OPINION: Wheels to Wings cycleway (was it really consultation?)

John Neighbourly Lead from Papanui

Why the ‘Wheels to Wings’ Cycle/Woke-way Won’t Fly!
By affected resident John Stringer.

I’M BEING STALKED! Living on Rutland Street was ruined by a dual cycleway hardly anyone uses. Moving to Harewood Road, Council has followed me with a proposed Wheels to Wings cycleway up my second home street. It’s a creeping barrage of ideologically driven ‘feel good’ environmentalism that has captured town planning at huge expense.

When I served on the Papanui-Innes community board we were told this cycleway was not a priority and needed no public consultation. It’s first failure –it’s a ‘top-down’ Council imposition on a bemused community. In 2019 the Fendalton-Waimairi-Harewood community board wanted it deferred.

Apart from a few dedicated cyclists, it’s not a need. Nothing wrong with cycling –its healthy. But at $301 million for a 101 km cycleway of tax-and-rate-payers’ hard won bling (including NZTA levies), our wallets are unhealthy. (Wheels/Wings is a $19 million portion).

Criticism of ‘Top Down’ is justified when you look at the heavy adjusting going on at the consultation end. More than 1348 submissions and 70 re-designs.

With the west-end closure of Wairakei Road as an exit route to the airport, Harewood Road has been forced to absorb the west-bound traffic. Compressed further by the new Northlinks mall, the light industrial infill along Langdons Road, and the Northlands expansion, Papanui is more congested. Council’s response? Impose scattered 30km speed limits.

Critically, Harewood Road is now the main east-west utility conduit: Ambulance, Police, Fire. They belt up and down with sirens blazing. I know, I live there. A cycleway will only narrow the traffic further. How are these utilities supposed to speed through to emergencies? The problem is proven on Rutland Street. When parents open a street-side car door it blocks the traffic. When the recycling truck works the street, it blocks the traffic. Children use the old footpath, because the cycleway is dangerous with rapid-moving commuter cyclists. Same problem in St James park where dogs and walkers have to dodge speeding bike commuters hurtling down the single slice of asphalt as they join up with the Papanui Parallel cycleway.

Culturally, Papanui has the highest density of mobile retired persons in the city. We also have the largest number of retired and dementia care facilities. Imposing a cycleway along Harewood Road adds complexity to local mobility. Mobility scooters tracking down a footpath from the many retirement centers will have to negotiate a cycle strip before they cross the road. It’s already a much busier road, so they’ll have to run a gauntlet of fast-moving cyclists as well as cars coming either way. Double-jeopardy!

And then there’s the wheelie bins. Look at Rutland Street and you’ll see the monumental design failure. Any nor’west gale bin dislodgement and the $4.2million per/km cycleway is completely unfit for purpose. There was shock by residents when the western feeder cycleway was at $2.5 million per km. Will local Harewood Road residents start protesting with the placement of their wheelie bins?

Papanui Cr. Mike Davidson is one of the strongest advocates of big-spend cycleways. Disingenuously, he campaigned in recent years on bringing rates down. The reality is, he’s only ever advocated rates increases. In 2016 he promised “to keep annual rates increases below inflation by cutting non-core spending.” Columnist Mike Yardley was scathing in a column in The Press on 1 March throwing Davidson’s words back at him… “He has failed to walk that talk.” Taxpayers’ Union CEO Jordan Williams also criticised the Papanui Cr. for “a severe lack of self-awareness to describe rates as not a major burden on households.” Chris Lynch also chimed in, “[Davidson’s] comments appear at odds with his re-election campaign.” This month the Cr. controversially backed an $8.6 million increase in the Heathcote Expressway; a 65 % increase while the Harewood and Waimairi Cr.s fought back.

Well-known Papanui champion and fellow Harewood Road resident Yvonne Palmer is unhappy with the lack of consultation and told me the proposal is “not safe because of too many infills.” I agree. It was a ‘Claytons’ consultation from the beginning. The initial brochure was a fait accompli (“Sheet 14; Harewood Rd…safe cycleway coming to your area”). It only asked residents which design option they preferred, not whether they wanted it. That’s not choice but design-by-stealth.

Northside Harewood Road residents will lose their on-street parking, as have many on Langdons Rd (“On-street parking next to the cycleway will be removed” Sheet 14, p. 2). While on the local community board, Cr. Pauline Cotter (Innes) and I spent quite a few votes trying to haul back ever-increasing yellow no parking paint jobs across our community streets.

With a scary escalating cost-of-living, are Papanui fixed-income earners salivating to build more cycleways? There are already thousands of meters of cycleway in the area, some of it parallel and only a few blocks apart. Northern Line; Northern Motorway Cyclepath; Papanui Parallel. How much more do we need?

There are no flocks of cyclists commuting from the airport (Wings) up Harewood Rd (Wheels) to Northlands Mall. Cr. Keown has been largely re-elected on his community-driven campaign to get more safety at the Harewood–Breens Rds intersection. The cycle proposal just adds more complication and expense. The result is, locals now fill up the side streets (Chapel, Sails, Hoani Streets) with parking. Council’s response? A proposal to block off more side streets. Options to move north from Harewood Road are shrinking. Traffic is forced eastward into the bottleneck of the Library/Papanui High School/Mitre 10/Railway crossing.

The community is tired of ‘feel good’ ideological tinkering within residential communities. They want the footpaths repaired and road congestion alleviated. Wheels to Wings is a theoretical construct to make us feel bad using cars. Christchurch is a seasonal city. It’s not Florida. We have southerlies, and black ice winters. We don’t have the density of Amsterdam where it makes sense to cycle. We’re more like a semi-rural provincial UK city like Surrey but with New York style escalating costs-of-living driven by unnecessary ‘feel goods’ with oblique benefits.