What is iWay?

Don’t know what iWay is? Well where have you been?

iWay is all about making Hastings a walking and cycling friendly city. We want more people to beat the feet or get out on their bike because it’s an easy safe and fun option for the whole family.

Hastings won a hotly contested $4M in funding from the NZ Transport Agency’s model communities project.

The $ is to help us make Hastings a world leader in encouraging walking and cycling. So what are we doing with the $4M bucks?

We are linking where people live with where they work and where they play. This includes new cycle lanes (on road ones painted bright green so drivers know to stay out) and some off road ones to keep you extra safe.

We are also going to be improving safety at intersections and roundabouts and slowing down traffic in some places, so no matter where you bike, it’ll be sweet as.

Plus we’ll have plenty more bike racks all around town, so if you do ride, there’ll be somewhere to park up. But iWay isn’t just about biking, because walking is cool too!

We’re fixing up our footpaths, creating new ones, making them wider, improving lighting and making it safer to cross streets with pedestrian crossings and the like. Hastings is set to be walking nirvana.

Other things we are working on include travel planning with schools and workplaces, cycling training for kids and plenty of cool events that you can all get involved in.

Hastings is made for walking and cycling, it's got good streets and it's really flat. iWay is going to help Hastings people get up on their feet or take up pedal power.

iWay is fixing 'em up

We’re trying to get more people out there riding, so we figured if their bikes are safe and they ride real smooth they’ll be whole lot more likely to put the pedal to the metal.

And so we started our Big Bike Fix-Ups in December last year. We held the first one in the Hastings CBD and weren’t really sure how many people to expect.

We had five bike mechanics at the ready, to churn through free safety checks on everything from BMX bikes to tricycles, but would the people come? Well, yes they did.

They came in their hundreds! We had over 300 people turn up on the day and our mechanics worked away furiously, fixing 214 bikes. Mean! Since then we’ve had two more Fix-Ups, one in Flaxmere at the Flaxmere Family Festival and one just the other weekend out in Havelock North.

Three events in and the Fix-Ups are proving just as popular. In Havelock we only had three bike mechanics because the weather was a little iffy.

They were supposed to be at the domain for about an hour, but in the end we had to double it, as a couple of hundred people turned up and we fixed over 100 bikes.

It was definitely a hit with the locals, people were coming along to take a look at what was happening and then driving home to pick up their bike and bring it back for some expert tweaking.

Heaps of kids turned up and it was also great to see mums and dads looking to start riding again, now their old ride had been given a new lease on life.

So many people told us they had been meaning to get back on their bike but couldn't because it had a flat tyre, dodgy brakes or some other problem.

The Fix-Ups were just the ticket and got their bikes back in tip top shape. The Fix-Ups have been so popular, that there’ll definitely be a few more in the pipeline….maybe when it warms up a bit.

Bike skills for Hastings kids

Through iWay we’re doing everything we can to get Hastings kids on their bikes and out there on our streets riding safely.

One thing we quickly noticed was there just wasn’t anywhere that schools in Hastings (or even NZ for that matter), could go to get a consistent standard of bike skills training.

That’s where we came up with a cunning plan. So we (the iWay team at Hastings District Council) teamed up with the guys at BikeNZ to change the world one bike rider at a time…well in Hastings at least.

So we started the Learn to Ride programme which gives kids a whole bunch of sweet cycle skills. You know the drill, how to start, how to stop, balancing, turning corners and maybe even popping the odd jump.

Learn to Ride is going to be training over 500 Year 6 primary school kids in Hastings….that’s a really good start.

The whole reason we are doing this is we want to see more kids on bikes and we know this training will keep them safe and help them be more confident.

But our plan doesn’t stop there, in Hastings we want to be Aotearoa’s role-model for cycling and we reckon this is a really big step in developing a programme that will work right round the country.

It makes sense that it’s all starting here; as everyone knows that Hawke’s Bay is already the Cycling Capital of NZ!