The Campaign For Better Transport

What a fantastic day for Auckland! After 50 years of having the Auckland Harbour Bridge locked off to all those not in cars, today Aucklanders took back Our Bridge. I was right there at the front of the rally – impressed by the speeches (particularly that of Christine Rose) and heckling abuse at Wayne McDonald of NZTA. There were certainly a LOT of people there, perhaps more than the 2000 quoted by most newspapers.

For a while I thought we weren’t going to get across, as Wayne said “no” as we asked him nicely. But then we shifted down to the Curran Street onramp, found our way through the trees and onto the onramp itself. The police were there but didn’t really try to stop us – the crowd was just too great. First NZTA blocked off the clip-on lanes and then, perhaps because they were afraid of having so many people on the clip-ons, they blocked traffic off from the centre lanes too. So we had the entire northbound side of the bridge to ourselves. Everyone was jumping and yelling, absolutely exhilirated in what we’d achieved. It was a huge egg on Mr McDonald’s face in the end, as I’m sure traffic was absolutely screwed throughout the city. If NZTA had avoided being such idiots they could have easily managed it, but in the end it was their stupidity that led to the entire northbound side of the bridge having to be closed.

Leila and I walked across and back, seeing heaps of people of all ages, with kid, dogs and push-chairs. It was a day when we all celebrated being Aucklanders and celebrated the bridge as linking the city, not dividing it. This is just the start of things to come I hope – a day when the tide turned against our automobile-centric thinking.

As Christine Rose from the ARC said: “Let’s burn fat, not oil!”

What a fantastic day weather-wise for us, and also thanks to all the Aucklanders who turned up to celebrate Our Bridge. And to NZTA, shame on you for being such narrow-minded fools, it is your fault that the whole motorway got shut off, you could have organised this to run smoothly. Shame on you.

Photos here: http://transportblog.co.nz/2009/05/24/our-bridge/

Responding to NZTA CEO Geoff Dangerfield’s fuddy-duddy response to the May 24th protest, Bevan Woodward tells it like it is:

It’s not just about the cycleway. I’ve been campaigning for walking and cycling access on the Auckland Harbour Bridge for more than 10 years. During that time the NZ Transport Agency (and its predecessor, Transit) has strongly opposed the idea.

It has come up with all kinds of excuses, ranging from, “It’s not a priority for the region”, to “It’s too steep and windy”.

Campaigners have responded to each excuse and the Transport Agency has come back with ever grander reasons why a walkway and cycleway could not be provided. Its latest excuse is that it would significantly shorten the service life of the clip-ons, but this excuse doesn’t stack up with the facts.

The honest reason why the Transport Agency doesn’t want to provide walking and cycling access is because, fundamentally, it is a road-building organisation which thinks Auckland’s traffic problems can be solved with more and bigger roads. The Transport Agency sees pedestrians and cyclists as a hassle they could do without.

Read the rest here.

For those out there interested in what the government, through NZTA, is going to be spending your petrol tax dollar on over the next few years, there is an interesting chart that shows what projects are hoped to be constructed over the next 5 years. There’s another chart that shows all projects that NZTA wishes to progress into a design phase over the next 5 years too – although for these ones construction will be further down the track. The government’s huge push to build state highways and ignore everything else (including local roads, maintenance of roads, walking and cycling initiatives and public transport) becomes fairly obvious with a bit of analysis of these proposed projects. In particular, the projects that are due to be investigated and designed over the next 5 years is a pretty amazing list.

Read the rest of this entry »