KEY POINTS:
Drive along Auckland's Northern Motorway, look hard at the structures overhead and you will see, just south of the Takapuna onramp, a monument to modern madness.
It is a solid concrete pedestrian bridge to nowhere. It dates, I think, from the earliest construction of the motorway on the mudflats when the authorities agreed to give nearby residents access to what remained of the harbourside.
Some years later I became one of those residents and once - only once - I used the bridge. My dog had more sense. Barely halfway up the first of the long, gently sloping ramps he flattened himself, scrabbled desperately to dig in his claws and refused to go higher.
I pressed on alone. Once up on the thing the sensation was decidedly unpleasant. Traffic roaring by below was physically disorienting, the proximity of speed and noise overwhelming any sense of stability and safety, and height made the exposure worse.
That is one reason you will never have seen anybody on it. The other reason is that if you can force yourself across, it takes you down to the tidal flats right beside the traffic. It is no place for a picnic.
A year or two ago when they were building the adjacent busway, I thought they would quietly bowl the bridge since one end of it was in the way. But of course they didn't. It would be classed a "walkway" nowadays, a sacred concept, part of the alternative transport trinity. They extended it.
Daily I drove past the visual pain of public money being turned into concrete pillars and ramps and steel barricades for what now stands as a newer, longer, larger bridge to nowhere.
There is a lesson here, I hope, for the determined folk who rallied at the Harbour Bridge last weekend to demand a slice of it be somehow dedicated for a walkway or bikeway or both.
They seem to be getting some traction with councils and this week the Auckland Regional Transport Authority agreed to give it serious consideration.
Every time I read this suggestion I am seized by the urge to put these people in a car, take them halfway up the bridge and stall. Have they never broken down on the Harbour Bridge, or stopped up there for a moment?
It is not a pleasant place to be. It is like the pedestrian bridge to Shoal Bay but a hundred times worse. The Harbour Bridge shudders and flexes with the flow of cars, which are rushing past you, one bullet after another, in a slap of tyres and a blur of machinery.
Up there, walking or biking on the edge of the precipice with the torrent of traffic alongside, would be hell, and I don't think it would be much more pleasant in an envisaged perspex tube.
Some daring cyclists did an illegal crossing to last weekend's rally. The report didn't say whether they enjoyed the ride but I couldn't believe them if they said they did. And I'd be amazed if they honestly want to do it again.
Whatever motivates the campaign for walking and biking on the bridge, it can't be a quest for simple pleasure. It appears the cyclists want to commute, though the bridge must be a sweaty hill climb.
They present their case as a "right" to walk or bike across the harbour, which is not the same as a desire, a need or even an intention to use.
Cycle lanes have been marked out on some flatter Auckland roads and they seldom see a cyclist. A letter published in this paper from a Sandringham resident on Wednesday suggested taking "a deckchair, a (small) piece of paper and a pencil" to count the use of cycle lanes in Mt Albert Rd.
He recommended assigning "several months to the task since weeks often go by without the passage of a single cyclist".
Letters of an opposing view were interesting because, for them, the value of cycle lanes can be largely symbolic. Auckland Regional Council member Joel Cayford said walking and cycling structures on the bridge would "symbolise the start of the next crucial stage in Auckland's urban transformation".
That is what it's about: a statement of alternative transport on a prominent city symbol, where peak traffic flows more smoothly than on most stretches of motorway.
I am probably missing the point of the bridge to nowhere too. It may not have mattered to those residents, mostly long gone now, that they were unlikely to actually use it. It was retribution for the loss of their nearest shoreline.
If the authorities were determined to destroy a waterfront for a motorway they would damn well pay with a token to what was lost. And there it still stands, monumental evidence of how silly a symbolic gesture can be.
