by Russel Norman
Went for a bike ride out to Petone day before yesterday. It could be a great ride, next to the Harbour from Wellington CBD out to the beach at Petone. But the bike track is really bad – it’s rough as guts, has lots of glass on it, is covered in loose gravel in various places. At some points it’s hard to figure out where to go. The track is crammed between the motorway and the railway. The road next to it is freshly surfaced, smooth and new lines painted on it. It epitomises the govt’s priorities for transport – roads get all the money and cycles and pedestrians get second rate treatment.
The picture below gives some idea of the comparison.
Published in Environment & Resource Management by Russel Norman on Thu, December 27th, 2007
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on the trolls and those who are unable to keep on topic
Russell, You get what you pay for. You can blame the 1898 Parliament for that.
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Russ
The reason the cycle track is like that is because NOBODY uses the thing, I lived in Wellington for 35 years and I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I witnessed anybody using the thing.
Cycle lanes will never take off in Wellington, you may not have noticed yet Russ but it does tend to blow a little bit down there.
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Perchance you are looking for something to do on a rainy day here is a little light reading you might find interesting.
http://www.petroltax.org.nz/PDF/CycleTrafficBill1898.PDF
Sadly my laptop can’t run the text converter part of Adobe Acrobat so this is scanned images so the file is somewhat huge, 2mb, about 30 secs to download on broadband. If any of you helpfull folks are can download it and convert it please let me know. It would be good to make a more acessible version available.
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Pictures like that always remind me of the 1m sea level rise that’s becoming an ever more optimistic view of the future.
But yes, glass because the sweeper trucks can’t reach it, and rough because it was never built properly in the first place. There’s no way cycles could wear down a proper construction, unless that place catches land slips, storm surges, or off-target vehicles on occasion.
Hell, at least you’ve got a cycle lane. The motorways round Dunedin force you to take some very windy, hilly, narrow, blind cornered, edgeless deathtraps of back roads to get anywhere.
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“The road next to it is freshly surfaced…” A picture is worth a thousand words. The clearly visible wheeltracks suggest this surface is well into it’s eight year lifespan. Road paint succumbs to the relentless onslaught of mother nature (and lanechangers) much faster than bitumen so it has to be replaced twice as often.
At least that motorway isn’t as ugly as the railway.
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Big Bro:
You obviously haven’t lived in Wellington over the last three years. During this time, I have worked in Khandallah with a view of the motorway and the cycleway. Every morning and every evening (I work long hours) I can count tens of cyclists using the cycleway over a period of minutes, and the number has noticeably increased since I started. This suggests the wind, which certainly hasn’t abated during that time, is not what is putting people off.
I used to bike to work along the cycleway that adjoins Old Hutt Road, and still would if it was remotely safe and well maintained (or perhaps well constructed in the first place, as tussock suggests). I vote for improved cycleways!
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mvaf & tussock,
The biggest problem with getting well constructed and maintained cycleways is that cycleways are too narrow. The highly machanised production line methods used in carriageway construction and maintenance is possible only because the lanes are wider than the trucks that deliver the raw materials. Ergo cycleways are essentially handmade, and handmade is always slower and dearer than mass production.
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roads around here are awash with broken glass. street sweepers are either too infrequent or they just clear the road & push it to the sides where bikes go. the action of cars, whose tyres are sturdy enough to handle it anyway, also pushes it to the sides. regular punctures are a tiresome inevitability. i read a letter to the paper from a foreign tourist who had enjoyed every other aspect of the country but felt compelled to write & mention the rivers of broken glass paving the roads which had marred their cycling experience, so i guess that means we have it worse than overseas. perhaps the problem is hooliganism – a problem to do with the character of people & hence insoluble to any legislative or administrative solution in the short term
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Cycle tracks are one form of infrastructure that must be installed BEFORE there is a real demand for them.
It is not sensible to wait until the number of cyclists increases before more/better cycle tracks are installed, because the modern reality is that cyclist numbers stay low because cycling on existing public roads is a near-death experience. Cyclists are at a high risk of being killed.
I think we should be much more creative with adding wide, well-formed cycleways everywhere we possibly can, especially leading into large metropolitan areas.
How to encourage councils and government to fund them?? I don’t know. I think we should be continually pricking their consciences about how backward (NOT green) NZ really is.
Our poor diesel fuel standards, our penchant for importing old technology cars, our clogged motorways, our extremely poor public transport system all stand in stark contrast to the image our leaders portray of NZ being an environmental leader. Bollocks.
I would like to see public reserves like Cornwall Park and the Domain (in Auckland) etc etc used as areas where cycle traffic is given priority as a means of avoiding other vehicular traffic. The bikes should not share roads with cars (if at all possible) and neither should they share skinny paths with pedestrian traffic.
