When good intentions paved the road to gridlock: New Zealand’s cycleway saga

Hawke's Bay's cycleways started with Rotary spreading some basecourse on a stopbank.

  I used to cycle across town to school without a second thought about safety. The roads were shared space, drivers watched out for cyclists, and common sense prevailed. That was before cycling became an industry.

  The transformation began innocuously enough. In 1994, New Zealand made helmets compulsory for all cyclists—a well-intentioned safety measure that research now shows may have backfired spectacularly. Cycling participation plummeted by 51% in the following years, yet injury rates per hour cycled actually increased by 20%. We made cycling “safer” by driving cyclists off the road.

  But the real cycleway story begins in Hawke’s Bay, where Rotary clubs, driven by genuine community spirit, laid basecourse along river stopbanks to create New Zealand’s first dedicated cycleways. These were charity-funded projects—volunteers putting in the hard yards because they saw value in connecting communities. The Rotary Pathway Trust, formed in 2002, wasn’t chasing government grants or consultant fees. They were simply building something useful.

  Then came the 2009 Jobs Summit. Prime Minister John Key, grasping for stimulus projects during the Global Financial Crisis, announced a $50 million national cycleway—originally pitched as a continuous route from Cape Reinga to Bluff. It was the 21st “surprise” item of the summit, and critics were right to be surprised. As Labour’s Kelvin Davis later noted, the Cabinet paper contained “absolutely no rigorous—or even token—cost-benefit analysis.”

  That announcement changed everything. Suddenly, cycleway lobby groups sprouted throughout the country, competing for their share of the money. What had been an altruistic, community-driven model became a government-funded consultant bonanza. A whole new bureaucracy emerged, setting standards for cycleways and requiring business cases that, as we’ve since learned, were often based on wildly optimistic projections.

  The Auckland Transport report obtained by the Herald revealed what many suspected: cycle demand was overestimated in business cases for the Quay Street, Nelson Street, Grafton Gully, and Beach Road cycleways. The Nelson Street cycleway predicted 986 daily cyclists but counted just 333. Two projects went over budget and may not have been economically viable. The report suggested possible reasons included “exaggerated data to improve business cases to give a favourable cost-benefit analysis.”

  This is where the urban cycleway experiment went catastrophically wrong. Councils began replacing vehicle lanes and parking spaces with bicycle lanes, imposing massive costs on ratepayers and local businesses. Wellington’s Brooklyn Hill cycleway reduced a busy three-lane road to a single uphill lane—the same road constantly used by heavily-laden trucks. The cycleway sits mostly deserted while vehicles queue behind slow-moving trucks.

Moleworth Street used to be a two lane feeder to the motorway. Now it is a congested single file with less parking for once popular pubs and businesses.

  In Wellington’s Karori, 21 car parks were removed from Chaytor Street for cycleways that remain empty 98% of the time, as local residents report. Parking outside the Botanic Gardens has disappeared, making it harder for families and elderly visitors to access what was once a vibrant recreational area. Businesses along Thorndon Quay saw 72 car parks replaced with parallel parking to accommodate cycleways—and subsequently faced mortgagee sales.

  The Petone cycleway epitomizes the consultant culture disaster. Originally forecast at $50 million for the entire Wellington-to-Hutt route in 2015, the Petone section alone ballooned to $63 million—including a million-dollar “clerical error.” Planners forgot to allow for coordination with KiwiRail, quality assurance, or even a contingency fund. Contaminated land cost ten times more than expected. The cost-benefit ratio collapsed from 1.2 to just 0.6—meaning taxpayers lose 40 cents for every dollar invested.

  Then there’s the Auckland Skypath saga—a masterclass in how the consultant model fleeces taxpayers. Bevan Woodward founded the Skypath Trust with an innovative vision. NZTA paid the trust $1.8 million for engineering designs and intellectual property in December 2019, then promptly developed their own design from scratch, renaming it the “Northern Pathway.” Costs exploded from $67 million in 2018 to $240 million, before the Government finally pulled funding. A benefit-cost ratio below 0.4 confirmed what critics knew: the project was “stupidly expensive” and economically indefensible.

  Woodward didn’t disappear. He renamed his trust “Movement” and has since led legal challenges against the Government’s reversal of lower speed limits—fighting to maintain the very restrictions that make cycling in hilly, windy cities even less practical for the average person.

  The pattern is clear: cycleways work brilliantly where they belong. The Hawke’s Bay Trails, Otago Central Rail Trail, and the Great Rides on basecourse through stunning scenery are tourism and recreation successes. They didn’t require demolishing existing infrastructure or creating artificial demand through traffic restriction.

  But forcing cycleways into already-congested cities with undulating terrain—particularly Auckland, with its hills that even ebike riders struggle against—is urban planning folly. Hastings’ Havelock Road now devotes more space to bicycles than vehicle traffic, despite vastly disproportionate usage. Throughout New Zealand, the story repeats: deserted cycleways alongside congested vehicle lanes.

  The “Greater Auckland” and “The Spinoff” crowd can spin their theories about induced demand and mode shift all they like. The evidence speaks louder than their ideology: Auckland cycling mode share remains stuck at just 1.2% of work trips despite massive infrastructure investment. Meanwhile, removing traffic lanes in Wellington hasn’t encouraged cycling—it’s created ghost towns in business districts.

  We crossed a line somewhere between community-built paths and consultant-designed social engineering. The scales tipped when we replaced volunteers with bureaucrats, charity with government dependency, and common sense with cost-benefit models manipulated to justify predetermined conclusions.

  New Zealand needs cycleways—the right cycleways, in the right places. Off-road trails for recreation and tourism. Separated paths where genuinely safe routes can be created without sacrificing vehicle capacity. But we must abandon the fantasy that we can transform our hilly, weather-beaten cities into Amsterdam through sheer political will and ratepayer money.

  It’s time to return to first principles: build what works, where it works, and stop forcing square pegs into round holes while calling it “progress.” Our city centres are dying, congestion is worsening, and empty bike lanes mock us as we sit in traffic queues. The good idea went horribly wrong when the consultants arrived.