Do it today if you've still got it, Waka Kotahi. I dare you. I double dare you.
Diary of the last 10 hours and years. You cannot change the laws of physics, but you can wonder how it could take so very very long to get to this point
7.20am
The bridge we stormed by bicycle twelve years ago is on the front page of this morning’s Auckland newspaper. The news is a little bit extremely disappointing. No Skypath for you, bike hippies, is what Waka Kotahi appears to be saying, or rather declining to expressly confirm.
However! There is also, as you sift through it all, hope.
You may know the Skypath, from earlier exciting reports, as the climate-friendly-clipon that was going to make it possible to cross the harbour bridge on a bike, if that's the kind of fringe kink you're into.
Now, after a series of delays and changed plans, it's sounding, walking and talking like a dead duck.
Waka Kotahi is the organisation responsible for building roads and maybe thinking about a future where those things are not a climate menace.
We have reached this point of clarity not because Waka Kotahi has deployed its mighty communications resources to let us know, but rather because there has been some determined questioning and challenging by Bike Auckland and adroit reporting by Simon Wilson.
The upshot is: this thing may not go ahead because they feel the bridge is no longer up to taking the load of any further steel.
Okay, you cannot change the laws of physics, but you can wonder how it could take so very very long to get to this point. It’s almost as though certain people who love the smell of tarseal in the morning (actual quote of a senior AT manager) kind of sort of figured if they let it drag and drag and drag, it might end up dying of thirst.
But be not cast down, dispossessed and persecuted tribe of two-wheelers! I bring you good news! Or rather MTAF reader Simon - Hi Simon! - does, in his excellent aforementioned newspaper story. It appears that at least two possibilities remain very much alive.
STILL-ALIVE POSSIBILITY NUMBER ONE
Give bikes the far left hand lane of the bridge - the side that looks out to the Chelsea sugar factory. You just need barriers to separate the lane from the other traffic. Hell, you could even just paint it green, we grin and bear that cheapo option all in many other parts of the city already. You’d need some access ramps, and you'd be coming off at Northcote, so you'd still have to sort out the bit that gets you from there to Takapuna; but one thing at a time.
Can’t be done quickly? I wonder, I really do. One further shout out to Simon: a nice observation in his column the other day about moving the port to Whangarei, I hope I recall correctly. Vast objections were mounted about the sheer vast scale of upgrading the rail line that would be entailed: Oh no, dear me, no, out of the question.
But then what do you know! they find they need to get the line open and all of a sudden they find a way to make it work in just months and at a not-by-any-means undue cost.
Dare to dream, Waka Kotahi. You open that lane up tonight and I’ll be on it! Well, not tomorrow. But absolutely in four weeks time, once I'm allowed to put my prostate back on a bike.
But don't wait for me, do it today if you've still got it, Waka Kotahi. I dare you. I double dare you.
The crowd of e-bike riders of this city is swelling, held back only by the shops that can keep up with demand. We love to ride this way. We are leaving our cars behind, and we are happily gladly making the kind of trips that can take you from one side of the city to the other. What we really, really lack, is a bridge.
Once, twelve years ago, I got all these people to sing happy birthday to a bridge and then we all stormed the bastard, after I'd expressly said to them over the bullhorn please don't do that. I've got plenty of appetite for more ineffectual rabble rousing, so let's start with clicking a button. Here: click yes if you care at all about the climate crisis.
Yeah I know: unreasonable emotional blackmail. But this is where you end up when the institutions entrusted with spending our money wisely just keep building more roads so that people in their SUVs and Rangers can go on gridlocking and emitting fumes and listening to Mike and Pete and Baz say: what's wrong with leaving things the way they are, and: shut up I’m eating.
As for Waka Kotahi, you reach a point in making these arguments when you stop patiently setting out why moving people out of cars is good for the planet and for everybody because, is it not beyond all doubt to a reasonable and informed thinker at this point? It feels less like why don't they get it and more like God, they really don't want to, do they? What the actual fuck is wrong with them?
There you go, Simon, I put in the bit that newspapers don’t like to print.
So. That's option one. What’s option two?
STILL-ALIVE POSSIBILITY NUMBER TWO
Here's the, shall we say, money shot from the minister.
A new bridge, even restricted to cycling and walking, would be expensive. [Transport Minister] Michael] Wood said that wasn't necessarily an issue. "Major assets will always require an investment and this Government is committed to a quality outcome for cycling and walking over the Waitematā harbour."
He said that wasn't necessarily an issue.
I’m laminating that and putting it in the pool room above the blueprints for my cherished Waitemata harbour underwater pedestrian tunnel.
Come with me now as I cut and paste stuff I’ve written before and let's see if I can condense it down to just the most hugely exciting bits.
Why not have an underwater tunnel where we can cross from one side to the other at will on foot, scooter or on bike?
Tunnels are not just for trains and automobiles. They can be for happy people doing stuff like we did in lockdown, walking, biking, scooting from one point to another.
They can be made with immersed tubes. An immersed tube is a kind of modular undersea tunnel. You construct chunks of it elsewhere, you float the chunk to the tunnel site, sink it into place, link all the chunks together, gasket them up tight as a drum and there you go.
You could have it at the shortest point between Devonport and the city. That would be about 800 metres, by the look of it, from the Devonport ferry terminal to Bledisloe Wharf.
That tunnel could be taking a whole lot of human non-car traffic and if you have your doubts about that, here, come stand with me outside the railway station in Amsterdam. Holy mackerel look at all those fucking bicycles. The future is coming and it's full of e-bikes.
