Sweating the small stuff, Nr 02

Sweating the small stuff, Nr 02

Bike Auckland

In our “sweating the small stuff” series, this time we have two Northwestern Cycleway fixes, and one in the City Centre:

  • Some while ago, we noticed that one of the side road accesses of the Northwestern Cycleway, at School Road in Kingsland, was often parked on. So people couldn’t get onto the cycleway easily (see “before” photo below). Well, the drivers may have been guilty of particular rudeness, but as there was no broken yellow line marked here, they were apparently not doing anything illegal. We managed to get AT to extend the no stopping lines. Took a while, since it is a legalese process, but – done now!
  • At the top of the Northwestern Cycleway ramp from Takau Street onto Bond Street overbridge, there was a massive bump where the ramp had subsided over the years. We asked for this to be smoothed out with new asphalt. This got done pretty quickly – see before/after photos below.
  • In the City Centre, at the intersection of Mayoral Drive and Cook Street, we finally managed to get the uphill cycle lane and Advanced Stop Boxes greened. They had been marked as a late response to a project we did with ACC quite some time ago, but initially stayed un-coloured for quite a while.

Please feel free to tell CAA about issuess you managed to get fixed, especially with before/after photos – to encourage everyone to demand better cycle infrastructure in Auckland. The squeaky wheel gets the oil! Please also feel free to lodge issues yourself.

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Why does CAA care about small things like these? Shouldn’t CAA work on the bigger picture?

  • Correct, and CAA does so every day, particularly in our work on the overall Regional Cycle Network, or in our advocacy for more cycle funding. But we all ride “down at ground level”, not on the visionary plans. So getting the details right, here and now, is important too.

Okay, but shouldn’t CAA still spend its time mostly on other things?

  • Actually, we do – these items only take up a small part of CAA’s time. Mostly, they involve logging a problem with AT’s call centre, and then following it up. Not so hard – and you can do it too (and should!) if you see something that needs fixing.

Still, these aren’t exactly earth-shaking things. Why should we treat them as wins?

  • Because they give us a little boost every time – which helps us volunteer on things where pay-offs may be months or years down the line. It also ensures AT and NZTA staff know about cyclist’s needs. So maybe next time, the issues won’t happen in the first place.

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