What will it be like in 20 years if we do nothing?

  After 3 weeks in England, it is blindingly obvious that every local and regional (County) Council is asking itself the question: ‘what will our cities and towns be like in 20 years if we just do ‘business as usual’ and don’t seriously address the growing car problem?’

  Not one of the ones I’ve seen has taken the ‘build more roads’ option – the political colour of the local and national administrations seems to make liitle difference, except round the edges. I’ve seen Tory, Labour, Liberal Democrat and even one Green city administration – they are all working hard on public transport and cycling & walking solutions to ensure their communities are liveable in the future.

   One transport innovation that has the Brits justifiably enthusiastic is the newly opened ‘Cambridgeshire Guided Busway’ – the longest such in the world, with a total length of over 32kms. In an area similar in size and population to the central Waikato, the Conservative Party-led equivalent of the regional Council has developed a dedicated bus network, partly on old railway lines, linking 2 outlying commuter towns and 2 new development areas (one not yet built) to the old centre of Cambridge, the well-known University town with a 90,000 population.

  The buses travel up to 90kmh out of the city, but just use the normal bus routes and bus lanes inside Cambridge. In every respect bar the small mechanical guide wheels they are normal new buses similar to the Hamilton Orbiters (except for a couple of double-deckers, but in the first month recorded a 92% increase in passenger numbers over the last month of the routes they replaced.

  Well-used shared cycle/walkways parallel the guided busway out of the towns, linking also to a nationally important wetland area that was previously run down and almost inaccessible to the public.

Who'd live in London?

  Obviously, 9 million people - but after a hectic day with 4 appointments, not me! The train (very expensive) in from Bath was 40 mins late, the tube (underground) was massively overcrowded, dirty and hot - and closed on the line I needed to use (electrical fault), leaving me and thousands of others exiting at the wrong stop. And the train out was standing room only for hundreds of us as for the first 40 minutes.

  But, surprisingly, the taxi was cheap, and the driver friendly & fair, and the 'Cycle Superhighways' and 'Boris Bikes' (named after London's Tory Mayor Boris Johnson) were also cheap and easy to use - although I was very thankful I had a local cyclist 'guiding' me on the 4km ride we needed to make through the traffic. There are about 500 official bike docking stations, and over 6,000 hire bikes in the city, along with tens of thousands of other private bikes chained to bike racks, railings, posts and trees throughout the commercial area - sometimes I thought I was in Copenhagen!

  I also visited the central traffic control room, where about 2,000 traffic cameras, dozens of operators, traffic police, utility and emergency service co-ordinators managed all the city's traffic - actually (and very efficiently) managing to keep it from grinding to a halt - one of the operators I met was a kiwi, so that was probably why!

  All in all, however, competing with literally millions every day for footpath, road, and train space is definitely not your average kiwi's cup of tea. The fact that the London transport authorities have managed to get such a good (and growing) cycle network and infrastructure in place in the last few years is a testament to inspired political leadership, excellent staff management and clearly some community realisation that cars in such a crowded place are simply unworkable.

First impressions - after 3 days 'On the Road'

Visits to Winchester, Brighton and Portsmouth in my 1st three days in the UK have shown a few common threads.... [Pic: on-street cycle parking in central Brighton]

  1/. how much more safety-conscious in the cities people are here - all three have extensive areas of 20mph (=30kph) road speed zones in residential and central city commercial districts - something that is clearly widely bought into by the travelling public, with almost zero enforcement needed. Portsmouth - with 94% of the city covered by these slow speed zones - has recently turned off all their speed cameras, while the police are at the same time saying they don't have the resources to police the lower limits - BUT there is still no obvious speeding problem, and average speeds have dropped;
  2/. how the 1980s and 1990s privatisation of public transport has led to really high fares and an almost complete inability by local councils and communities to have any control over bus, rail and tram services, and their pricing. Already I'm hearing a common thread of complaints by staff and elected members in councils here about how difficult it is to plan for future land use and transport needs;

  3/. how much more cycling, and cycle facility provision, there is here - while the weather and traffic volumes are noticeably worse - I'll have to find out the secret of this!

