Transport planning and policy

ViaStrada has assisted in the development of Kaikoura's first walking and cycling strategy.

The vision is:

- Kaikoura - he hikoi me eke pahikara pararaihi, ki uta ki tai.
- Kaikoura - a walking and cycling paradise, from the mountains to the sea.

ViaStrada undertook research both domestically and overseas to produce a major discussion document for the New Zealand Transport Agency.

The "think-piece" looks at ways of optimising New Zealand's road transport network. Seven themes are explored through a literature review, five overseas case studies and 30 New Zealand "best-practice" examples.

The Waimakariri District Council (WDC) commissioned ViaStrada to undertake a high level assessment of the possible western bypass options for Woodend and in particular to determine whether the conclusion reached by Transit, to eliminate further consideration of the full western options, was sound.

Environment Bay of Plenty asked a number of consultants to bid on the development of a regional walking and cycling strategy in September 2007. We won the tender and have since held three intensive stakeholder meetings to refine the strategy. Participation included all six district councils, Land Transport NZ, Transit NZ, two district health boards, the police, Sport BOP and a local cycling advocacy group, Cycle Aware Tauranga.

Bike path users in Melbourne can often find it difficult to find their way around on the many off-road paths around the city. Hence, a review of the adequacy of signposting was required.

This study built on previous work by ViaStrada with assistance at different stages by Beca and MWH. The premise is that a cycle route provides a certain level of service to potential users if it lies within a certain distance of them, whether they be residents at their homes, school or university students at their schools or people at work.

For Northlands Mall, we were commissioned to explore access options and designs through to obtaining Resource Consent from the City Council.

ViaStrada was engaged by ARTA to develop a tool to convert short-term manual cycle counts to "annual average daily traffic" estimates of cycle traffic. The methodology used standard pneumatic traffic counters with softer than normal rubber road tubes for detecting cycles.

Environment Canterbury (ECan) is developing a regional cycle network plan. ViaStrada staff developed an audit methodology, enabling alternative network elements to be compared with one another. The resulting methodology combines site visits with a clever RAMM assessment.

MWH New Zealand Ltd (Christchurch) and ViaStrada evaluated five different potential cycle network models. ARTA’s British expert peer reviewer thought that our GIS-based methodology, using Auckland demographic data and existing transport models, was pretty clever.