Cycling Auckland

The other day I saw another post which showed the cycling provision in Auckland.

The post provided a couple of pictures showing roads on one side and dedicated cycling facilities on the other.

Cycling vs Cars - TransportBlog

So with this image the following claim was made.

"Its no wonder that only 1% of commuters are cycling to work in Auckland if less than 1% of our road have safe cycling infrastructure"

What we have here is another case of Myth & Reality where we are told that 99% of streets aren't safe for cyclists. The reality is that the vast majority of roads in Auckland are quiet residential side streets brought about by the sprawled non-grid nature of the city. If you actually created a plan of all the quite and safe roads for cyclists in the city, and then included the various parks, off-road cycleways and pedestrian plazas that cyclists freely use you will find cyclists actually have a larger and more connected network than what cars do and so the image above is not only misleading but straight out wrong.

The following image shows the school of thought that went into making the above image.

Average Auckland Road

So seeing what the streets are like in Auckland, what are they like in Copenhagen where they get 20-30% of people cycling.

Copenhagen St

Well looking at that typical Copenhagen side street the carriageway is narrower and therefore needs to be one way, there is no berm but there is a narrow concrete footpath between the parked cars and the edge of the road reserve that I believe cyclists also use. In all cases the Copenhagen St seems less safe for cyclists with one exception, that being that there are no driveways. If the road above had driveways on it with the expectation that cyclists bike right next to the boundary I would say the road above was downright dangerous.

To that extent I suspect there are two big reasons why cycling is so popular in Copenhagen. One reason will be that Copenhagen is near totally flat and therefore its very easy to make the 5km average trip, the next reason will be that driving in Copenhagen isn't really much of an option. As you can see in the image, in Copenhagen you are pretty much required to park on the street both at home and at your destination, given the various one way streets and that many are closed off to everyone except for residents driving would be both slow and inconvenient and vehicle damage would be a common occurrence.