Weekly Roundup 18-October-2024

Happy Friday, and welcome to another round-up of interesting stories about what’s happening in Auckland and other cities. Feel free to add your links in the comments!

This post, like all our work, is brought to you by a largely volunteer crew and made possible by generous donations from our readers and fans. If you’d like to support our work, you can join our circle of supporters here.

Our header image this week shows Auckland Transport’s delightful Diwali-themed “Bolly-Bus”, a collaboration between Creative@AT and the art talents of Shiv Narandas and Jai Pancha – more details here.  Diwali festivities will be happening in the city this weekend in and around Aotea Square, 12pm – 9pm, culminating in fireworks on Sunday night.

The Week on Greater Auckland

• On Monday, Connor asked: who benefits from secrecy around major public infrastructure investment? (Spoiler: not the public, for starters)
• On Tuesday, we reported on the first judicial review against the Minister of Transport, and noted other ongoing queries into the quality of his decision-making.
• Wednesday’s post by Matt covered upcoming changes to public transport in Auckland, the most consequential we’ve seen in six years – updates to make the isthmus crosstown routes run more smoothly for more people, and the advent of contactless payment by credit card and phone.
• And on Thursday, a subtle guest post by Tim Adriaansen outlined a pressing emergency, and the ready solution. Unfortunately, the actual point  – that climate action is a no-brainer when you’re given a very concrete example – seems to have sailed over a few people’s heads. (Perhaps it needed more asterisks?*****)

Auckland’s transport future: major decisions ahead

On Thursday 24 October, at its Transport, Resilience and Infrastructure committee (agendas and meeting details here), Auckland Council will finalise its decision on which transport projects will be prioritised over the next few years. It’s a challenging situation, with the Minister of Transport having throttled funding for active modes and safety in particular.

One thing is clear – the vital importance of maintaining a continuous pipeline of the small safety and active modes projects that have huge local benefits.

Everything you see being built today – footpath fixes, pram ramps, safer intersections and crossings, local bike routes – have often been in the works for up to a decade of design, consultation, re-design, re-consultation, and often repeated delays, while always avidly advocated for, on the way to actually finally being delivered.

So, if Council and AT choose this week to pause safety and active modes projects and programmes, it may be 2035 before many communities see the essential local improvements that they desperately need.

Remember how earlier this year almost every local board in the city begged the Regional Transport Committee to fast-track safety and active modes? It’s never too late – or too soon! – to remind your Councillors of this, and let them know how you feel.

For help, see Bike Auckland’s excellent list of the threatened active modes projects, and friendly guide to how to appeal to your elected leaders.

Local voices for local good things

Related: this fantastic video by All Aboard, who are reaching out and amplifying the voices of people in Manurewa who yearn to be able to bike safely around their neighbourhood – and who can’t comprehend why local politicians have repeatedly left money on the table to fund good, basic improvements.

A councillor, profiled

Here’s a lovely interview with Councillor Josephine Bartley, from e-Tangata.co.nz, that builds a compelling portrait of public service, and the many winding and intersecting paths that might lead a person there. Appropriately, it’s titled “Me and My Community”, ‘cos cities – like families – are a collective effort. It offers glimpses of great things about this city, like:

We all rode our bikes everywhere around Māngere. My cousins would come over, and we’d go to the pools. It was a good childhood.

And:

The thing I love about Tāmaki Makaurau is that it’s my home. It’s given me so many opportunities that I wouldn’t have had if my parents had stayed in Sāmoa. This was their dream, their vision and reason for uplifting themselves, and I’m truly grateful to them for their sacrifice and their blood, sweat and tears on the factory floor for a better life for us kids.

And:

What else do I love about this city? I think if anywhere in the world is going to achieve a melting pot, it’s here, because we have so many different cultures — and because this is Aotearoa, we have tangata whenua. Nowhere else in the world do you have Māori as the Indigenous people of the land.

