Occupy Garnet Road is still trying to keep its mission alive and kicking in a small pocket of Auckland. Lyric Waiwiri-Smith headed to a community meeting to find out if people still care.
Handmade signs provide little decoration for the Garnet Station theatre where no one under 30 (except me) has come to hear the Westmere community gripes. “Stop AT [Auckland Transport],” one sign reads, beside a sketch of Garnet Road’s four-way roundabout drawn with a sad face in the middle, then “Single lane roundabout maddness.” The spelling error gets a chuckle out of a few attendees. “That’s Lisa’s fault, isn’t it,” emcee Gael Baldock says. “She can’t spell.”
Veteran activist Lisa Prager, of sledgehammer fame, is one of the most vocal Occupy Garnet Road (OGR) members, often to her own detriment. She was arrested in 2018 after bashing a traffic island with a sledgehammer to protest a Grey Lynn cycleway, once chained herself to a digger and has equated her protest against the felling of trees to standing up to the Holocaust. She spearheaded OGR’s mission in 2017, after occupying a roundabout outside of her business in protest of a cycleway. But tonight, personal reasons have kept her at home, so her partner-in-crime Baldock heads the meeting alone at Garnet Station, a cafe owned by Prager and her partner Verity George.
The meeting was called for “Westmere shopkeepers, concerned Westmere locals, Waitematā local board area residents and Meola Road commuters”, but only 11 members of the public have shown up, including this reporter. Baldock chalks the “poor” turnout to the fact that the meeting was only called days ago, and her posters promoting the event were ripped off the streets. No shopkeepers are present, and when asked, Baldock declines to reveal the concerns they had apparently shared with her regarding the works. “I wouldn’t want you to print what I had said for them,” she tells me, despite speaking on their behalf for the entire meeting.
It’s the six-year-long war for Westmere’s roads, a fight boldly undertaken by a very select few against Auckland Transport, the council and anyone else who gets in their way. Tonight’s topics of discussion focus on Westmere and Point Chevalier’s cursed and contentious “L” connecting Meola Road, Garnet Road and Point Chevalier Road, which has been under construction for months, with improved floodplains, foundations, traffic speeds and landscaping promised by Auckland Transport. This particular pocket of Auckland is especially attractive for a new cycleway thanks to the 41% of students at the nearby Western Springs College who walk or cycle to school, a figure higher than most areas of Aotearoa, which may help bump cycling figures in Auckland up to the 17% AT is hoping for.
If you ask OGR and its supporters, the works have provided everything but an improvement to their daily commute. Baldock quotes herself from a New Zealand Herald article published six years ago before the “L” area construction began: “As I was quoted in the Herald, this will be a blood sandwich.”
She thanks her supporters despite the small turnout, telling us we must have been moved to back her after reading her latest column in the local magazine, Ponsonby News (she has copies to share in case we haven’t seen it). It’s a curious publication – somehow, Baldock (and often Prager) has her views published in almost every edition.
Her recent column focuses on rat running, the practice of using residential streets rather than main roads and motorways to get from A to B, an apparently growing problem that is particularly bad through the nearby “bird streets”: Huia Road, Kiwi Road and Tui Street. It’s not illegal, though highly controversial, and if you ask Baldock, those guilty of it are just as conniving as her enemies at AT.
Unlike Ponsonby News, “The Spinoff” does not get you very far in this area of Westmere. “The Spinoff … they’re big fans of all of this, aren’t they?” One suspicious local at the meeting asks me. In an attempt to ease the tension, I reply: “I don’t think anyone’s a big fan of road works.” He shakes his head. “I mean, a big fan of what this all means.” If only he could spend a day in The Spinoff office listening to the whinging of the staffers who live in the inner west and hate the traffic as well.
What this all means is more cycleways for Westmere, meaning more headaches for these residents. They represent the Nimbys of their neighbourhood, but they do have genuine concerns about the roads here and in neighbouring suburbs. One woman describes the road works as a “nightmare”, another is concerned Meola Road has become too dangerous to use and someone else is sick of cars using her street to avoid congestion. A man from Rock The Vote (which was part of the Brian Tamaki-founded Freedoms New Zealand alliance at the last election), wearing a branded baseball cap, worries AT is becoming “very anti-car” and threatens to put candidates forward for the next local body election to stop them. Another woman in the crowd is unimpressed by his speech: “But what are you actually going to do?”
Baldock has myriad reasons to oppose cycleways, too. She believes construction could ruin local businesses, the roads are no longer safe, it costs too much and the design is crap because she didn’t make it (she often references her background in “design and architecture”, though she is better known as an artist). To top it off, she’s very sure no one will be using those cycleways anyway. “There’s one group of cyclists that want a cycleway,” Baldock says, “and it’s the people who don’t wear helmets and have normal clothes.”
Baldock tells the crowd she went down to watch the traffic on Meola Road on a Friday afternoon after the final school bell, and was shocked to see that a mere 12 rangatahi were using the cycleways. She says this minuscule number of children is proof that no one really wants or uses the cycle lanes – though if that were true, the numbers at this meeting would suggest that even fewer people care enough to fight them.
Over an hour in and no resolution recognised, a couple get up to leave, and another woman starts filing her nails. I wonder if it would be rude for a reporter to Irish exit a community meeting early – I really want to go to Westmere Roast for dinner before it’s too late. I get up, Baldock announces “the journalist is leaving”, and before I can get out the door, the local with The Spinoff suspicions asks me where I’m based. My cover is blown: I live in Parnell.
Getting up to leave, Baldock asks me not to go before I share my own thoughts on cycleways. It’s not really the function of an objective journalist, but the anti-Spinoff man is watching me with piqued interest. I tell her I recall working in hospitality on Karangahape Road during the cycleways construction in 2019, how the road works impacted foot traffic, and that I understand her concerns that businesses could go under. This sends her off on another spiel, and after standing there and letting her talk at me for a few minutes, I slip out the door.
Westmere is chillingly cold, and Baldock’s last-minute questioning has made me lose my appetite for dinner. Traffic was relatively slow moving along the Garnet Road shops when I was making my way here around 6pm due to cycleway construction, and though it may be slightly annoying, it was smooth sailing the rest of the way, past a blinking road sign advertising that businesses were still open. Now, the streets are almost completely silent, and it takes less than 15 minutes to drive back to Parnell, through a bit of my own neighbourhood construction and traffic. In the grand scheme of things, it could be worse.