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cartoon images of trains buses and bikes
Most people drive to the airport, rather than biking or using public transport Image: Tina Tiller

PoliticsMarch 21, 2023

Why is it so hard to combine biking with public transport in Auckland?

Staff Writer
cartoon images of trains buses and bikes
Most people drive to the airport, rather than biking or using public transport Image: Tina Tiller

There are plenty of practical ways the city could make multi-modal transport more accessible – but have they all been consigned to the too-hard basket?

How can Auckland start mitigating its impact on the climate crisis? Our biggest city’s sustainable solution must start with transport, its number one source of emissions. To do so, Auckland’s public transport (PT) system needs to be greatly improved and expanded, because, as professor Timothy Welch argues, electric cars alone are not going to save us. 

One little discussed part of this conversation is how people get to the bus, ferry or train. In the Netherlands, a bastion of planet-friendly transport in the western world, half of all train passengers arrive by bike – equating to half a million people daily. Combining more than one form of transport is known as multi-modal transport. If more Aucklanders biked to PT it would help unlock the latent potential of sustainable transport in the city, being a relatively cheap and fast way to get to the PT stop and back home. Could the city of sails follow the Netherlands’ lead? Currently the answer is no. 

Bikes are allowed onboard commuter ferries (except West Harbour) but are subject to space availability, meaning cyclists often aren’t allowed on and miss their ferry. This is particularly true for the busy inner North Shore services, especially around peak times. Making matters worse is that bike parking on ferries is wildly inconsistent from service to service. Some ferries have internal bike parking on the bottom floor amid passenger seating; others use their back decks, which range from spacious and simple to tight and terrible for bike parking. Taking your bike on an Auckland ferry is truly a lucky dip.

A common sight for cyclist-ferry commuters, not enough accommodation for bikes.
A common sight for cyclist-ferry commuters, not enough accommodation for bikes and being forced to get in everyone else’s way (this time of the toilets and exit). (Image: Tommy de Silva)

Taking your bike on a train is also subject to space availability. Three-carriage trains have one bike-accessible section, and the six-carriage variants have two. But these sections aren’t only for cyclists, with bikes sharing space with mobility devices, scooters, prams and luggage. Folding bikes are always permitted onboard Auckland trains, but Auckland Transport (AT) suggests not bringing your regular bike onboard during peak times, a policy enforced by staff and passengers. Speaking of folding bikes, the only bicycles permitted on buses in Auckland are compact folding bikes, with no accommodation for full-size variants available. Auckland’s only inter-city commuter train, Te Huia, can fit six bicycles per train. All this means that bike-PT trips are difficult in Tāmaki, with peak-time commuters particularly hard done by. 

The situation is starkly different in other parts of the motu, however. In cities like Christchurch, Hastings, Napier, Nelson, New Plymouth and Wellington, most if not all buses are fitted with racks, typically carrying two bikes. I’ve heard of Wellingtonians who cycle downhill into town and catch the bus back up the steep slope with their bike strapped on. There are even examples of buses accommodating bikes within wider Auckland. Waiheke Island buses have bike racks, and the privately operated Warkworth-CBD Mahu City Express stores bicycles onboard. 

So why is Auckland an outlier? AT told The Spinoff that bus bike racks are not coming any time soon, citing studies that suggest the racks could pose safety risks – apparently there would be issues with rack-equipped buses fitting into existing stops. Rectifying the safety issues would be expensive and time-consuming, so AT is instead focused “on providing more quality cycling infrastructure”, to encourage people to bike to PT. 

University of Auckland student Ryan Nichols is a passionate but often disgruntled sustainable transport user in Tāmaki Makaurau. He tries his best to primarily use PT and biking, but its not all that easy. He says that constructing cycleways that connect to PT hubs would promote multi-modal transport – but where should bikes go once their riders hop onboard a bus, ferry or train? Nichols thinks we need more bike parking at the point of embarking PT. 

Auckland Central MP Chlӧe Swarbrick would like to see combined bike and PT use made easier in her electorate, also pointing to the need for more space for bike parking at public transport stops. “Bike parking and cycling [infrastructure] integration extends public transport catchments beyond typical walking range and comes at a much, much lower cost, carbon footprint and space hog than park-and-ride facilities for cars.”  

One Amsterdam station recently opened almost 11,000 bicycle parks. Could some of Auckland’s plentiful car parks be converted into bike storage? Since 2020 AT has installed 500+ bike parks, with a particular focus at PT hubs. But as of 2021, AT alone – not to mention private providers – had 6,649 CBD car parks, many of which are a stone’s throw from Britomart’s PT nexus. In the same area, there are barely 400 bike racks. Some racks can squeeze two bikes onto them, but even if they all could, there would still be roughly eight times more parking for cars than bikes in the CBD. Although this parking imbalance reflects the status quo of Auckland’s car dependency, it does not reflect the city’s ambitions to reduce emissions. Part of that ambition is “supercharging” cycling, which is impossible without connective-tissue infrastructure like parking and cycleways. 

