News

Our Fundamentals of Planning and Design for Cycling course has featured in the September 07 Land Transport NZ newsletter.

The Land Transport NZ newsletter (issue 31) is available on our website and the article can be found on the last page (page 6).

The 'Fundamentals of Planning and Design for Cycling' has reached a huge milestone. Over 500 individuals have now attended one of the courses. That's a great success for such a small country as NZ.

A hook turn is an indirect way for cyclists to turn right at a signalised intersection (see the diagram below). It involves moving to the far side of the intersection (position 1), keeping as far left as possible. The cyclist then waits there until the side street gets a green light and then moves with side street traffic across the intersection (to position 2).

So it is turning right in two stages. Pavement markings can assist cyclists with undertaking this manoeuvre and explaining it to other road users, but some cyclists execute hook turns routinely even without hook turn pavement markings.

Under Land Transport NZ's Competitive Pricing Procedures, the dollar limit for negotiated contracts for professional services for road controlling authorities and others (such as regional councils) is now $100,000.

This means that councils and Transit can negotiate contracts with individual consultants for up to $100,000, without going through a competitive tendering process. This saves staff valuable time preparing tender documents and evaluating proposals, while consultants save time (and money) preparing proposals. Ultimately this should help keep the cost of engaging consultants down, as less time is spent preparing bids, leaving more time to do real work. The safeguard for councils is that if consultants do not do good work for a good price, they can ask someone else next time.

September is going to be one big welcome party for new staff at ViaStrada: Megan Fowler, Jeremy Phillips and Rhys Chesterman.

Jeremy Phillips starts as Senior Planner. He is well known in Christchurch and beyond for his planning expertise. Rhys Chesterman, also well known in the transport planning field, is based in Dunedin and starts as a Senior Transport Planner. Megan Fowler joins us as a Traffic Engineer coming from the University of Canterbury, where she has recently completed her studies for a Master of Engineering in Transportation (MET) degree. All three bring strong credentials to the ViaStrada team and increase our diversity and range of expertise. Great to have you on board!

Ordering the new 2016 CROW manual ‘Design manual for bicycle traffic' is easy. The design guide is a revision of the 1993 ‘Sign up for the bike' and the subsequent 2007 edition. Send an email to Klantenservice@crow.nl and request an order form. State that you want to pay by credit card. Once they have received your order form, they will send you an invoice, and a link that allows you to pay for it by credit card. As soon as payment is received by them, they will send the order.

Axel Wilke has come back from the 2007 Velocity conference with 'Lessons for NZ'. He presented the most important topics to the Canterbury Active Transport (CAT) Forum on 23 August 07.

Please refer to our publications page for more details on the presentation, and read the full report about the conference.

Our office painting ‘Chevrons to 70' by local Artist Mark Duggan has won the first prize in the inaugural Hallifax Emerging Art Award. You bet that we are all pretty stoked. Congratulations to Mark from the ViaStrada team.

The 2007 Velocity conference in Munich, attended by ViaStrada director Axel Wilke, was most worthwhile. Below are a few reflections on this conference lessons learned of relevance to New Zealand, and a list of Kiwi attendees.