Wayne Brown tells Herald NOW what he aims to achieve if elected for a second term. Video / Herald NOW
Opinion by Simon Wilson
Simon Wilson is an award-winning senior writer covering politics, the climate crisis, transport, housing, urban design and social issues. He joined the Herald in 2018.
Cycleways account for about 1% of transport spending in Auckland.
Mayor Wayne Brown has a long list of instructions for Auckland Transport that includes cheaper cycleways.
Minister for Auckland Simeon Brown is an enthusiast for a boardwalk cycleway in Hobson Bay.
Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown was on our new streaming service Herald NOW last week. When the interview turned to transport, he was asked one thing: what is he doing about “all the stuff that annoys people, the cycleways” for instance?
But while there are angry voices, aremost people really so annoyed?
Brown told viewers: “There are other things that need to be fixed.”
Before work started on the new cycleway on Great North Rd, 50 community organisations, including all the local schools, pleaded with Auckland Transport (AT) to make it happen.
His long list includes faster progress in making the roads more efficient, more cost-cutting on all fronts, better customer relations, more non-rates revenue (such as parking fees) and more clarity about preparations for the City Rail Link (CRL) opening next year (100 bus routes will be reconfigured).
AT wants to reduce its targets for public transport and cycleway use, and building new cycleways and footpaths, but he’s told them not to. Keep those stretch targets and do more to meet them. He also wants clear measures to reduce carbon emissions and track progress on that.
This is big, complex and on the whole very good stuff. I imagine the mayor would enjoy wide support for his determination to see it all happen. But none of it is easy, and Brown himself hasn’t thought through all the implications.
For example, he’s always said cycleways are fine, but not when they’re too expensive, like the cycleways on Karangahape Rd. In his letter of expectation he calls for “innovative, value for money approaches”.
The cycleway on Karangahape Rd, Auckland, was more expensive to install than some others across the city. Photo / RNZ / Tom Kitchin
Fair enough. But we already know how to build cheap, safe cycleways: you convert a strip of existing road, divided from traffic by a low concrete or rubber barrier. This has been done successfully in many parts of Auckland, most recently on Victoria St along the SkyCity and TVNZ blocks.
Yet somehow Brown doesn’t like that. That cycleway was “plonked just around the corner here with no warning to the council”, he told Herald NOW.
However, a cross-town cycleway along Victoria St has been in the city plans for more than 10 years and was always going to be built as part of the street makeover now under way in preparation for the CRL opening.
AT doesn’t have a strong record with cycleways. It has failed to meet its own cycleway targets in recent years and the Government’s new transport policy statement makes it difficult for new ones to be built. Only about 1% of the total transport spend in Auckland goes on cycleways, but because of the new policy and AT’s own nervousness, even that measly proportion is about to fall.
And yet, strangely, some members of the Government are keen on expensive cycleways.
Minister for Auckland (and former Transport Minister) Simeon Brown made this clear last month when he turned the first sod in the last part of Te Ara Ki Uta Ki Tai, the path of land to sea, otherwise known as the Glen Innes to Tāmaki shared path.
Dignitaries ready to turn the first sod of the last stage of the Glen Innes to Tāmaki Drive shared path. From left: Ōrākei Local Board's Sarah Powrie, AT's Richard Leggat, Ōrākei Local Board's Scott Milne, Auckland Deputy Mayor Desley Simpson, Minister for Auckland Simeon Brown, NZTA's Steve Mutton and AT's Mark Banfield.
He called it a “great community asset” and said it would be “a beautiful place to ride”. He’s not wrong. This last section of the path will be a wide boardwalk over the edge of Hobson Bay, around the pōhutukawa that line the shore.
You can imagine the cost. At least, let’s put it this way: try doubling whatever you imagined.
I asked the minister why he was such a fan of such an expensive cycleway. Brown, remember, is a senior member of a Government that tells us all the time how relentlessly focused they are on cost-cutting. He said with a big grin that it was because it won’t take any space on the road.
And there we have it. The perceived right of drivers to the exclusive use of the roads is more important than the expense.
You’d think Finance Minister Nicola Willis would knock some heads together over that. But apparently not.
While we’re talking about money, the economist Geoff Simmons has recently looked at the cost benefits of cycling. He used a 2023 Australian study by the consultancy EY as a springboard, and gathered data from Statistics NZ, the NZ Transport Agency, the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, and the Ministry of Transport (MoT).
Simmons found that spending on cycling directly adds more than a billion dollars to the economy each year. There are also health benefits of more than $600 million, personal travel cost savings of about $250m and benefits to other road users and society, mostly from having fewer cars on the road, of about $150m.
MoT analysis puts those health benefits at $1.51 per kilometre cycled, and NZTA estimates the marginal benefit when an “otherwise sedentary person” starts cycling is $4.90/km on an ordinary bike and $2.50/km on an e-bike.
Simmons also noted that spending on e-bikes has risen by almost 600% in the past five years, making this our fastest-growing transport category. Spending on cars in the same period grew by 30%.
And are people using the cycleways? They are in Pt Chevalier. The new Meola Rd cycleway, the subject of so much abuse before and during construction, recorded 500 trips a day in its first month, March. As Karen Hormann from Bike Auckland has noted, that’s close to the 700 trips a day AT thought it would take four years to reach.
AT has 81 bike counters around the city, but for its official tally it relies on 26 of them, nearly all of which have been in place for close to 10 years. They record about 3.4 million trips a year. As Matt Lowrie at Greater Auckland has reported, this total, as with most transport modes, is still down on pre-Covid numbers: it’s about 90% overall.
But bike rides into and out of the central city, unlike car trips, are back to their pre-Covid level. Lowrie suggests this could indicate “a significant mode shift happening under everyone’s noses”.
Bike rides on the Northwest Motorway cycleway at Kingsland are also back to their pre-Covid best. This is a good sign that the “network effect” is working. The NW cycleway now extends from the Viaduct as far west as Westgate and has many branches into the suburbs along its route. Peak days are Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, with less than half their number riding on weekend days.
And here’s something else to look forward to: AT is about to do a bikes-on-buses trial on the Northern Express from Albany. That will mean bikes crossing the bridge, even if it isn’t as originally hoped.
In all of this, there’s one big thing to remember. Every person on a bike is a person not in a car. And when parents can trust that the cycleway network is safe enough for their kids to ride to school, that’s a powerful way to help solve congestion.
Why do people – some people – hate bikes so much? Why does that hatred trump other widely shared values, such as public health, children’s independence, road safety and even value for money?
Think about the cheap cycleways on Nelson St, Ian McKinnon Drive at the top of Dominion Rd, Beach Rd, in so many other locations. Turns out they don’t ruin the driving experience at all.
Cyclists make use of Auckland's Beach Rd cycleway. Photo / Auckland Transport
Does it just boil down to car brain?
Car brain is the belief that the goal of transport planning should not be to make the roads flow more smoothly, but to get everyone out of my way so I can drive the way I want.
Mayor Brown was asked if there would come a time when “all this madness will stop”.
The madness will stop when we refocus on the transport problems that really are blighting this city: congestion, road safety, carbon emissions and the seriously challenging cost of construction.
Car brain is the last thing we should be listening to.