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    Swarbrick summed up the impact of sustainable transport, saying, “if we want vibrancy, freedom, disintegration of gridlock, cleaner air and climate action in Tāmaki Makaurau, one of the easiest and cheapest things we could do is reallocate roadspace.” She was implying transferring roadspace away from cars towards “safe walking and cycling, and rapid transit networks.” Other ideas Nichols and Swarbrick had to promote multi-modal transport in Auckland included better wayfinding (targeting new cyclists), more designated bike storage onboard ferries and trains and more bike/scooter rental schemes. Swarbrick believes that “genuine freedom in a transport network isn’t being chained to a 2,000kg hunk of metal, but a city designed to prioritise movements of people and their wellbeing.”

    If it was easier for more Aucklanders to combine a bike ride with a PT trip, it would be a double whammy that prioritises people’s health and that of the planet alike. 

    Keep going!
    Image: Tina Tiller
    Image: Tina Tiller

    OPINIONPoliticsMarch 20, 2023

    Why a teal deal has no appeal

    Contributing writer
    Image: Tina Tiller
    Image: Tina Tiller

    The idea of the Greens flirting with National gets an airing before almost every election. It remains as much of a nonstarter as ever, writes Henry Cooke.

    This article was first published in Henry Cooke’s politics newsletter, Museum Street.

    It’s far more reliable than clockwork.

    Every election cycle – often several times – a commentator sparks a new discussion of The Problem With The Green Party.

    This problem is that they refuse to sit in the centre of the political spectrum, negotiating with both National and Labour for power, thus giving them leverage over both. Reasonable people make this argument in good faith, and it has a certain brute logic: The Greens have no strategic ambiguity. Any Labour prime minister can rest easy knowing that they will huff and puff but never quite put a National Party prime minister in the ninth floor.

    But away from game theory abstraction and in actual political reality, the argument is absurd. It’s as silly as attacking Act for not threatening to work with Labour.

    Here’s a quick rundown of why, with some help from my favourite post-election survey, last used to explore Labour’s lost voters.

    Green voters are overwhelmingly left-wing

    The Green Party’s current voters do not see themselves as centrist pragmatists committed to finding the best deal from the two main parties. If you ask them to rate themselves on a left-right scale, as the New Zealand Election Study did in 2020, 80.5% of those who party voted Green place themselves broadly on the left, compared to 7.2% who place themselves on the right.

    This makes the Green Party voter base dramatically to the left of not just National Party voters (2.8% placed themselves on the left) but of Labour Party voters too (39.8% placed themselves on the left.) In other words, Labour voters and National voters are far closer ideologically than Green voters and National voters are.

    Asked specifically who they would prefer to be in government, Labour or National, 95.4% of Green Party voters say Labour, compared to 0.2% who say National.

    In general, these voters don’t like the National Party. Just 4.5% said they found National “trustworthy”. Asked to rate how much they liked the National Party from 0-10, a fifth (19.8%) give them “0” and 79.3% give them a rating under 5.

    Now, you could say – “but Henry, those were their voters in 2020, when it was clear they wouldn’t support National. If they positioned themselves to be more centrist things might look different.”

    This ignores actual political reality however. The party is not going to do something that will make a super-majority of their voting base extremely upset in the hope of appealing to some voters they don’t currently have who are not just to the right of the Greens themselves but to the right of Labour. After all, they can see what happened to the Māori Party after it allied itself with National.

    The two parties have irreconcilable ideological differences

    These voters are not stupid. The Green Party’s most right-wing policies are generally well to the left of National’s most left-wing policies, across both economic and environmental policy spaces. The parties’ fundamental ideologies are not just not aligned, they are often in direct opposition to each other. Much like Act and Labour’s.

    That is not because there are no Tory environmentalists, or Green Party capitalists. It’s because when you strip things back both parties are representatives of interest groups whose views rarely overlap. National generally represent business people all around the country and farmers in particular. This is nowhere near the limit of its vote – this is a major party – but these are the people who generally become National Party members or donate to them, and will stick with them even in a bad election year like 2020. The Green Party generally represents young urban professionals with strong left-wing views across the environment and economy.

    The National Party base generally see government intervention as a last resort to be avoided, while the Green Party base see it as essential to any kind of ecological or social justice. Now, National is a big tent party capable of reaching well outside of its base for big policies, but only to an extent. Even at the high water mark of John Key centrism, National was not keen to seriously regulate either agricultural emissions or freshwater quality. The Green Party’s MPs and leadership were around for all that – they do not see them turning over some new leaf any time soon. And the Green Party itself has ideological rigidities that would mean even it did prop up a National government it would face serious pressures to bring it down the moment that government enacted almost any of its core economic policies. Both parties would face serious electoral consequences for bringing in such chaos.

    The members would stop this before it even happened

    Remember all that stuff I said about the Green Party’s voters hating National? The 7000 or so members of the Green Party make them look like libertarians. And in the Green Party the members have to OK any potential deal to go into government. I’m not the first to say this, but the members would simply stop this from even getting started. They would punish even a bit of strategic ambiguity quite fiercely.

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      Does this mean this would never happen ever? No. After all, the original MMP country, Germany, sees its Green Party negotiate with its right-wing party. As the climate becomes a more and more important issue it will likely stop being so ideologically split, especially if carbon trade barriers really become a thing. But I think you can safely rule a teal deal out for another couple of election cycles.

      This article was first published in Henry Cooke’s politics newsletter, Museum Street.

      Politics