There have been high fives all round the cycling community in response to the Herald on Sunday editorial that came out in support of cycling. A response that was perhaps warranted, even when taking into account the tragedy of the circumstances. It suggests that some in the media are finally starting to take cycling seriously. And why has it taken so long? The research is all emphatic. And we can all witness cities around the world that have successfully integrated cycling into their transport landscape. Cycling is a winner and should be encouraged. It makes a city livable. Roll out the platitudes….

So is this the beginning of a new era for cycling in Auckland? It would be very nice, if it was true.

Any hint of hesitation and lack of conviction on my behalf is due to reading the caveat in the tail of the editorial. It would suggest that cycling in Auckland is in for no easy ride in the near future. Even if the final paragraph was put there to appease the red blooded motorists of New Zealand, and to avoid the paper being deluged with hate mail, it is very indicative of the problem cycling is faced with. Cycling in New Zealand still fails the credibility test. Ask Russell Norman about his cycling experience in Waitangi for validation.

At the same time, some cyclists would do their cause a favour by displaying a bit more respect for the rules of the road. A bicycle is a vehicle under the law and if a cyclist wants to be defined as something other than a vehicle user, it takes no effort to dismount and become a pedestrian for a few moments.

One of the many problems of this final paragraph is the presumption that cyclists and motorists should ever be treated as equals on the road. This has never been and never will be a recipe for a city to gain a successful cycling culture. Until the media, and dare I say advocates, denounce this clap trap, clearly and unambiguously, cycling in Auckland will never reach its potential. The successful transport culture that exists in The Netherlands treats people first. Cars are not the priority. Nothing will change until we fully grasp and really embrace this concept. Our view of transport and urban design has to change at this fundametal level. There needs to be a deliberate and strategic approach to reducing our addiction to cars and to stop catering so slavishly to their dominance of our cities. Until then, we will see no significant improvements. In fact, I anticipate that the media will continue to play Devil’s Advocate and help postpone any productive progress. (Prove me wrong NZ Herald).

And this leads to a second point. So far, the discussion has been focused around the response to the Judge’s decision to dismiss the case. I don’t think the question posed in ‘As Good As It Gets?‘ was necessarily attempting to apportion the blame to the individual driver. It was in fact, asking the question of how this could be allowed to happen. How could the Council be so negligent when it comes to providing for the needs of cycling? And yes, it is easy to see how the lack of physical infrastructure puts cyclists at undue risk and stops people taking up cycling. But the Council’s reticence to promote cycling is another example of how far cycling is from being taken seriously as a transport option.

Of course there is money for roads. But the budgets always seem to dry up when it comes to cycle provision. And I mean provision in the broadest sense. Not just separated cycle paths. A publicity campaign that tells the public at large that cycling is a worthwhile essential investment. A campaign that matches the best that the car industry can offer. Because that is what it is going to take. Something that we have never seen to date. Such a campaign needs to start now because, getting cycling in Auckland beyond the margin of error, is not going to be easy. It took the Dutch 40 or so years. It won’t take us that long because we can learn from them but, it will be a bloody battle at times. Motorists are not going to take kindly to ‘their roads’ being shrunk to accommodate cyclists. They will be bloody grumpy to think all ‘their taxes’ are going to be spent on those ungrateful bludging cyclists.

It is great that Auckland has a cycling advocacy group. It should be congratulated for working tirelessly to progress cycling interests in Auckland. Our city needs them. But there is also a time and place to challenge the status quo. To be demanding of the gatekeepers, the people in authority and the decision makers who have the power to change things for the better. There are people’s lives at stake.

Transport cycling is more than just separated paths and painted lines. It is about appropriate and supportive transport policies. It’s about education. It’s about promotion and enforcement.

It is time for tough questions and serious demands to be made, and met. And the expertise is out there, just waiting to make it happen.

In the meanwhile, all this cr*p about cyclists needing to be considerate road-users is just a big ugly red-herring. It merely allows Transport Authorities to avoid facing up to their real responsibilities. Once again, just for good measure; people before cars.

Cycling. It’s as easy as walking, but faster….

You can follow the #wheeledpedestrian on Twitter- @wheeledped

A memorial service for Jane Bishop at the crash scence.

