Public Comment
The following draft Standard is available for you to comment on. The closing date for comment on this draft Standard is 5 February 2010.
DZ 4404, Land development and subdivision
This draft Standard is a revision of NZS 4404:2004 Land development and subdivision engineering. The revised draft Standard encourages sustainable and modern design that emphasises liveability and environmental quality in the development and subdivision of land, where these activities are subject to the provisions of the Resource Management Act 1991.
The impetus for the review of NZS 4404 came from requests for changes and updates from the New Zealand Transport Agency, Local Government New Zealand, and a number of individual users of the Standard.
The 2004 version of the Standard was completed about the time that new thinking in urban design was finding its way into the consciousness of planners, surveyors, and engineers who are involved in land development, but was not sufficiently developed in the New Zealand context to be able to be incorporated at that time.
Sustainable urban design contributes to liveability and economic development, and is now a goal of reputable developers, forward thinking designers, and territorial authorities. The review committee members all agreed that the revised Standard needed to strongly encourage that aspiration, and remove roadblocks to it.
The revised draft Standard proposes significant changes to the way roads are classified and designed, and changes the emphasis on how we manage stormwater. The sections on landscaping and reserves have been combined and rewritten.
The key changes include:
- removing ‘engineering’ from the title of the Standard to emphasise that collaboration among a number of disciplines is important for good land development outcomes
- requiring that road design allows ‘context’ or ‘place’ to be given significant emphasis, and that roads be designed to achieve safe (slower) operating speeds
- a new emphasis on managing and treating stormwater ‘before it gets into a pipe’, by the use of grassed swales, natural or artificial waterways, ponds, and wetlands
- a requirement to consider climate change and potential sea level rise.
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