Flashback Friday: What can Christchurch learn from The Netherlands?

This week we heard the fantastic news that a large chunk of local streets in Chch will soon see their speed limits lowered – bravo! For some people, speed management still seems like a strange (and unnecessary) facet of our

Flashback Friday: Cycling in Houten – a triumph in Planning

There’s a growing group of people within Christchurch looking to meet regularly in Christchurch to discuss urban transport and planning issues, including good sustainable transport practices like cycling. Tonight was another meet-up and, amongst the many topics discussed, was some

Flashback Friday: Inside the new Bus Interchange – What’s in it for Cycling

On my fairly regular trips out of town I often use a bike-bus combo to get to and from the airport. The central Bus Interchange is a great facility to join the dots here and they really did do a

Flashback Friday – End of Tour: Reflections on Cycling in Europe

Earlier this week I reported on the recent draft Chch Transport Plan, which has some great proposals in it. It’s stated that many of the ideas in it came from looking at best practice elsewhere in the world; many

Flashback Friday – Vauban and Rieselfeld, Freiburg: Suburbs for Cycling

Last week I reminded you about my time visiting the German city of Freiburg and some of its transport-friendly aspects that the similar-sized Christchurch could emulate. Another feature that Greater Chch could do well to consider is how Freiburg develops

Flashback Friday: Freiburg – Cycling and Sustainability

This week has seen a flurry of discussion locally by City Council about whether to release or not the draft future transport plan. In the end, the Council decided to publish the 30-year draft plan for the public to have

Flashback Friday – Cycling in Zürich: An uphill challenge

This week I have been spending time in Wellington, looking at some proposed cycleway routes and observing bike behaviour in our capital city. Although similar in size to Christchurch, Wellington suffers from having a lot of hills that limit the

Flashback Friday: Cycling in Nantes and #VeloCity2015 Conference

Like many parts of the world, Europe is starting to attempt some semblance of post-lockdown normality (even despite the ongoing Covid infection numbers…). In the cycling world, that meant another recent Velo-City cycling conference two weeks ago, in Ljubljana,

Flashback Friday: Bikes on Buses

I’m back home again in Christchurch after a long stint away, although ironically I’m heading out of town again this weekend, so back to the airport I go… As mentioned previously, my short jaunts away typically involve a combination

Flashback Friday: Reflections on a Month in the UK

With all the recent Govt announcements allowing more easy travel in and out of NZ once more, it feels like the world has suddenly opened up again. People are talking about doing the travel they’ve had to postpone for the

Flashback Friday: Cycling in Bristol

Any time that someone claims their city is too hilly for lots of cycling (and conversely, that’s why everyone bikes in Chch…) I invariably think about all of the hilly cities I have visited around the world that somehow buck

Flashback Friday: Bikes and buses – starting to think about multimodalism

As you may be aware, the Governments of the world are currently trying to sort out their obligations to tackling climate change at the COP26 Summit in Glasgow. So what does that mean for transport? Well, while there has been

Community Board makes walking and cycling harder

Some may recall that a Council ‘professional traffic planner’ decided the best way to deal with congestion at the corner of Memorial and Greers was to get rid of the cycle lane and narrow the footpath to make more room …

Memorial/Greers Cycle lane to be Removed

The corner of Memorial Ave and Greers Road is to be made more ‘efficient’. The Orbiter and motorists are inconvenienced by people on bikes and all those kids going to school on foot. The solution? Remove the Greers Rd cycle …

Cycling Central Melbourne

Since the Christchurch earthquakes, the subsequent rebuild, the rearrangement of certain public spaces, and changes to the way people are being encouraged to travel around the city, travelling to other cities sets me onto comparison mode. Naturally, critiquing the cycling …

A postcard from Melbourne

This post is long time coming; too many other distractions since, like Biketober… I was lucky to head across the ditch in September for a couple of week’s holiday in Australia. We started in Melbourne and then drove the coastal …