In that regard I have a bit of a confession to make. My initial reaction was almost the same. I even asked Barbara, our hardworking chair, why she felt so strongly that the driver was blameless. I did it internally, phrased as a polite emailed question – but it was way-too-tensely-worded, and expressed my fear that one of the things drivers would take away from this verdict was that they really didn’t have to take all that much care. Surely, my email seems to say in retrospect, we aren’t out for revenge, BUT…

After talking the case over with Barbara (who was there for most of the court hearing, including the key periods) and after reading more about how the crash happened, I have come to feel different. Yes, as Tim says, some different behaviours by the driver could likely have avoided the fatality. So could have any number of other factors changed just a little tiny bit (the truck having been a car, any of the three parties having been delayed a little bit in arriving at the scene etc…)

The judge decided that under the circumstances, the amount of care displayed by the driver in getting out of his car was not neglient. Whether we need to raise those standards for drivers to a much higher level in practical and legal terms, so that in the future, it would be neglient, is a quite different question. Convicting the driver, who was presumably not taught by driving instructors or parents to do all those reasonable extra steps Tim talks about in his blog post… it would be about sending a message – at the expense of the driver.

Furthermore, the limits of the court case were quite narrowly circumscribed. As I am given to understand, the case did not even include clarifying the accident as such (sequence, blame or otherwise etc…) – legally, it was solely about whether the motorist’s actions were neglient in the circumstances.

I still worry about the messages some types of people will take away from the verdict. But we should realise that none of the three parties involved was on the ramparts of any cycle culture wars – not Jane Bishop, not the driver who opened the door, nor the truck driver under whose wheels she fell. A court conviction of a non-cyclist is never the best possible outcome of a cycle-motorist crash. There are better results, and better routes to take – particularly in a case like this, where a deficient road environment played the crucial role.

Rest assured that Cycle Action is pushing hard for faster improvements on Tamaki Drive and elsewhere (as well as better road user behaviour!). Since 2010, members of Cycle Action have donated enormous amounts of time working on various culture change and infrastructure improvement programmes for this road (not to speak of numerous other roads). It has been difficult at times, particularly in a cash-strapped environment, and during a massive administrative change-over – and many of the improvement works are still being finalised (as CAA are involved in advising Auckland Transport on some of them, I cannot talk about them until they are provided for public consultation). But things are happening.

The tragedies that occured in recent years on Tamaki Drive have already produced an urgency that mere warnings did not – and I feel that the public mood, as shown by editorials like that of the Herald on Sunday, is coming around as well. That, more than anything is cause for hope.

[Max is the grandly-named "Infrastructure Liaison" of Cycle Action Auckland. It was that or call himself "The Infrastructure Guy"]

So what can we make of the  Jane Bishop case?

Many of us may have reacted with incredulity at Judge Gittos’ decision. But we were reassured that no one was really responsible.

The overall message that the NZ public has taken away is that things like this ‘just happen’.

But if the aftermath of Jane Bishop’s death has given us a snapshot of the standards of ‘reasonable care’ for vehicle drivers – then our standards have been found seriously wanting, along with our traffic infrastructure.

With its customary insightful monitoring of infrastructure, Cycle Action Auckland did a great service in presciently identifying the accident spot as a potential death trap. And we’ve still to find out why its warnings were unheeded, until it was too late.

But unfortunately, post judgement, CAA has has been far too keen to avoid a new round of road culture wars, in backing the judge’s decision to the hilt, and totally assigning the cause to bad infrastructure.

If I understand this right, the point of such legal process is for justice to be be A) restorative – if at all possible, (and here it’s plainly not), and  B) to prevent or minimize recurrence.

On this last point both Judge Gittos and CAA have failed every one of us who gets on a bike.

However personally distraught he has been, (and there is little doubt of his personal agony) Glenn Becker didn’t do everything a driver can and does do in more enlightened societies, to avoid this tragic outcome.

I doubt that any of us bear Becker any personal ill will, and there’s clearly no point in punitive sentencing. It seems that by current New Zealand standards, he exercised “reasonable care”.

Then clearly it’s time our standards of ‘reasonable care’ were raised.

Cycling deaths aren’t an inevitability. Paris’ surging metropolis has just enjoyed a year with zero cycling deaths. Nada. Zip. None.

And in in the Netherlands, drivers are taught to open doors with the opposite hand, forcing them to look behind for people on bikes, as they open the door. And it’s not just for drivers – Danish kids are urged repeatedly by parents to look out for bicycles when they open a door.

I honestly dont know if a more nuanced judgement could have been made sending a message that while Glen Becker acted consistently with current standards of care, that he still could have taken more care – particularly given the conditions. Just as any road user would take extra care while in motion, in the case of icy roads or poor visibility. Just as door-opening drivers in Northern Europe do every day.

But I do believe an informed judgment would have, at least in the Judge’s comments, drawn attention to better driver/passenger habits which would have avoided this outcome. And that  communications savvy cycling advocacy would have seized the opportunity to frame the bigger picture – to encourage drivers to higher standards of care, as well as pressing institutions to give real urgency to cycle-friendly infrastructure.

So what are we left with?

There is as yet no smoking gun found as to why CAA’s warnings were unheeded. And with the exception of today’s wonderful (if atypically) enlightened and forward looking Herald editorial, there has been no refocused spotlight on the overall lack of cycling infrastructure. And most of all, the public is none the wiser that there are greater standards of care that can and should be taken.

