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a page with yellow background divided in two. on one side a pedestrian crossing, on another a firetruck
Image: The Spinoff

OPINIONPoliticsAugust 6, 2024

Windbag: Why firefighters often oppose pedestrian safety measures

a page with yellow background divided in two. on one side a pedestrian crossing, on another a firetruck
Image: The Spinoff

There’s an awkward conflict between safer street design and emergency service response times. Joel MacManus explains.

Last month, a person died in a medical emergency in Karori that was attended by paramedics and firefighters. That person was apparently a close friend of councillor Ray Chung. Chung is a vocal opponent of speed bumps, raised pedestrian crossings, cycle lanes and other street safety initiatives that sometimes inconvenience drivers. 

Chung immediately saw that death for what it was; not just a tragedy, but an opportunity to start another stupid argument. He blamed three raised pedestrian crossings in Karori for slowing the fire engine’s response time. While he didn’t explicitly say the pedestrian crossings were responsible for his friend’s death, it was the clear implication. “Every second counts,” he told The Post, a statement that is vague enough to always be somewhat true and impossible to disprove. 

Fire and Emergency New Zealand didn’t comment on this particular incident, but has raised concerns about several recent Wellington street changes. Firefighters said the Island Bay cycle lane would mean there was less room for cars to pull over, speed bumps in Brooklyn would delay response times, and the Adelaide Road cycle lane would cause “quite significant traffic delay and congestion issues”. When speaking about the council’s overall cycleway rollout plan in 2022, assistant area commander Michael Dombroski urged the council not to “roll the dice with the public’s welfare”.

Ray Chung

The conflict between safer street design and emergency service response times is common around the world. Firefighters have opposed similar changes in New York, Baltimore and SydneyIn Los Angeles, the firefighters union bankrolled a political advertising campaign to oppose a citywide street and footpath improvement project.

Fire departments have a narrow safety remit. They think primarily about getting to their jobs and saving lives. It’s not their job to think about how a street change will affect carbon emissions or retail sale figures or the rates of kids biking to school, nor should it be. 

A Fire and Emergency spokesperson told The Spinoff: “Fire and Emergency New Zealand supports measures that are clearly intended to improve safety for everyone on our roads, but having to slow down for features designed to reduce speed will of course impact crews’ response times which in turn may influence the outcome of an event.

“Our people will continue to work closely with territorial authorities across the country when traffic-calming measures are being considered to ensure they understand the complexities and potential impacts.”

Chung also claimed am ambulance had been delayed going down Ngaio Gorge because of the cycleway. Wellington Free Ambulance avoided taking a position. “At this time we are not entering the debate or conversation publicly and maintain our view that the overarching objective of initiatives that improve safety for all road users are positive for our community,” a spokesperson said. 

Last year, 341 people died in car crashes in New Zealand. On average, 36 pedestrians are killed and 1,000 are injured every year in New Zealand. More pedestrians and cyclists die per capita in New Zealand cities than European cities.  

a bike lane in wellington
A bike lane by Wellington’s harbour, heading towards the airport (Photo: Wellington City Council)

Safer street changes aren’t just about reducing deaths and injuries. There are a whole bunch of co-benefits you unlock simply by improving perceptions of safety. When you don’t have to worry about you or your kids getting hit by a car, it tends to change your behaviour. Street-level improvements around retail areas make them nicer and calmer places to be, which keeps people around longer, spending more money. Cycleways that feel safe make more people want to bike. Cycling on dangerous roads turns people off, especially women and children. There is some number of adult men who will be willing to bike in almost any traffic conditions, but cities with the most women and children on bikes are almost perfectly correlated with high perceptions of safety.

It’s really important to have a public discussion about street design. Streets are negotiated spaces, owned collectively by everyone, so everyone should be part of the conversation about their form. Almost every city in the world is taking steps to move away from car-centric design to adopt more people-friendly streets. Wellington City Council is embracing that change with more enthusiasm and pace than most. There will be mistakes – for example, the proposed design of Thorndon Quay goes a bit overboard – but, with a bit of creativity, there will also be solutions.

‘Hutt Valley, Kāpiti, down to the south coast. Our Wellington coverage is powered by members.’
Joel MacManus
— Wellington editor

After some feedback, Wellington City Council staff added miniature speed bumps to the cycleway outside Wellington Central Station, to warn cyclists to slow down in case a fire engine is pulling out. Rather than pushing for fully pedestrianised streets, most urbanists are increasingly adopting “open streets”, like Barcelona’s Superblocks, pedestrian-priority spaces that don’t completely block accessibilitly for emergency services. San Francisco, Singapore and Stockholm are among cities that have adopted miniature fire trucks that are better at manoeuvring narrow streets in dense areas. Firefighters in Amsterdam can drive on wide cycleways in emergencies. New Zealand typically uses its smallest fire engines in mostly rural areas.

As a city, if we have street design debates in good faith, we can get great outcomes. But if politicians like Chung start blaming every tragic death on pedestrian crossings and media keep credulously reporting their bad faith claims, it’s going to devolve into a tedious, bad faith shitfight. 

