Andrew McGill, AT’s head of integrated network planning, defended the proposal to ditch kerbside parking telling Newshub Live at 8pm on Tuesday “change is necessary”.
“I think once people understand and we explain more some of the detail behind the proposals and the rationale for doing it, there’ll be more accepting of what’s being done – but I also understand that it’s going to take time,” he said.
“We’re not planning to just take out car parking but over the next decade, whenever we have a project coming along a key road… we want to be able to look at the parking lane and say, ‘Do we really need that or is it better serving the people of Auckland to turn that into a bus lane?'”
He said AT was targeting “very specific” areas across the Auckland region.
Molloy said his big issue with AT’s plan is it proposes to build combined cycle and bus lanes.
“What I would say is look at the Lake Dunstan opportunity, where you go in first with your infrastructure and you build great cycleways that add value to people’s lives,” he told AM.
“Clearly the opportunity in this city is going to the Botany area and you follow it in with good infrastructure, you make cycleways dedicated cycleways.
“It has to be an ‘or’ thing, a carriageway or a cycleway, it can’t be both. We are now trying to retrofit cycleways to carriageways.
“Look at Mission Bay, Tamaki Drive is a disaster. They have built this camelback arrangement and it’s for people that cycle once a week and they go about 2km/h and get in everyone’s way, so all the cyclists are back out on the roads again holding up the traffic doing 40km/h. The model doesn’t work.”
