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.

The Anti-Road Campaigner

Yesterday there was a rather large announcement for people who are passionate about transport, sustainability and urban design. In what will likely become a rather influential president a group of apparent 'pro-public transport' and 'pro-active transport' activists successfully campaigned the Auckland Council not to improve the walking and cycling facilities on Great North Road and not to improve the public transport on Great North Road. The announcement I refer to is the saving of 6 Pohutukawa trees that were going to result in a number of significant benefits for all transport users, primarily being PT users and cyclists.

Now you may think this is strange, why would people who are pro-PT and active transport campaign against what they are in support of? Well it all comes down to why people become campaigners in the first place, and it also comes down to those who are most vocal being happy to lie and misrepresent the facts to get others on board.

So to start with, when it comes to people who are pro-PT or pro-active transport there are two types; there are those who simply want to promote these modes whilst letting other people go about there own business, and there are those who who simply hate other people using cars and want to prevent anything that makes driving easier for other people.

Hatred of Cars:

What it is that makes certain people hate other people using cars so much generally comes from a high degree of self interest, they don't like the fact that roads get congested and they don't like the fact that increasing the capacity of roads generally results in them using up more space. These same people may very well use cars themselves, however this they will claim is because they have no option because the PT system is so poor. In their world they may very well only ever travel from inner suburbs to the CRD where PT is ideal however the fact that other people have lives of their own and are making different trips is of no relevance, these other people are simply getting in their way are nothing but an inconvenience unless they are adding to the ambiance of the area.

For example, the following image shows a busy street with many people eating away at a cafe. In the average anti-car campaigners world the entire city should be full of streets like this, how these people get there, where they live, or what they do for a living doesn't is irrelevant, their only purpose in life should be to add to the ambiance 24/7. In a way its like these campaigners live in a theater where they are in the audience and they don't want to ever see or know the inner workings going on behind stage. 

Busy Street

Save the Trees:

Although the project in question has been in the public arena since 2013 there hasn't really been all that much concern over the loss of these trees until recently, the main objection to the project was that money was being spent to improve vehicle travel. This is actually evident in the numerous submissions that were made to save the trees, when reading the submissions that were in objection the general message in most of these was

"save the trees because I don't like you improving the intersection for cars"

Quite possibly the most important thing to get out of the way first is that most of these campaigners aren't actually all that fussed about chopping down a tree or two. In fact some of these folk have campaigned for years to have trees chopped down so they can get what they want. One good example of this is the Grafton Cycleway that required the removal of hundreds of trees and the only criticism was that it should have been done sooner. They will be equally keen to chop down any trees that get in the way of the Skypath.

The Lost Trees

Being a bit of a keen cyclist myself I've taken a few rides along this path however I have somewhat mixed feelings about it. The grade of the path makes it both a bit of a challenge for the average Joe and coming down the path is potentially quite dangerous as you can get up to some insane speeds and when you come into the corners that have the camber sloping the wrong way is an accident waiting to happen. Additionally the path doesn't give you access to anything, apart from a few mid-block access points its most suited for people going from the top of the CBD to the bottom and nowhere in between.

There other thing I have noticed about this path is that it hardly gets used, most times I've taken this path I haven't seen anyone else on it although one day I did see 5 pedestrians.

How Old is a Tree:

A good example of how disingenuous the "save the trees campaign" was is the quoting of the age of the trees. Throughout the campaign these trees were referred to as 6 giant and magnificent trees that were over 80 years old and in some cases almost 100 years old, yet in reality they were more in the range of 65 years of age.

You can see in the following image taken in 1940 that the trees didn't exist, yet they are claimed to be 6 years old at this stage.

Tree Location - 1940

The following image is taken in 1965 where we can now see in the red circle the trees which they look to be around the size of 15 year old Pohutukawa, this would mean they were planted around 1950 making them about 65 years of age. In the blue you can see some other trees that were not overly apparent in 1940 however given there size are obviously older.

Tree Location - 1965

Livable City:

One of the big slogans being used during the campaign was the "most livable city" which is what the current Mayor is championing.

To start the campaign they decided to claim there were 19 lanes in the area. Technically there were 19 lanes however this is because the count was based on 4 different roads. You could very well say there are 50 lanes here if you include a few more roads.

In reality Great North Road has 1 general traffic lane and one bus lane each way and so that's a total of 4. Add in the fact that we are at an intersection were you get additional turn lanes and we are up to 7.

The other thing the campaign implied was that the 6 trees would be removed and replaced with nothing but road pavement, when in reality 9 semi mature trees would to be put in their place along with some new and improved landscaping. All up there would be 3 more trees after the works than there were before.