What would this magnificent vision cost? I asked my friend Vic-the-very-experienced-engineer to get his roughest ballpark estimate down on the back of a napkin and don't worry how rough as guts it is mate I won't use your name and he told me:
Very much an estimated guess as there are no tunnels of this type in NZ. CRL rail tunnel is around $1B per km which includes stations. Ballpark for immersed tunnel - 500 to 700 million per km.
Sold. I imagine a day, not too far from here, where things are different and better, where we have moved on from one person, one car and a thousand awful journeys. I would very much like to see us put 500-700 million up for an immersed pedestrian tunnel beneath the Waitematā.
Cut and paste ends. See how easy that is: whole paragraphs of wondrous future, just dropped straight into the newsletter! Just imagine a submerged tunnel as a giant cut and paste that gets you a tunnel under the Waitematā for under a billion.
When I first wrote about this idea - airport travelator, tropical fish, booths selling weed - I was being somewhat fanciful. But there has always been a strand of earnest intent to this. Now I’m all earnest and deadly serious. I believe in this. I want a lane on the bridge, and I want a lane under the water. I want to see us going back and forward at will, on bikes and scooter and foot.
Like the maxim goes: if you design a city for cars, it fails for everyone, including drivers. If you design a multi-modal city, it works better for everyone, including drivers.
Build it! Watch the e-bikes disappearing into the tunnel and out the other side and minutes. They will come, oh you bet they will come.
10.35am
Reading messages about yesterday’s column, loving what people have to say about trains.
Jack has a mighty story. Like many good tales of recklessness leaving you wondering how you’re still alive, it involves Keith Richards.
When the Stones played Western Springs 1973, me Dave and Jim took the overnighter 2nd class from Palmy to Auckland. It was overbooked and we had no seats. The doors between 1st and 2nd class were locked.
Dave was a real athlete and madman. He climbed out the small toilet window, gripped the roof ledge and inched to the front of the carriage, climbed over onto The end of the 1st class carriage and inched along the outside of it to the toilet, opened the window with his toe and climbed in.
Through the windows we could see him waving us to follow. I did it. It was scary. If you fell it could have been fatal.
We waved Jim on. He was tubby and no athlete. It took him maybe 20 minutes, inching incredibly slowly. He was on the last leg when suddenly the train went into a tunnel. When it came out he seemed paralysed, sticking to the side of the carriage. We yelled and guided him in. He looked like a panda, whole face black with soot with white eyes where they had been tightly closed. He could feel the tunnel sides only inches away. He was virtually catatonic.
The stupid things young men do.
11.35am
Jack’s not done with the memories, he has another very good one.
Our farm was a mile down the road and track from the Station. When l was 11 and brother 10 we were walking home from school and saw a jigger on the side track. We pushed it onto the air trunk line and jigged our way to opposite our place, pushed the jigger off the track and walked the last 100m home.
The Stationmaster visited the next day, enquiring. We said nothing. Mum was anxious and annoyed. Dad tried not to smile. It being a straight line, we reckoned we could see and hear a train miles off and would have had time to pull the jigger off the line and hide in the fern.
This reminds me that More Than A Feilding reader Mum - Hi Mum! - used to enjoy trips to the mountain, Before Family, with her mates. On one trip she took up a dare to walk across the Mangaweka Viaduct.
I’m glad she had a good ear for a coming express train too, or I wouldn’t be here to type it up all these many years later, when the viaduct itself has gone, and most of the trains.
Mum remembers one marathon trip we all made as a family to Auckland that somewhat took the shine off: just too much slog. But up until then, riding the train had been all kinds of fun. But she says she like the idea again, now, reading about it again and remembering the good times.
Reader and musician John Egenes also messaged yesterday: cheers for those Johnny Cash lyrics. John did a whole lot of riding the rails hopping empty box cars up and down the west coast of America as a teen. He tells some tales of that in his memoir about riding across America with his horse Gizmo, a lovely warm remembering of a different age. It’s really worth your time.
Ruth had a lovely memory too:
We took an Amtrak sleeper car from San Francisco to Portland on our honeymoon ten years ago. They used to offer a writers’ residence where you just live on the train and write things and I was so very tempted to apply.
And:
Several novels just in the folk you encounter in the dining car.
Just like that, I have a new ambition in life.
12.35pm
Watching a most excellent letter to the editor steadily make its way around the whole country via social media, and fair enough too. Letter of the damn year.
2.45pm
Lastly, a mystery, from a Facebook friend.
She is puzzled, and so am I, but I know there are some demon cryptic crossworders reading this newsletter. Bet you can make short work of it. What does the plate mean to say? Please and cheers. Or if you prefer, s’il vous plate.
Jeepers, get clicking on that bridge vote peeps, its currently running 75/20 agin us bikers. Maybe its all them poor folks in their cars stuck in traffic and reading the news who are currently clicking.
Loving the train theme, having heard the lonesome whistle of the Blue Streak through childhood. Travelling the US for several months in 1989, the best conversations I had with strangers were in Amtrak dining cars. One was a professor of death, travelling with his daughter (that's how the academic studying grief, etc, described himself. He looked like Donald Pleasance playing a Bond villain). And a fellow in his 40s with a fabric business, who turned out to have an encyclopedic knowledge of Southern Culture. It helped pass the time on a 30 hour journey from New Orleans to New York. But thanks especially for recommending John Egenes. I had a farming uncle who rode horses from the age of 2 into his 80s. He was a non stop story teller. I once had an idea to go on a long ride with him, from Ohakune to Waverly, and just listen, to write the stories down. Too late.