Meet Wellington’s new elite – cyclists

Saturday, 7 September 2024

Luke Pierson is an entrepreneur, company director, father and lifelong Wellingtonian.

OPINION: Sometimes, my kids demand I read them a battered book at bedtime. It’s one you probably know, about an emperor who buys expensive new clothes, believing only the most clever people can see them. Not realising he’s been duped, he parades naked through town – until a child dares say what everybody else is thinking.

A few weeks back, Wellington City Council published a story summarising what thousands of us think of its priorities for the next decade. Buried on page 40, you’ll find what Wellingtonians really think of the council’s controversial new cycleways. It turns out just 30% of us are happy, while 60% want to see the work reduced, or stopped altogether.

In other words, twice as many Wellingtonians oppose council’s cycling network as support it.

Wellington’s cycleway shambles has become a regular topic all over town, but I’ve never met anyone opposed to cycleways in principle – we’re an environmentally and socially conscious city, and most agree cycling should be a choice in our transport mix.

So why are we all so outraged?

For a start, we’re doing them atrociously. Our streets have become littered with a mishmash of painted strips, cones and poles, stapled bits of plastic, incoherent road markings and routes that weave in and out of parked cars and through groups of pedestrians at bus stops.

Then there’s the impact on parking. Aside from the obvious inconvenience, removing parking from the central city alone has cost council $8m annually in lost revenue – directly contributing to record rates rises.

And of course, there’s the irony of an environmental initiative that completely ignores its own environment. Wellington is a city of steep hills, gale force winds and horizontal rain – much better suited to buses than bikes.

But with council parading its expensive cycleways all through town, it’s time someone said what we’re all thinking: the cycleways have no cyclists.

This, the most clever people say, is because the ‘’network effect’’ is required before anyone will get on their bikes.

To me that sounds a little too much like a ‘’build it and they will come’’ leap of faith. Let’s fast forward a few years and imagine Wellington has a network of connected cycleways. Who will be using them?

Well, if my mornings are anything to go by, I doubt it will be busy parents on the school run. With the exception of an incredibly fit few, it won’t be the elderly, either. It won’t be people with disabilities, or the healthcare workers who care for them. It won’t be our emergency services, builders, electricians, plumbers or painters.

Anyone short on time to get across town is out – cleaners, gardeners, real estate agents. If you need to drop something off, pick something up, or use anything more than a laptop for work, you’re out of luck. Not fit enough for steep hills and gales? Not for you. Unless you can afford an e-bike, or that rules you out, too. And let’s not forget the horizontal rain – which rules almost everybody out for 122 days of every year.

So, who does that leave? Tertiary educated, able bodied, professional knowledge workers with end-of-trip facilities, a spare $10k for an e-bike, and flexible working arrangements. And even these lucky people can’t cycle 30% of the time due to the weather – and probably won’t another 20% of the time, because they’re working from home.

Already quite a privileged group, don’t you think? And very small. I’ve run some numbers, and I reckon they represent well under 5% of the city’s population – before anybody asks whether they even want to cycle in the first place.

The desperation and hypocrisy with which this imbalance is defended is also telling. For example, while Green MP Julie Anne Genter shoved a phone in a florist’s face because of opposition to an empty cycleway hurting her small business, Genter’s colleagues at the Green Party office on Adelaide Road were asking to borrow their neighbours’ car parks because they’d lost theirs to – you guessed it – an empty cycleway.

This, to me, goes to the heart of the problem with Wellington’s diabolical cycleways. Council is quite literally bulldozing ahead with $111m more of this work, ignoring the pleas of our emergency services, struggling small business owners, vulnerable healthcare workers and two thirds of Wellingtonians just trying to get by, in favour of cycling extremism.

This story isn’t over, but we can all see how it ends. Far from being environmentally and socially conscious, council will double down on a privileged few, while making the city less liveable for everybody else – and force the rest of us to pay for it, at a time we can least afford to.

Cyclists, it seems, will become Wellington’s new elite.