Cyclists and parents who were promised a safe coastal route from Wellington to Eastbourne are finding out that the long-awaited $80 million Tupua Horo Nuku shared path stops cold across Days Bay, leaving a one kilometre stretch where children on bikes spill back into oncoming traffic on Marine Drive.
The four kilometre seawall and combined cycle and walking path opened in April after years of planning and construction, with the project funded largely through the previous Government’s Covid era infrastructure programme. It was sold to residents as the missing piece of a safer coastal commute between the Hutt Valley and Wellington, complementing the Te Ara Tupua route on the harbour’s western side.
But anyone trying to ride the full length quickly discovers that the smooth concrete path narrows to a strip of paint as it enters Days Bay, then disappears altogether before resuming further on.
Local resident Kava Crosson-Elturan told RNZ the section was especially dangerous because it pulled families straight into traffic. “Right through here was especially dangerous, where we had strings of kids on bikes heading into traffic,” she said, calling the missing link “unfortunate to see” and a “lack of planning”.
Eastbourne resident Jessica Haines tried the new path with her children and said it was a bit scary when the dedicated lane ended without warning. She told reporters she is worried about how the route will cope in summer once tourist traffic and weekend cyclists return in larger numbers.
Will, a father of two who uses the path with his children, said the gap effectively negates the rest of the project for families like his. “For us, it hasn’t worked out, because we’re not really able to actually make it into Day’s Bay safely with the kids,” he said.
Avid cyclist Peter Healy, who rides the route six days a week, said the missing section is the difference between a serious commuting corridor and a leisure route that families cannot finish. “At the moment, there’s a bit of a gap here, but it’s just a bit of paint,” he said.
Hutt South MP and Minister for Infrastructure and Transport Chris Bishop has acknowledged the gap is a problem but insists there are no easy fixes. “The Days Bay section is not great, but it is also a tricky problem to solve,” he said. “There are no easy answers.”
Hutt City Council says the Days Bay stretch was always excluded from the Tupua Horo Nuku scope because the area already had some footpath provision and wider on road shoulders. The council also says the section was not shovel ready when Covid funding was being signed off, meaning it could not be folded into the main contract without holding up the rest of the project.
Council economy and development director Jon Kingsbury said a separate link between Sunshine Bay and Days Bay is now being worked up and will be brought back to the Eastbourne Community Board. He said the new section is being designed with a properly separated path so cyclists, walkers, and cars are not sharing the same strip of asphalt.
The catch, Mr Kingsbury said, is that any continuous path through Days Bay almost certainly means losing carparks along Marine Drive, which has its own constituency of beachgoers, cafe customers and Eastbourne ferry passengers who would rather the parking stayed where it is.
That trade off has already played out elsewhere on the route. To get the seawall and shared path built in the first place, the council had to remove a string of carparks closer to Eastbourne, with the storm and coastal erosion resilience case carrying the day.
Tupua Horo Nuku is the eastern bay sister project to Te Ara Tupua, the $312 million Petone to Ngauranga shared path on the western side of Wellington Harbour, which is due to open in stages later this year. Together, the two projects were meant to give Wellington and the Hutt a continuous, mostly off road harbour edge route from the city’s railway station to Eastbourne village.
For now, however, the Days Bay shortfall means that promise is incomplete. Cyclists who want to ride from the Wellington side to the Eastbourne ferry terminal can do so almost entirely on protected paths, until they reach the gap and either dismount, take the footpath where one exists, or fall in with traffic on Marine Drive.
There are also questions about how the gap will be policed when summer arrives. Marine Drive narrows considerably through Days Bay, and the speed limit drops, but locals say drivers regularly travel well above the posted limit. Adding more cyclists, including the children who are most attracted to a new path, raises the risk of a serious crash on a stretch where there is now nowhere safe for a bike to go.
Cycle advocacy groups have argued for years that piecemeal cycleways are worse than no cycleway at all, because they encourage people who are not confident in traffic to start riding, only to drop them back into the road at the most dangerous point. The Days Bay gap is being held up as the textbook example.
Hutt City Council and NZTA Waka Kotahi have both said the Sunshine Bay to Days Bay link is a priority for the next funding round. Whether it lands inside the current Government’s Land Transport Plan, which has tightened the criteria for cycleway spending, will depend on how the project ranks against road maintenance and public transport bids in the same pool.
For families on the Eastbourne side of the harbour, the wait will feel longer than it sounds. The Days Bay section needs design, consenting, consultation over the carparks, and then construction, all of which will run well into 2027 at the earliest on present timelines.
In the meantime, the council has put down fresh paint and additional signage to warn motorists that cyclists will be entering the road. Whether paint will be enough to keep families safe through the summer holidays remains the open question.
What do you make of the Days Bay gap, and would you give up carparking on Marine Drive for a continuous protected path? Let us know in the comments.
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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