Sue Cardwell is the communications manager at Bike Auckland, a non-profit organisation advocating for a better region for people on bikes.
OPINION
Communities around the country are hanging on tenterhooks this month, waiting to see which of their hard-fought transport and road safety improvements will be cancelled.
It’s the projects for people travelling on foot, scooters and bikes that are under the axe most of all.
Adrian Lord, Auckland Transport’s head of cycling, captured the irony when he said, “It’s funny how when money is tight, the cheapest and most universally accessible modes of transport are regarded as ‘nice to have’ and the most expensive, most damaging, most hazardous and least efficient mode is ‘essential’.”
The United Nations recommends 20% of transport spending should be on active modes. Aotearoa New Zealand has never contributed anything like that, and now virtually all funding is completely gone.
It’s by no means inevitable that NZ should continue down a car-centric path on its transport journey. That, say experts, is a 1950s way of thinking, dubbed “motonormativity”.
Motonormativity is one of those concepts that once you see it, you can’t unsee it. In NZ it surrounds us, and it’s a truly weird phenomenon.
Consider free on-street parking: the right to take up real estate to park one’s private vehicle. Those 12.5sq m would cost us a lot more to use if we wanted to do almost anything else with the space. For example, to use 12.5sq m of Auckland space for an office costs about $4000-$5000 a year.
A different path for our transport future has been mapped out. It’s one where people have transport choice.
Artist impression of a segment of Auckland's Great North Rd improvements. Image / Auckland Transport
In Auckland, about a third of the population doesn’t, or can’t, drive. To cater only for cars for this population is confounding.
That non-driving third of the population includes kids. If you’re enjoying the relative quiet of the roads during school holidays, imagine how roads would be all the time if our kids were safe to cycle themselves to school — because a lack of safe infrastructure is the primary reason they can’t do so today.
On the flip side, imagine how much more crowded the roads would be if people on bikes were in cars. That’s one in 20 of the journeys into Auckland’s city centre. Almost 2000 more cars every day would be in Quay St, for example.
The funding debate so far has focused on cherished projects that communities have fought long and hard to get. Many are ready to be delivered, like Auckland’s Great North Rd improvements, or are at various stages of their design and planning. Canning these “approved” projects after years of consultation on them will certainly lead to disillusioned communities.
But what should be even more concerning to us is the lack of funding for projects at earlier stages of the process: those marked for investigation.
For a cycling infrastructure project to be delivered, a concept is first assessed in an investigation phase, and then goes through a design phase, which typically includes public consultation and can take several years.
Investigation includes working out if the project meets criteria such as connecting into the existing or committed cycleway network, offering good value for money, prioritising connections that help the most people, and prioritising areas where safety risks are highest.
If potential projects are not being investigated, there is no pipeline of projects that can advance to design and delivery phases. Network planners can’t include walking and cycling in their plans.
Essentially, if we turn off the funding tap for new cycling projects to be investigated, we introduce a long delay (probably about five years) before we can expect to see new cycling infrastructure being delivered. Experienced and skilled staff members will be lost to transport agencies, making it challenging and costly to restart the pipeline again once funding returns.
At Bike Auckland, we dread the impact this would have on our region.
As our population grows, the infrastructure to support it would become less and less fit for purpose. We would be going backwards relative to so many other cities around the world that are putting in place policies and infrastructure to reduce their emissions and create liveable communities.
We would be choosing a different path for the future of our region, and it would be incredibly difficult and much more expensive to course-correct later on.
