Weekly Roundup 6-June-2025

Already halfway through 2025, here’s the first roundup for winter of different stories that have caught our attention!

This week on Greater Auckland

• On Tuesday Patrick did a deep dive into productivity, transport, and the City Centre.
• On Thursday Matt examined the Auditor Generals report into the reliability of public transport in Auckland and AT’s response.

This post, like all our work, is brought to you by the Greater Auckland 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, or support us on Substack!

Party on the Paths

Here’s a fun one: on Saturday 7 June there’s a celebration of the completion of the new bike paths between Point Chev and Westmere (plus the associated improvements to footpaths, crossings, planting, and underground infra). All are welcome, and you can roll up by bike, on foot, by bus, however you like.

Instead of the usual static ribbon-cutting and speeches, this is a lively ribbon of pop-up fun along the paths from 11am to 3pm, up Point Chevalier Road to Meola Road, then Garnet Road to Westmere Village. There’s no start line and no schedule as such – start anywhere and follow your nose to find activities by community groups, local cafes and creatives, and good neighbours.

Tireless local heroes Bike Pt Chev will be based at Seddon Fields, fresh from running the first day of a new season of Bike to Football– with a smoothie bike, stationary bike races, mini-obstacle course for little kids, and new maps and friendly chats. There’s also a discovery trail along the paths, and we even hear rumours of a roving karaoke bike…

Police Buses

The police have taken over some of Auckland’s double decker buses.

Police have taken temporary possession of five double-deckers as part of a recruitment drive for 500 new officers.

The Auckland Transport buses have been decked out in police livery and will now take to the streets in Auckland in an attempt to recruit more cops.

Police Commissioner Richard Chambers says the buses seat 500 people – the exact number of staff they want to recruit.

“Auckland has always been a key recruitment area for us, and we are keen to be highly visible and advertise far and wide.”

The buses will be in circulation for over three months, with Chambers saying it is “ideal” for reaching the “whole of the city”.

The cost to wrap the buses totalled $119,800 including print, installation and 12 weeks of media advertising.

Transit lanes for Mount Smart Rd

From Auckland Council:

Mount Smart Road connects Penrose with Onehunga and Royal Oak, carrying around 18,000 vehicles daily. In the evening, trips through this area can take more than twice as long as off-peak, with average speeds dropping to as low as 15km/h.

To help ease congestion, a new T3 transit lane heading towards the roundabout, has been proposed. This will operate from 4-7pm on weekdays and be reserved for buses, motorcycles, cyclists, and vehicles with three or more people.

Maungakiekie-Tāmaki Local Board chair Maria Meredith said a quick-fix, low-cost solution will enable more efficient traffic movements in the early evenings.

…..

Broken yellow lines will also need to be added at four bus stops along Mount Smart Road to ensure that buses can enter and exit the stops safely.

AT is seeking feedback from the community on this proposal, with a second community drop-in session planned for Oranga Community Centre, 1 – 3pm on Saturday 07 June 2025.

Have your say on the Auckland Transport website by 15 June 2025.

AT should be making these kinds of changes all over the city.

Most article use of the word wow at Auckland Council

Discussing the speed limit reversals, Councillor Shane Henderson asked a pointed question, and got a blunt response from AT legal counsel:

Cr Henderson: If we lowered speeds to protect children, it gets captured and the speeds are raised. If we didn’t lower speeds to protect children, the safer speeds can stay. Is that correct?

Legal: that’s how the rule is drafted

Cr Henderson: WOW.

Wayne Explains

Mayor Wayne Brown has put out a video called Wayne Explains and focusing on Queen St. Given his last video we were concerned it would be a case of him ranting about the pedestrian improvements but it’s actually about the timing of traffic signals.

Queen St was meant to be the heart of the city – not a theme park for traffic engineers.

Somewhere along the way, we replaced common sense with tickboxes and clipboards – it’s a miracle we manage to get stuff done.

Imagine how much more we could achieve with systems that didn’t punish critical thinkers!

The good news is that change is coming later this year as we take back control of Auckland Transport and other CCOs, and restore democratic accountability.

