This is a cross-post from Bike Auckland, shared here with kind permission. It assesses progress on Auckland Transport’s November 2021 promise to install 70 km of quick, robust protection across 60 painted bike routes around Tāmaki Makaurau over a three-year time span.
According to that original plan, right now Auckland should be celebrating the completion of this bold programme, and planning the next phase. Likewise, we should all be enjoying the bike boom that ensue when cities roll out protected bike networks at scale and at pace – as well as relishing the international accolades and happy tourist TikToks.
So, three years on, how’ are we doing? And how could we do better? Read on…
In our budget-constrained environment, we need fast and affordable solutions that support more people to feel safe to cycle and scooter from A to B. Pop-up protection is a crucial part of the solution (alongside safer speeds) for filling in more of our disjointed cycle network.
You may have seen them, you may have heard of them, or you might be new to them; concrete and rubber pop-up protection is a fast and affordable way to create safe on-road cycleways.
As appreciators of the concrete “tim tam” (also known as “cameo creme”) the concrete separator, concrete protector, or occasionally its sibling, the rubber separator, we thought we’d give you an update about how things are going in the world of car-and-micromobility separation.
Some people call it the Pop-up Protection Programme; it used to be called the Minor Cycling and Micro-mobility programme; and more recently it has been renamed the Community Initiated Programme – Cycling and Micromobility Design Projects. It has been (mostly quietly) making streets safer since 2022 – and, it could be coming to your neighborhood soon.
The pop-up programme originally focused on adding protection to existing on-road painted cycleways. The idea was that because painted cycleways are already identified as cycleways and don’t allow for parking, transport agencies would be able to add protection without having to go through expensive and time-consuming processes like full public consultation.
However, lots was learned from one of the first routes on the 2021 list that Auckland Transport added protection to, including the importance of local consultation, using the right materials and layout for how the area is used, and improving other aspects of the road environment to ensure safety (such as reducing speed, improving intersections).
You can see more about what transport staff learned in this presentation from the 2WalkandCycle conference. Auckland Transport has also now approved a new type of concrete tim tam which is shorter (120mm high) and chamfered, reducing damage if it’s hit head on, and strong enough to be mounted if needed such as for rubbish truck access.
The programme’s scope has now been widened to include providing short connections between existing bike paths (even if there isn’t a painted cycleway there), and improving intersections along these routes where needed. The protection is usually installed on roads that have a large amount of motor vehicle traffic or which require more transport options due to an increase in people moving about in the near future (eg. connecting public transport stations, high density housing areas, or growing business areas).
While we love world-class high-quality bikeways like Glen Innes to Tāmaki Drive, or the Southern Corridor, pop-up cycleways are an affordable solution for providing more safe spaces for more people to travel by bike in a shorter span of time. The pop-up programme gives us some hope for a rapid roll out of cycleways somewhat similar to the ones which ‘supercharged’ numbers of people cycling in Paris, London, and Milan. [Ed: and famously, Seville!]
Where are they?
In late 2021, Auckland Transport’s original plan was to install 70 km of protection across 60 routes around Tāmaki Makaurau over a three-year time span. But, due to budget reductions and changing Auckland Transport priorities (among other reasons), as of March 2024 only 10 km of protection had been delivered across nine routes.
You might have seen some of these around, such as at:
- Ian McKinnon Drive, across the New North Road flyover to connect to the Northwestern
- Lambie Drive and Noel Burnside Drive in Manukau
- Cavendish Drive in Manukau, from Noel Burnside to Lambie Drive
- Upper Harbour Drive (rubber protection)
- Te Atatū Road
- Where did we miss? Let us know
Though Upper Harbour Drive got a large amount of attention, most of the routes with added protection have been quietly appreciated. We’ve also heard a fair bit of positive praise for the Upper Harbour protected cycleway, especially from parents and teachers who are glad to see kids cycling safely to school.
