A city for the people must have cycle lanes

It is becoming increasingly apparent that, from an international perspective, we are years behind in the way we plan our cities. The way we use our streets has been stuck in a time warp.

City streets need to be viewed as a valuable public space. But, instead, they are being used as funnels to maximise traffic flows and store cars.

Great cities take care of people. It is they who bring life and vibrancy. People need to feel welcome and safe to use the streets. And in the 21st century, people and businesses are mobile; they can live and operate anywhere.

It is no accident that the cities in which the needs of people are given priority are also full of bicycles. That can happen because those cities have provided infrastructure that makes riding a bicycle an attractive transport option.

Providing infrastructure for riding bikes makes financial sense. Riding a bicycle can be a quicker and easier way of commuting. It saves time and money and is healthy. In some cities, more people do their daily commute by bike than car.

Any city could cater for bicycles. Within five years, New York has added 640km of bike lanes and created a public bike-hire programme. The scientific ignorance and bigotry displayed in David Vinsen’s letter would be laughable if it was not so terrifying.

Carbon dioxide is essential to life: therefore, climate change is a global conspiracy of 97 per cent of the world’s climate scientists, the Greens are Nazis (yes, he went there), and the Greens’ climate tax cut is somehow a tax grab.

This makes about as much sense as saying that because oxygen and water are essential to life, fires and floods are a global conspiracy to hike up insurance rates.

As for the Nazi slur, it is a sure sign that he has no argument.

The National Party’s energy policy consists of employing the 10,000-yearold technology of burning things.

The Green Party’s energy policy says that the first country to develop smart, efficient energy solutions will make an absolute bundle of cash selling these solutions to the world. It can and should be us. In the current political scrum, it is clear that one of National’s electoral strategies is to cry foul about the affordability of each policy put up by the opposition parties.

No matter how great the benefits that these policies might deliver, a National minister will brand it as “simply unaffordable” — and the tax-averse public will shy away.

But shouldn’t the question of affordability be asked both ways? In particular, can New Zealand really afford the increased environmental degradation that will be the price of National’s promise to dismantle the protections in the Resource Management Act.

Do we really want to pay in the form of increased destruction from mining, greater freedom for private enterprise developments in our national parks, more Government-subsidised co-opting of publicly owned freshwater by industrial agriculture for irrigation, and yet more degradation of our rivers and streams? If banks can provide high levels of security for their online users, surely it must also be possible for medical records.

As someone who has had well over a dozen surgeries, and all the form filling that this entailed for multiple treatments, I welcome having my records online. Having to provide the same personal information over and over becomes irritating, especially when you do not feel well.

I could never understand why I had to provide the same details to different departments of the same hospital.

There is also the obvious risk that errors are made when information is transferred from hard copy to soft copy.

I always wondered why a terminal requiring me to enter a pin number could not be used to allow information to be accessed by medical professionals.

Different levels of access for health workers could be set, so only relevant information was visible depending on the circumstances.

The current system is time-consuming, inefficient, costly and, most of all, frustrating to patients. Your correspondent Gabrielle Gregory cites “absolute values and respect for creative law” as core reasons for the Anglican Church to retain its broad rejection of same-sex marriage.

In so doing, she reflects the dogmatic inflexibility of most religious belief systems, wherein the comfort blanket of written codes of conduct — in her case the are clung to for dear life.

There are no absolutes in life, other than death, a reality many of the religious find difficult to grasp or accept for complex reasons such as environmental conditioning, inter-generational family tradition, neurological wiring, and life experiences.

The notion of a “creative law” relating to our respective genders being “intertwined with our identity” further reflects the kind of supercilious tangle of cliched codswallop the Anglican body repeatedly ties itself up in in order to justify the indefensible.

In 2014 its General Synod has yet to approve the ordination of female priests.

It came as little surprise that 2013 Census figures found the number of Anglican adherents had fallen 17 per cent in seven years when such supposed insights continue to be expressed.