The Wrong Side of my Car

The blog that wants to go obsolete

Pedestrian give way rules: “We’re thinking about it”, year 4

About four years ago I wrote a post on our investigation on priority rules for pedestrians on crossings.

this Unique Piece of Kiwiana Heritage is going obsolete.

Nope, it did not.

I did not see that coming back then. Even New Zealand, ass-backward as it is, was still making progress, albeit slowly. And this so obvious, and so common overseas.

But this seems to have died on the vine, and even a crisis like COVID-19 couldn’t budge this process.

It also made me think about what happened to Auckland Transport in the meantime.

Something seems to have gone wrong around the end of 2018, Just as the transformation of Auckland from provincial backwater to city was picking up steam.

The cycling and walking team at Auckland Transport got sacked around this time. There was a nice theory about this being embedded in other teams, but the obvious actual consequence is that work on for example the cycling network effectively stopped.

But it did not stop there. A year later of the leading figures of urban design, Ludo Campbell Reid left. That was not a good sign, and indeed, a couple of month later, the rest of the urban design team got disbanded. (It was weird when a few months later a team that no longer existed could pick up an award for High Street.

Which then landed us in a situation where even trivial improvements like the cycleway on Cook Street just stopped happening.

The inner workings of this machinery is a mystery to me. Did these two teams ruffle too many feathers? Maybe there was a preemptive strike against a more progressive government? I’m curious, but I am not expecting to find out unless I get that $10,000 per year golf club membership.

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