Hey world, have you heard of Christchurch?!

We all love a bit of healthy rivalry, whether it’s which is the bigger “second city” in NZ or even which is the “shittest town in NZ”. Bike-friendliness is another metric by which many people seek to answer “where is the best place to cycle?” But curiously, when it comes to the cycling credentials of our beloved Christchurch, there is a bit of a blind-spot internationally…

About a decade ago, local cycling advocacy group Spokes Canterbury set an audacious vision: By 2020, Christchurch will be considered one of the top 5 cycle cities in the world. 2020 has now come and gone, so it’s timely to consider whether we are even close to meeting that lofty aim. Probably not, but we are heading in the right direction…

I’ll come out and say it: I certainly think that Christchurch is already the best cycling city in Australasia (feel free to try to persuade me otherwise…). Sure, there are some nice facilities in the likes of Perth, Melbourne and Brisbane to name a few, but the concept of a true connected cycling network is still a challenge in many of these places, not to mention all the other cycling-related things we do like Biketober and bike fixup workshops. It was interesting to show various Australian delegates around our cycle networks during the technical tours of the recent Australasian Road Safety Conference and they were just drooling at how our cycleways came together…

There have been many different attempts by all sorts of organisations (weirdly, few of them related to transport planning) to try to come up with some kind of international ranking, and we’ve mentioned some of these before. Some of them limit which cities get considered for selection, e.g. the famous Copenhagenize index only considers cities that have at least an urban population of more than 600,000 – sorry Christchurch… Ah, but it does also include national capitals, so I guess both Auckland and Wellington are in there?

And this is a common theme that I see in many of these rating systems: if they look as far afield as New Zealand they will only consider the largest city (Auckland) and the capital city (Wellington). Neither of them is that great on the cycle-friendliness scale; I wouldn’t even rate them in the top 5 cities in NZ (kudos though to Wellington for recent improvements) – although that hasn’t stopped them from sometimes scaling quite unexpected heights in these rankings. Meanwhile, the city that is the same size as Wellington but considerably better on the cycling front just gets overlooked…

A few examples for you:

• Luko Insurance had a Global Bicycle Cities Index 2022 and in that, Wellington came 30th and Akld 49th. Really? Well, there were only 90 cities in their rating system… The input data seems a little bit ropey though when claiming that Wellington has a bike mode share of 10% and Auckland 8%…

• Luko used to be known as Coya and in their 2019 index they surprised everyone, not least the city itself, by naming Auckland the best large city for cycling and 7th overall. Turned out it was another case of “garbage in, garbage out” – they had erroneously attributed a very high cycling mode share to Auckland (when it was actually just the proportion of people who had ridden in the past year) – when that was corrected, the city fell to a more believable 49th place (Wellington was 57th that year, by the way)

• Moving company reviewer ScanMovers compiled the 100 Best Cities in the World to Ride a Bicycle and they rated Auckland 8th and Wellington 9th – really? Above the likes of Groningen, Nantes and Munich? Apparently Auckland has 9% bike mode share and Wellington has 500km of bike lanes – okay… Interesting too that in the top 20 there were five other cities smaller than Christchurch…

I often wonder whether a lot of attention about cycling in Auckland is largely down to the introduction of a single pink path in 2016 that captured the attention of the world. Perhaps also because Auckland has its own (slightly out-of-date) Wikipedia page about cycling there, whereas Christchurch doesn’t, only rating some minor mentions on the Cycling in NZ page? Given the comprehensive cycleway network slowly growing in Christchurch, there might be a summer project in there to redress that balance…

Mind you, sometimes it’s a challenge even to get people to notice New Zealand at all: PeopleForBikes, a US-based cycle advocacy group, have for many years been doing annual City Ratings of the best places to bike; however it has generally only focused on US towns and cities. In 2021 they briefly expanded their ratings to include over 100 “international” cities, but in practice this only meant Europe, Canada and Australia. Bizarrely, the list of Australian “cities” included separate ratings for component councils within the Greater Sydney and Melbourne areas as well as rankings for unusual locations like Eurobodalla rural shire NSW (pop. 40,000), Mildura VIC (pop. 32,000) and Mt Gambier SA (pop. 33,000)…

Some lists simply seem to be more about encouraging people to visit various interesting places rather than really being a true indicator of the best places to cycle. For example, travel rewards company Pointship cited the most bike-friendly cities around the world and, while many places listed were quite worthy, it included Sydney in its top 20 – I think some visitors there may be sorely disappointed…

I’ve been lucky enough to visit a number of amazing cycling meccas around the world, from the obvious ones like Amsterdam and Copenhagen to some of the other less-heralded gems like Portland OR, Freiburg GER, Davis CA, and Houten NL. In my case I deliberately went to these places to see what their cycling networks were like in reality, i.e. the ultimate “cycle tourist” – and I am sure I’m not the only one doing that.

Back in 2015, there was a nice article in The Guardian (UK) highlighting how Christchurch was rebuilding itself as a cycling city post-quake – I’m not sure that I’ve seen a similar overseas article since. Perhaps we want to consider whether we promote Christchurch a bit more as a world-class cycling city to attract some bike-minded travellers to direct their attention here? A good start would simply be to get registering on the radar of the international bike-friendly ranking schemes…

Do you think that Christchurch gets enough attention globally for its cycling?