The Dark Nest Of Your Village

Today I was out for a lunchtime preamble around Eden Terrace, Auckland. For those of you not familiar with the area, it is an old part of Auckland, with a maze of narrow streets, often one-way and, more often than not, reasonably steep. I've ridden through quite a bit of it at times, sometimes feeling like I was about to heave and go knock-kneed from the effort, especially following CTB as we followed his Nut Cracker Suite.

I was trying to work out a new permutation of the streets to allow a couple of previously unridden sections to be added in to a loop. As a bonus I got to see some old rundown villas, some restored villas and various small business operating out of ramshackle premises. All quite interesting.

Until I got to the bottom end of Fleet Street, there I discovered what are arguably the worst situated apartments in Auckland. I will return with a camera to capture the true horror of what I saw. Imagine a line of shoe boxes stacked six high, with their ends cut off so you can see in. These, set facing SE, slightly below street level and a large turning bay for the front yard, have no privacy and no sense of humanity. How did this happen?

Speaking of bad planning, on Sunday, at the death, one hundred and sixty kilometres under my belt, I followed The Croc and Junior onto the Norwest bikepath east of St Lukes Road. I have ridden that in the past, fresh, and thought it a pretty miserable experience. Several stop signs, a couple of nasty little pinches, one short wall and threading in and out of narrow streets. After the width and freedom of the bike path proper, it was a nightmare, and to add insult to injury the ramp up to Newton Road was where my form left me, and I was left a shell of a man.

What gets me, is that planners have planned and built an excellent path West of St Lukes Road, past Chamberlain Park, through Unitech and out along the side of the Norwestern Motorway. But East of St Lukes Road, they have had some sort of collective ice cream headache and routed the thing through very bike unfriendly streets. All okay if you are fit and familiar with the route, but not at all friendly for Jo and Josephine Average, or for the Sunday Family Ride. My One Point Three meters of Kaos Kreation is pretty fit and strong on a bike, but there's no way he'd survive the walls and bergs that present en route.

What I'd like to see is some sort of continuity with the existing bike path West of St Lukes Road and segregation from traffic and homes/drives.

That, at least, will save me the embarassment of whimpering in the midst of the urban public when I implode.