Road rage and bikelash: The battle for our city streets

Friday, 31 May 2019

The battle lines have been drawn. Some are painted yellow, others white; a few are green and include a cycling icon.

The fight has begun for the heart and soul of cities and urban centres around the country, and the many concrete ribbons that tie them all together.

Car drivers have for decades won the battles, but recent developments suggest they are beginning to lose the war.

From Whangarei to Dunedin, the Government has poured a third of a billion dollars into cycle lanes and initiatives; it is spending $4b on 'rapid transit'. Car owners will pay for much of it, through the petrol excise and regional fuel tax.

Car drivers have held sway over city roads for decades. Some are not happy about giving that up for more cycle and bus lanes, and fewer car parks.

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In Auckland, city council chief executive Stephen Town says drivers will bear the greater burden of the region's transformation to allow for more pedestrians and public transport.

In Christchurch, cars increasingly have been pushed out of the inner city to allow for more shared spaces, bus lanes and pleasant Avonside walks.

And in Wellington, communities and car drivers are railing against plans to pull vehicles and car parks from the streets to create more options for pedestrians, public transport and pedal power.

An artist's impression of a possible future for Wellington: city streets shared by mass transit, cars and bikes.

Mayor Justin Lester has pledged to ban private cars from the main thoroughfare between Parliament and Courtenay Place, known as the Golden Mile.

The grand plan from Let's Get Wellington Moving goes even further, pushing cars to the fringes to make room for mass transit and other modes of transport.

That's slated to cost at least $6.4b, and car owners might end up paying for a chunk of that with levies on car parks and garages and other charges.

'We're making Wellington the most progressive city, I think, in the entire world,' says Lester.

So incensed are some that they have formed a pro-car political party to contest the next council elections.

Others are seeking a judicial review of Lester's 'compromise' plan for a controversial cycle lane through Island Bay.

One inner-city ratepayer, responding to the council's plans to raise charges for resident and coupon parking, said it felt like car owners were being demonised. The complaint has been echoed by many others.

Clive Matthew-Wilson says plans for more walking, cycling and public transport options do not reflect how the majority of people interact with their cities.

Clive Matthew-Wilson, editor of the car review guide The Dog and Lemon, believes they are right; he describes the battle for the streets as class warfare.

'It's part of a gentrification globally of the inner cities in which you get a small group of people comfortably living in apartments and therefore they see cars that come from the outer suburbs as a threat,' he says. 'I suspect that many of the planners want to empty cities of cars to make them a nicer place for them and their friends.

'It is ideologically driven because they have a theory about how the world should be, and they are not going to let reality or other people's rights get in the way of a good story.'

That story relies on 'a theoretical world in which cars are the enemy', says Matthew-Wilson, and drivers the easy targets.

'They all show confident, white, middle-class people sharing the inner city in a peaceful way, and it's a complete ignorance of the life of the majority of inhabitants of not just Wellington or Auckland but most Western cities globally.'

That isn't how many of these cities work, he says.

'The wealthy bureaucrats in Wellington, it doesn't occur to them that the people who clean their houses can't afford to live in the inner city, and commute in from places like Porirua. And because they are cleaning 2-3 houses at a time, they need to take a car, and it's their only choice.'

Both Richard Osborne and Isabella Cawthorn say improving that choice is at the intersection of the issue.

The former is the head of transport at Christchurch City Council, the latter convener of the Talk Wellington blog promoting progressive issues in the capital.

Christchurch has reinvented its city centre, partly out of necessity after the quakes of 2010 and 2011.

It has taken the opportunity to use government money to promote the provision of other more active 'modes' of transportation, and to address a lack of options for commuters.

'Car was king then,' Osborne says of the city before the quakes, 'and you could probably argue that the car is king now.'

But the council has made some progress in transportation's Game of Thrones. There's greater power to the pedal, thanks to a significant investment in the city's Major Cycle Route Network.