  4/. How proud staff and Councillors have been about their transport initiatives, and how keen they have been to discuss them, and show them to me.

On the Road - first of a series of columns from Europe

Dave Macpherson is the recipient of a 2011 Winston Churchill Memorial Fellowship – for as study trip to the UK & The Netherlands looking at what New Zealand can learn from practical examples of good public transport systems and cycling and pedestrian facilities in medium and smaller cities and towns.

  Last month Cambridgeshire County in England saw the opening of a ‘guided busway’ network between the central city of Cambridge and the ‘necklace’ of smaller towns surrounding it – an area similar in population and structure to the central Waikato.

  The network is the newest and most advanced example in the UK of a Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system, where public transport links significant employment centres with suburbs and towns that the staff live in. Bus routes are typically separate from the main roads, or (when part of them) have dedicated bus lanes, and bus priority measures at intersections.

  In a couple of weeks I’ll be experiencing the Cambridge BRT first hand, and seeing what we can learn from both the successes and delays and cost overruns they experienced!

Brighton and Hove, on England’s South Coast, won national awards for its network of ‘home zones’ where residential and suburban streets have 20mph (30kph) speed limits, and ‘shared space’  road corridor designs that encourage pedestrian and cyclist priority use of the streets, and cars – while not ‘second class citizens’ – have to negotiate roads with care and consideration for more vulnerable users.

  In the Netherlands, I’ll be looking at the same type of place, in towns like Haren, Houten and Drachten (where the ‘shared space’ concept was born), and at the amazing network of cycling facilities that country has built up.

Some of these have been in place for 30-40 years, and have helped the Dutch develop, and accept as part of their everyday life, a whole new culture around safer use of roads, and acceptance of walking and cycling as healthier, cheaper and very often quicker means of transport.

  In Hamilton and the wider Waikato, we’ve been trialling 40kph zones outside schools, and better methods of slowing traffic in suburban streets than the old ‘hump in the middle of the road’. Until two years ago, we also had nation-leading growth in bus usage, but which has stagnated or even gone backwards recently.

  If we want to continue to be leading lights in New Zealand of transport innovation, including safer roads for all users, it is important that we learn from best practice wherever it happens – I hope my study trip will bring back a lot we can learn from.

Community organisation wins the day!

  I've attended two great events in the last two days that show the great value in communities organising for things they want or need......
  On Thursday 14th October, the Mardon Rd community successfully stopped plans for yet another suburban liquor store being plonked (so to speak) in their midst. As a successful community protest march was starting up, news came in that the public opposition to the liquor licence had caused the applicants to withdraw their application to the City Council.
  Over 1200 submissions in opposition had already been organised, and will still be delivered to the Council to reinforce a very widespread community view that there are far too many local booze shops, and that they are far too accessible for communities already suffering from the effects of a booze culture.
  Today (Friday 15th Oct) I was at the opening of the 4km Horsham Downs to Hamilton cycling/walking track - not something that either Waikato District or Hamilton City Councils had installed FOR the community, BUT a facility that the local Horsham Downs community had itself planned, fundraised and organised for, with work and materials provided by the local community.
  Hundreds of primary schoolkids from both Horsham Downs and Te Totara Primary schools attended, and showed their support for both the project (a winner of the inaugural Celia Wade-Brown active transport award) and for the Cancer Society, which the opening was fundraising for.
  Congratulations to both communities - motre power to your arms!

On Govt Cycling funding con

The NZ Transport Authority has proposed that a handful of communities around the country will be awarded ’model walking and cycling community’ status and will receive increased cycleway & walkway funding – i.e. more than the current zero! We will be applying for this for Hamilton, but it should be noted that, at best, we will only end up with the sort of subsidy level that in the past would have automatically applied to every community in New Zealand anyway – so there will be no ability to advance beyond our normal programme. Beware, if you are not building a road, there is little transport support to be expected from the Government