Should cycling highways be a priority for investment?
Guest blog by Lucy H.
Over the last ten years the various transport agencies in Auckland have built a number of cycle highways. By cycle highways I mean cycle ways that are a decent width, are specifically built for cyclists to use (i.e., they’re not just walking tracks) and that run off road. In Auckland, such cycle ways often tend to follow motorways.
The mains ones I can think of in Auckland are the:
- North-Western cycle way
- Onehunga cycle way that runs along SH20 from Mt Roskill to Mangere Bridge
- The lesser known but still rather awesome cycle way that runs from Onehunga all the way down to Hugo Johnston Drive along the coast through a cemetery. Check this out if you are in the neighbourhood [PS: This would be the Waikaraka Cycleway]
- The (rather short) cycleway that runs between Greenhithe and Hobsonville along SH18
Two other major cycle highways that will soon be built are the:
- The Waterview cycle way
- The Grafton Gully cycle way (extension of the Northwestern Cycleway)
It’s hard to work out what the exact spend on cycling in Auckland is because the costs are divided up between many different agencies and it gets complicated when you start looking at roading projects that include cycling upgrades. But I think it’s entirely possible that we are spending up 50% of the total cycling budget on these cycling highways. I’m pretty sure it would be at least 30% of the budget.
This is not to say other cycling improvements are not always happening in Auckland. The recent upgrades to the on-road cycle lanes on Triangle Road are a good example. But it does seem that a lot of time and funding has gone into cycling highways in Auckland recently. There are some good reasons why that have happened which are largely about the way our transport system is funded. I’ll get to those in another post.
For now, the question I want you to consider is whether cycle highways are really the best, most cost-effective transport investment we could make to get more people cycling for transport purposes (rather than recreationally).
What do you think? Do you think they should be a priority for cycling investment in Auckland?
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By the way, I wrote this, not Barb. Just in case anybody is confused.
I think money should be invested creating cycle lanes downtown – at present there’s basically nothing and by cycle lanes I mean the sort of lanes Vancouver or New York is retrofitting to its innercity streets.
That aside, there needs to be a lot more cycle lanes on roads in the intercity suburbs too – we’re not all commuters. I use my bike for all sorts of activities so a cycle lanes that leads from the CBD out to the suburbs is pretty useless most of the time. In fact it appears to be based on the similarly useless bus system in Auckland which is also based on a spoke model.
A big missing piece is the lack of cycle facilities – why doesn’t the council do what San Francisco is doing and replace some CBD parking spaces with loops. SF has replaced 27 parks with parking for 300 odd bikes – it’s about time Auckland used its streets smartly.
*innercity Suburbs
Thanks RTC. Your comments have actually reminded me that I forgot to include another cycling highway – sort of – that is the boulevard on the waterfront. But I agree there is a real lack of cycling lanes and facilities in the CBD
Good questions, Lucy. I think you’re right to examine how these projects are being prioritised. I would go one further and say that they pose a risk to advocacy of cycling and walking, with long-term consequences that leave me pessimistic. Here are three reasons why:
* Opportunity cost of political capital
Gil Penalosa recently said of painted bike lanes, “DO NOT paint lines on pavement and call bikeways; will NOT work and then your critics will kill the project”. This is generally true of any effort to provide cycling infrastructure that could turn out to be inadequate. If there is only a half-hearted effort, with second-class treatment of cyclists (see below) then it runs the risk of wasting political capital from the transport agencies, elected ribbon-cutters and others. They will be cycle-shy when the next project comes up (or indeed the next phase of a long-term advocacy strategy).
* Opportunity cost of funding
Lucy, you’ve already raised this in your post, and it is a legitimate risk for any project.
I will only add that projects like in Grafton Gully involve absurdly huge sums of money for cycling infrastructure. One of the major benefits of a city buying into cycling as a serious transportation mode is that it is cheap. Risking millions of dollars on building a few new structures, and with great expectations of patronage, seems unwise.
As with political capital, if the spend on supporting cycling is concentrated on just a few big and risky projects, long-term budgetary predictions for activity-based expenses might appear inflated. There are many, cheaper things we can do (which largely involve removing private motor vehicles from spaces) to improve the city for people to cycle, walk and take public transport.