Fiáin from Bike Kingsland (who is also our Chief Biking Officer) says that Ian McKinnon Drive is now their favourite way to get to the city centre. “I’m a huge fan of the protection which popped up on the Ian McKinnon flyover. Once the concrete tim tams appeared I changed my route to include upper Ian McKinnon. I wouldn’t have chosen to regularly travel this way without the added protection.”
Other locals told us that the protection across the flyover has helped them to feel comfortable to travel between Ian McKinnon and Dominion road, an essential part of their commute.
Juan from Manukau City Bike Burb appreciates the addition of protection to the painted cycleways in Manukau. He says “I personally use the protected cycleway along Lambie Drive everyday and feel like they [the concrete tim tams] have saved my physical integrity more than once already.”
Overall, these pop-up routes are improving people’s lives, giving them access by bike and scoot to more places, and keeping them safe while they’re out and about.
Our Wishlist
We love these pop-up lanes, so our biggest wish is for lots more of them, protecting lots more cycle routes, and creating more transport options for our communities! We would also love a few improvements to make sure everyone can enjoy them:
● Wider lanes, please!
Our cycleways should be comfortable and accessible for all bike types! If they are too narrow, people using trikes, bike trailers, and cargo bikes will miss out.
The pop-up programme avoids reallocating road space as much as possible, pushing the limit in terms of minimal cycleway widths. If the road space allows for a more appropriate width, the space should be reallocated to allow for all bike types to access the cycleway.
Waka Kotahi NZTA’s inclusive cycleway design guidance note recommends that cycleways are 2.1m wide, with an absolute minimum of 1.5m width. We agree! Let’s make ’em wider, people!
● Flatten those gutters!
Gutters might be fine for a lot of bikes, but they can create a dangerous hazard for some bike types – and they can take up a lot of the bike lane real estate, narrowing the cycleway. Trikes and wheelchair bikes in particular can tip over if a gutter is on an angle.
Gutters should be flush with the road surface or should be covered, so that cycleways are accessible and safe for every bike type.
● No more surprise dead-ends
Sometimes our bike lanes end unexpectedly, often into a row of parked cars or a bridge where it was deemed ‘too hard’ to have a protected cycleway. These sudden changes can cause significant danger for people riding bikes; especially if people driving aren’t aware that the cycleway is ending and that people on bikes are going to end up back in the general traffic lane.
Let’s put an end to dangerous dead-ends please!
● Clean up in aisle 4
We love our cycle paths, and they need to be kept clean so that they are safe to ride. Glass and debris in cycleways can make them unsafe and unappealing. If they aren’t swept regularly enough people start to avoid them instead of using them. And, it’s important that any litter that has blown onto our cycle paths is collected before it gets into the ocean.
There is a pretty cute vehicle which sweeps our cycleways. Have you seen it? Anyone snapped a photo?
Our city centre cycleways and key high-cycle-traffic routes are supposedly swept daily. Other cycle routes are on monthly sweeping cycles. If a cycleway is outside a bar or under trees which drop lots of leaves or seeds, it will require more regular sweeping to keep it in a safe and usable condition. If an issue is reported on a cycleway, such as glass, it will be bumped up the list and swept sooner (find out how to report an issue here).
Although community clean-ups are a beautiful response to this issue (check out Bike Eastern Suburbs‘ ‘Love Your Path’ events), our cycleways should be on sweeping schedules that are appropriate for the environment they are in, and which are regular enough that they are safe and appealing for people to ride.
More regular and location-appropriate sweeping for all our cycleways please!
Most of all, we want more pop up cycleways so we can be safer, smarter, sooner!
Do you love your local pop up protection? Want some to appear in your neighbourhood? Let your local board and Council representatives know, and tag us in on social media @bikeakl
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I fell off my bike into the middle of the road due to one of those plastic ones on Sandringham Road. It was the only one in ages (I think the others had fallen off), and I was looking over my shoulder to see if it was safe to move to the centre to turn, and rode over it. This is the issue with budget solutions, it might be fine for a year but then its more of a hazard than a safety feature.
I disagree. I prefer any protection to none. However, a sample size of 2 is not statistically significant. I’m sure someone has done the math.
