I guess the Long Term Plan exercise just completed is essentially an “opt in” survey, which in this case showed support more than 2:1 for continuing the cycleways programme. I can’t think of any statistically representative survey that asks this question though. I guess the challenge is that typically you have a decent-sized middle group who are indifferent to cycleways (i.e. they’re not too fussed whether you build them or not), and you don’t tend to hear from them in any opt-in survey.

I suspect that it’s more a case of people cycling a bit more (and this may not be fully captured by the coarse frequency categories shown), so there are more trips out there but not necessarily a lot of new people. Some other data has suggested that about 15% of new riders in Chch have switched from driving, but it’s not clear whether they previously fell into the “never cycled” category or just “rarely cycled”.

It does seem interesting that people’s satisfaction has gone up and down heaps, yet numbers of people cycling are really steady. Other count data has gone up, so I would’ve thought this would as well. A couple of thoughts on why:
1) the surveys exclude anyone under 18 which is a key part of the growth in people using the cycleways
2) it maybe suggests that growth on the cycleways is just people who were already biking shifting their routes
3) the categories are too coarse to capture some kinds of growth – e.g. people who previously biked once a week and now bike every day won’t be picked up by this question
4) the network is still very disconnected – most people can’t bike to their destinations without hitting a section that is incomplete and being required to bike on a busy road for part of their trip- so it still largely excludes anyone who doesn’t feel safe biking on busy roads (which is most people).

S.

On the basis of the 2nd graph, the cycleways over the past few years haven’t actually made a difference (which I don’t believe)