Until then, I’ll keep calling out the silly stuff.

Another example of bike lane protectors proving why they’re needed.

Stuff reports from New Plymouth as part of what appears to be a ramping up of anti-cycleway rhetoric from Stuff.

New Plymouth’s controversial cycle lanes are proving to be lucrative addition to the city for tyre repairers as public opinion rages about the safety measures.

It has been just over a month since the New Plymouth District Council installed concrete separators on one of the busiest thoroughfares in the city.

The separators, which have been met with outrage from a section of the community but welcomed by some cyclists, were installed along Devon St West and South Rd.

The power of the e-bike, and cost of household vehicles

Andy Boenau goes into the quiet transition of many people in America to the e-bike, in an effort to save costs.

In 2022, more than 1.1 million e-bikes were sold in the U.S., nearly quadruple the number from 2019. E-bikes now account for over 20% of total bicycle sales in the U.S., and they represented 63% of revenue growth in the bike industry between 2019 and 2023. Bikes have become robust enough to handle everything from kid pickups to bulk grocery runs, and more cities are creating rebate programs to accelerate adoption.

Replacing a car with an e-bike can save a household $120,000 over a decade—enough to wipe out debt, fund a college account, or boost retirement savings. And as infrastructure improves with more protected lanes, slower streets, and secure parking, the e-bike can graduate from practical to preferable.

• What if you spent less on movement and more on meaning?
• What if streets worked as well for bikes as they do for cars?
• What if getting around town felt like a lifestyle upgrade?

French are doing it right!

Also from France, how its public transit was saved from Catastrophe.

It may be hard now to imagine such a situation in France. Few countries have a more impressive national patchwork of public transit in cities large and small as France, after all. Paris the capital city is the darling of 21st century city-scale urbanism and the North Star of those who believe trains, buses, and bicycles are the urban future over the privately owned car. Paris’s transit network is mushrooming and thriving; in 2024, RATP (Paris Metro and RER’s operator) registered more than 3.1 billion trips. The regional transit overseer, Île de France Mobilités, is building four new Metro lines as part of the Grand Paris Express super-project.

This super-charged transit system was 50 years in the making. In the early 1970s, under the presidency of Georges Pompidou, France passed a slew of reforms to not only save public transit but make it competitive to driving a car as a mode of mobility. While the positive effects are felt by the sum of these reforms, this post focuses on one particular vehicle which, on its own, has transformed French public transit: the versement transport (transport tax). Introduced in 1971 and now called versement mobilité (mobility tax), this is a payroll tax on employers operating inside an urban region which goes to the local regional transport authority to use for operations or capital projects. This tax is the lifeblood of French buses and trains and the engine of French transit’s current and future successes. Just to put into scale: RATP reported in 2023 that 48% of its annual operating revenues, or 4.457 billion Euros, was generated by this payroll tax alone.4 Systral, the agency which manages the transit networks of France’s second largest city Lyon, reported in 2024 half of its operating revenues, or 505 million Euros, came from versement mobilité.5

The cost of road safety for our best friends

On Greater Greater Washington, Dan Reeds story when his dog was hit by a car.

May afternoons on Thayer Avenue in Silver Spring are just perfect. It’s the kind of street that still has big old trees, and at 5 o’clock the sun hits just right and casts these golden shadows on everything fortunate enough to be in the way. Kids are out playing in apartment building yards, and cheers ring out from a soccer game at the elementary school up on the hill. Drizzy and I are on our post-work, pre-dinner walk. We know everyone we pass, if not their names, at least their faces, or their dogs.

Among them are three little boys on bikes, weaving around us on the sidewalk. The smallest one wipes out in front of us, landing in the street–I recognize him from our neighborhood block party the week before–then picks himself up and asks me, “When is there going to be another party?” Next year, I say, but it was so much fun, maybe we’ll have one sooner.

Five minutes later and 500 feet away, I am kneeling in the street cradling my dog after he’s just been hit by a car.

Oldie about cycling in London, but a goodie

To finish off

Our friend and occasional contributor Tim Adriaansen has published the latest in his series of riding a bike from Alaska to Argentina.

Have a great weekend.

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