I’m still amazed that East Coast Rd and Rosedale Rd on the Shore still have unprotected cycleways. They connect several of the largest schools in the country on some very busy roads. Surely a no brainer given that the painted lanes are there already? (Would also add Beach Rd from Browns Bay up to East Coast Rd; painted but not protected)
I’m not surprised. The Shore is definitely the poor relation when it comes to anything to do with bikes.
Some of the problems with existing painted cycle lanes is that they do not have enough kerb-to-kerb width to be able to add the separators to the cycle lanes and traffic lanes. This is real problem as these routes are often the ones deserving better protection. Roads can sometimes be repainted after surfacing to make lane widths sufficient with a painted buffer. This can allow for separators to be added when budget is available.
The current government has explicitly told Councils they are not allowed to include safer cycling/pedestrian infrastructure during funded road maintenance/renewals.
That is a pretty brazen way of making a proper bike lane network illegal.
Totally agree – plus some consistent infrastructure on Oteha Valley road. Filled out AT’s bike survey yesterday and asked for exactly that.
Talking of schools. Orewa College, Orewa School, Orewa Beach, and Red Beach are all within Cooke of each other. The terrain is mostly flat, and streets wide. Absolutely perfect for a packets of Tim Tams.
Bloody predictive text. Cooee, not cooke.
10 out of 70km! Where was the accountability for AT delivering so poorly against a plan?
I wonder how this compares to the planned sealing of gravel roads in rural Auckland.
Most of our roads are very unpleasant for bike riding, particularly if you take into account the particulates that are farted out the back of our combustible machines, which is likely to be reducing our life expectation, and our children’s brain development.
This is not the riders of bikes fault however, this is the resistance to change amongst the motor normatives.
It is a long road to salvation, but we are going to win, because my parents survived Muldoon, and my kids will survive Simple Simeon.
Our truly amazing infrastructure investments are still in place, and appreciated by the bike / skateboard and pedestrianised population very well. Of course you need a car to arrive to many of these, particularly when the train is not functioning, so we still have decades before the private motor vehicle can be consigned to history, where it belongs.
Concrete does stop things, and the more concrete blocks / concrete planters that we install, the safer our city becomes for us, and our kids.
As we can see, Wellington is becoming less relevant, Auckland has a football team in the Australian league, which basically removes every claim that Wellington had to some degree of superiority over us.
We are bigger, and we are better, and we will decide how this country moves into the modern world. Hopefully with apartments, trams, and all the good things from the last few hundred years, minus the smelly fart mobiles!
bah humbug
> Where did we miss? Let us know
New Lynn received tim-tams along both sides of Clark Street between Portage rd and Totara ave. I use these lanes regularly, they connect nicely to a lot of shops, Rankin ave shared path, and the New Lynn to Avondale path.
There were a stack of tim-tams left roadside for a few months, and I hoped they would be used to fill in the gap on Portage road down to the railway crossing, but that didn’t happen, they just disappeared.
Unfortunately with the many driveways and bus stops on Clark street, the tim-tams are a bit sporadic, and I don’t consider them good enough to ride with my six year-old on their own bike.
Yes! Love tim-tams, quick easy win solution for faster cycleway network.
Need some around Mt Wellington/Ellerslie/Otahuhu areas…and all of Auckland basically.
An easy win one is in the curvy bit of Penrose Rd that currenlty had wide as single lanes with not hugely necessary painted median and some on-street parking the latter that is very seldom used.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/6rGNSEyq4LnKA2mL7
10kms of protected cycleway – Wahooo !!!
10kms of scrolling through all the internet posts on the merits or otherwise.
Is 10kms of cycleway enough to warrant a cycling team at Auckland Transport ?
We could extend by 10% this distance over night with a few liberating road cones on the Auckland Harbour Bridge. Who knows what internet outrage that could cause.
“Is 10kms of cycleway enough to warrant a cycling team at Auckland Transport ?”
Well, you may be surprised that the cycle team got disestablished (and then slowly re-established) during the timeframe.