And this is a really good reminder:

I can see what [the Mayor, Wayne Brown]’s trying to do, because he’s got an engineering background and wants to fix things. But then I also take on board what someone said when they came and presented to us — not to see Auckland as a box of problems. And I think that’s a good point. Because otherwise, we don’t see all the positives and all the good things about our beautiful city. We can get too bogged down in the negative.

Ongoing fallout of government’s knee-jerk road safety policies

A solid piece by Amelia Wade in the Sunday Star-Times on the long list of Auckland road safety projects effectively cancelled by the Minister – even when, as we reported here, they’re the kind of project that’s been championed by his fellow MPs.

…figures provided to the Sunday Star-Times shows 326 proposed local road projects that included at least one speed bump have not received funding, including 126 projects proposed by Auckland Transport.

The Auckland suburbs with the most stopped speed bumps are all in South Auckland: Papakura (7), Papatoetoe (5) and Manurewa (5).

…
In 2021, [now Minister of Education] Erica Stanford as local East Coast Bays MP launched a petition to pressure Auckland Transport into committing to a roundabout safety upgrade that included speed bumps.

At the time she said: “Those affected, and travellers alike, have experienced several near-misses and are very concerned a fatal accident could happen at any time.”

She also this year successfully advocated for a speed reduction at a dangerous bend outside a rest-home in Browns Bay.

Kudos for this coverage, and we hope there’s more to come. One way more reporting can improve public understanding: by resisting the urge to regurgitate the Minister’s phrase “speed bumps”when reporting on his crusade against raised crossings.

To be clear:  speed bumps are one of many speed-calming devices, along with things like chicanes, bump-outs, street trees, all the way up to Low Traffic Neighbourhoods. Raised crossings likewise calm traffic speeds and raise driver awareness, yes – but most importantly, they are:

1. tried and trusted safety solutions wherever busy roads pass through heavily-peopled places – which is why they’re widely used around schools, parks, shops, retirement communities, and in small towns on state highways.
2. road-tested (and well-evidenced) ways to lower the risks at certain types of intersections, especially roundabouts, where people outside vehicles are extra vulnerable to harm.
3. absolutely integral to accessible, safe and attractive all-ages networks for walking, cycling and mobility.

Correcting the Minister of Transport’s misinformation, one country at a time

You’ll recall that the Minister of Transport, Simeon Brown, when announcing his “sensible” new speed rule – the one opposed by the vast majority of experts and local road-controlling authorities – made claims about default urban speeds in peer nations.

“Throughout the world, 50km/h is used as the right speed limit to keep urban roads flowing smoothly and safely. The evidence on this is clear – comparable countries with the lowest rates of road deaths and serious injuries, such as Norway, Denmark, and Japan, have speed limits of 50km/h on their urban roads, with exceptions for lower speed limits.”

He repeated these claims in the House even though, as we covered here, they don’t pass the sniff test. For example, here’s Copenhagen, showing maximum speed zones:

An enterprising reader, Tim Frank, went one better than the “let me Google that for you” test. He wrote to Danish authorities asking firstly whether Brown’s statement reflects the Danish position on speed limits, and then “whether it is regarded as best practice to prohibit local towns and cities to set a speed limit lower than 50 km/h on certain roads”. The reply:

Your email about speed limits in Denmark has been forwarded by the Danish Road Traffic Authority to the Danish Road Directorate (the national road administration in Denmark), and we will try to answer your question.

According to our Road Traffic Act, the general speed limit in urban area is 50 km/h, so I guess you could say, that this is the “official” Danish position on speed limits in urban areas.

But this doesn’t mean, that 50 km/h is the normal speed in all Danish towns. Many municipalities have reduced the actual driven speeds in urban areas by lowering the speed limits on specific roads or by installing road humps etc. designed for 30 or 40 km/h.

This is quite normal in residential areas, near schools or in town centers, it is not a rare exception that only applies to a few roads or specific locations.

It is true, that Denmark has a low rate on road fatalities, but within the last 10-12 years, we have not been able to make any major improvements to the fatality rate. This is one of the reasons, why many municipalities want to go further and lower speed limits on more urban roads, also on through roads and distributor roads.