Bikes can have their own ‘motorways’ if we really get creative and make them a priority.
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Perhaps someone can correct me, but when I lived in Wellington, it was extremely difficult to get (safely) on to the cycle track at the Petone end. Is it any better now?
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Yes it still does run out about 200m before the end of the motorway. This is actually supposed to be a one-way cycle track (for travelling South – toward Wellington). If you’re travelling the other way (toward Petone) you’re supposed to ride in the painted lane on the motorway itself!
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Samiuela, not much better.
The remarkable thing is that bikes are selling like hot cakes but people are only using them for recreational purposes. If we had a decent system of safe bikeways then I reckon a lot more people would consider them as a commuting option.
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Russell, This year 80 people have been killed on our roads as a direct consequence of Labour’s refusal to act on the advice of the LTSA, in 2000, that more money needed to spent on safety engineering. That is over 600 years of life lost to political expedience.
A government that is prepared to sign that many death warrants is hardly likely to have a genuine commitment to safe cycling.
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In Holland, you can ride motor scooters down the bike lanes, too. I thought their system worked very well.
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Russel,
I think bikes are selling so well because they have become so cheap. I can buy an adult size bike in Kmart for around $100. Only five or six years ago, an equivalent bike would have cost about $500. I don’t know how bikes can be manufactured so cheaply.
An unfortunate side effect of bikes being so cheap is that they are becoming viewed as “disposable” items. When I was a kid, the bike shop was staffed by mechanics, now I think half the staff wouldn’t know how to fix a puncture, let alone straighten a buckled wheel. Instead, if you have an accident on your bike, it is cheaper to buy a whole new bike, rather than fix it.
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You are all correct: it is dirt cheap to ride bikes, yet too dangerous to ride them. We should learn significant lessons from Holland and other places that value cycling traffic, even if it is motorised cycles/mopeds.
How to make the government understand the need for good/independent cyce tracks? I don’t know. But we have to keep trying.
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The smartest thing the Dutch did was to discourage longdistance motor traffic from using country roads by building intercity motorways in the 1960s. That way speed limits on rural roads were set at 80kph with no complaints. The absence of high speeds and high volumes of traffic has kept cycling popular as everyday transport in rural communities.
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The $100 bikes are designed to become rubbish – there’s very little on them that can be fixed, and they only last a few hundred km before critical bits wear out. Better to start with a cheap second hand bike. (I say this as a member of a bike re-use co-op where we get a lot of those bikes donated).
There are very narrow street-sweepers available, IIRC Wellington council even own a few and use them on footpaths. So it’d be possible to drive one the length of that cycleway every couple of weeks… except that you probably couldn’t get it on or off because the ends are so badly stuffed up. We really need decent approaches to the cycleway and then the cleaning to be done. It might be better to just get a tractor with a rotating broom on the front like road repair crews use. The cycleway should be 2.5m wide anyway, just to meet the standard for a two way facility.
The Dutch moped problem is bad but not fatal, most Dutch cyclists seem to regard them as a blight to be tolerated as the price for excellent cycleways – anything that keeps them off the cycleways makes the cycleways unusable for many cyclists. Fortunately The Greens have Mike Ward on his trike to remind them that not every cyclist is a fit young guy on a mountain bike so hopefully we won’t see too many army assault course type barriers blocking cycleways.
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As far as promoting cycling, it’s just like roads – built it and they will come. Look at what’s happened in Christchurch since Moore was elected mayor. I was stunned by how good the facilities were last time I was back (I live in Sydney… we know about anti-cyclist sentiments but even here commuter cycling is growing fast).
At a national level, mandating that every new major road must have a cycle facility the full length would be a huge advance. The cycle stuff doesn’t have to be bolted right on the side, as long as it’s well signposted and is not purely recreational. The railway reserve path in Nelson (Stoke/Tahuna) is a good example – it’s some distance from the road and has priority at local road crossings with excellent street signage and good design. You’d be surprised at how many cycle facilities assume that every cyclist either knows the area intimately or carries a local map… good street signs as well as directional signs are a big help.
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Moz,
What’s has happened in Christchurch since Moore was elected mayor is that Mayor Buck’s ambitious cycle lane program has been scaled back in favour of bus priority measures. Either because buses are funded by the regional council not the city council and the bus exchange would be a memorial to Moore’s mayoralty or because the cycle lane program was not having any measurable impact on cycle usage.
The new mayor “Sideshow” Bob is living up to his nickname by wanting to shift the emphasis yet again. This time to the ultimate money waster – light rail.