And believe me, the active modes team in AT are not the ones you should be blaming. They have to fight their own organisation for permission to as much as breathe loudly. When all your bosses’ support is super-conditional, and other agencies are often actively hostile, you need some passion for cycling to stay in that team.
When you have to fight every manager, every subject matter expert, have an unanimous support from every politician and your project can still be cancelled if one person is loud enough. It doesn’t matter if you have 70-80% of the community supporting you, you can’t build anything because it is not a 100% support. And if you touch parking, it is over.
The Upper Harbour Drive debacle really was the absolute nadir of NIMBY anti cycling nonsense
Actual adult humans outing themselves as too incompetent to drive safely enough to not smash into concrete barriers that were literally there to stop them driving into cyclists
I still struggle to comprehend how big a drama it was
I think the number of crashes (as discussed in the linked presentation) does indicate something more than that – after all, Vision Zero also goes the other way. Drivers DO make mistakes, because they are human. So just because drivers tend to come off much better in a cycling VS driving safety and crash context doesn’t mean we should disregard their issues with a design.
It just showed that a road where higher speeds occur needs to be treated differently when protecting bike (and I am not saying that means cycle protection needs to be “softer” or “lesser” – just that you either need more space, or slower speeds if you want to go for the heavy concrete stuff.
What really disappointed me (but not surprised, not after a decade of cycle advocacy, albeit I was just dropping out of that at the time this happened) was the way in which these things tend to feed a culture war. Actually feel AT seem to have done reasonably well in their response there…
Absolutely agree. I really respect that AT stayed firm on keeping some kind of protection along their corridor (no doubt some furious advocating inside the organisation to allow for that to happen). It’s great that there is still a cycleway along that stretch, providing protection for people to ride from A to B.
Was there a point where the width between those concrete barriers dropped to something narrow like 5 metres?
hi, awesome that things are improving despite the minister Simeon Slytherin Brown doing everything in his power to stop people from both cycling and walking. Two words though.. Lincoln Rd, the poor cousin from out west. It’s great that there is an alternative bypass route via Central Park Drive but cyclists , and pedestrians , also want to travel up and down Lincoln Rd to go any of the numerous places along it’s mile long strip. 95% of those cyclists cycle on the footpath and two of the major intersections, Central Park Drive /Lincoln Rd/ Royal Rd, and Universal Drive still have unsafe slip lanes with no pedestrian crossings. And , theoretically, it is still illegal to cycle on the footpaths. On top of that you’re contending with numerous driveways to shops which many drivers still straddle making it a somewhat perilous journey. The plans to upgrade Lincoln Rd have been in place for some years now, with a decent plan to have a planted median strip, cycle lanes and u turn bends like the ones that work so seamlessly in Australia. They were very nearly ready to go but unfortunately Lincoln rd, is constantly put on the back burner when something has to be cut. With S. Brown as transport Minister he would no doubt change them to car centric plans if it happened in his tenure anyway. As I understand it two cyclists have been killed at the Universal drive intersection over the last few years. Tragic and not to be overlooked in safety plans surely. Not long ago AT put in raised pedestrian crossings at Te Pai, Lincoln Rd intersection. This has made little difference to motorists who , surely, have to slow down anyway, but a massive difference to cyclists and the hundreds of netball players who use these courts every day. It is just wonderful to be able to cross safely there instead of running when there is a gap. It is sad to see AT not make the same effort at the Universal and Central Park drive intersections, especially when the NZTA website states slip lanes are categorically unsafe unless removed, have traffic lights, or have a raised pedestrian crossing.
Carlton Gore Rd cycle lane is in desperate need of separation from traffic. It’s not part of my everyday type, yet I’ve had more crashes and near misses with cars there than anywhere else, and it’s a rare time I cycle it and see less than 2 or 3 cars double-parked in the cycle lane, turning across it without looking or just driving into it. The problem though is the number of driveways and the land being between car parking and traffic lanes…..
Ooh yeah it is ridiculous down there, I commute through there regularly and I know exactly what you mean. People drive like complete loons when they’re cruising for street parking.
Oh lord, now I want to eat tim tams, can someone think of another nickname ?