Hard News: The Cycle Frolic
59 Responses
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Ciclovia is a very exciting event, and hate to be a downer, but not good timing.
This is a rail network closure weekend, so no trains on Western, Eastern or between Newmarket and Britomart. This has been long planned, so organisers should have looked this up. and also can't be next weekend because of NRL nines, Lantern festival which means definitely need trains that weekend.
Irony will now be most people driving into the city to enjoy a car free bike ride.
Also pity the people that will turn up expecting to be able to take bikes on trains, and being told they can't, or get dumped at Newmarket and have to cycle along busy roads to Quay St.
Should be seeing the end of these closures soon, inevitable but events need to be planned around them! -
trains haven't operated on the weekends for a long time due to the electrification work, which whilst necessary is very painful for those wishing to attend the many and varied events or just come into the city in the weekend
with the rise in interest in cycling whomever makes/sells those car bike racks in NZ is onto a winner, shame that really
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Ray Gilbert, in reply to
trains haven't operated on the weekends for a long time due to the electrification work
Closures are staggered - only every second weekend for the next couple of months according to AT website. However there are no trains or replacments at all to the Waitakere stop on Sundays, something I think is a bit of a shame as it is a good place to alight for cyclists trying to avoid the city rush on their way to ride in the country.
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A good friend of mine was knocked off his bike yesterday, and spent the night in a serious but stable condition in Auckland Hospital. A few weeks ago I would have considered it a tragedy. Now I consider it a tragedy which Auckland Council (the ultimately responsible organisation) have failed to prevent.
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This excellent release about the health benefits of cycling has just come out this morning from Auckland University too.
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/AK1402/S00092/long-term-benefits-of-cycling-investment.htm
Great to see it joining the chorus of people calling for separated cycleways. -
Following on from my OIA requests to ACC and the Police, I got a response from ACC today.
The promptness of the response aside, it was interesting to see that over the three years (2010-2012) for which hospitalisation figures are available there were only 14 hospitalisations for cyclist/pedestrian collisions. For 2008-2012 there were a total of 45 claims to ACC for cyclist/pedestrian collisions. I've gone back to ask if it's possible to correlate them to whether one or both parties claimed for a given collision.
And, unsurprisingly, fatalities from cyclist/pedestrian collisions over 2008-2012 were zero.What's clear is that cyclists are not the danger. The danger is motor vehicles. Whatever can be done to improve the safety of cyclists will also benefit pedestrians, if only because it will provide better separation between pedestrians and motor vehicles.
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Thanks Russell for publicising Ciclovia.
You said: "A Ciclovía – the word means “bike path” in Spanish – is a kind of riding fair, where the road is closed to cars and we all may trundle safely and freely where we please. "
Can I suggest another image? The road is open to bikes, scooters, horse riders, skaters, mobility scooters etc, everything but cars. We can think of this not as a closure, but instead as an opening!
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Russell Brown, in reply to
We can think of this not as a closure, but instead as an opening!
Nice image. I shall bear it in mind.
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Coming to Wellington as well.
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Craig Ranapia, in reply to
This is a rail network closure weekend, so no trains on Western, Eastern or between Newmarket and Britomart.
Details of the rail replacement bus services this weekend are on the Auckland Transport website here.
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I'm a cyclist. I bike to work more often than not and I really enjoy doing it. But, having said that, it's damn dangerous and I fully understand why many won't do it.
Commonsense, and this bikecam footage, suggests that I should reconsider.
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kris_b, in reply to
Rail bus replacements are of course no use in this case anyway, since you can't take your bike on a bus.
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Brodie Davis, in reply to
Have you sent the stats to the guys at transportblog? they would probably be able to make a post out of it (for their mythbusting segments).
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Matthew Poole, in reply to
Have you sent the stats to the guys at transportblog?
I'm waiting for the Police to come back about reported incidents, since that'll be a different angle on things. They've got a little while yet. My follow-up to ACC about particular parties has to be a full formal request, too, and may not even be able to be answered, so it'll be a while on that too.
Once I've got all the responses I'll put it together electronically (ACC emailed, but as an image PDF so I have to do some work to get the numbers out) and then let the Transport Blog guys have at it. -
Craig Ranapia, in reply to
Rail bus replacements are of course no use in this case anyway, since you can’t take your bike on a bus.
You can on the ferries, and I understand most of the buses on Waiheke have bike racks. But it wouldn’t hurt anyone to suggest to Auckland Transport that would a useful piece of kit to make standard on new and upgraded fleet. (IIRC, Wellington and Christchurch have run pilots but don't know if that's gone anywhere.)
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bbrooks, in reply to
...or you can ask them to send it to you in a different format. They're required to provide the information in your prefered format unless there are good reasons not to (refer them to s16(2) if they give you any trouble). Although, to be clear, they don't have to create anything (i.e. if it isn't in an excel file they don't have to create one).
