Voting begins to Name the Cycleways

Now for a bit of fun! Promotion of the City Council’s Major Cycleway Programme began a couple of months ago, and one of the interesting activities was a competition to suggest names for the 13 planned cycleway routes. Previously they’d had somewhat generic names to help refer to them (“University to City”, “Airport Route”, etc), but here was a chance for people to inject some local flavour to the final routes (and accompanying signage/maps).

Entries closed in mid-January and now the promotion team have whittled the 220 suggestions down to 3-5 possible names for each of the routes. Now comes your chance to vote on which names you prefer and, in doing so, help determine who gets the prizes up for grabs (and the glory of their chosen names along the routes).

There are some pretty clever suggestions proposed, e.g. “SeaBD breeze” out to New Brighton and “Wheels to Wings Route” out to the airport. Some don’t seem that original (or indeed, a lot different to the previous monikers) but I guess you have to work with what you’re offered. You also have to be careful not to get too cute with a name that doesn’t help people understand where it goes (mind you, I’m not sure that the likes of the “Galloping Goose” trail in Victoria BC and “The Wiggle” in San Francisco are all that obvious from the name…). Somewhere in the middle there’s a happy balance…

Interestingly only one of the 54 finalists refers to a person (Kate Sheppard), while there are a fair smattering of Maori names proposed for most routes. If you’re not sure where exactly a route is expected to go, you can download an indicative map of the routes (2MB PDF) – not necessarily the final location but a pretty good indication in most cases.

You have until Saturday February 15th 2014 to cast your votes for the best name for each route. After that, the most popular two for each route will be presented to City Councillors for the final decisions. It is expected that the selected cycleway route names will be announced in April.

Get voting today!