The long-awaited Te Ara Tupua walking and cycling path between Ngauranga and Petone opens to the public on Saturday, drawing a line under more than a decade of planning, consenting and construction along one of the most exposed stretches of coast in the lower North Island.
Transport Minister Chris Bishop confirmed the $348 million path will be open from today, telling RNZ the opening was a long-awaited milestone for people living in Wellington and Lower Hutt. Construction began in 2022, but site investigations, community engagement, design and consenting work stretched back to 2013, meaning the project has effectively been in motion for the better part of 13 years.
The new shared path runs 4.5 kilometres along the harbour edge and is five metres wide. Until now there has been no safe walking or cycling route connecting Wellington and Lower Hutt, with cyclists forced to either share the busy shoulder of State Highway 2 or load bikes onto the train. Bishop said the project changes that overnight.
He told RNZ that NZ Transport Agency projections forecast around 2,100 daily bike trips on the path, 360 walking or running trips and roughly 290 trips on e-scooters or similar devices each weekday by 2032. That compares with about 450 daily trips estimated before construction began, a more than fivefold lift in active travel between the two cities.
Funding came from four sources. The Crown contributed $80 million, the National Land Transport Fund $261.7 million, Wellington City Council $5 million and Greater Wellington Regional Council $2 million.
While the path itself has captured most of the public attention, NZTA has always described it as first and foremost a resilience project. The route sits on top of 2.7 kilometres of new sloping coastal defences, more than 6,000 interlocking concrete blocks, six vertical seawalls and 0.8 hectares of reclaimed land. Together those works are intended to protect both State Highway 2 and the Wellington to Hutt rail line from storm surge, sea level rise and slip damage.
That protection is not theoretical. In 2013 a section of land underneath the rail line was washed out by severe weather, triggering millions of dollars of recovery costs and days of disruption for commuters. Bishop said the new structure had already proven its worth during recent wet weather, holding the shoreline together during storms that in previous years would have closed lanes or stopped trains.
“And when you’re building a seawall, it makes sense to put a cycleway on the top,” Bishop told RNZ. He added that he expected more resilience projects of this kind would be needed over the next few years if climate change and extreme weather kept worsening. “I think we’re waking up to that as a community and as a country, that investment in resilience is a future proofing of our existing networks and it’s an investment in our future.”
The minister was not entirely upbeat. He said he was not happy with the final cost of the project, a sentiment shared across successive transport ministers as estimates climbed during construction. Even so, supporters argue that the resilience benefits, the avoided cost of future emergency repairs and the new connection for cyclists, walkers and emergency services together justify the price tag.
NZTA worked closely with mana whenua, whose connection to the land and waters shaped both the design and the construction. Mana Whenua Steering Group chair Kim Skelton said the project had exceeded expectations and described the finished path as “absolutely stunning”. She told RNZ people had been asking her whether she was thrilled with how it had turned out, and her answer was simple. Of course she was.
The first cyclist on the new path after the ribbon was cut was Green MP and former Wellington mayor Celia Wade-Brown, who had championed walking and cycling links along the harbour for years. “I was ready to be the first cyclist on this trail,” she said. “We worked hard to persuade people to build it and it’s been done very well.” She was soon joined by Bishop and fellow Green MP Julie-Anne Genter.
Wade-Brown, who now represents the Wairarapa, said she had watched the path take shape from the train window every time she travelled into Wellington. “It’s so beautiful. I think it tells the Māori history of this part of the whenua beautifully.”
She also pointed out a less obvious benefit. With Te Ara Tupua now joined up, it is possible to walk, run or cycle from Wellington Airport all the way to Greytown, stitching together a chain of off-road paths and cycle-friendly roads that runs from the southern tip of the North Island, around the harbour edge, up the Hutt Valley and over the Rimutaka rail trail to the Wairarapa.
The opening also matters for resilience reasons beyond commuter traffic. Bishop said the path provides an important lifeline connection for emergency services if SH2 is ever blocked after an earthquake or heavy rain, giving Wellington a second route into the Hutt that is hardened against the kinds of slips and washouts that have closed the highway in the past.
The new section sits alongside the council-led Tupua Horo Nuku cycleway through Eastbourne, with the two projects together forming the long-promised continuous loop around Wellington Harbour. As Newswire reported on Thursday, that loop is not entirely seamless yet, with a gap at Days Bay still pushing cyclists onto the road. Even so, the opening of the Ngauranga to Petone section closes by far the largest and most dangerous gap in the network.
For commuters who have spent years either driving solo on SH2 or taking the train with a folding bike, Saturday’s opening marks a quiet revolution in how people can move between two of the lower North Island’s biggest urban centres.
Have you cycled or walked the new path yet, or are you planning to make the trip from Petone or Ngauranga this weekend? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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