Proposed Landscape Plan - 2015

The general sentiment was that removing these trees would result in such extensive environmental damage that it would take generations to grow back. Given the trees were planted around 1950 and looked pretty snappy in the 90's, that would imply that if 9 semi mature trees were planted here it would take about a decade to get to where we are rather than some 80 years as implied.

The hypocrisy of this all is that trees get chopped down all over the show for a number of reasons, many of which are for improved pedestrian and cycling facilities.

Of course this in situation it is a bit of a special case as 230m down the road there is a long line of trees of the same species and so people like to imply these trees are part of that line.

Great North Road - 2015

This is similar to other tree lined streets within the city.

Howe St - 2015

The difference with these 6 particular trees however is that they are not part of a greater picture but rather a small disconnected patch of trees.

When is a Cycle Lane a Cycle Lane:

One of the most amusing aspects of the "save the trees" campaign was the unanimous opinion that shared paths are no good for cyclists, with the TransportBlog stating "in my book shared paths don't count".

To a similar extent Cycle Action Auckland doesn't like shared paths either as they put cyclists in conflict with pedestrians. What's ironic in this case is that it was only the previous day they had celebrated the opening of another section of shared path just up the road.

One of the criticisms was that the path was "only" 3m in width, that's 3m plus an extra 0.5m clearance either side but they chose to ignore that for their case. So in effect, this 4m (including buffer area) wide path was hopelessly inadequate, this is despite the path they were celebrating the previous day was 3.0m with no clearances. If they really were of the opinion that 4m is not enough space then they would be up in arms about the 4m width of the SkyPath, however we see here they think the 4m width of the skypath is fantastic and safe for all users regardless of the 5% grade.

The other criticism they had was that the path only extended for the extent of works and didn't connect into the existing network. This is again another rather funny one, if you look at a map of the area you will see that there isn't an existing network of any shape or form and so that makes it rather hard to tie into it. To a similar extent a project can only work within its extent of works and hence the name. A complaint of this nature is rather short sighted, it suggests that nothing should be done in stages and that they would rather get nothing than get it delivered to them one section at a time.

As it turns out they have got what they wanted, they said they didn't want a shared path and the council has listened to them and it no longer features as part of the works.

Stop Planning for the Future:

The other great argument they had was that the traffic model was predicting congestion in 2026, given the road is congested today it's pretty obvious that it's going to be congested in the future but the campaigners didn't seem to think this was an issue and that there was a good chance that if we do nothing that the congestion we experience today will simply vanish.

The following image is Great North Road on a typical Saturday when nothing special is going on, this is hardly a busy time of the day but as you can see there is a large queue of cars trying to turn left onto St Lukes Road and another large queue of cars trying to turn right onto the SH16 eastbound on-ramp.

Great North Road - 2015

Another funny thing to be seen was from the TransportBlog when the posted the following image.

TransportBlog - 2015

I can only image they weren't wearing their glasses when viewing this image as the only difference they could make out was that there were "slightly fewer vehicles on the eastbound off-ramp". I don't know how they failed to notice the queue on Great North Road gets extended over 700m to the Grey Lynn town centre and and off the map.

Buses are Too Fast:

The biggest losers in this situation are the bus users travelling along Great North Road. In the preferred scheme buses travelling both eastbound and westbound had a relatively uninterrupted run however the campaigners seemed to not like improvements being made to the bus network and for now they have go their way.

It was only last week that the people campaigning against bus improvements at this intersection were celebrating a new bus lane being installed. It seems the issue here is these people simply don't understand how the dynamics of traffic work and therefore don't understand how small changes can make a big difference.

In the case of the preferred option two things were being done for buses. The first thing was that by adding the additional left turn lane the congestion on Great South Road will be greatly reduced and therefore bus movements freed up.

As shown in the congestion map above the queue of vehicles on a typical weekend PM peak can be expected to extend back all the way to Grey Lynn town centre and therefore before the existing Great North Road bus lanes start.

Grey Lynn Town Centre - 2015

So first up the buses will get stuck here, once in the bus lane they will be able to pass much of the stationary traffic up to about Tuarangi Road where the bus will again get stuck in congestion. The bus will then slowly make its way through the intersection of both Stadium and St Lukes Road before it is able to get back into a bus lane.

In addition to longer trips brought on by added congestion buses will also end up getting stuck behind other buses that are dropping off passengers as there will be no space to pass.

The 2nd benefit the buses get comes from the short 100m bypass lane. Although 100m doesn't sound like much, when it comes to peak time traffic this is the difference between waiting for the same set of signals once rather than twice.

Of course it seem the apparent "pro PT" supporters were not at all impressed with improving PT in the area, despite this being part of their Congestion Free Network (CFN).

