AT hits back over cycling numbers
Auckland Transport chief executive Shane Ellison says a report saying the council body may have overestimated figures to give a favourable business case for four cycleways is fundamentally flawed.
A Herald story last week led to a debate on cycling numbers in the report and whether they came into effect when cycleways opened or were 2026 forecasts.
The report figures — 1060 users per day for Quay St, 986 for Nelson St, 975 for Grafton Gully and 443 for Beach Rd — were used in business cases to get funding for cycleways.
Emails obtained by the Herald show AT finance officers in February last year said the Quay St cycleway numbers were for 2016, not 2026.
Ellison and NZ Transport Agency chief executive Fergus Gammie are standing by “very clear statements” in the past week that the figures were forecasts for 2026.
Ellison said the AT report, which said cycle demand was overestimated, was written by a relatively junior former employee.
“It was not and is not an official AT document. It was not endorsed or ratified in any way. Suffice to say, the assumptions and conclusions it came to were fundamentally flawed. As such it has no validity,” he said.
This month AT walking, cycling and safety manager Kathryn King said it was a “work in progress” document never finalised, although the issues it raised had been followed up to improve business processes.
The Herald has obtained internal AT emails, an economic assessment and NZTA worksheets about the cycling numbers, which show:
● Figures of 1080 in 2016 for Quay St and three options between 1270 and 1310 for 2026.
● Emails in February 2017 between AT finance officers on Quay St where they talk about “a total cyclists of 1060 in 2016”, “total cyclists of 1285 in 2026” and “confirming that 1060 number for 15/16 100%”. One email said the consultant who came up with the 1060 figure did not use consistent numbers and “can’t conclude with 100% sure that it is the total cyclist number in 2016”.
● A year-by-year cyclist demand count for Grafton with 969 cyclists per day in 2016 and 1228 in 2026.
An NZTA spokesman said the “reference case” figure of 1080 for Quay St was not a prediction for day one.
“It is a starting point for building a prediction about cycle demand [in 2026], when all of the cycling network has been constructed”.
Documents obtained by the Herald show AT and NZTA finance officers raised concerns over how the numbers were calculated by consultants.
In one email, an NZTA officer said a “car assumption” had been used by a consultant to calculate travel time costs (TTC) for the Tamaki Drive cycle route, adding: “It would be great to come up with an agreed TTC for all our Auckland projects. Far better than forcing our consultants to be super creative.”
An NZTA review of 54 urban cycling projects nationwide said the way numbers were estimated were “acceptable and robust”, including estimating numbers at a future date.