12. Auckland Council attitude - as mentioned in point 3 NZ councils have no real success creating cycling lanes and the same can be said for their attitude to motorbikes. Bikers will be ticketed if they are not excatly in a motorcyle park if they try be considerate and not park in a full car park. I have seen all the motorcycle parks full with scooters so parked beside it in a massive pedestrian walkway only to be fined where I was not blocking pedestrian or vehicular traffic - go figure. Next time I will park in a full car park. This is an example of an underlying battle with Auckland Council's true attitude to bikers. Openly it professes support but in practice it is short sighted and boorish. Having said that, some Auckland parking lots have free motorcycle parking although even here I have noticed an increase in regulaions of where exactly. Don't get me started on Wilson's parking lots!
13. Exhorbitant ACC (accident compensation) levies on motorcycles - apparently motorcyclists costs the ACC and health system a small fortune. Whereas cyclists pay nothing so presumably cost the system nothing? And skateboarders who break bones every day don't pay to ride at free taxpayer skate parks. I assume that if a truck knocks a motorbike then it is recorded as a motorbike statistic but who knows? Bikers just assume that it is a punitive deterrant. Apparently some years back they wanted to introduce truly absurd levies but suddenly reduced them to less than half when enough bikers protested outside the beehive in Wellington. Maybe time for bikers to show some muscle. There are so many who love to ride but this is a shocker. Certainly not an incentive in the NZ rain one would think the authorities would promote less car traffic especially with one occupant per car as most are. In Tel Aviv I saw people in the pouring rain on their scooters and bikes but then I'd guess they don't have sky high costs to run them. I read somewhere about the huge damage overloaded trucks cause the road surfaces (see comment under point 8) and in contrast then motorcycles must place very little wear and tear on roads so despite this or the low impact on the environment they pay a massively disproportionate amount of roading costs. I met a fellow motorcyclist on the Wellington ferry who had just started riding again due to a long recuperation after a bad accident - on his bicycle on his way to work! Had never crashed his motorcycle.
14. Infrastructure lag - as mentioned in several places above NZ has not kept place with tourism and immigration growth and while some narrow roads are a quaint reminder of a bygone ear of yesteryear, it only works if the road is isolated and quiet. For the additional traffic the road and rail infrastructure has simply not kept pace, either on main roads or around residential developments (see point 8). Again, the authorities simply think keeping every vehicle to a snail's pace will keep society at thinking it really is living in the 80's but our modern cars and motorbikes remind us otherwise. As an example, Auckland has a stunning motorway in and out of the Northern bound tunnel. As you head north you come flying out only to see 80km/hr speed signs and eventually to enter Warkworth in a single lane (usually made into 2 lanes by drivers) and on we go up north at a snail's pace again. Likewise if authorities hope to see business and labour move out of Auckland they cannot expect employees to factor in a 3 hour drive for a distance that would be 1½ to 2 hours in other first world countries. Some effort over better roads with faster limits need to kick in to make Auckland and NZ a modern place to live.