In 2009, two thousand Aucklanders surged across the Auckland Harbour Bridge to show the urgency of a decent walking and cycling link.
In 2015, more than ten thousand of you added your names in support of SkyPath.
Were you one of the bold 2000… or the strong 10,000? We urgently need your voice on SeaPath too. Because a citywide network depends on every one of its branches.
Time is tight, so please, PLEASE click here to register your support for SeaPath before submissions close at 11.45pm on Friday 29 April!
Mathew Dearnaley, former NZ Herald transport reporter and cycling aficionado, by coincidence found himself off-duty and driving over the bridge in 2009 while walkers and cyclists were joyfully invading the pitch. He can’t wait to ride over the bridge himself. Here’s his take on how SeaPath is a crucial step towards that:
How times have changed since May 2009, when 2000 brave souls surged across Auckland Harbour Bridge on the grey coat-hanger’s 50th birthday, voting with their feet – and their bikes – for a long-denied walking and cycling connection.
Back then, in response to a reasonable plea to allow an orderly crossing to mark the occasion, the newly-formed NZ Transport Agency’s response was to erect a security fence beside the Curran St motorway on-ramp and call in the police, in a finger-in-the-dyke (some might have said two-fingered) bid to guard the status quo and keep vehicles flowing.
But it couldn’t hold back the ‘Get Across’ tide…
In the years since, that dream of a harbour crossing has of necessity become the largely privately-funded SkyPath, a shared pathway beneath the bridge’s citybound clip-on. A whopping 10,000 people wrote in support of the SkyPath resource consent which was granted last year, and the project is now working its way through the resolution of Environment Court appeals. It’s also subject to wind-testing, and an agreement by Auckland Council to partially underwrite the project against any failure to meet patronage projections.
Meanwhile, NZTA has been busy absolving itself by getting behind the goal of a cycling-and walking-friendly Auckland, with the likes of the Grafton Gully Cycleway, and the stunning Te Ara I Whiti – LightPath, which not long ago was a mere glint in the eye of our Max Robitzsch.
And now the agency is again showing how it can run with the ball, with the proposed SeaPath, which will extend 3km north and east from the Harbour Bridge to Esmonde Rd, Takapuna.
This project, too, has grown from the grassroots – of a vision articulated in 2012 by landscape designer Garth Falconer for show-casing Shoal Bay and humanising what has until now been largely the utilitarian preserve of the motor car.
For now, NZTA is carefully keeping some daylight between SeaPath and SkyPath – because the latter still faces a few hurdles. Fortunately, SeaPath makes sense even without SkyPath in the picture: NZTA’s official line is that when (or if?) a new harbour crossing is built in 10 to 15 years, cyclists could potentially use existing traffic lanes on the bridge, and SeaPath would be a critical link for bike and foot traffic from the wider North Shore.
The agency has also written Northcote Point’s wharf into the equation, given that SeaPath will deliver more cyclists and pedestrians to ferries. (Of course, they also need to extend the northerly end to Takapuna’s Akoranga busway station, in order for SeaPath to truly make sense as a multi-modal transport connection.)
But inescapably, SeaPath provides irresistible validation of SkyPath under the agency’s own ‘One Network’ philosophy. Making SeaPath a reality will help deliver the overarching missing transport link denied to our community for so long.
Help us help NZTA, Council, and AT deliver on this vision of a truly connected city. Click here to say a speedy YES to SeaPath before submissions close on Friday night, 29 April!
[Header image: the Get Across rally in 2008, which also involved a small breakaway protest crossing of the bridge, and set the scene for the following year]
