This month it’s come to Wellington’s cyclist citizens rebelling one way to get cycleways in and in Onehunga car-unfriendly manoeuvres protested the other way.
In Onehunga, the pro-car-access vandals won and the trial was dumped.
Cycling in New Zealand is an urban guerrilla war encouraged by “tactical urbanism”.
Of course GreaterAuckland can see nothing but virtue and rosy-viewed necessity to it all irrespective of the grief everyone gets. They’re a clearing-house not an actual activist group.
Whereas groups like Bike Auckland and Bike Wellington are some of the most dogged and resolute activists I’ve encountered outside of a Treaty settlement.
In Wellington, there have been years of tensions between shop owners seeking to keep retail car parking, and the cycleway. Tacks have been strewn. There’s no money to fix the Island Bay cycleway issues it’s brought up even in the mighty new budget.
Yet away from the urban contests of cyclist versus shop owner, NZTA steams ahead with a massive cycleway along Wellington’s foreshore:
And in other parts of Auckland, major cycleways are complex works that have to tunnel under rail lines and navigate years of landowner permissions and safety audits:
Plenty can decry that it’s not like somewhere else in some European paradise, but fail to decry the abuse that Council staff get for trying to implement unpopular road designs for urban cyclists.
The contest is huge within our big bureaucracies, with both big setbacks:
… and big wins:
Since we are utterly dominated by the ease, speed, safety and convenience of the combustion engine private car, there will never be a time where this re-allocation of road space or budget for cycling gets easy. It is going to make people really insanely road-rage scale mad.
Sometimes I want Al Pacino to get down there to Wellington Council and do his Any Given Sunday speech crawling back one damn more inch of roadway.
Don’t knock local politics until you’ve had to stand up and defend a cycleway in public.
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