A joyful day! A new story from our resident teller of tales, Simon Vincent (search for ‘Simon’s stories’ to find more). “I often find things catch my eye when I’m riding – sometimes it is because they are unusual or unexpected, but in this case it is things that I notice often and that stay with me,” says Simon, about this lovely list of landmarks along his regular routes… As a child, I loved spending time visiting my cousins. The cousins were great, but what made the visits so special was that they lived in Blackpool – the Rotavegas of the English North. The (in hindsight, short) trip up the …
Bike Auckland
Updated Thursday 15 August: Good news! We’re told the cycleway bridge at Mountain View Road is now re-opened to bikes, pedestrians, motorised wheelchairs, and scooters, with signage to be made and installed ASAP. (Maintenance vehicle access will be restricted). Stay tuned for further news from AT of how and when the repair will happen, and whether it will affect access over the bridge. “Why is it taking so long for tangible action? This should be an absolute priority.” We’re 100% with Newton Central School’s principal Riki Teteina on the matter of the bottleneck on the busy Northwestern Cycleway, as reported last week by RNZ’s Rowan Quinn. Auckland’s second-busiest and fastest growing bike …
UPDATED 27 February 2019 Additional media coverage of this story in the week since this blog post was published in the wake of the initial RNZ story by Rowan Quinn: How dare Auckland Transport pit schoolkids against cyclists (column by Simon Wilson, NZ Herald, 22 Feb 2019) ‘Multiple’ close-calls on Auckland’s Northwestern Cycleway spark safety improvement calls (Kendall Hutt for Stuff, 22 Feb 2019) Auckland Transport to try to educate cyclists (RNZ, 22 Feb 2019) AT signals codesign of controversial northwestern cycleway (RNZ, 26 Feb 2019) Note the welcome development in that last story, with Auckland Transport signalling an intention to redesign this section of path in cooperation with Bike …
Running alongside SH16, the Northwestern Cycleway is not only the key bike path from the western suburbs into the CBD, it’s also a crucial local connection to and between Kingsland, Eden Terrace, and Arch Hill. And it’s booming – daily bike traffic has tripled in less than five years, with a daily average of close to 1000 trips registered by the automatic bike counter near Bond St (and 1500 on the last Thursday in February!). It’s a huge success story – with a major pinch point: the section between St Lukes Rd and Newton Rd. Built in the early 2000s as a shared path for bikes and pedestrians, the width …
TL:DR – Auckland Transport proposes making it legal for people to cycle across Carrington Road on the Northwestern Cycleway. We suggest you support this by giving your feedback here. The crossing where the Northwestern Cycleway meets Carrington Road at Unitec has long been an example of the complicated rules around bikes. Neither fish nor fowl, people on bikes fall into the grey area between ‘vehicles’ and ‘pedestrians’, with many problematic outcomes. When the Northwestern Cycleway was connected through here in the early 2000s, perhaps planners thought the pre-existing pedestrian crossing would suffice, or perhaps they didn’t have any reasonable options in their then very limited legal toolkit. Either way, since then …
Doing the rounds of AT’s website, we found this short but useful bit of new protected cycle lane coming for the Pt Chev community: AT is proposing to install what looks like St Lukes-style separators on Carrington Road, on the southbound section from the Pt Chev town centre and across the motorway bridge, as far south as Sutherland Road (i.e. to the Northwestern Cycleway entry!). Sadly, this quick fix project doesn’t extend any further down Carrington Rd, because the lanes get a lot narrower south of Sutherland Road and then swing out around parked cars outside Gladstone Primary. Despite the obvious limitations, we think this is a good quick improvement …
For experienced navigators of the city, it can be hard to remember what it was like just starting out. We get used to figuring out how to get from A to B by following the breadcrumbs, or the ant trail of other people on bikes. Once you know the way, it can be almost impossible to return to what the Zen masters call ‘Beginner’s mind’. But with Auckland Transport reviewing its paper bike maps (and looking at map apps for the digitally enhanced among us), it’s ever more crucial to see things with fresh eyes. Enter Neil, a retired school teacher who regularly bikes around his Henderson neighbourhood for exercise. He contacted us the other day with the following good-humoured tale of …
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