The orange cones popped up on roads and on-street parking spots were painted over as the Wellington City Council went ahead with its proposed cycleway in Newtown on April 19.
A last-ditch effort to halt the roadwork failed after a petition with over 1200 signatures was voted out by the Council’s planning and environment committee a week earlier.
During the Council debate which preceded the vote, speaker after speaker from among the public participants applauded the health benefits of cycling. Only Urmila, who represented the petitioners, and a handful of others, raised the livelihood threat faced by businesses that depended on kerbside parking.
As a solution, the Council resolved to provide alternative public parking at the children’s hospital as well as in the Countdown supermarket car park. In addition, the existing loading zone serving businesses will be retained as a “time restricted on-street loading zone,” operating between 7pm to 7am . A new full time loading zone will be established on the “hospital access road just south of the shops.”
The businesses maintain that they were never consulted on the process.
“The issue is that more than 1200 people petitioned the Council to create a pause so that we could have an actual consultation and come out with a good solution,” Urmila explains. “But the Council refused to do it.”
The Council’s move to appropriate parking space from the new children’s hospital as well as the Countdown supermarket is not a viable solution, business owners say.
“While that would mean displacing a patient, a caregiver or a staff member from their car park, relying on private entities is also not sustainable over the long term, especially since the Council plans to charge a levy on private industry if it operates more than 10 parking spots,” Urmila observes.
The debate showed a disconnect between councilors and business owners. One councilor asked Urmila if she would be flexible in the timings for the loading zone.
“This reflects the lack of understanding of business within the Council.” Urmila notes. “We’ve got no control over freight delivery. That is absolutely dependent on the freight companies.”
The councilor was clearly referring to the Council’s proposal to adjust freight loading times so that they did not overlap with peak traffic hours. But the question posed by the councilor also showed that Council was under prepared on how industry worked, unaware that business owners cannot control the stops and starts of freight movement.
“How many places the delivery vehicles need to stop at or if they are involved in an accident along the way or are held up on the motorway, all these are factors beyond our control. Council simply does not understand that food comes from all over NZ to get to the supermarkets or the grocery stores,” Urmila says.
There has been no response so far from either the hospital or the supermarket. But businesses are mindful that a doctors’ lobby is hard at work to create more cycle slots within the hospital’s parking lot, citing public health.
But as Felicity Wong, one of the speakers at the Council debate, pointed out, the real drivers of emissions in the area are the port and the airport. “Cycleways will not help us reach carbon zero,” she said.
There is an echo of history in the way the City Council is pushing cycleways in Newtown. Leaving businesses and freight companies out of the solution go back to the era when the railways were pushed through in the colonised world, Urmila says. “We are not in that situation now.”
While the businesses along the Riddiford St intersection have suffered a setback in last week’s Council vote, they plan to regroup.
“Newtown businesses have risen,” Urmila says.
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