29 East Street, Newton, Auckland
The Pink Path
by James Littlewood
It was famous from the get go, it’s utter pinkness — surrounded as it is by steel, glass and rapidly out-moded motorways — screams “share me” to anyone who sees it. Nothing that big was ever that pink. You couldn’t so much as stand on it without wanting to selfie up a storm.
On one level, the lightpath is a marketing ploy, and a successful one, if search algorithms are anything to go by. But what’s the product? The Pink Path itself is barely even a thing. We’ll, it’s several thousand tons of steel reinforced concrete; a bit of surplus motorway; a piece of lego they found under the carpet, with billion dollar views of Victoria Park, St Mary’s Bay, the Waitemata, the Harbour Bridge and Northcote beyond. But as cycle paths go, it’s a baby, just a few hundred metres long.
Because it’s also a conduit. At the north end, it links to a two-way protected bike lane on Union Street, delivering riders safely into midtown Auckland around Victoria Street west. At its southern end (just a kilometre away), just south of Karangahape Road, it connects to more protected cycle ways and shared paths on Grafton Gully, Dominion Road, and Ian McKinnon Drive. From there, you can reach — respectively — Tamaki Drive to the bays and the ferry terminal to the North Shore; Dominion Rd; and the Northwestern Cycleway all the way to Henderson.
So as a big pink thing, it’s what it represents that counts: getting you onto a bike. It’s the cycle version of the City Rail Link, connecting those on two wheels to hundreds and hundreds of miles of cycle lanes across all areas of the city, and growing. Auckland has over 300km of cycle lanes or shared paths lacing the suburbs, the centres, the maunga, the parks, and there’s more coming.
Sometimes, I tell people about my bike trips in Auckland: putting the bike on the train, going to meetings, that kind of thing. Or riding through Unitec with my daughters, along the northwestern cycleway, down Grafton Gully to the ferry and over to Devonport to see the grandy.
“Oh” they say. “Do you ride the Pink Path?” Usually, the answer is no, and they look a bit miffed. But I seldom have meetings in that bit of the CBD. And — such a westy am I — if I’m meeting someone in town I’ll probably put the bike on the train and ride from either Grafton, Newmarket or Britomart station, so bypass Spaghetti Junction and the Pink Path altogether.
And that’s the point. The Pink Path offers one of the greatest selfie locations on the planet. Just being there feels like you’ve smothered yourself the latest, greatest optical filter. Go ahead, tell the world. And then enjoy the city, all of it. On a bike.
Image Credits: The Auckland Psychogeographer
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