New cycle trail builds hit a brick wall – but riders optimistic that will change in 2026

Source: Radio New Zealand

On a mild evening in November, Dave Howard and John Wellington were out with their machetes and some pink ribbon bush-bashing a route for a new bike trail beside the Hawea River in Upper Clutha.

They tied ribbon on scrappy broom bushes and laid low the pigfern as they went.

“That’s kind of a fun part of it, just cutting a track, going, ‘What are the cool things that we can see along here?’, whether it’s little plants or view-corridors,” Howard said.

“So you might take them past cool rocks or trees or just, how the landform will feel when you move through it, thinking about what’s the experience someone’s going to have when they travel through here.

“So that’s quite a fun stage despite the matagouri and the bush lawyer (two types of plants) and everything else that wants to kill you and prick you.”

Up until recently he had thornier problems to deal with. He had helped design the Kawarau Gorge trail from Queenstown to Cromwell, and the Roxburgh Gorge extension. By 2018 they were ready to go.

Instead, they went nowhere, running smack-dab into a long-forgotten policy suddenly reactivated at the Department of Conservation (DOC).

“Until recently, the current Conservation General Policy was applied quite rigidly in Conservation Management Strategies (CMS),” DOC told RNZ. “This meant that unless the CMS listed a proposed location for biking, a (costly, multi-year) partial review or amendment process for the CMS was required, simply to consider the application on its merits.”

While the policy had slumbered, trail building had cracked on, the network and patronage expanding rapidly in the decade after John Key’s government latched on to cycling in 2009 as a way to create jobs.

‘Silly little thing written on a bit of paper’

In 2019, DOC shifted suddenly and question marks appeared over existing trails’ compliance, while new builds hit a brick wall. Many regions had few potential trails listed on the schedules in their various CMSs. They were going nowhere.

“It was horrendous,” Howard said. “It was all consuming, all consuming. DOC was supportive of so many of the trails, but they just had to pull the handbrake on them because of this silly little thing written on a bit of paper.”

Pete Masters at Bike Taupō hit the wall too. So he joined with others to use a trail in Tongariro as a test case to help break the rigid grip.

It worked – 11 out of the 16 DOC regions began easing up on trail building in the last year or so – but it took time and money.

“So we won that,” Masters said. “Interesting thing is after the six years, they turned around and agreed on what we said on day one.

“Instead of having to be rigid, to have it on a schedule, it could be on ‘effects-based’, which is what we’d been arguing all the time.”

For trail builders in Te Anau and Gore the battle was far from won, but their experience was now more an exception than the norm. Rowan Sapsford at Bike Taupō sawthe flipside: He helped Masters with the test case, and now things were at “half full”, he said.

“All our trails in Taupō are OK… we were able to secure access… we can carry on,” Sapsford said.

The application process had sped up.

“The last one I was involved in professionally, it went through an under 12 months, which was a bit of a record really.

“It can also be the difference between whether we’re able to secure funding or not, and often, you know, the permissions process is seen as one of the key risks… for new trail development.”

Officials now saw biking in the bush as legitimate, not just tramping, he said.

Recently he went to the annual national trails forum.

“It was probably the best representation from DOC in the odd 13 or 14 years I’ve been going to these forums.”

In a report in July, the Department of Conservation said its backlog of concession applications for cycling had been cut from 1300 to 550, and processing times were three times faster.

It was now able to tap into co-funding too for new trails from the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, that also had $8m a year to maintain the 23 Great Rides.

‘We’re through the dark days’

Otago was unusual among the 11 newly flexible regions, alone in undertaking a $500,000 review of its conservation strategy that ran for several years. This ended up last year in it designating a lot more potential trails, though only after volunteers spent thousands of hours mapping them out.

Now those lines were down on paper, that allowed Howard and Wellington to bash them out for real along a simple 5km trail south beside the Hawea.

“We’re through the dark days,” Howard said.

“All those particular trails, they were part of connecting Wānaka, Queenstown through Dunedin, so they’re all back on track and underway, which is fantastic. So there’s been a massive swing, you know.”

The much-anticipated Kawarau Gorge ride would be steeper and more exciting than other Great Rides thereabouts, he said. E-bikers would love it, he predicted.

The bill would be steeper, too: They had had to go back to where they got to in 2018 and “do a bunch of stuff again” which probably added several million dollars in costs.

There was an up-side to this – Kawarau had become a bit of a test case for new thresholds around wildlife permits, lizard studies and relocations, and the like, Howard said.

