Path will link uni with rail

Auckland City has allocated funds to link the university quarter in Symonds St to the railway at Parnell with a cycling and pedestrian path through the Domain.

The city council's combined committees yesterday added $750,000 for cycling infrastructure to their annual budget plan, including the design and construction of a path between Wellesley St and a desired railway station site beneath the Parnell shops.

Although most of the money will go on the path, with a hope of attracting subsidies from the Transport Agency, the budget is also intended to cover the purchase of 20 bike stands over two years and the development of a city-wide cycle parking policy.

That follows a row between the council and bike hire company Nextbike, which it has ordered to prune its 160-strong fleet to about 100 machines to comply with a resource consent and to free parking space for general cyclists.

City transport committee chairman Ken Baguley said the cycle-pedestrian path was aimed at giving students and others easier access to the railway network, via a station the council wants the Auckland Regional Transport Authority to build at Cheshire St in Parnell.

The path would be designed in the next financial year, in the hope of constructing it in 2010-11.

Although KiwiRail has yet to confirm Cheshire St as the preferred site for a station, Parnell Mainstreet manager Debbie Harkness said it had agreed to leave heritage buildings there for a possible multi-faceted development.

It has previously wanted to demolish the buildings, which now house the Mainline Steam vintage train operation, and she believed the council's funding decision would help to turn Parnell into a transport "nucleus".

The Auckland Regional Council also wants a new station built there, confident it would become one of the busiest on the network, and the transport authority has completed a study establishing the site's feasibility.

Mr Baguley also acknowledged that a cycle-pedestrian bridge between Wellesley St and the Domain, across the motorway through Grafton Gully, would be a "big ticket item" which he had been discussing with the Transport Agency for the past year.

"Improving access to the university is considered to be a national issue and not entirely an Auckland ratepayers issue - we will keep talking and pushing," he said.