CFN - 2020

This makes you wonder how they plan to build this section of the CFN. According to their pricing it will cost zero dollars to build a grade separated busway from Te Atatu all the way to Britomart which they show going going through this area. If 6 trees is too high of a cost to improve PT in this area I don't know how they plan to build a grade separated busway through this area, even if they increase their $0 budget.

I am No.6

Throughout most of the campaign there was a claim there there was "an alternative option that provided all the same benefits but saved the trees", this option was referred to as 'Option 6'.

If there was such an option it would have been good to see, however if this 'Option 6'  was an option that removed the 3rd eastbound lane on Great North Road then it wouldn't have provided all the same benefits.

One of the benefits of the preferred option was that it was safe for all users and that it provided for eastbound buses. If you were to simply remove the 3rd eastbound lane and then move all the other lanes over you would create 2 issues.

1. Westbound vehicles would be directed into the eastbound right turn lane resulting in head-on collisions.
2. The traffic waiting to turn onto the SH16 eastbound on-ramp would block the eastbound buses.

TransportBlog - 2015

Winners and Losers:

So now that the trees have been saved, and we are no longer going to see as many improvements to the pedestrian, cycling and PT in the area who won in the end of the day?

Well in 1st place comes the trees who get to stay, apart from some long overdue trimming.

In 2nd place comes the automobile user. Although Great North Road is going to be more congested than it is today, this added congestion is a result of the benefits these users will be getting from using the SH20 tunnel, and so although their trip may take an extra 7mins or so in comparison to the 2-lane option they are still getting to where the want to go faster than they are today.

In 3rd place comes the humble pedestrian, although not great in numbers for most of the day they do come out in swarms from time to time when there is an event. They will get to enjoy some new and improved crossing facilities at the intersection which should reduce their wait time, although the existing slip left turn which is a bit of a safety hazard will be retained as chosen by the campaigners. Sadly they will have to live with the existing footpath width that reduces to 2m in width rather than the 4m (including clearances) path that was proposed.

Unfortunately for cyclists they have been hit rather hard by the campaigners, they were going to be given a nice and wide shared use path which could have been easily extended to Ivanhoe Road however the anti-road campaigners have put an end to this. The poor cyclist will now need to remain on the carriageway with the general traffic until they can get to the shared paths that have survived.

In last place comes Public Transport users, due to the overwhelming hatred of cars that many of the campaigners have they have managed to make life worse for those who take the bus in the westbound direction along Great North Road.

Moral of the Story

This is a classic case of people being unable to see the wood for the trees. So much focus was put on there being an additional general purpose left turn lane that the majority of people were unable to see that the biggest winners in the 2 left turn lane option were the bus users. The 2nd left turn lane effectively got the cars out of the way and by extending the bus lane just 100m was enough for it to be able to bypass this reduced queue.

What is probably most disheartening about this is that the main campaigners actually knew the benefits of the project yet chose to ignore these and set out on a campaign of spreading misinformation. This is quite possibly the best example of an anti-road advocate you can get.

Sadly the call has been made to slow down buses, increase congestion and provide no improvements to cycling and pedestrians and it has all been driven by the people who claim they want to improve PT, cycling and pedestrian transport.

The Community

All up there were only some 3,000 people who in favor of saving the trees despite there being extensive coverage in the media, yet the campaigners claim the entire community and indeed all of Auckland was in favor of saving the them. Even when it comes to these 3,000 people however, the majority of them were being sold lies on the project by a small group of anti-road campaigners, not being told of the benefits, the actual age of the trees and what was going to be put back as mitigation.

It is hardly a democratic process when 0.03% wins out over the other 99.97% of the city, or the tens of thousands who will be inconvenienced daily due to this result.

SkyPath v1.0

Introduction:

A few weeks back the SkyPath submitted its application for a resource consent and we all had our chance to put in a submission on the current plans. It will be sometime before we know what the outcome of the submission and in all likelihood we will never know the actual details as these are for the person who submitted the application and not the general public.

CAA.ORG.NZ

When it comes to submissions on these sorts of things your normally get about 50 or so from a various locals who are being disrupted, however every now and then a marketing machine will get behind it resulting from people from all over the world making submissions. We saw this with the SkyPath where Generation Zero created a easy submission form that brought in about 11,000 submissions including my one.

The idea of the Generation Zero form was to get people to submit in approval of the project and therefore they gave 5 reasons as to why the project should go ahead as follows:

1. The Skypath will provide much needed transport choices by providing a long overdue walking and cycling link between the North Shore and the City.
2. The Skypath will be a great way to encourage cycling. It will connect the two sides of the harbour allowing people to commute or for a Sunday ride.
3. It will be easily accessible with great work done by Auckland Transport to accommodate all stakeholders.
4. The best thing about it though is that it'll be amazing iconic attraction for Auckland.
5. There's one thing we think that should be changed and that's it's opening hours. We think it should be open till midnight rather than closing at 10PM. If you support this make sure to tick the box to add it to your submission.