Christchurch has already tried all of the “approved” techniques to discourage traffic congestion. Not building motorways, operating a sensible bus service centred on the CBD, building a road hierarchy (narrow residential streets – wide arterial roads), building cycle lanes, chicaning and judder barring the rat runs, bus priority measures. Yet Christchurch has overtaken Auckland as New Zealand’s most congested city and officially ranks as third worst in Australasia.
This would suggest that your basic premise. If they want to, they will come, whether you build it or not.
The historical evidence supports the post WWII experience. Build roads to open up land for settlement and they will come. Once you’ve opened up the land you don’t need to build more or better roads. They will just keep coming. In fact, the main reason we have been building better roads over the last eighty years is because they (motorists) keep coming and handing over wads of cash for the privelege. Cyclists, on the other hand, haven’t dispayed that same willingness to pay for at least a century.
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Moz, The motoring unions identified the same problem with the assumption of local knowledge and lack of signage at least as far back as the 1920s. Their solution was to erect and maintain the signs themselves. Maybe the cycling unions could take the same initiative?
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Kevyn, you forgot “and lobby for government funding”. Both on signage and building roads – New Zealand is like many other countries in having taxes on motorists that are big enough to generate a strong sense of entitlement but not enough to cover the cost of building new roads, let alone funding the upkeep of existing ones or coving third party costs like pollution and crashes. I didn’t realise that Christchurch was so congested – maybe I should try driving around it sometime instead of cycling.
As far as cyclists paying for cycleways and roads – we do, the same way motorists do – general taxation. There’s a good argument that cyclists pay a lot more than they should because the costs from cycling are so low. Keep in mind (for instance) that most cycle paths are built way stronger than necessary for cyclists and pedestrians so that council can drive motor vehicles on them. That bumps the cost significantly. Crashes are similar, and once you remove “cyclist hurts themself” crashes you’re into “man bites dog” territory – on the occasions when a cyclist maims someone else we usually get headlines because it’s so freakishly unusual. Not so for cars…
IME if you give people any choice they will use public transport, but it actually has to work. Buses stuck in traffic don’t do that, any more than cars do. Hence the popularity of rail. In Sydney rail works disturbing well considering how thoroughly it’s been Thatchered over the years.
I’d love to hear examples of cities that have followed your advice to build more roads and have coped well with growth and avoided congestion.
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moz said “As far as cyclists paying for cycleways and roads – we do, the same way motorists do – general taxation.”
Roads have never ever been funded from general taxation. From council rates yes. From road user charges, yes. From Public Works Loans which had to be repaid with interest, yes. From revenue from Crown Land sales in liue of the Crown not paying rates, yes. From general revenue, never. With one exception – roads to open up marginal farmland.
Not using general taxation to pay for roads is one of the few provisions of good government in the Constitution Act that has never been abandoned.
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moz – Tauranga.
Of course, I can give you a long list of cities that have built commuter rail networks and have failed to cope well with growth and have not avoided congestion. Wellington, San Francisco, New York, London, Sydney, Melbourne, Paris, Moscow…actually the list is as long as a list of the cities with commuter railways.
I never stated or implied that building more roads prevents congestion. I merely stated that not building them doesn’t prevent congestion or traffic growth either. The really worrying thing is that Christchurch really does have all the things that should discourage congestion yet we have more cars per capita than Auckland (City) and we use our cars more than Aucklander’s do. We also have more shopping malls per capita. I suspect there is a common factor underlying this. Perhaps something as simple and human as climate control, escaping the weather. It is no less bizarre an idea than sitting in a car in rush hour traffic every day instead of living closer to work or using some better mode for commuting. An example of the sort of irrational behaviour that makes a mockery of both central planning and market forces.
Tauranga? Currently this is true, but for for how long? Unlike Auckland and Wellington the motorways actually form an integral part of the region’s land use plans. Whether that will work to constrain traffic growth remains to be seen.
As long as most people work nine to five Monday to Friday we will always have peak congestion on all of our transport modes. Motorways, subways and even CBD footpaths.
Er, maybe if I’d typed the whole sentence in my original comment it might have made more sense.
>>This would suggest that your basic premise is wrong. If they want to, they will come, whether you build it or not.
Here is the best site I’ve found for research on congestion and public transport. The evidence so far is pointing to demand pricing for roads and parking as the only traffic reduction strategy that actually works long term.
http://www.uctc.net/access/access.asp
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Russel, Transit needs one of these:
http://cycleliciousness.blogspot.com/2007/12/comfort-testing-bike-lanes.html
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i’m from Poland in central Europe, i’ll be glad if they build even one cyce track
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