That’s not to say the total funding level currently is at all sufficient, but the expenditure of limited resources could be smarter.
* Second-class treatment of cycling
This is the big one for me, and what creates risk for the capital expense above. I like to call the NW-to-waterfront project the Grafton Gully Garden Path, because that’s where it takes cyclists in more ways than one.
The route itself is, like the NW cycleway, shaped around the motorway (thanks to the benevolence of NZTA and abdication by AT). It weaves and it ducks and it dodges and it dives. It runs alongside, and in between, and over and under the motorway and its tendrils. The attitude behind the design very much says please-sir, excuse-me-sir, don’t-mind-me-I’m-just-a-cyclist, as it does everything possible to get cyclists out of the way of anything.
As a result, it goes literally where no one wants to go (which is why the land for it was available in the first place). The NW cycleway itself does a great job of connecting backyards to motorway on-ramps, and the new garden path continues the singularly unambitious tradition of avoiding front doors everywhere.
We ought to be demanding street-level space, within plain sight, and leveraging the existing built environment and its transport channels. Not settling for a rear entrance between the banks of a forest and a forbidding highway.
(A happy coincidence of going nowhere useful is that no-one driving a motor vehicle can, or wants to, be there. So there is no contention for that space. That may make for a nice recreational detour — like any other park — but it is decidedly not treating cycling as a first-class transport mode in the city.)
What about the value of a connection to the waterfront? Although the plan is not yet fixed, as far as I know, there are still three major faults with connectivity. Firstly, it relies on Ian McKinnon Drive’s shared-path hedge-maze remaining much the same at the south end. Secondly, NZTA proposes to confusingly knot its way over, under and around the CMJ while there are perfectly straight and direct, competing routes that are supposed to be connected to this backbone of a path anyway (Queen and Symonds). Thirdly, the ideas for the north end at Beach Road (likely a shared path?) defeat any semblance of a new kind of “connection” to the waterfront.
But could this path help induce demand for cycling in the area, such that broader improvements will need to be made? I’m sympathetic to this suggestion, but still have doubts. Assume that the cycleway is enormously successful and draws increasing numbers of cyclists into the CBD. Would it be politically sensible for central government to spend even more money on cycling in almost exactly the same space (read: electorate) that they just dropped a few million on for a fancy new cycleway (also consider the state of the economy)? Would it even make sense for the local government to do that (given competing local boards, CRL, etc)? How hard would it be to make the case for more spending in the area, given that improving Symonds or Queen Street will directly compete with the cycleway to deliver people to the heart of the city and the waterfront? And how will all this work out if the cycleway isn’t the magnificent success we wish it will be?
Ultimately, the Grafton Gully project is to build a motorway-shaped path, with motorway-shaped funding, trying to move people on a motorway-shaped itinerary to motorway-shaped destinations, where motorway-shaped vehicles take priority anyway. We can do better.
Pretty sure I responded to a similar question over on the cycling in auckland blog before. For me weather cycle highways should be a priority comes down to what you want to achieve first, do you A) want to get a small number of existing cyclists that commute by bike from A to B on a quick but not necessarily direct route which feels safe because it it segregated from cars or B) do you want to create a much larger on road network that interested and confident potential cyclists could begin to utilise to move more directly from multiple points within the network for work or social purposes, whilst simultaneously setting an exemplar for cycling within the city and enabling cars to adjust and learn how to drive around cyclists.
Without having read in detail all of the comments I would ad the caveat that when a new piece of road or motor way is being put it that it makes sense from a resource point of view to construct a cycle highway at this time.
I believe there is a place for long distance cycle-ways as well as lanes all through the city. However cyclists and pedestrians in my opinion sharing except perhaps for children on toddlers bikes are a worse mix than bikes and cars. This is particularly the case on the waterfront and the Greenhithe Bridge lane. The way it is marked for bikes and peds.and with poor vision in places it is potentially very dangerous. The designations on this lane should be changed forthwith.
