and straighter and more permanent-looking than anything that stood here before.

In 1930 most people still arrived on foot or by bicycle. The bus service had been running since the mid-1920s. Car ownership was real but not yet universal. The street's extraordinary width... built for horses and coaches, then adapted for trams, then redrawn after the rebuild... was waiting for something to fill it.

That something was coming. It just had to get through the war first.

Five Years After the War. Still No Free Petrol.

February 1950. The war had been over for nearly five years. Italy and Germany had abolished petrol rationing. Australia had abolished it. England was talking about easing it. And New Zealand... with its Government-installed pumps and its imported petrol... was still rationing. The North Island Motor Union was lobbying the Prime Minister, Mr Holland, and the Minister of Industries and Commerce, Mr Bowden, to end it.

They had a point. The ration had been introduced as a wartime necessity. The war was over. The pumps were full. But the bureaucracy of rationing, once installed, is slow to dismantle. The stickers, the coupons, the inspectors, the rules... all of it was still in place five years after the reason for it had gone.

When rationing finally ended in New Zealand in the early 1950s, the effect was immediate. Car ownership climbed. The angle-parked spaces on Heretaunga Street West filled up. The street became what it had always looked like it was designed to be.

The Street Floods. Nobody Stops Shopping.

A torrential downpour recently flooded the busy main streets of Hastings. Although traffic was not disrupted to any great extent, most drivers used extreme caution negotiating the streets which had rapidly taken on the appearance of canals.

That is the caption in the Hawke's Bay Photo News, December 1958. The tone is comic. The city is underwater and the newspaper is making jokes... "A pedal submarine." "Parked car gets a wash." "Row in for service."

Look at the bottom left photograph. Hector Jones Electrical Co. Ltd. "Everything Electrical. Domestic. Industrial. Automotive." The sign is visible through the rain. The street is flooded. Hector Jones is open.

That is 1958 Hastings at its most confident. Cars driving through water that reaches their running boards. Morris Minors. Pre-war American sedans with their wide fenders and chrome grilles. A street so full of motor vehicles that flooding it doesn't stop traffic, it just slows it down. A newspaper so comfortable with the scene that it treats the whole thing as entertainment.

The decade between rationing ending and the oil shock arriving was the golden era. Cheap petrol. Full car parks. Every shop independently owned. Saturday morning on Heretaunga Street West was the ritual around which the week was organised.

October 1973. The World Ran Out.

On 17 October 1973, OPEC announced an oil embargo against the nations that had supported Israel in the Yom Kippur War. The United States. The Netherlands. New Zealand imported almost all of its petrol. The price of oil quadrupled in three months.

In the United States, petrol queues stretched around city blocks. In Britain, the three-day week was introduced to conserve energy. In New Zealand, the Muldoon Government panicked quietly and began calculating how dependent the country had become on something it could not produce.

The answer was: entirely dependent. New Zealand had no oil. No coal liquefaction. No alternative. The cars on Heretaunga Street West ran on imported petrol, full stop. The farmers who drove in from the plains ran on imported diesel. The buses ran on imported petrol. The whole economy of the Heretaunga plains... the orchards, the meatworks, the freezing works, the canneries... ran on imported energy.

The Think Big energy projects that followed... the Maui gas field, the Marsden Point refinery expansion, the synthetic petrol plant at Motunui... were all direct responses to the 1973 shock. New Zealand had been caught completely exposed and it took a decade to partially fix it.

But in Hastings in October 1973, the immediate effect was simpler and more personal. Petrol cost more. And then, six years later, it got worse.

The Carless Day. 2,700,000 Sticker Forms Printed.

On 30 July 1979, the New Zealand Government introduced carless days. The second oil shock... triggered by the Iranian Revolution... had sent prices soaring again. This time the Government did not wait. Every owner of a petrol-driven car selected one day a week they would not drive. A coloured sticker on the windscreen indicated their chosen day. Anyone caught driving on their day was fined.

The Ministry of Energy printed 2,700,000 application forms. That number is on the bottom of the form: 28250G–2,700,000/4/79 M. Two million seven hundred thousand forms. For a country of three million people.

The exemptions list tells you everything about what a car-dependent society looks like when it tries to ration itself. Motorcycles exempt. Rental vehicles exempt. Taxis exempt. Farm vehicles exempt. Police, armed forces, ambulances, fire brigade exempt. Courtesy cars for tourist accommodation exempt. Diplomatic vehicles exempt.

Everyone else... chose a day. Wrote their registration number on a form. Received a sticker. Put it on their windscreen. And on that day, didn't drive.

On Heretaunga Street West, one day a week, the angle parks were emptier. Not empty... people walked, caught the bus, rode bicycles... but noticeably, strangely quieter. A street that had been designed around the assumption of cars had to imagine, briefly, being something else.

The carless day scheme lasted ten months. It was scrapped in May 1980. It had done almost nothing to reduce petrol consumption. What it had done was make visible, for ten months, how completely the country had organised itself around the car... and how little it could imagine functioning without one.

The Strip Without Everything It Was Built For.

The 1970s photo at the top of this article is the peak. Bunting. Angle parking. Every shop independently owned. Sutcliffe's Music Shop... where you went to buy a record or a guitar or sheet music. The EMI Music Centre next door. The Pacific Hotel. The banks. All of it organised around the assumption that you drove here, parked here, spent your Saturday morning here, and drove home.

In the decade after the carless days ended, the economics of that arrangement started to shift. The supermarkets arrived. The first out-of-town shopping centres appeared. The anchor stores that had defined the strip... the drapers, the hardware merchants, the department stores... began to close or move. Not all at once. Slowly. One by one.

The cars didn't leave. They went to new places instead.

What's on WestSide in 2026 is not what was on it in 1970. The music shops are gone. The department stores are gone. The Pacific Hotel... gone. But the angle parking is still there. The wide road is still there. The infrastructure of car culture is still in the bones of the street, because it was built into the rebuild in 1931 and nobody has changed it.

What has changed is what people are coming for. The food trucks in the laneway don't need angle parking. The Line doesn't need a loading zone. Bliss Thai Massage, Lien Lashes, Urban Retreat... these are businesses you walk to, or park once and walk between. The street is filling up again, but differently. Not with the Saturday morning ritual that the 1970s photo shows... with something more layered, more varied, more deliberate.

The car made WestSide what it was. What comes next is being made by people who mostly arrived on foot.

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Sources...Hawke's Bay Herald Tribune 16 February 1950 · CHB Press 17 February 1950 · Papers Past · Hawke's Bay Photo News December 1958 (Hawke's Bay Knowledge Bank CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) · Application for Carless Day Sticker, Form Energy 1, Ministry of Energy, 1979 (Massey University Library Special Collections, Bagnall Collection, Ref 343.09460993 App) · HWML Collection Library ID005146 (Hastings District Libraries Recollect CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) · MTG Hawke's Bay Collection Object 98453 (Public domain) collection.mtghawkesbay.com/objects/98453