Of the 5 reasons I think two of them are key, being:

1. The Skypath will provide much needed transport choices by providing a long overdue walking and cycling link between the North Shore and the City.
2. The best thing about it though is that it'll be amazing iconic attraction for Auckland.

The Existing Path:

So there we have it, the SkyPath is needed both as a important transport link and as an iconic attraction. But what would you say if I told you we already had a SkyPath right here in Auckland? All lies I'm sure you'll say but it just so happens we have one just down the road over the Mangere Inlet as part of the Mangere Bridge opened in 1983.

Magere Bridge - 2015

Being built in the early 80's when lowest cost was the primary driver it's not exactly the best pedestrian/cycle bridge in much the same way its not the best motorway bridge either. However what it does that the existing harbour bridge doesn't is provide an pedestrian and cycle connection over the harbour.

Being a nice sunny Saturday I biked my way down here in the weekend to give this thing a go and see what it was all about. The first thing you will notice about it is that it's had quite a few years of the wrong type of love with no shorted of depictions of self expression. However riding over it was actually a rather nice experience and the grade wasn't an issue. 

Magere Cycle Path - 2015

One thing I wasn't expecting to find were two observation platforms located approximately a 3rd of the way along from each end. Although a little on the small side each one of these had a seat and rather nice view out across the harbour. Given there was a bit of a concert going on in the reserve by the south bridge abutment a few people were making use of the elevated position the bridge gave to get a better view.

Magere Bridge - 2015

The new SkyPath intends to have a few of these widenings along the route, which originally they were going to charge extra for, and generally the feel of the route will be somewhat similar to the Mangere Bridge.

CAA.ORG.NZ

The main negative to the Mangere Bridge crossing from what I could see is the inadequate security which has resulted in years of vandalism and neglect. The other downside it has is that it needs to be a long narrow route with only one way in and one way out meaning it pretty much fails when it comes to CPTED. This means that the only way people can feel safe using it is when it's busy or if it has visible and active security.

The SkyPath will be in exactly the same situation as the Mangere Bridge and will need to have extensive security measures to make sure people feel safe and to prevent any vandalism.

The other obvious thing any cycle or pedestrian crossing needs to access to and from the crossing. The Mangere Bridge has been pretty well connected since it was built back in the 80's however there have been a few recent upgrades at the northern end including a new bridge over Onehunga Harbour Road and a new board walk.

Mangere Bridge North Abutment Boardwalk - 2015

Findings:

Before actually testing the bridge out myself I wasn't expecting much as I had heard various people talk it down along with hearing stories about homeless people living there and lighting fires. But after giving it a go I think the crossing is actually pretty good and if I lived in Mangere and wanted to commute to work in Onehunga I would probably give it a go. During my brief ride across, with a few short photo stops, I saw about 15 other people using it and so it wasn't a complete ghost bridge.

When relating it to the SkyPath, the Mangere Birdge is 650m in length whereas the SkyPath is about 1.3km. The Mangere Bridge is at about 3% in grade whereas the Skypath will be about 5%. Both of these grades are pretty easy to climb but the safety issue arises when it comes to cyclist heading downhill where they like to go as fast as they can which doesn't mix all that well with children randomly stopping and darting side to side.

Users:

When it comes to the SkyPath one of the biggest issues I see is that in order for it to feature as part of your daily commute you will need to be cycling quite some distance. Assuming you live Northcote Point you will be looking at 5-6km to get to the city depending on where you live. If you relate that to people on the CBD side of the harbour it would be like cycling in from Waterview, Mt Roskill, Ellersle or Meadowbank. Physically all these trips are pretty manageable, however what portion of people are actually willing to bike 10km or more to and from work each day.

In Auckland the average commute is just over 5km and about 70% of all commutes are <10km, therefore anyone wanting to cycle over the harbour bridge would be cycling more than the average commute distance and by the time you get to Glenfield this cyclist would be up in the 85%ile of longest commutes. The point being is that the SkyPath will only provide for a very small portion of all commuting cyclists and in all likelihood zero pedestrian commuters.

Auckland - 2015

And so this is why I think the main use for the SkyPath will be for recreational and tourist users, in the weekends you can expect to get a few cyclists who are up for doing 30km or so and you will also get quite a few families driving down to Westhaven and walking up the bridge. In effect I think the SkyPath will be sort of like the Sky Tower as a tourist attraction but I don't see it being an overly important transport link.