It will take years to form a satisfactory network of street lanes and our planners should look to Europe to see how to do this. The gradual process should continue as fast as possible but it will take time bearing in mind that everybody’s A to B when travelling is always different particularly in a sprawling city like Auckland
Thanks for getting this discussion going, Lucy! I’m interested in the wholesale criticism of the NW Cycleway and the proposed Grafton Gully as I know that these routes have a high level of utility for weekday commuter cyclists who want an efficient route from West Auckland to the city. And the NW is hugely popular with weekend recreation cyclists.But I am the first to say it doesn’t suit all trips or all cyclists’ needs, and we need to keep pushing and collaborating until we get more of what we need. So I agree, the ultimate success of the Grafton Gully route will depend on its connections to key destinations and nodes along the way, including Queen St. Like most cyclists I pick and mix routes for most of my travel across the city, which includes the cycling highways, lanes on arterial roads and back streets in residential areas. We need them all, and are making real progress in performing mini- miracles with inadequate budgets. The monthly increases in cycling numbers across Auckland are evidence of this.
Cycle highways are just like car highways, in other words a direct route to get from point A to point B, so just like motorways you have to travel to get on to them and most probably travel once you get off them. This doesnt make them a bad thing. If I was to ride to Henderson from Mt Eden where I live say, I would ride the NW path mainly because it is flatter, less stopping, seperate, etc, rather than riding the roads through Mt Albert, Avondale, New Lynn, Kelston. If I was driving I would probably do the same NW motorway route to the same area. So no, cycle highways dont go exactly where everyone wants but offer a safe and sometimes quicker alternative to just using roads to get to a destination.
Barb, I appreciate your comment and the many mini-miracles (if nothing else, I like to photograph them!). I’d love to have as much faith in the monthly increases, but the absolute numbers are still too small to believe this is a transformational change. I can understand government agencies being conservative and lacking vision, but surely that’s where we come in.
Paul, your comment captures exactly what I meant by deference to motoring in advocacy:
Firstly, I agree that the NW cycleway currently presents advantages as you say. But that is because street spaces have been developed badly for cycling, not because cycle highways provide benefits that street space cannot.
Are cycle highways really just like car highways?
The difference between a local road and a highway for a car is vast. The speed limit is roughly twice as high (similarly, the average speed is higher). The shape of the motorway is truly smooth in three dimensions; constructing it often involves steamrolling over private and public property. Right-of-way is strict, exclusive and unambiguous, with no mixed traffic, no cross-traffic, no square intersections, no calming or furniture. And so on.
None of these apply to cyclists in the way cycleways are implemented — certainly not predictably.
But more than that, these differences between highways and local roads exploit the basic automated, vehicular nature of the machines driven on them, in ways that often can’t apply to cycles. Doubling the nominal speed limit for cycling on cycleways as on local streets will not help you pedal faster, for instance.
Considering that cycling as an active transport mode lies somewhere between walking and driving, think of how absurd a “pedestrian highway” sounds (in contrast to footpaths along local roads, I suppose).
So motorways are useful to motorists because they provide something that the space allocated to local roads cannot — i.e. not without local roads turning wholly into motorways themselves.
But can local streets support the benefits of a cycle highway to cyclists, without losing their value as streets generally?
Sure! There can be separate, exclusive and continuous paths (with priority at intersections) laid out at street-level, in plain sight, and between front doors — at the cost of a lane or two currently reserved for motor traffic, if anything.
And to the extent that you might be willing to spend money on shiny new cycle highways, it could be spent instead on treating steep grades on key streets where feasible. (But I suspect it would be difficult to claim that the NW cycleway or Grafton Gully are on the whole flatter than the streets they bypass anyway).
So doing the minimum decent thing for cycling on local roads, by laying an ordinary separated cycle path, would be at least as effective as the redundant “highway”.
(The obscure paths may still remain useful to some, possibly as a scenic or recreational route, but then does it justify the priority, spending and celebration it receives at this time? They are not inherently bad, but are risky for the complex reasons I gave in my previous comment.)
To surrender street space — the valuable urban connective tissue between front doors — especially by going out of our way to build isolated paths in the bush, is deference to motoring. And to expect the same vehicular dynamics of motorways to apply exactly to cycleways is also a kind of deference to motoring.