You know.. shit just happens, right?

Jane Bishop deserves better.

Tired bikes at journey's end

I was somewhat nervous about my inter-city cycling adventure. I had visions of:

• the bus driver refusing to let me put my bike on the bus
• my bike tyres getting multiple punctures that I would be unable to fix (TBH, I would struggle to fix even one puncture)
• massive trucks running me off the road
• myself collapsing prostrate on the road between Thames and Coromandel, unable to go on..

But it went like a dream!

I got my bike on the bus from Auckland to Thames no problem – the driver was a sweetie and, in fact, the bus was so empty my bike had virtually a whole compartment to itself.

The bus was clean, comfortable and arrived in Thames early. After a leisurely coffee and muffin I set off on the 6 km ride to my destination in the Kaueranga Valley.

This short ride went fine and I was actually surprised at how easy it was for me to carry all my gear including tent, sleeping bag, clothes etc. Carrying weight seems to make less difference to how hard cycling is than it does to tramping.

I had to ride my bike over a small section of gravel and was a little nervous about this. But luckily my elegant road bike with it’s wimpy city tyres seemed to deal with it fine.

The next day we set off for Coromandel Town at about 12.30. It was a cloudy day but calm – perfect cycling conditions.

A typical view from the coastal section of the road

I was surprised by how incredibly flat the first section of the road is – for 33 km you are just cycling around the coast and the road hardly rises or falls. Because you’re right next to the sea the views are beautiful and it is great for swimming.

There was also surprisingly little traffic – we only saw two big trucks and most of the car drivers were courteous and gave us plenty of room while passing. The road turns inland at Wilson Bay and we stopped here to have a drink and muster up our courage for the monstrous hill ahead.

The hill was very hard and I was grateful at this point that we had managed to offload most of our gear into a car going back to Auckland.

However, even as I struggled upwards, wondering if I might soon throw up the muesli bar I had just eaten, I was able to reflect that this experience was (hopefully) washing the fat out of my arteries and lowering my risk of heart attacks.

Aaron Edwards on top of the mighty hill

There are two hills – the first one is much bigger but the second one (feels) much steeper. I found descending both fairly scary and had to brake a lot but, once again, there wasn’t much traffic and what there was generally passed us carefully.

Once you get over the hideous hills then you have about another 10 km of fairly flat ground to cycle to get to Coromandel Town. This seemed very long at the time but really isn’t too bad.

After a quick (but excellent) dinner in Coromandel at the Pepper Tree we rode back about 10 km to Hannaford’s Wharf where the ferry leaves from. This is a beautiful, peaceful spot and we got to watch tuis playing in the nearby trees while we chatted with an English cycling tourist.

Tui fooling around at Hannaford's Wharf

The ferry ride went smoothly, we landed at ten and, pausing only to cycle up K Road and Great North (which seemed even more grey and ugly than usual after our beautiful day in the country), we were soon home!

Overall, it was a great ride and I’d highly recommend it to anybody who is keen to try some inter-city cycling and wants to have a fairly easy trip first off. You could even break it up into two days and book a bach or camping spot along the way if you wanted to take it easy and have plenty of time for swimming etc.

The ghost bike that marks the spot where Jane Bishop died

I blogged gloomily last week that the Jane Bishop trial was likely to set off a series of vitriolic comments and op eds about cyclists in the media.

But, instead, the Herald on Sunday has published an awesome editorial about the need to invest more in cycling infrastructure.

“Not all drivers are as blameless; as the city’s intrepid cycling community will ruefully attest, door are flung open in their paths every day. With a little luck, the wide coverage of this incident and its legal aftermath will make all drivers look out for cyclists a little more closely, but stupidity can never be eradicated – least of all by regulation. What can be improved is the road network that motorists and cyclists share.

What emerges clearly from this sorry affair is that the “pinch-point” piece of road where Jane Bishop died was an accident waiting to happen. The space between the line of moving traffic and the line of parked cars at that point was, on November 17, 2010, just wide enough to accommodate both Glenn Becker and Jane Bishop, but there was no margin for the error that, in this case, proved fatal.

Within two days of the death, the pinch-point problem was solved by the removal of some parking spaces, but council officials had been told about it for years and have yet to explain, much less apologise for, their inaction which in other jurisdictions would see them civilly, if not criminally, liable.

The idea that an audit of such danger spots on popular cycling routes (followed by their immediate improvement) should be simply the first step in setting up a comprehensive system of cycle paths around the isthmus may seem radical to many Aucklanders.

In discussions of public transport, we are accustomed to shrugging our shoulders and saying that this is a car city.

