I live in Otaki – not quite regional enough to be regional, in my view, but certainly no less a town with a distinctive presence and a local culture. Traditionally Otaki has struggled with transportation issues, with many local town roamers unable to manage competing commitments of study and work so far outside of Wellington. In part, this has been remedied by more regular bus routes travelling through the town; but transport is still a major issue, and if it affects Otaki, it will no doubt affect regional areas of New Zealand.
Rather than being one town, Otaki is actually for the most part two towns plus a beach, some outlying farms and a whole bunch of interesting hiking and bike tracks. The old town is separated from the main retail strip that adorns the State Highway, and caters to a very different market of locals from the outlet shops and highway cafes that pull in the out-of-town shoppers.
It’s the disconnection between these two sections of the town that concerns me. The intervening three or four kilometres adds a significant difficulty in people moving from home to work, and even the addition of a bus route doesn’t greatly speed things up. In my interview with Sam Jennings late last year he drew attention to the ways in which lack of access to transport deprives the community of opportunity, even giving the example of one constituent who had to choose between study and work, primarily because of transport.
Which is why I think that ebikes can provide a solution for many locals. For myself, I’ve found it a breeze to bike in daily to and from my new office on Paraparaumu Beach, a steady 25 km from the motel. While some people are surprised that I make such a long trip every day, I actually find it my favourite part of the day.
This is partly why I view that a scheme to make ebikes affordable would go a long way towards improving the educational and employment opportunities for virtually everyone in Otaki.
The effect of providing local people with ebikes would be threefold: first, you improve the connectedness of individuals within towns. You do so without creating new carbon emissions – in fact I recently calculated that travelling by ebike is roughly 21 times more eco efficient than driving a Nissan Leaf. Second, you greatly improve the health of locals who take to ebiking – studies have shown that ebiking burns around 80% of the calories of normal biking because it is after all a very effective means of exercise. Third, it improves connections with other local towns and commerce to and from: with the addition of local cycle tracks accompanying the newly built expressway, Otaki has greater reach to other towns within Kapiti than ever before. In fact, since the Expressway, the whole of Kapiti has become more connected.
But the biggest obstacle to ebike adoption is economic deprivation. Although Otaki has come up in the world in recent years, still there are many families living on the poverty line. These are the people who would most benefit from flexible and cost effective transportation.
I’ve noticed that ebiking even creates its own kind of tourism. It’s very likely that in future years, forward-thinking cafes and motels will construct bike racks to cater for tourists and locals arriving by ebike. And the money not spent on petrol can and often does go to other forms of (cleaner) expenditure.
It would be great to have a working case study of a town that benefits from ebike traffic. I’m sure there are many ways to do it.
So if you want to foster growth in regional New Zealand without adding a tonne of carbon emissions (or by reducing emissions in the process), then creating a scheme to give low income families within regions and small towns access to an ebike is a great way to go.