The heat and the light. Photo: Toby Manhire
The heat and the light. Photo: Toby Manhire

PoliticsAugust 5, 2024

Luxon seeks the light as the heat fails at National jamboree

The heat and the light. Photo: Toby Manhire
The heat and the light. Photo: Toby Manhire

Labour got a lot of mentions. But there were a couple of parties almost entirely ignored, writes Toby Manhire.

What’s the mood, I asked a National MP on my way into the Due Drop Events Centre yesterday morning. A victory lap? “Well, no, not really,” he insisted. “Humble,” he said. “Humility,” he said. “You know, there’s a lot to do.”

Inside, it looked like they had taken the stoic thing a bit far. The heating had conked out for the weekend, and the seven or eight tardis-like patio heaters weren’t doing much. Demonstrating that you understand the realities of the cost of living crisis is one thing, but this was ridiculous. And it was really, really cold. Delegates – who had parted with $350 to attend – sat huddled around round tables in coats, parkas, puffer jackets and a scattering of royal blue official-issue zip-up fleeces. The scene looked less like the 88th annual conference of New Zealand’s most successful political party than a horticulture society getting briefed ahead of a day of shrubbery planting by the local estuary. 

Eleven months earlier, the last time National gathered at this south Auckland venue, the temperature was higher in more ways than one as Christopher Luxon officially launched his party’s campaign. His podium then said “Get our country back on track”. Yesterday that was upgraded to “Getting New Zealand back on track”. But that was the least of the differences. In 2023, the event seemed to want to bring the energy of a Las Vegas UFC title fight. This time it was a markedly more sober, workmanlike effort. 

And that – borked heating notwithstanding – was very much by design. It wasn’t joyless. There was an eagerness to thank the party faithful, and the Live Laugh Luxon mugs quickly sold out. But even in acknowledging achievements, the importance of noting what remained to be done was palpable. There was no place for self-congratulation, certainly not flamboyance.

Something else that was noticeable for its absence: the coalition partners. In her Saturday speech, deputy leader Nicola Willis hailed not a National-led government but a “National government”. She referenced the Labour Party six times, but words such as “Act”, “New Zealand First” and “coalition” didn’t warrant a mention. Nor did they in Luxon’s big speech on Sunday, though both Labour and the Greens got a name check – for “ushering in an era of lawlessness”.

To be fair, Willis did acknowledge the coalition partners in introducing Luxon on Sunday, but that was about it. The Act and NZ First parties were mentioned many fewer times – honestly – than John Key’s cat, Molly. 

Fair enough, as far as it goes: this is a party conference not a government rally. And after nine months of an unprecedented three-part coalition, with the small parties determined to avoid the MMP pitfall of fading into the background, when it often looks like the tails are wagging the dog, well, you can hardly blame National for wanting to have a weekend in which they get to play the music uninterrupted. 

And yet amid reports that the message being delivered to Luxon is get us back to the good old John Key days of 40-something-per-cent poll results, the unavoidable corollary of restoring that level of popularity is coalition partners getting pared back, if not flattened, in the process. If you think Act and NZ First are noisy today, just imagine what they might sound like a year out from an election if they’re slipping towards oblivion while National thrives. 

That is for another day. In his first conference keynote as prime minister, Luxon pitched it just right for the crowd and the moment. The speech was focused, unfussy and completely forgettable. The policy piece, a “maths action plan” to tackle a “total system failure” that showed 63% of year eight students are tracking more than a year behind the curriculum benchmark, will see a new curriculum expedited and enhanced professional development for teachers.

Christopher Luxon addresses the National Party conference at the Due Drop Events Centre. Photo: Toby Manhire

Luxon said it should be “bigger than politics”; Labour responded that he would say that, given it was the fruit of the last National government’s national standards approach. The union warned that it would load pressure on teachers without bringing results. But the metrics reported are genuinely shocking. And in Erica Stanford, Luxon has an MVP minister. She was one of three (along with Simeon Brown and Chris Bishop) graded nine out of 10 by Audrey Young the other day. Yesterday, she was repeatedly praised by Luxon in his speech, generating three separate ovations. “She’s doing awesome,” he said. 

And with that, a diligent, spirited conference, absent both coalition heat and central heating, was done. The closest it came to controversy was in a session on infrastructure and housing earlier on Sunday, when an eloquent grandmother asked a question. Given how important language was, she said, noting that the words on the screen earlier had pointed to “military-style academies”, rather than “boot camps”, how about quitting the use of the term “granny flats”?

The panel appeared flummoxed. A murmur of discontent rippled through the crowd. That sounds like something the officials in the Ministry of the Environment would say, half-joked Chris Bishop. “We’re very woke in the National Party,” three-quarter-joked Chris Penk. Look, said Bishop, granny flat is the vernacular, and when you want people to understand what you’re talking about you use the vernacular. The audience burst into applause. A couple of people took to their feet and raised their arms. Surely they weren’t going to flatten the granny? I needn’t have worried. They were holding their hands up to the patio heater.