Weekly Roundup 6-September-2024

Welcome to another Friday and another roundup of stories that caught our eye this week. As always, this and every post is brought to you by the Greater Auckland crew. If you like our work and you’d like to see more of it, we invite you to join our regular subscribers and shout us the equivalent of a coffee or whatever you can manage. Or drop us a line if you’ve got a great story to share. Thank you kindly!

Our header image this week is from the City Centre Residents’ Group and shows a fresh angle on Te Wānanga on the waterfront.

The week on Greater Auckland

• On Monday, a guest post by Charmaine and Dylan Vaughan looked at the problem of container truck-trailers on local roads.
• Tuesday’s post by Matt looked at the wildly unbalanced National Land Transport Plan, its problematic funding issues, and how it’s destroying the pipeline of shovel-ready local projects.
• Wednesday’s guest post by Tommy de Silva offered a tantalising flashback to the civilised streets of the pandemic response, and asked could we free up our streets again?
• And on Thursday, Matt looked at how the Minister of Transport’s fuelling an insatiable need for speed, on a very thin evidential basis.

Simeon Brown’s NLTP continues to take a beating

In The Kākā, Bernard Hickey gives a rigorous rundown of the RLTP which chimes with what we think about it. A must read. Here’s a snippet:

In essence, NZTA is saying:

• its own models were not very good and, anyway, don’t show how transport funding and the ETS work together to change emissions;
• Also, the ETS is ‘out of scope’ of the NLTP and 2050 is a long way off so anything could happpen; and,
• Anyway, the Government might come up with something else, so we don’t have worry about how this $32.9 billion spent over three years on the future of transport effects emissions.

Basically, it has been told not to care, so it isn’t. And, therefore, we can just park any thought of emissions on a motorway somewhere while the Government encourages tree planting in the ETS to achieve the 2050 net zero target.

No worries then.

Hope the planet doesn’t notice.

Or our trading partners.

Other angles that caught our eye:

• Prof Thomas Lumley has some nifty graphs showing how the NLTP funding shortchanges the South Island, both in total and per capita.
• Prof Tim Welch writes in The Conversation that rather than moving us forward, this NLTP “steers New Zealand back to a car-dependent past”.
• Also in The Conversation: new research from Caroline Shaw and colleagues shows the major and increasing benefits to be enjoyed from decarbonising the transport system sooner rather than later – and the more valuable and equitable option involves behaviour change. Unfortunately, this government has just committed to doing the opposite.
• At Newsroom (paywalled), Jonathan Milne asks what does the NLTP mean for children? The Minister of Transport’s war on raised crossings means that at schools that have been pleading for years for safety improvements, school children will continue to be injured just crossing the road.
• Further afield, this sensible suggestion to the UK’s Labour government reads like a subtweet of our NLTP.
• And Bike Auckland tells it like it is:

Kiwis are losing projects which they need today, and which the NZTA could deliver tomorrow. This investment plan is taking money away from much-wanted, shovel-ready projects which could be delivered quickly, in favour of massive motorway projects that we may not see for many years, if ever.

The Government is ignoring what Kiwis have said time and again they want: transport choice. An affordable A-to-B. Safer trips to school for kids. These are all good things that make sense, that Kiwis are absolutely right to ask of their government.

Greater things around the motu

Someone asked this week why Greater Auckland occasionally covers things that happen elsewhere in this small island nation, and – well, that’s why, actually. Because we’re all connected, and there are great people everywhere working for better things. For example:

Greater Tauranga

The Sustainability Society is hosting a free webinar today, Friday 5 September, called Tāmaki to Tauranga, chaired by Simon Wilson and asking: how can we build passenger rail for the golden triangle (Auckland, Hamilton, Tauranga) without being subject to three-year political cycles and central government funding? Speakers: Heidi Hughes, Daniel Headifen, Ben Ross and Angela Strange.Tickets are free and available here.

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Urbanerds monthly meetup is Tuesday 10 September, at Waitoa Victoria Street, Wellington. Free/ RSVP here. Doors open at 5pm, and at 6pm the special guest speaker takes the stage. This month, it’s housing consultant Joey Shannon, on the topic of social housing. Urbanerds also have a mailing list and share good links about topics of interest to us all.

People on bikes aren’t going anywhere (because they’re going everywhere)

Speaking of great mailing lists to put yourself on, our cuzzies at Bike AKL have a great and inspiring newsletter full of news and events about people on bikes in Tāmaki Makaurau. You can subscribe here to get it straight to your inbox.

One of this week’s stories is about Waterview Primary School’s brand new bike train, joining the originals at Pt Chev, Bayswater, Puketāpapa and Wesley. Read all about it in this lovely post:

The parents seem delighted that their kids can ride to school without the parent themselves needing to be present. There are comments along the lines of “she wants to go by herself and she would probably be okay, but there is that road crossing…” Being at a stage where I can’t even imagine letting my kid ride up the road without me, I get it. The kids seem excited too, and happy they are part of the launch. All of them look confident on their bike or scooter.

