KEY POINTS:
You might have thought that by now the Auckland Harbour Bridge bosses would have realised that, like rust, the cycle lobbyists will keep gnawing away until something gives.
As sand-blasting and spraying them with a repellent coat of aluminium paint is probably a bit radical in this day and age, I say call their bluff and do as Auckland Regional Council chairman Mike Lee suggests. Open up a lane or two each summer weekend for any cyclist or walker willing to risk life and limb.
Transport Agency acting regional manager Tommy Parker says such an experiment wasn't possible this summer as the western clip-on lanes would have to be closed at times for the ongoing $45 million structural strengthening project. But as Mr Lee says, transport bureaucrats "have always found reasons why not to do things".
I've always been a sceptic of cyclist claims that 10,000 or more trips would be taken by cyclists and pedestrians each day if the bridge was opened to them. That's why I reckon putting it to the test will be the quickest and easiest way of shutting them up. That's certainly what happened 30-odd years ago when the ancestors of today's lobbyists were given several free road shuttle trials, off and on, over a period of years. The final year-long trial in 1983 averaged just 20 users a day.
After that, the clamour died down for a generation. My guess is the present proposal of closing a lane for weekend cyclists and pedestrians will produce similar results. Which for Mr Smith and his team would be good result for little cost and only mild inconvenience. If, by some miracle, 10,000 a day did turn out, then I'm happy to be proved wrong and accept there is a genuine issue to be dealt with.
Mr Lee says that with traffic this year down 10 per cent on last year, that equates to almost a full lane empty at peak hours. Therefore, why not open a single lane to cyclists and walkers over the summer weekends and see what happens.
A couple of months before, a former colleague of mine, Jon Addison, came up with a similar proposal in a letter to the Herald. He suggested closing the eastern clip-on lanes to motor vehicles each Sunday during daylight saving. He accepted this would inconvenience motorists who used the Shelly Beach Rd off-ramp, but said the alternative route up College Hill was "a modest detour".
More controversially, he proposed the busway on the northern side could be used as a temporary parking lot for the cyclists and walkers from the north. "If use by cyclists and walkers turned out to not justify the effort, little harm would be done, whereas building dedicated cycling and walking lanes would result in millions down the gurgler."
He later wrote a piece about his two years as "Auckland's loneliest commuter". The reason: "I chose to use a cycle." He said that even using "perhaps the best bike lane in the world - the flat Tamaki Drive scenic waterfront stretch between the dormitory eastern suburbs and downtown Auckland - there was never more than "a handful of pedalling commuters". He said it had been that way for the 30 years he could remember.
Auckland's hills and wind and rain and sprawl "conspire against the cycling commuter". Rejecting the enthusiasts' claims that increased sales of pushbikes were an indication of a widespread desire for pedalling to work, he slyly noted the sales of kayaks had increased even more rapidly, "but there's no strong movement to spend public money on facilities to encourage paddling to work".
There's no doubt cycling is good for your health - as long as you don't get knocked off - but even where geography doesn't conspire against you, as along Tamaki Drive, the vast majority of Aucklanders refuse to see it as a sensible means of commuting to work.
All that retrofitting old roads with bike lanes - Mt Albert Rd, for instance, or Lake Rd, Devonport - seems to have achieved is to upset motorists and the adjacent property owners who lose their street parking. Certainly, I've seen no evidence of a rush to use these costly new bike corridors.
Perhaps it's time for the politicians to stand up to the cycle lobbyists and say either use them, or lose them. And what better place to start the trial than high up where we can all count them on the harbour bridge.
