Auckland’s pink cycleway
It’s quite well documented both on this blog and on all of my other social media outlets, that I am not fond of running in fact there isn’t much (barring child birth) that I dislike more however for some reason quite unbeknownst to myself, this year I’ve decided to run – quite a lot .. (well for me anyway).
What I’ve found about running more often is that there are only so many places you can run to from the same starting point. My weekday runs usually start from the gym so I tend to either turn left and run through Ponsonby, turn right and run along the the waterfront towards Parnell or run straight ahead and venture through Silo Park and Beaumont Quarter – either way for someone who doesn’t enjoy the act of running, seeing the same things day in and day out gets pretty tedious, so the other day I asked;
Can anyone tell me how long the pink cycle path is? Everything I’ve found so far doesn’t give me a distance – only that it ends up at Upper Queen Street (which doesn’t make it seem very long) .
My friend Suzanne estimated that it was 800m for the pink section so OBVIOUSLY I decided I best go find out!
The cycleway runs between Union Street & Mercury Lane, in fact it ends basically right outside “Mercs” and although the sign at the Union Street entrance told me that the path was 1.0km in length my Garmin disagreed and gave me a distance of .67 kilometres.
Although the path is super wide, I travelled along the edge because you can really notice the slope underfoot, it actually reminded me somewhat of an indoor cycle track (albeit not as steep) but the path has been designed that way to make it fast for the cyclists.
I also imagined that sticking to the side would be the safest place for me to be as it would keep me out of the way of any early morning cyclists hooning along the path, except there weren’t any. Apart from a young couple out on their early morning run, it was just me and a large expanse of pink.
It’s definately no where near as long as I expected it to be – not that I knew where it went, but from the motorway it looks much longer than it actually is and although the pink path is somewhat of a novelty (and pink) in my opinion it’s more a way to get somewhere else than a track that you would run regularly – well that is unless you worked on Union Street and ran over to Mercs every lunchtime.
I for one, wouldn’t be keen to run along it in the heat of the day or for that matter during peak time traffic – although I guess those 3m high throw screens may help with the fumes, but honestly, I’m not that keen to find out. 😉
So there you have it, the Nelson Street cycleway as seen by me – all 670m of it ..
One thing I will say is that the Grafton Gully cycleway is WAY nicer and not just because most of it is downhill (although that is a bonus) but I’ll tell you about that next time.
Till then,