Yet the inflexible grip of the Conservation General Policy still held in five of the 16 regions.

“We can’t consider new proposals for bike tracks for Waikato, Canterbury (Waitaha), Stewart Island/Rakiura, Otago and Southland,” the July DOC report said.

“We appreciate this is frustrating,” DOC told RNZ, “but it underpins the importance of progressing modernising and updating the legislation.”

Those changes would not deal just with CMSs – likely dumping them – but also with constraints other trail builders still face when they veer into national parks.

The Mountains to Sea trail had the funding to build Te Hangāruru and Te Ara Mangawhero sections of Ngā Ara Tūhono Great Ride, but needed to go through 200m of Tongariro National Park.

“That held us up for a number of years,” central North Island trails promoter Lynley Twyman said.

“It meant that the value of the funding we secured diminished in its value. So that’s been really, really tough… in a region where cycling and walking are the resilience for our tourism industry.”

‘Totally broken’

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon seized on barriers to biking when in August he called the concessions regime on public conservation land “totally broken”.

“Outdated rules mean we’ve got examples of modern e-bike users being turned away from potential touring opportunities because they have to be considered as proper vehicles,” Luxon and Conservation Minister Tama Potaka said in a statement..

One high-profile example is a ban on e-bikes on the Timber Trail near Taumarunui, though that is widely ignored and not impinging on business, operators said.

The ministers’ statement collided with DOC saying processing times had sped up by three times.

And the press statement’s title, ‘Unleashing growth on conservation land’, appears to invite a fight over the government’s plans to reform the Conservation Act next year.

DOC said this was about striking a balance.

“These improvements are aimed at making the system more enabling and easier to navigate, while ensuring any development does not compromise conservation values.”

Guided biking and e-biking might be allowed as part of low-impact activities exempt from needing a concession or pre-approved with a simple online application process, it said.

The likes of the Timber Trail’s e-bike ban looked likely to fall under the definition of “unnecessary and outdated restrictions” set for removal, plus the way trail plans could be amended would be streamlined under the reforms.

A bill is due from ministers in the first quarter of next year. A new National Conservation Policy Statement might end up doing a lot of the heavy lifting.

‘Correct tracks in the correct places’

Cycle trail builders and operators would not want any part in a fight over the reforms. The way they tell it, the argument over the economic benefits of trails to the regions has been well won, DOC is far more on board than it was, and the ongoing disquiet over environmental impacts is turning in favour of them being no greater than from tramping and needing to be assessed the same way.

“Really, the debate of a [new] trail or an existing trail being used by bikers and walkers should be on social interaction,” Masters, who is also acting chair of New Zealand Cycle Trail Ngā Haerenga, said.

Federated Mountain Clubs was watching the changes being made.

“Hopefully the new [flexible] rule interpretation allows the environment to continue to be cared for and make sure that the tracks are the correct tracks in the correct places,” president Megan Dimozantos said.

The Clubs group had not been consulted on by DOC about new trails being put in, but perhaps they had not needed to be.

“They don’t consult us on every single concession. I would hope that if the particular track that was being built was going to affect other user groups, that they would come and ask us for our opinion. And I’d generally trust them to do that.”

“We are super supportive of people to get out and enjoy the ngahere, but our view has always been the right trail in the right place.”

‘We’re in a lot better space’

The incredibly messy rules around trail building based in regulations and legislation not changed in decades have not done anyone any favours, yet even so the Great Rides alone had grown into a $1.3 billion industry that mostly benefitted the provinces.

The system has reached a new, still messy halfway house where some regions remain largely locked up, while in others new trails are being assessed on a “case-by-case basis by district teams with strong local knowledge” about local needs, conservation considerations, and whether community or third-party partners bring forward proposals, according to DOC.

It is not any sort of stable equilibrium though, and next year promises more, bigger changes.

“We’re very pleased with what we’ve managed to achieve in the last few months, but we’ve still got some gaps and we need a sustainable, resilient solution,” Twyman said.

“We’re in a lot better space, they’re [DOC] in a good space, and we want to work together to have good outcomes for all the cycling and walking community, because there’s as many walkers on the cycle trails as there are cyclists,” Masters said.

Howard was just “super-stoked” to be route-blazing again.

“Someone was saying passion is the degree of suffering you’re willing to endure towards a cause. So, if the amount of suffering and persistence required to pull a trail off, then I’m certainly passionate.”

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand