Minister for Auckland Simeon Brown (third from right) with Auckland Deputy Mayor Desley Simpson (centre) and other dignitaries ready to turn the first sod of the last stage of the Glen Innes to Tāmaki Drive shared path.
This is a transcript of Simon Wilson’s weekly newsletter Love this City – exploring the ideas and events, the reality and the potential of Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland.
Minister for Auckland Simeon Brown dug the first sod for a new cycleway last week. He seemed very excited, talking about the “great community benefit” and how it would be a “beautiful place to ride”.
He revealed that at his home in Pakūranga he lives next to a shared cycling and walking pathway, as this one would be, and he knew that it “adds enormously to the community”.
No, I am not making this up.
Brown was celebrating the start of work on the final stage of the Glen Innes to Tāmaki Drive shared path, also known as Te Ara Ki Uta Ki Tai, the path of land to sea.
Glen Innes to Ōrākei is already in action and it’s a lovely addition to the city. This last stage will connect the Ōrākei train station and Ōrākei Rd bridge with Tāmaki Drive. Its feature – imagine this – will be a 4.5m-wide, 820m-long boardwalk over the water, skirting around the pōhutukawa that line Ngāpipi Rd.
After that, it will join the widened footpath already built, along past the boatsheds.
Deputy Mayor Desley Simpson was the MC. “Welcome to one of the best Friday afternoons you’ll have this year,” she said, wearing a hot pink jacket and matching sneakers.
I mention it only because later on she was going to get into the soft muddy ground with a spade to turn her own sod and I wondered how she’d manage. Little spot of mud on one toecap.
She praised Sir John Key, who kicked the whole project off and was, she said, “committed to encouraging people to get out of their cars and try cycling”.
She praised Michael Wood, Labour’s Transport Minister, who agreed his Government would fund the most expensive stage of the project.
She introduced “my great friend”, Simeon Brown.
After Brown had spoken, other speakers returned to the theme of encouraging people to get out of their cars.
Auckland Transport chairman Richard Leggat assured the minister that AT was “not anti-motorist”.
“Good to know,” grinned Brown.
“We are trying, very hard,” said Leggat, “to reduce journey times. It is our main goal. We want it to be possible to drive 10km in no more than 20 minutes, anywhere in Auckland.”
The current average is 23-24 minutes.
“To do this,” he told Brown, “we need people, when they can, to get out of their cars, to use the CRL [City Rail Link], to use busways and cycleways. If they do that, it will be to the benefit of motorists.”
Steve Mutton from the NZ Transport Agency was next. He told the minister that east Auckland was growing rapidly and if they could find ways to have fewer vehicles on the roads, these would become more efficient for the people who do need to drive.
Did the minister feel they were ganging up on him? He took it well.
Then it was the turn of Scott Milne, chairman of the Ōrākei Local Board. He quoted Hannibal, who crossed the Alps. “If there isn’t a way, we’ll make a way.”
An 820m boardwalk might not be in quite the same category, but this one, Milne said, will have 30m piles. There’s a lot of mud to drill past.
The dignitaries then hopped into cars and were driven 800m to the site of the sod turning.
They’re right this shared path will be wonderful. The parts that are built, across the Ōrākei Basin and up through the Purewa Valley to Glen Innes, are already wonderful.
It won’t be “finished” when this last stage is done, though. The path was supposed to connect to Meadowbank with an underpass beneath the railway line at Gowing Drive, but that got “value engineered” out in the last round of AT budget cuts.
This means the path is not accessible by a big part of the catchment, including hundreds of schoolkids, it was originally intended for.
“What’s the point? The Government and the council have spent billions on the City Rail Link,” developer Mark Todd told the NZ Green Building Council this week. “But there are no incentives for anyone to build near the stations.”
He has a couple of radical suggestions for the council: impose much higher rates on the land and make monopoly utilities provide connection for free.
Ideas that make economic sense and possibly won’t be at all popular.
Pretty much everyone agrees the value of the CRL will be best realised if land near railway stations can be intensely developed. More trains require more people living and working near enough to use them.
There are arguments about how intensely: four to six storeys, or double that, or double it again? But there’s no argument it should happen.
RMA Reform Minister Chris Bishop has already complained this year that almost no new development is happening in Kingsland, on the Western Line. Todd points to the same situation down the road at Morningside.
“That whole area is commercial low rise,” he told me. “Just two or three storeys. Most of the land is owned outright, with no mortgages, and there’s no incentive to the landowners to do anything with it.”
Todd wants the council to rate the land much more highly, so owners have to find ways to get a better commercial return from it, or sell. And if they sell, the people who buy will be developers who put up mid-rise and high-rise.
“Everyone wins,” said Todd. “The council gets more revenue, the railway gets more use, which helps control congestion on the roads, and the suburbs on the rail line get more people and more life in them.”
His second beef is that it costs him half a million dollars or more to connect water and power to an apartment block that might have 30 units in it.
“That’s ridiculous. If I want to enrol my kids in school, no one tells me I have to pay a sign-up fee. What’s the difference? I’m providing housing in the places it’s supposed to go. Why penalise me and the people who want to live there, because we’re doing what the city plans say we should do?”
He believes the council “should require monopoly service providers to provide free connections for homes built in the right locations”.
Auckland Transport is preparing to raise speed limits in 1500 locations around the city. This, say experts here and abroad, almost certainly means more people will die on our roads.
The agency is doing this in response to the Government’s new speed rule, adopted by Cabinet late last year on the recommendation of the previous Transport Minister, Simeon Brown. The new speed limits must be in place by July 1.
But AT’s approach is radically different from the one adopted by two other large road-controlling authorities, the Hamilton City Council and the Dunedin City Council.
In Hamilton, for example, only three streets are getting higher speed limits. Why the difference?
The new speed rule introduces a blanket reversal of all speed limits that were lowered under the previous Government. But local communities that express clear support for keeping the speeds lower can gain an exemption. There is also a carve-out for streets outside schools: for a short time at the start and end of the day, their speeds can be lower.
However, the rule is badly written. One example: if the presence of a school was given as the primary reason to lower the speed limit in the first place, that street must get a higher limit. No scope for an exemption.
This means streets outside many schools will become more dangerous than similar streets further away.
The reason Hamilton and Dunedin have been able to reduce the impact of the new rule is that they have found what Auckland Deputy Mayor Desley Simpson calls “cracks in the legislation”.
They consulted the public robustly, they gained clear support for lower limits, and they did it in a way they believe means the outcome is not negated by the new rule. So they can exempt many streets.
In the case of Dunedin, the lower limits have been in place for a long time. Besides, as councillor Jim O’Malley says: “We know that when another Government comes in, they’ll want them back to where they were before, so it would pretty much be a futile waste of effort, to be honest.”
The new Transport Minister, Chris Bishop, seems comfortable with this. He’s said as much in Question Time in Parliament.
Bishop has not signalled he intends to revise the new speed rule. But nor, it seems, is he going after roading authorities that find ways to sidestep Brown’s original intention.
Auckland Transport also consulted robustly and has something like two-thirds support for lower limits in urban and suburban areas. But chief executive Dean Kimpton says AT has legal advice it can’t follow the Hamilton and Dunedin examples.
This is tragic. AT was a brave nationwide leader in making streets safer. Where it lowered speed limits in 2022, there has been a 30% reduction in deaths and serious injuries (DSIs), compared with a 9% increase on its other streets over the same period.
Lower speed limits save lives and AT has proved it. Last December it won the prestigious Prince Michael International Road Safety Award for this work.
But now, in my view, it has capitulated.
Kimpton told the council this week: “There was no problem with how we initially consulted. We did the right thing.”
They’re just not prepared, I would argue, to keep doing the right thing.
Councillor Richard Hills reminded Kimpton that when the new rule was adopted, the council had voted 18-3 to push back. But, he said, AT is not doing that.
AT’s board chairman Richard Leggat has, instead, written to Bishop asking for “clarification”. He’s had no response and the agency is not waiting: it’s preparing to raise the limits.
“We may not like it but we’re satisfied with our interpretation,” said Kimpton.
The topic also came up last week at the AT board meeting, with a presentation from Marie Guerriero, executive director of All Aboard Aotearoa, an umbrella group for advocates of safer streets.
“This is a test of leadership as well as common sense,” Guerriero told me afterwards. “The safety of our communities should be the top priority. Auckland Transport is now a conspicuous outlier, sticking to a rigid early reading of the speed rule, when other cities have found a more rational approach.”
She said Hamilton and Dunedin have thrown AT a “lifeline” that it should take.
Why is it so adamantly refusing to do that? The future of AT is under review and while Brown may not be Transport Minister, he is still the Minister for Auckland. Are they just trying to get into his good books?
The council has decided it will also write to the minister.
Along with its curious capitulation over the speed rule, Auckland Transport is also in the last stages of preparing its Statement of Intent (SOI). This is an annual declaration to the council of its principles and priorities for the coming financial year, which starts on July 1.
One factor it has to wrestle with is that deaths and serious injuries (DSIs) have risen. Not where speed limits came down, but everywhere else. The target for the year to March was “not more than 576”, but the actual number was 586.
The problem AT faces, in the words of officials advising the council on AT’s draft SOI, is that “the improvements in road safety under ‘reducing harm’ should be based on evidence and cost-effective outcomes”. That points clearly enough to the need for lower speed limits, along with safer intersections, more surveillance and enforcement of the road rules.
But the officials go on to say this should be done “in addition to improvements within the direction of the GPS on Land Transport 2024”.
The GPS is the Government Policy Statement, promulgated by Simeon Brown last year, which explicitly mandates higher speed limits. Transport Minister Chris Bishop says he has no plans to produce a new GPS.
Desley Simpson asked AT this week if the higher rate of DSIs was due to more crashes or fewer safety initiatives. The answer: both.
AT executive Simon Buxton said while there had been more crashes there was also “a lag time for interventions we’re putting in”.
My translation of that having read AT’s performance report is: “We’ve done less than we thought we would to make the streets safer.” One of the reasons: cost cuts.
In the draft SOI, AT chairman Richard Leggat declares: “Legislation requires us to provide a safe transport network, and recent speed rule amendments along with a change in Government focus and funding have required us to rethink our approach. This is a work in progress, but Aucklanders can be assured we will continue to uphold the Vision Zero aspiration as set out in the Auckland Plan 2050.”
No we can’t. The current SOI, soon to expire, has an express focus on “safer journeys for everyone”. In the new draft, that’s gone. And Vision Zero was much more than an “aspiration”, it was a coherent strategy explained over many pages. That’s gone too.
The number of mentions of Vision Zero in the new SOI? Zero.
Back to Te Ara Ki Uta Ki Tai. When Simeon Brown was Transport Minister he changed the funding rules to make it almost impossible to build cycleways. So why does he like this one so much?
“Because it’s not taking space from roads,” he said on Friday, beaming.
But it is taking something else: money.
Here’s the equation. This stage of Te Ara Ki Uta Ki Tai is budgeted at $32 million and most of that will go on less than a kilometre of boardwalk.
One comparison is with Meola Rd, which is 1.6km long. Its makeover cost $35m, but only $6.2m of that was for the cycleway. Most of the money went on a complete rebuild of half the road and all the underground services.
The Ngāpipi boardwalk won’t include any upgrade of the road, because, as the minister says, it’s off-road.
Another comparison is with the basic cost of putting a cycleway on the side of the road and dividing it from cars with concrete or rubber barriers. They’re known as tim-tams, because they’re shaped like the biscuit. That costs as little as $500,000/km.
