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Known internationally as industrious with a sporty outdoors culture, New Zealand has a population of 4.8 million people, 300,000 less folks than British Columbia.
Can you imagine in B.C. (or Canada for that matter) any Associate Transportation Minister saying they want to consider bicycles, e-scooters and e-bikes on the sidewalks?
In a public process and questionnaire just released by the New Zealand government, “Accessible Streets” is asking citizens whether e-skateboards, hoverboards, and electric unicycles can be considered non motorized and be allowed on sidewalks. And bicycles would be allowed on sidewalks as long as they are being operated at a speed below 15 km/h.
Motorized items less than 75 cm tall (that includes those mini foldable motorcycles) are also being considered as legal on the sidewalk.These are the fiddly bits of motorized technology also called “micro mobility”, and governments are looking where they should be placed in the public realm. I have written about British Columbia’s approach to E-Scooters here.
In New Zealand’s proposal there are some good things~ motorized wheelchairs and assistive devices are allowed on sidewalks and on cycle lanes, and pedestrians and cyclists have to give them priority. And on roads, vehicles making turns will be required to give way to pedestrians
New Zealand has undertaken some responsive Covid-19 initiatives, including making wider sidewalks to accommodate the needed 2 meter separation for physical distancing, and widening bikeways for the same reason. Perhaps it is that widening of sidewalks (called footpaths in New Zealand) that emboldened the federal government’s strange policy proposal.
You can imagine the reaction from sidewalk users to this proposal.
The Associate Minister of Transport is an avid cyclist and is being criticized as having her “enthusiasm for cycling clouded her vision of what a footpath (sidewalk) should be.” Worse still, the minister and the New Zealand cycling lobby are being said to “want everyone to work around them”.
Andy Smith with Walk Auckland spoke succinctly about the issue: he stated that it was “absolutely ridiculous” to shape sidewalks into sharesies for bikes, e-bikes and e-scooters.
“At the moment we have got kids on bikes and skateboards on the footpath and that is fine. We don’t want any more than that. People, particularly the elderly, would be scared to go out for a walk if they had to share the footpath with electric vehicles, like e-bikes that can weigh up to 50kg and cause serious harm from accidents with pedestrians.”
Consultation with the Federal Government is open until May 20. You can review the package and the proposals here.
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This is SUCH a bad idea. Electric bikes and e-scooters are already a challenge in bike lanes: they move with a different rhythm, often at unanticipated speeds. But that’s still where they belong – there or on the roadway, where car drivers, like cyclists, must learn to share and find a way to accommodate other vehicles safely. Sidewalk users, however, include many vulnerable users who need and deserve safe space. Putting de facto motorcycles in their midst would be a recipe for disaster.
Many jurisdictions already legally allow cycling on sidewalks. Close to here are New Westminster and Maple Ridge which both allow cycling on sidewalks (with exceptions in a few places.) There’s Boston, Washington, DC… the list goes on and on. It’s really not that uncommon or new. It happens in places where it’s illegal without incident all the time. Most of the time it’s no problem, sometimes it’s annoying, it’s extremely rare for it to be dangerous (but can appear to be when it’s not but that’s just an illusion.)
Making it legal is an easy way to provide for something that won’t take space away from cars but it’ll just cause other problems because of the difference in speeds. When there are conflicts there’ll be people saying that unicycle users (or whatever) are bad people. It’s once again letting the disenfranchised fight over scraps so that the privileged aren’t affected. The real culprit of course is that too much space has been given to motor vehicles and really some of that should be repurposed to provide a space for medium speed devices.