The Wrong Side of my Car

The blog that wants to go obsolete

The case for and against Skypath

A prominent missing link for bicycling and walking in Auckland is the bridge over the Waitematā Harbour. About 10 years ago it was expected that Skypath would fill this gap — long story, but now, after another couple of somewhat dumb iterations, it looks like we will be without a cycle crossing for another while.

Some go as far as saying it is the most critical missing link in Auckland. But I think this is an exaggeration, seeing how the rest of the bicycle network on the North Shore basically doesn’t exit.

Precedents

First, some context. There are 2 cycling links that can be seen as precedents for this path:

The Northwestern Cycleway

This cycleway sits in a very similar spot in the bike network. It connects the city centre to the suburbs, and is highly useful to commuters.

However, unlike our hypothetical Skypath, it goes entirely over land, and it has many connections to the local street grid over its entire length.

And while it is successful relatively to the rest of Auckland, in absolute terms it is quite the let down. An estimated 1,600 movements are recorded on a good day *1. This sounds impressive over here, but not if you compare it to our other transport networks. On the railway one 6-car train (2 Auckland Metro class units) can carry around 740 people, so we are only just over the capacity of one single train driving both ways. And a single lane on the motorway carries this amount of movements in less than an hour. The Harbour Bridge carries almost 140,000 vehicle crossings per day *2, and buses carry another couple ten thousand trips.

So overall, you can’t call this an unqualified success. A cycleway of this calibre should be carrying 1,600 people in well under an hour during rush hour. The reasons why are well-known, and we will come back to them later.

Ngā Hau Māngere

On the other coast, there are two bike and walking crossings over the harbour, parallel to State Highway 20. Ngā Hau Māngere was completed last August, connecting Onehunga to Māngere. There has also been a bike path under the motorway bridge since 2018.

Arguably this is a much easier crossing since it is well under a kilometre long, and it doesn’t rise dozens of metres into the air to let through hypothetical freight ships. In comparison, the Waitematā Harbour Bridge is about 2 km between points where it can realistically get down to street level.

Unlike Skypath this path does not sit right next to the city centre so it doesn’t quite have the same demand from commuters. Cycling is also famously nonexistent in Māngere, despite the Future Streets programme, have a look at the cycling dot map if you are wondering how bad it is. There is a cycle counter called ‘Māngere Bridge’ which is recording between 200 and 400 movements per day.

The case for Skypath

It is a missing link

Even on the worst arterials, you can almost always ride your bicycle slowly on the footpath *3. However when going from Northcote Point to the city you are well and truly stuck. Skypath is a missing link with very poor alternatives.

You can get on the ferry, but only if there is still room (this is a pain point in Devonport), and only if there is actually a ferry. From Birkenhead we only have a couple of sailings per day in weekends, which makes crossing quite a high stakes game. It is easy to get your bicycle stuck in the city. Going around the harbour via Westgate is impractically long — almost 40 km from the city to Birkenhead.

Whatever bicycle network we cook up in Auckland, it is always going to have a bicycle crossing over the harbour.

It is cheap *

* if we are willing to use an existing car lane on the bridge.

This is the idea behind the current “liberate the lane!” campaign.

Getting cyclists to use one of the current lanes on the bridge is eminently possible. I don’t know the technicalities but it is certainly a lot less than the 600 or so million earmarked for that ill-fated new cycle bridge bridge proposal. It can also be trialled without permanent changes to the current bridge.

It is a very prominent and symbolic connection

The Harbour Bridge is a highly visible spot, used by almost a hundred thousand people every day. Adding this link would be a powerful signal that cyclists are more considered a legitimate way of going somewhere.

The case against Skypath (right now)

The key question is, who is going to use it?

This is a thorny question, and predicting usage on new infrastructure is notoriously hard. Many people thought the northern busway would be a white elephant. How can we estimate how many people would use such a path?

Also, is it really the number 1 priority?

The precedent is bad

Its closest analog in the bicycle network is probably the northern cycleway on SH 16. As mentioned this path is not moving a lot of people, so this is already a bad sign.

The reason why is that the path is stranded in a road network with little provision for cyclists. A bike path is no good if nobody dares to ride a bicycle to it. Well, this is even worse on the North Shore, as a quick look at a cycle map will tell you:

From this, I would assume that Skypath would likely see less cyclists than the current northwestern cycleway.

Does it really make sense to push for a crossing if it is nearly impossible to reach from most of the area north of it?

Long rides are relatively uncommon

This is important because Skypath would be a relatively long path with most of its immediate catchment under water.

How long is the typical bicycle ride? One source is the New Zealand Household Travel Survey. The term ‘trip length’ is always ambiguous, is it one way, or both ways? However in the 25 years anniversary document *4, figure 28 has an unambiguous metric, namely, how long did you ride your bicycle today? You can go at most half that distance from home.

The median is probably around 6 km, and 70% was below 10 km. Most bicycle trips thus go less than 5 km from home. What would a 5 km trip involving Skypath look like?

You would just make it from Northcote Point to the city, or from Northcote town centre to Point Erin Park or to the marina. And these are already relatively long trips on a bicycle. You can’t ignore the fact that most of the catchment is under water, and bicycles are mostly used for shorter trips.

This again indicates that Skypath would get less usage than the northern cycleway.

If you think otherwise you should wonder what is stopping more people from using the northwestern cycleway, which has existed for many years. And if you say ‘tourists’, you can compare to the path on Tamaki Drive.

It is a very prominent and symbolic connection

This argument cuts both ways. If you do a liberate the lane trial, it will draw a lot of attention. And not in a good way if it turns out only 500 or so people are using the path.

The average lane on the Harbour Bridge is used by more than 10,000 people per day, and congestion towards and on the bridge is a big topic already. Going from 8 to 7 general traffic lanes will almost certainly be deeply unpopular. So unlike its counterpart, the northwestern cycleway, I am not sure if it will survive a couple of years chugging along at 500 to 1,000 cyclists per day.

The rest of Auckland

Well, I can’t really speak for the rest of Auckland, but the North Shore barely has any bike lanes right now. For me personally, I could maybe use Skypath to ride to the city every so often, but the lack of cycleways in between will almost certainly prevent me from doing this with the family.

As symbolic as Skypath is, said cycleways are also important, and in my opinion higher priority. How many people will cross the Harbour Bridge to go grocery shopping, or to drop the kids off at school? These trips may be boring, but we do them quite often.

So if our goal is to get many more people to use bicycles, a harbour crossing is probably not critically important, and certainly no low hanging fruit.

On the North Shore side, we could focus on completing the link between Northcote and Takapuna, both major centres, and grow the network from there. It is quite mundane compared to a harbour crossing, but probably much more important in terms of enabling new bicycle trips.

The ideal outcome would be to get a harbour crossing as well. But a local network without harbour crossing is still useful to many people. Whereas a harbour crossing without local network will be useful for only a couple of strong and fearless commuters.

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