Photo: Cambridge Terrace cycleway, Wellington. Credit: Josiah Nevell

If you haven’t been to Wellington, New Zealand, in the past few years, I highly recommend visiting to see the transformation the city has undergone. Everywhere you go you see all sorts of people zipping around on a bicycle or a cargo bike, there are connected cycleways forming a network and more in construction to be delivered within the financial year.

Last month Sara Stace (WSP and Better Streets president) and Jullietta Jung (GDCI and Better Streets board member), were in Wellington to present at the 2024 2WalkAndCycle conference and heard from Wellington City Council’s transitional team lead Claire Pascoe and engagement manager Oli du Bern talk about the (stormy) journey that they went through to achieve the rapid roll out. They spoke of a “trust fund” they decided to invest in. They decided they needed to invest in building trust with the community, leadership and industry if they were to deliver 100 kms of cycleways in 3 years. They invested and reaped the returns. The invested in iterative designs processes with community engagement and adaptive implementation through consultation.

If the Wellington story wasn’t enough, the conference gathered minds from around the country doing impactful projects in the community. Seeing the representation of Māori people in projects, leading projects, and several projects that featured youth engagement was another stand out of the conference.

And if that wasn’t enough the conference featured two internationally acclaimed keynote speakers Janette Sadik Khan (former transport commissioner of New York City, famous for transforming Time Square and Broadway to people friendly places, read her book Street Fight) and Salvador Rueda (Barcelona’s Superblocks, watch how you can transform your neighbourhood with a line). Their stories of the transformational projects that they have led over the years drew whistles from the crowd and were hugely energising.

These inspiring stories are even more celebrated as the crowd needed hope. In the backdrop of the conference there is a draft Government Policy Statement that halves the budget for walking and cycling, gone are the days of unfettered support for initiatives like Streets for People. Paradoxically, it may be precisely this adversity that seemed to fuel the energy of the crowd.
Listen to Janette Sadik-Khan tell the New York CIty story in Auckland here.

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