25.11.16

The Editor,

North Shore Times.

Letter to the Editor. Cycling Questions.

Firstly, may I congratulate your two correspondents (Kit O’Halloran and Henry Toung) for their thoughtful analyses of Auckland Transport’s harebrained, unsubstantiated proposals “safe cycling” proposals for Northcote Point.

What is particularly telling is Mr O’Halloran’s testimony about AT’s proposal because he is both a keen cyclist and a former traffic engineer of North Shore City and he knows ‘the Point’ extremely well. When an experienced traffic engineer disagrees with AT proposals and his cycling friends agree, something is radically wrong.

Mr Toung points out strongly the nonsensical figures produced by the proponents of the Skypath to further their project, and rthe ongoing costs of the Skypath folly, along with the costs of mushrooming and largely unused ‘cycleways’ all around the region, ratepayers should surely support much stronger arguments and information from AT and our elected Councillors to justify the costs of these developments.

I would be particularly interested in seeing an independent cost/benefit analysis of all benefits and disbenefits of per kilometre of roadway vs per kilometre of cycleway vis a vis per capita usage.

This should also include the costs of extra pollution caused by squeezing and slowing road traffic resulting from  the advent of cycleway impacts and switching of funding to cycleways.