News and media
The Pedal Corridor
Let’s assure you all that we’re not about to get on our bikes. After news of the proposed NZ-long cycleway broke, a lot of people talked loosely about the cycleway following Te Araroa’s route.
Hardly. Cycleways go low, in the valleys. Hikers go high. Cycleways need a gentle gradient – try the rail corridor perhaps. Tramping tracks don’t need that gentle gradient, they head for the ridges.
We put in a paper to the Employment Summit of February 28 this year that suggested TA could provide employment if the Government wanted to inject extra money. We have 31 shovel-ready projects, good work for quite a few gangs, and once they’re done, then – with a few back-roads between trailheads knitted in – our track will be pretty much in place. At present only some of these 31 projects have a budget. Where we have good budgets – and those ample budgets are comparatively few – we usually have professional contractors at work. Where the budgets are less generous – and that’s mostly the case – you’ll find usually just one skilled Te Araroa employee leading a small band of volunteers. And sometimes it’s just volunteers.
There was some talk at the Employment Summit of providing Te Araroa with money to do these 31 projects – $6 million in fact, which was the cash sum mentioned in our paper. The cycleway was proposed at that same summit, to run from Kaitaia to Bluff. It was a new idea. It got huge media attention. It had approval from the Prime Minister and his team, and with that kind of backing, it seems a viable corridor would indeed be found.
Great idea, and we like the concept too – how to do it though, and would it really cost just $50 million ? The chatter goes on through the Letters To The Editor columns and on the radio.
Then some time after the Employment Summit, reports began to surface that, for example . . . “The officials were also looking at whether the cycleway could be linked with parts of Te Araroa . . .” (NZ Herald March 11).
Just to clarify the matter. Yes, in places TA is suitable for bikes. Te Araroa includes the Queen Charlotte track, where cycles are permitted by DoC. Our 58-km Tekapo-Twizel track is suitable for bikes - relatively flat, cyclists and hikers can see each other for a good distance and there's plenty of room. Again, the Hawea River Track, being put in as part of Te Araroa's connection between Hawea and Albert Town has a $150,000 bridge that was made especially wide so it could take bikes, and the track itself will be bikeable. The money for the bridge was taken from the fund the Government voted in 2007 to assist Te Araroa across the public estate - a DoC fund. All up the parts of the trail suitable for bikes is around 8% of the distance. Much of Te Araroa is coast, which means sand and salt. Much of it is in land which was historically too steep to farm and so has become part of the public estate - its rugged. And down on the agricultural lands, there's fences galore where we put in stiles, and Te Araroa's access agreements with farmers tend to specifically exclude bikes - they frighten stock.
The cycleway may, in its gradual extension, use parts of Te Araroa, but in general the Te Araroa route is unlikely to be a suitable corridor for it. On anything but the most open routes, and without good separation, the two means of travel - both great outdoors recreation in themselves - nonetheless would not rub together easily. The two cultures are distinctly different.