And speaking of kids on bikes, here’s a good question: whatever happened to the party of urban cycleways? Pippa Coom says what we’re all thinking, in this post on LinkedIn.

What has happened to the National Party of John Key and Simon Bridges who had the vision to invest in urban cycleways a decade ago? They created a legacy across the country they can be proud of including Tāmaki Makarau’s famous pink path Te Ara i Whiti.

Yes please, street trees!

Via @thirdculturebot on the place that used to be Twitter, here come the trees on Te Hā Noa, the Victoria St Linear Park.

Kimpton goes permanent

Also in local news: Auckland Transport’s interim CEO Dean Kimpton now has the job permanently.

he AT Board has permanently appointed Dean Kimpton as Chief Executive.

Mr Kimpton joined AT in April 2023 on an 18-month contract, after both an international and domestic recruitment process. During his tenure he has challenged the organisation to improve its service to Aucklanders, with a focus on network productivity and delivering great public transport services for Aucklanders.

AT Board Chair Richard Leggat says the appointment will continue this focus on driving better outcomes for Auckland.

“Under Dean’s leadership the organisation’s structure has been redesigned to focus on doing the right things and doing them exceptionally well. We still have work to do to increase Aucklanders’ trust and confidence in AT but the board is very confident Dean is the right person to do this.”

Cars are getting bigger and we’re all paying the price

A widely shared article by The Economist dramatically visualises the issue of car bloat, and the impact on human beings. It includes the very stark graphic below, along with some stark numbers, like:

The fatality rate is roughly seven times higher when colliding with a heavy pickup truck [aka double-cab utes] than with a compact car. As the weight of your car increases, the risk of killing others increases dramatically.

For every life that the heaviest 1% of SUVs and trucks save, there are more than a dozen lives lost in other vehicles.

Question corner

What makes great streets easier to build?

From Happy Cities, a look at what gets in the way of people-friendly street design… and how to navigate a better way:

If people-friendly design is explicitly added to people’s job descriptions, it gives them good reason to learn everything they need to understand to deliver good design. Once this happens, building great streets can become the default—not a rare exception.

Who needs a car anyway?

That’s not a rhetorical question, if you want everyone to be able to move around more comfortably and affordably. This essay by Addison del Mastro, in Plough Quarterly, takes the question at face value, sparking off with this observation by philosopher André Gorz:

“Unlike the vacuum cleaner, the radio, or the bicycle, which retain their use value when everyone has one, the car, like a villa by the sea, is only desirable and useful insofar as the masses don’t have one.”

Like all successful revolutions, the automobile revolution obliterated the memory of what came before and established itself as a staid, respectable status quo. Some will take this to mean that it was desired – that the car and its landscape are the majority preference, and that only elitists would question it. “We like the car, leave us alone.”

We? Who voted? Who chose? Did the residents of the urban blocks leveled for commuter expressways choose it? The carless families living in the only housing they can afford, semi-stranded by a landscape that never assumed they would exist? The teenagers and elderly and temporarily and permanently disabled whose ability to move around in the world is not enhanced but circumscribed? There is no we. There are those who can afford and benefit from the car and the vast infrastructure that supports its regular use, and there is everybody on the receiving end.

Dare we dream of a car-free city?

From the aptly named Reasons to Be Cheerful, a trio of stories on how to do it:

1. how congestion pricing is making cities more liveable
2. how low-traffic neighbourhoods are reclaiming streets for people
3. how calming traffic brings tons of benefits to cities

What is ‘motornormativity’?

A new paper by Tara Goddard looks at how people’s attitudes and values shift depending on whether cars are involved in the question – and how this “windshield perspective” is obscuring a major public health hazard.

For example: people are more likely to agree that it’s okay to bend the health and safety rules to get your job done if the question is about a delivery driver, versus a chef. And there’s a striking difference between people’s feelings about others smoking in public space, versus driving pollution-emitting vehicles.

This video is also a useful explainer of how a windscreen perspective alters our judgement in antisocial ways we might not be aware of.

How about a Sidewalk Joy Map?

To end with, and bring us back to the human scale: a little bit of good cheer! Every city needs something like this map from Portland, Oregon:

“The Sidewalk Joy Map showcases all the curated galleries, exchanges, and displays. Installed in curb gardens, front yards or sides of buildings these projects were created to bring a bit of whimsy and inspiration to the community. These are all free to enjoy though you’ll want to bring quarters for some of the vending machines or donate to pay for a pottery piece at the Poetry Pottery Box.”

Of course, here we have our own Pātaka Kai and Little Free Libraries, but what about Free Little Art Galleries (FLAGs)? And what’s not to like about a rock library or a wishing tree or a puzzle exchange or a tiny greenhouse or a toy swap or a dinosaur exchange? Lots more info and a whole lot of inspo at @pdxdinorama and @pdxflag on Instagram.

In a week in which the government seems to be telling us what we can’t do, it’s nice to be reminded of small things we can do to help our neighbourhoods be a little greater, right where we are. Have a creative and restorative first weekend of spring!

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