If the project includes non-cycleway elements such as reconfigured parking or bus stops, the cost might double. Remaking intersections can boost the price further.
But if it’s on-road and not digging under the road, it will probably be cheap. For the cost of the Ngāpipi boardwalk, you could create several new tim-tam bike lanes right across the Auckland isthmus.
I’m conflicted about this. We have some great off-road cycling routes in this city, including the rest of Te Ara Ki Uta Ki Tai, and they’re invariably more enjoyable and safer than on-road bike lanes. They add enormously to the experience of living here. So yes, more please, even though they’re expensive.
But the overall cycling network is absurdly limited. Most kids can’t ride safely to school; if you want to commute from Onehunga, say, to the central city, there’s no relatively direct and safe route all the way.
We need much more of that, too, and the only way to get it is to funnel the available money into cheap options. Like tim-tams on the road.
There are other factors. Off-road shared paths are better for kids but not so good for pedestrians, and not so good for commuter cyclists who want to go fast. Many in the disabled community really don’t like them.
But while I’m conflicted, I’m a little surprised Simeon Brown is not.
He warned at another event in Auckland this week that the city must “deliver solutions in a cost-effective way”. In our straitened economic climate, why is a minister of the Crown championing the most expensive kind of cycleway you could possibly imagine?
Mayor Wayne Brown, it turns out, doesn’t like tim-tams either. He told the council they’re “expensive and dangerous” and the better option is rumble strips.
This is nonsense. Tim-tams are dangerous to people who try to drive over them, but that’s the point: they stop it happening. Rumble strips provide no protection at all for cyclists and are therefore the most dangerous option of all.
Bike Auckland’s Fiáin d’Leafy, making a submission to council before Road Safety Week next week, tried to explain this to the mayor.
“Tim-tams are very cheap,” they said, adding that safety is the key barrier to cycling: 41% of respondents in AT’s recent survey say cycling in Auckland is not safe.
“Cycleways are not for people confidently riding on the roads right now,” said d’Leafy. They’re for the people who say they’re “interested but concerned”: they’d like to take it up, or let their kids ride to school, but they don’t think it’s safe.
“Rumble strips are no help to them.”
D’Leafy told the council that at Scott’s Point School in Hobsonville, the bike shed is overflowing with bikes. The reason: the school is surrounded by a network of safe cycling routes, laid out when the subdivision was first established.
That’s not a luxury confined to new suburbs, either. Councillor Alf Filipaina reminded d’Leafy that Nga Iwi Primary School in Māngere is similarly well-connected and riding to school is very popular there too.
Dare to dream? Something phenomenal is happening with cycling in London. The number of cyclists in the City of London, the financial district and heart of the city also known as the Square Mile, has jumped by 56% in two years, from 89,000 to 139,000.
On any given day there are now twice as many bikes there as cars.
The air is so much cleaner, nitrous oxide targets were exceeded at only two measuring sites last year, compared with 15 in 2019.
What’s caused this? Congestion charges designed to discourage driving played a role, but they’ve been in place for 20 years. One critical recent difference: more safe-cycling routes. Another: one-in-six bikes are ride-shares, operated by Lime and Forest.
In the wider city, cycling is also up, but by a more modest 12%.
At the breakfast event this week where the city’s bigwigs celebrated the 15th birthday of Auckland as a Super City, former PM Helen Clark said she thought the rest of the country wasn’t as dismissive of Auckland as is often said.
“Many of us are from somewhere else,” she said. And many of them, she implied, will one day become us. We’re in this together and we know it.
Wayne Brown, meanwhile, was as blunt as ever.
“We are a big lump,” he said, “so don’t treat us all the same.” His point was that the rules for a big city shouldn’t be the same as they are for small towns and regions.
“We are not like Horowhenua, wherever that is.”
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'Early indications are the crash was intentional.'