But such a defeatist response ignores such projections as those in a Transport Ministry report published this week, which predicts midday traffic jams within 20 years.

Cyclists, in particular those who commute, are not obscure oddball hobbyists; they are the trailblazers of a transport future whom we should applaud and accommodate. Those riders whose fluoro backpack-covers ungrammatically proclaim they mean “one less car” on the road are stating a literal truth: each cyclist contributes to easing congestion and competition for parking and they deserve to be treated with gratitude.

Yet our roading network is a hostile environment for cyclists. Lane systems that allow traffic either to turn right or go straight ahead make it impossible for a cyclist to choose a line that is guaranteed not to come into conflict with cars. And cycle lanes, where they exist at all, are narrow and not separated from the carriageway by raised kerbing.

It is commonly believed that the great “cycle cities” of Europe, notably in the Netherlands, have always been that way. Motorists are required by strict (and strictly enforced) law to make life easy for cyclists.

But in fact the cycle culture that grew up in the early 20th century, when bikes hugely outnumbered cars, was swept away by a wave of increased car ownership in the prosperous postwar years. It was only furious public pressure after many cyclist deaths, and then the 70s spikes in oil prices, that forced the wholesale building of wide, isolated cycleways.

It is well past time that we followed the Dutch example. It does not require great capital investment, just the appropriation of some existing carriageway, making dual-lane roads single-lane and cutting back roadside parking.

As cycling becomes safer, more people will saddle up. And fragile cyclists in snarls of traffic will live longer.”

Isn’t that awesome?

*Photo borrowed from Local Government Mag.

The Velociteers are recruiting now.

Can you ride a bike? Would you enjoy riding it in an artistic fashion, with other people?

If so, why not join Auckland’s premiere synchronised cycling group, The Velociteers. You can become part of a group of people who create and present cycling routines to music. You might have seen this group performing at Art in the Dark last year or after riding the Auckland Harbour Bridge Coathanger Challenge.

Practices take place in Grey Lynn at Richmond Rd School on Thursdays @6pm.

No experience is required.

Check out The Velociteers on Facebook.

Cycling: the non-vehicular way.

The first one is in New Lynn – where Auckland Transport is planning to extend the shared path network on Rankin Avenue and Margan Avenue. Those readers who know New Lynn know that there’s been a lot of transformation there in recent years, including a much-upgraded rail station and several “shared space” areas finished or still being planned. There are also some decidedly massive multi-lane roads straight through the heart of the place – which is a much less desirable outcome, despite them having (on-road) cycle lanes.

So it is good to see that going south from the centre of New Lynn, Rankin Avenue already has a shared path part of the way. This is now being extended south to the roundabout with Margan Avenue, where it wraps around to the west, before crossing to the south of the road on a raised platform pedestrian crossing, and running further west until Seabrook Avenue. As my readers may already know, I consider shared paths to be pretty much the highest quality in terms of suitability for novice users, short of totally “away from roads” paths such as through a park. So it is nice to see that Rankin Avenue offers the environment needed to provide such a path, with few side roads or driveways.

Especially if you cycle in New Lynn, it would be great if you could drop them a quick feedback response via their online form, saying that you support the project.

A crop from the consultation plan for Rankin Ave / Margan Ave. Source: Auckland Transport.

The second project I want to talk about is a much bigger one. While much more extensive cycling facilities are involved here, the new facilities form part of a massive upgrade. In this case, we are talking of the northernmost part of Glenfield Road on the Shore, where major roadworks will start this month. To give you an idea of how big – the works will last two years, and cost $40 million.

What’s in there for cycling? An extension of the existing cycle lanes both ways, north from those that already exist on the more southerly parts of Glenfield Road. Cyclists will have consistent provision of 1.5m wide lanes for a key 2km north-south axis of one of the more densely settled parts of the Shore.

To be true, this project is not exactly a cycling-led project – the key idea is providing two traffic lanes each direction, a heavy infrastructure investment into providing better traffic flow for cars. However, even if this road was not already one of those relatively badly suited for a shared path (lots of driveways and side roads), I cannot be displeased by the fact that even though NOT providing cycle lanes would probably have cut the costs quite notably (3m less total width would have reduced the land take and retaining wall costs by a serious amount), the designers and decisionmakers stuck to their guns. Would that all our new roading projects included at least an adequate level of cycle infrastructure like in this case. And maybe in the future, we can retrofit a kerb, and make the lanes protected.

Future intersection of Glenfield Road (across) and Wairau Road (from below). Source: Auckland Transport.

 [Max is the grandly-named "Infrastructure Liaison" of Cycle Action Auckland. It was that or call himself "The Infrastructure Guy"]

Diorama at Te Papa depicting Auckland summer cycling in 2012.

Thanks to Nukpuk in France for the heads-up.