Some other countries and cities in Europe have experienced very promising results from lowering the general speed limit in urban area. Not only have the driven speeds and the casualty figures gone down, it was also found, that the lower speed limits did not have negative effects on traffic flow. A synthesis on these results has been published by the Norwegian research institute TOI: www.toi.no/getfile.php?mmfileid=77103. I enclose a comprehensive summary in English. [link to English summary here]

Again we ask: is this our least worldly Minister of Transport?

Cross-party support for vulnerable road users

The Minister for Racing, Winston Peters, joins an impressive cross-party list of MPs – from the Green Party (Julie Anne Genter, Celia Wade-Brown), National (Grant McCallum, Dana Kirkpatrick), Labour (Kieran McAnulty) and Act (Cameron Luxton) – who enthusiastically back safer streets and roads for those not in vehicles, reports the NZ Herald.

This week, New Zealand Equestrian Network’s Julia McLean delivered a petition to parliament asking that horse-riders receive greater protection on the road. Designating riders and their steeds as vulnerable road users “would mean people who rode horses on the road would be included in consultation over safety standards and education efforts.”

As McLean put it to Stuff, “At the end of the day, we’re appealing for people to just slow down and give us space. And I think that can apply to any encounter with a horse or a cyclist or a person.”

One parliamentarian is notably absent from the list of supporters so far, notes the NZ Herald:

McLean said she had written to Transport Minister Simeon Brown about the issue but hadn’t heard back.

She was critical of public comments he had made arguing current standards were enough to keep those particular road users safe. McLean also challenged Brown to ride with her so he could witness the risks for himself.

The Herald was awaiting a response from Brown’s office.

“So, how do you like Auckland?”

The NZ Herald recently profiled actor Elizabeth Banks, who’s been here recently working on a new film, The Mistake, based on a novel by Carl Shuker:

She filmed in and around Auckland for about eight weeks, managing to keep a low profile. For the first few weeks, her family were here and they’d often catch the Devonport ferry to explore the city.

“We had a lot of fun dinners, had a lot of good food and explored the amazing beaches. One of my favourite things about Auckland was what a walkable, wonderful city it is with so many great neighbourhoods to go to.”

Most evenings after filming wrapped, she’d walk down to the waterfront or through the nearby neighbourhoods. These long walks were a way to distance herself from the relentlessly grim situation of her character and the brutal, overpoweringly bleak vibe of the film.

Join the climate club

A nice read by Newsroom’s Marc Daalder about Emily Mabin Sutton, the co-founder of accessible climate action organisation Climate Club Aotearoa, who also runs fun, interactive, informative climate workshops that help people figure out both the challenges and the opportunities:

“A CEO who took this [workshop] sent me a selfie of him taking a bike to work for the first time in a long time, the day after taking this workshop. We had a hospital employee talk to their employer about aligning train timetables to the shifts at work so that people could take public transport. People find very different actions based on their own context, but the range of actions is really large, depending on what levers we each have to pull.”

OMG, it’s true what they say, humans HAVE been manipulating the weather after all!

— John Gibbons (@thinkorswim.bsky.social) 2024-10-11T11:31:50.936Z

Ever wondered why train tracks squeal?

KiwiRail has got you, fam.

PS Use your power for good this week – vote in the Entrust election!

If you’re a power-user in the isthmus (east of Avondale, south of the harbour bridge), make sure to find and fill in and, most important, mail your papers for the Entrust election.

This is your chance to move this powerful community asset into the 21st Century, under the leadership of More for You, Better for Auckland. As Patrick wrote, this team offers a far more sustainable, resilient and visionary plan for empowering the community than those who’ve had a grip on the trust for 30 years.

Ballots must be posted in a NZ Post or DX Mail postbox before 5pm on Thursday 24 October.

Alternatively, you can also drop your completed voting paper into the Entrust branded ballot bins up to 5pm on Friday 25 October: See here for ballot bin locations, which include the election office in Penrose, and 10 Woolworths (formerly Countdown) stores around the area: Entrust 2024 Bin Locations

Be sure to vote – the power is yours!  Official info about the Entrust election here.

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