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The rail network closure thing is wildly frustrating: I'd just worked out how my whole family could make it to Ciclovia with our bikes: we can bike to the Mt Albert station and then emerge at Britomart straight into open-street-paradise. And then home again at the end of the day.
(Sure, the fittest/biggest of us could bike all the way into town and home again, but it's a huge ask for kids, and there's no route I'd be entirely comfortable taking an 8 year old on.)
A more forward-thinking city apparatus would have seen the conflict coming, and arranged a fleet of buses with bike trailers setting off from train stations and town centres around the city at designated times, and returning again at the end of the day...
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The Rock to Rock annual community bike ride across New Haven always had a shuttle vehicle to return people and their bikes to the start of the ride if they were unable to go the distance themselves. Something like this would do the trick.
Or I suppose we could all leave our own bikes at home and queue for a go on one of these... of which there are ten.
Anyone know at what point bike racks will be added to Auckland buses?
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Business in Auckland today. Suddenly struck me, taxiing back to the airport, how there are no cycle lanes on Pah Rd or similar arteries the way that there are on Harewood, Memorial Ave etc in Christchurch. There's room for them -- cut back some berm and put them on the far side of the parked cars.
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Martin Lindberg, in reply to
Anyone know at what point bike racks will be added to Auckland buses?
Never as far as I know.
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A more in-depth analysis of what I've got so far:
Total injury claims made to ACC for the period 2008-2012* for collisions involving some combination of motor vehicle and/or bicycle and/or pedestrian: 7,657
Injuries claims made to ACC as the result of a collision between a pedestrian and a bicycle over that period: 45, or 0.59% of the total.Total hospitalisation claims made to ACC for the period 2010-2012* for collisions involving some combination of motor vehicle and/or bicycle and/or pedestrian: 1,853
Hospitalisation claims made to ACC as the result of a collision between a pedestrian and a bicycle over that period: 14, or 0.76% of the total.Total fatalities for the period 2008-2012* involving the same combinations: 195
Fatalities involving a collision between a pedestrian and a bicycle over the period 2008-2012: 0, or 0.00% of the total.Normalising the periods for injuries and fatalities to match hospitalisation's 2010-2012, we get 25/4,471 injury claims (0.56%) and 0/115 fatalities.
Note that I do not know which party claimed for a given combination of pedestrian/cyclist.
*different years of available data for different kinds of claims.
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Matthew Poole, in reply to
or you can ask them to send it to you in a different format.
The analysis I just posted has taken me an hour, including transcribing the data across to Excel, doing the calculations, checking on my sleeping infant son, and writing up this post through a laborious draft process that included checking the snark factor for my FB version of it (FB comments having given rise to the OIAs in the first place). Asking ACC to change the format would have taken much longer to get a result, and the volume of data is so tiny (six tables, five columns in four, three in the other two, four rows including the header in each) that I just didn't see the point.
If they'd sent me an image PDF of pages and pages of numbers, that would have been a different story. -
Matthew Poole, in reply to
back to the airport, how there are no cycle lanes on Pah Rd or similar arteries
On the main 50km bicycle circuit that runs out to the airport, there is not a single dedicated bicycle lane along either of the main roads that run to/from the airport. There are quite wide shoulders, but they're shoulders not bicycle lanes. There're some shared bus/bicycle lanes in a couple of spots along Great South Road, but they're also not dedicated bicycle lanes. Auckland just does not do quality bicycle infrastructure, historically. That's gradually improving, in places, but with a marked out 50km route that has pretty much no bicycle infrastructure you get some idea of how seriously it's being taken.
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jb,
The Germans – as ever – have a word for this: Tal Total – “All of the valley”.
An annual event (29 June this year), it closes the federal highways on BOTH sides of the Rhine valley between Koblenz-Bingen and Lahnstein-Rüdesheim between 9am and 5pm and hands over 120km to cyclists and skaters.
They also have Fahrradstraßen – bikes only, motorised vehicles only for access (and not always).
And heaps of cycle lanes, of course. I live in a village 10km distant from a state capital and I can get into town with total separation from cars via sealed farm tracks and then cycle lanes.
And no helmet laws, either… -
Lilith __, in reply to
Rail bus replacements are of course no use in this case anyway, since you can’t take your bike on a bus.
You can on the ferries, and I understand most of the buses on Waiheke have bike racks. But it wouldn’t hurt anyone to suggest to Auckland Transport that would a useful piece of kit to make standard on new and upgraded fleet. (IIRC, Wellington and Christchurch have run pilots but don’t know if that’s gone anywhere.)
Buses on most Chch bus routes always carry bike racks* which hold up to 2 bikes each. It’s a fantastic service, giving a wide range of options. For those like me who have a bit of a walk to the nearest bus, it means I can bike there quick, get the bus, and then tootle around at the destination of my choice. Fantastic.
*there are some exceptions, which I don’t really understand, but you can see the little bike icon next to almost all the routes here: http://www.metroinfo.co.nz/timetables/Pages/default.aspx
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