St Lukes cycle lane, in Auckland, has been used by drivers who want to jump the queues and get on to the northwestern motorway. (File photo)

That is part of a new central city grid prioritising different options; some streets are for private vehicles, with others set aside for buses, bikes and pedestrians.

Included in this is more than $250 million to connect the city and its suburbs for cyclists.

They have responded, with council figures showing close to 890,000 cycle trips in 2018, up almost 90,000 (11 per cent) on the previous year.

But not everyone is happy; part of the planning involves making roads into cul-de-sacs and ripping out dozens of trees. And creating safe corridors for cyclists and public transport has meant removing car parks and some vehicle lanes, to the howls of residents and retailers.

'They [cycle lanes] are controversial because it's change and part of that change is that tyranny of space that you have,' says Osborne. 'When you've got 20 metres of road space to work with, something's got to give.

'Those people who are directly impacted by those changes, whether it be by public transport or by cycling, there is a change outside where they live, work or play, and often that results in us prioritising whether it be bus or cycling.

'That doesn't come without cost, and we're acutely aware of that.'

The council is now working with its regional council colleagues at ECan to promote greater use of public transport as part of its broader plan.

The few cars that do make it into the city centre also have to contend with new 30kmh speed limits, fewer parking opportunities and shared spaces where pedestrians have greater priority.

'It was to make it a place for people and some key areas which the Crown chose to invest in quite heavily, and one of those was the Avon River precinct, what we call the promenade, and that's really high quality, not just for pedestrians – you can cycle and even drive down part of it.'

The objective, says Osborne, is to offer more choice.

'We are not trying to force people out of their cars,' he says. 'I think once you provide people with those options some of them will go, OK, I can get there by cycling to work just as quickly.'

But maybe not without suffering 'bikelash', a term first coined by cyclists encountering angry New York drivers upset at sharing their concrete slice of the Big Apple.

Isabella Cawthorn says it's 'daft' that a walkable city like Wellington has such congestion problems.

Researchers from the universities of Auckland and Otago have observed it in New Zealand.

'Reductions in car parking or lane space as a result of new on-road bike lanes are commonly experienced as an 'annoyance' by motorists, who are generally used to being afforded unfettered dominion over road space,' they said in a 2017 collection of academic observations from around the globe.

'New space carved out for cyclists inevitably means the disruption of a real or imagined order within the existing streetscape … policies in general are becoming increasingly politicised.'

Talk Wellington's Cawthorn says it's not about winners and losers, but the 'choice' has to be secured at the expense of someone else; often that's the car driver.

She understands their pain and frustration, but she wants the motorists to understand the logic.

'You get what you build for, and in New Zealand we have been dominantly building for driving and spending our transport money on driving to the exclusion of every other option,' she says.

That design has created an atmosphere of resentment, 'where people feel put upon and endangered by others'.

'We bought into the idea that it would kind of be like the Jetsons, that we would all just zip around and not have to worry about any of the downsides of driving.'

Those range from rising carbon emissions and weights of children and adults to less dynamic shopping experiences and even poorer relationships.

'You see this coming up again and again in research,' says Cawthorn. 'The faster the vehicle speeds and the more of them there are, the fewer relationships you have with people around you.'

Talk Wellington doesn't want to ban cars, but it's time for them to move aside.

'We've dug ourselves into a hole; we're the compact, walkable city and yet we've got massive congestion problems. How daft is that?'

Digging ourselves out of that hole will mean offering people more and better choices.

It might mean they are 'a bus passenger one day; they might be a car driver the next hour; they might be a pedestrian every hour of the day'.

Matthew-Wilson gets it. 'Personally I'm a pedestrian, I make 60 per cent-plus of my trips by foot, and I know totally what they mean,' he says of the movement towards active transport and more options.

'I don't support the days when cars ruled and everyone else ran for cover.'

But he believes the shovel Cawthorn and others are using to dig themselves out of that transport hole is now being smashed over the heads of the hapless car driver.

'I think the world is moving towards being less car reliant, but it's up to the authorities to seduce people out of their cars, not to bludgeon them out.'

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