Auckland traffic: Simon Wilson - Harbour Bridge cyclists have proved the demand is there

OPINION:

A man has been emailing me this week to complain about cyclists. He's "not anti cycling", he wants me to know, but he does have what he believes is a legitimate complaint.

Cyclists make too much noise.

It's the talking to each other. Yelling, he calls it. He says he lives 60 metres back from the road behind double-glazed windows and still they wake him in the morning. It happened again yesterday, at 5.54am.

And there he was, at 6.01am, telling me about it.

Honestly, I don't know what to think. He says, "It's great having cyclists riding down our road, when they glide past they look so fit, and I envy them. But they let themselves down by yelling in the early hours."

Actually, I do know what to think. There are rude and unthinking people everywhere. There are people who care too much about the wrong things everywhere too, although who is to say what the wrong thing is? No one's waking me before 6am.

Although police helicopters over the motorway do quite often keep me awake late at night. It's called living in a city, isn't it?

Cyclists broke police lines and biked over the harbour bridge after a GetAcross rally last week. Photo / Dean Purcell

Cycling doesn't necessarily make you more or less rude or uncaring, either. Just as driving a car doesn't. Although it's plain enough that driving makes some people horribly obnoxious, it's also plain that when many others get behind the wheel, they do so with an elevated sense of courtesy and care.

In my experience, the number of drivers committed to keeping cyclists safe is growing. That's called living in a city, too. In all sorts of ways, we're getting better at mixing it up.

Which makes some of the responses to last Sunday's bike ride on the bridge a little bit disappointing. Breaking the law! Entitled middle-class white people! Lycra-wearing idiots! And, of course, how dare they slow me down when I'm driving.

I don't think they speak for everyone, just as I don't. But they do speak for some.

Worth a quick recap. The GetAcross coalition – which includes Bike Auckland, Movement (a traffic safety advocacy group), Generation Zero and others – called a bike rally at Pt Erin, at the city end of the bridge.

For months, they had pleaded with Waka Kotahi, the transport agency, to close a lane of the bridge on the day so they could ride over. Waka Kotahi said no. No, no, no. (Yes, they were asked that many times.)

But Waka Kotahi, with the police, knew perfectly well everyone at the rally would want to ride the bridge and many of them would probably try to. After all, they'd done it in 2009.

So, as they always do in these situations, they created a traffic management plan.

The police estimate about 1500 people went on to the bridge. Photo / Dean Purcell

The police could have prevented access to the bridge: at the Curran St on ramp, that would be super-easy using police cars, containers, or even just more cops. The police do it all the time when they really want to stop a crowd going somewhere.

But they didn't do that, which means they decided not to.

Videos of the moment when the frontline of protesters pushed aside the barricade arm show only four police officers trying to stop them.

They had many more there, but did not deploy them. That means the management plan was based on a decision to let the cyclists ride across.

Meanwhile, the traffic had already been diverted away from the western clip-on: Clearly that was also part of the management plan.

And then what happened? The usual four northbound lanes became two, causing traffic to back up. In its management plan, despite knowing they'd be closing two northbound lanes to traffic, Waka Kotahi decided not to use the lane-shifting machines to give that traffic another lane.

It could have been three each way. No inconvenience to anyone. It's almost as if Waka Kotahi was trying to make drivers angry.

The police estimate about 1500 people went on to the bridge. From what I saw, that seems about right. Lots of little kids, which suggests the 5 per cent gradient isn't a barrier to most riders.

And not a lot of Lycra. Ordinary folk, for the most part in their ordinary clothes, plus high-vis, because when they ride along the road minding their own business they don't want to die.

Most of the complaints about the bridge protest last Sunday boil down to this: Drivers should not be inconvenienced. "I'm not against cycling but", followed by something the complainant found obnoxious.

If we want to complain about obnoxious behaviour on the roads, why cyclists?

40 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions in Auckland are from traffic. Photo / Brett Phibbs

Sure, some of them are rude, or cross the boundary of what you think of as rude. But 57 per cent of deaths and serious injuries in traffic are to people not in a car. That is, to people hit by a car, or a truck. Pedestrians, motorcyclists and cyclists.

Last month, Mike Sheffield, aged 72 and wearing high-vis, a long-time cyclist doing what he loved, was run over by a truck and killed on Stanley St in Parnell.

Another relevant statistic: 40 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions in Auckland are from traffic.

The debate about the bridge and about cycling generally isn't about keeping drivers happy doing what they're doing now, and then seeing what else we can change. We all drive, or get driven, and we all have to rethink it. We have to change the way we get around. It has to become a rewarding option for many more people, much more often, to leave the car at home.

One more statistic: Most car trips in New Zealand are shorter than 6km and we also have one of the highest rates of "vehicle kilometres travelled", or VKT, in the world.

That tell us we use cars for a lot of trips where people in other countries don't feel the need.

We use public transport less, drive the kids to school more, drive round the corner to the dairy more and down the road to see a friend more. We hop in an Uber even when it's only a few blocks. And people on bikes are the entitled ones?

By the way, what is it with the jokes about Lycra? For many cyclists, it's activity-appropriate clothing. Why is it okay to sneer at that?

Transport Minister Michael Wood now says the Government will spend $685 million to build a bridge over the harbour for cycling and walking. Photo / Supplied

Transport Minister Michael Wood now says the Government will spend $685 million to build a bridge over the harbour for cycling and walking, and it will take five years. I said last week that if he really was looking at that, he was wasting his time.

If you want nothing to happen, propose the impossible option. That's what I think Waka Kotahi has done there. But hey, he's up for it.

In the interim, though, the GetAcross movement is calling for an existing lane to be converted for cycling and walking, for a three-month trial. Let's test whether the demand exists, instead of shouting at each other about it.

And let's test if Waka Kotahi, making better use of public transport, can come up with a genuinely useful traffic management plan, so we're all winners. I bet they can.

Wood says he's told Waka Kotahi he wants options for how to do that trial on his desk within weeks.

Excellent.