It’s that time of the year when Councils across the country review their budgets for the coming year to see what they can spend and how that might affect people’s rates bills. Christchurch City Council are currently consulting on their 2026/27 Draft Annual Plan to see what people think about the proposals – and it’s potentially not great news from a cycling perspective…
The proposed plan has landed on an expected average rates rise for the coming year of ~7-8% – not the worst problem to have right now. Mayor Phil Mauger in particular was pretty stern on wanting to see parts of the overall budget trimmed for the coming year. Council have attempted to do this by deferring some activities for the coming year to either the following year or beyond.
Sounds good in theory, and they have managed to reduce the budget for the coming year in the Transport part of the Capital Programme by over $30 million. However, at least a few of the cycleway sections planned for the coming year have been pushed back to later dates, and even some of the related projects planned for future years have had their budgets trimmed a bit too.
Particular projects where the timing of budgets have been adjusted include a number of Major Cycleway projects – namely the Northern Line ($2 million deferred), Nor’West Arc ($1.9 million), South Express ($2.7 million) and Heathcote Expressway ($2 million). So you might be waiting at least another year before seeing some of these on the ground – unless you can convince the politicians otherwise…
I suspect that most of these deferrals could be related to the proximity of these sections to railway corridors – as we’ve seen before, it can take quite a while for KiwiRail to resolve any issues regarding cycleways near level crossings, and that might not be this coming year. An alternative theory could be that, without any current Govt support for funding cycleways, the Council could be hedging its bets and hoping that a friendlier change of government next year might turn the subsidy pipeline back on…
Thankfully there are still a reasonable number of sustainable transport projects set to go ahead in the coming year, including the cycleway along Marine Parade, the final sections of the Nor’West Arc cycleway to the north plus a small part of the Wheels to Wings cycleway connecting this to the Northern Line, and the Te Aratai College cycle connection along Ensors/Aldwins Rds.
You’ve got until Fri 27th March to make a submission on the Draft Annual Plan; the webpage has more detailed info about the proposed plans and changes (there’s also a link to a pretty cool graphical tool allowing you to visualise how the capital spend is made up). So, if you have some thoughts about what is proposed – have your say!
What do you think of the Draft 2026/27 Annual Plan?
When people are paying $4 a liter for “Putin Juice”, it would make more sense to push ahead with the cycle ways and defer some of the roading expenditure.