The streets are for everyone, so why are they closed to so many of us and why is it so hard to get them open? Jess Berentson-Shaw keeps getting on her bike despite the dangers in hope of a different reality.
At 10.15am on a dull Wednesday morning I found myself in tears while watching a live stream of the Wellington City Council meeting. Perhaps it is not all that unusual for people to become emotional in the staid beige meeting rooms where democracy is done and often not done. It is, after all, where decisions are made, using the similarly beige and neutralised language of modern power, that shape our lives, our health, our wellbeing. And those decisions have real impacts.
I cried that morning because yet again people who deeply care about our communities’ wellbeing, our planet's wellbeing, were having to plead to local body councillors to do the right thing for all of us in relation to our streets, our cities, and our transport. Because I was tired, tired that people have to display their pain (often injuries) to ask for the changes that are critical for our wellbeing. Frustrated and angry because our current decision-making systems have been designed to prioritise the short-term fears and inaccurate assumptions of a few individuals over the long-term benefits to all of us, especially our children.
I cried because it should not be this hard for citizens, now and into the future, to be cared for by people in their governments.
But also I was hopeful. Hopeful and incredibly grateful for all those people who turn up over and over again, year after year on their own time, to demand that citizens are cared for. And that is what was happening in that beige meeting room on Level 7 of the Terrace on a rainy Wednesday morning. Citizens were engaging in hope.
A petition about angle parking that represents a lot more
What was being presented to that council meeting was a petition to change the angle parks on Thorndon Quay to parallel parks because of the extreme danger that people in cars create for all the people riding their bikes into Wellington and home again. There were presentations from the various petitioners, the usual awkward tech problems with microphones, a few uncomfortable laughs.
One of the petitioners was Dr David Tripp. He is part of a coalition of doctors in Wellington advocating for a transport system that centres our health and wellbeing over cars and car parks. David had, as you would expect, a lot of research proving the multiple benefits that come from cities where most people can ride, walk, tricycle (yes, tricycles are awesome for people with limited mobility) around the places they live. Yet the most compelling thing about David’s presentation (and you can watch it here at 43 mins in) was that he made a powerful case that opening our streets to people on bikes, walking, riding trikes, etc., is about justice for people.
When it is just too hard and harmful to walk and cycle through our streets as a child, as a disabled person, as a person with limited mobility, or a person with a healthy respect for their safety, and when money is put above this need then our own streets are for all intents and purposes closed to many of us. And that is not just. These streets are for all of us.
Why are our streets closed to so many of us and why is it proving so hard to get them open?
David made an off-the-cuff comment during his presentation that really grabbed me. Paraphrasing, he said people in government, including in our transport-specific organisations, have been chaining themselves to every car and car park for years. In effect, they have refused to open our streets to children, to disabled people, to women who have different needs when using bikes, to those people who would like the option to walk and bike.
The mechanisms through which this chaining to carparks happens vary, but our current legislation is not helping.
Currently every change to every single car park has to be consulted on under the various local government and transport acts. The practical effect of this is huge, endless consultations, reworking of plans, opportunities to lobby individual councillors by business owners. The justice effect is that the opinion of one (usually) shop owner on a car park change is weighed against the measured wellbeing of all citizens. These requirements to consult can hold up or even completely tank entire infrastructure programmes designed to open streets for people on bikes or walking. Those opinions are often driven by fear of a loss of money (which evidence has time and time again proven unfounded). This is neither just nor common sense. This legislation is one thing that needs to change to help unlock people in government from being chained to carparks and cars.
But changing that legislation means that those with the means to do so have to believe it is needed. And we still have many people in power, including in our transport agencies, who simply find it hard to see past cars and private vehicles as a way to get around.
The case of evaporating traffic
Too many people with the means to change legislation and open our streets are concerned that it will make traffic issues worse. They believe that the loud noisy opposition represents most people (or the most important) or that people will not use the infrastructure that is built, for example, an integrated cycle network. An integrated cycle network is when a city has a joined up, comprehensive and protected set of cycleways all over a city that move people on bikes around safely and efficiently without coming into contact with people in cars – a bit like how our veins move blood and oxygen around our bodies in a closed system.
These misunderstandings from people with the means to make the biggest difference is why so many advocates are running themselves ragged trying to prove what has already been proven: build cycleways and they will come, slow down traffic and children have freedom, open streets and people thrive.
The low traffic neighbourhood trial in Onehunga is an amazing trial that opens streets to kids to walk and ride to school. It is having real benefits, but from the outside looks like it has been set up to fail by the institutions who should be backing it. This is a massive complex piece of local implementation, that appears to have little formal support at the sort of level and over the sort of timescale that is needed. This is to both help local people experience the benefits of a change they may find tricky at first, and also needed to ensure the people running it get out alive. Too many good people are being sacrificed at the altar of politics and opinions in these processes to achieve mode shift.
A shift has to be made, the people running our cities and transport system need to deepen their thinking and understand that, with good planning and a commitment to what I would call transport justice, opening our streets will help traffic to evaporate. Better still it will mean our cities really thrive. Kids get to walk and cycle their way around their own cities again. People can get to work, to shops in ways that are healthy for them. Businesses will have both people who work in them and people who frequent them turning up in various modes of transport that keep them well and out of hospitals. It just makes so much bloody good sense.
I left for work before that council meeting on Thorndon Quay ended (I heard later the council agreed to the proposed parking change but it needed to go back out for consultation...). I got on my bike and experienced the usual and mundane threats to my life – a young woman swerved right across two lanes of traffic and cut me off to get to a park, a bus came too close to be safe, etc., etc. I continue to ride because I don't want my own streets to be closed to me. It is a stubborn refusal to accept the current reality I suppose. But it is also an act of hope that a different reality is possible. And our leaders can help create it – not just for me, but for all those children and adults who cannot currently see their streets as being a place for them. Because one day I know they will be.
