What’s wrong with this picture?
Posted July 31st, 2006 in Transport
Paths to put more bums on bike seats.
All residents in the CBD and inner city would have a cycle path within five minutes of their home under a new plan to increase the number of bike journeys five-fold in the next 10 years. Parking stations with showers, change rooms and repair facilities would be built to encourage commuters under the City of Sydney’s draft cycle strategy. Two years in the making, it aims to lift the proportion of CBD trips made by bike from 2 per cent of all journeys now to 10 per cent by 2016.
All well and good but unfortunately this plan continues the Sydneycentric focus of transport, sure this would be an important addition to the city’s infrastructure, however, it’s more of an athmospheric solution than a practical one, we already know about the efficiency of riding a bike but it’ll take more that a few bicycle paths to make a difference in an environment where people will have to be blasted out of their cars before they take the train or bus.
Ultimately, solving the transport problem lies not within the city, but suburbia and exurbia, city residents already have a plethora of choice, it’s the outlying areas that are bereft of options, and the change will only come when we have built proper rail infrastructure and links to the city or the cost of running the family fleet outweighs the social embarrasment of taking public transport.
Aftermatter: I had a look at the link provided by the SMH for info about the Sydney Transport Summit to be held later this week and I was appalled, not at the speakers list, which of course included the usual rogues gallery of political players, but the cost of registration - if anything was designed to keep out the riffraf and entrench the intertests of a particular world view this was it, as an individual, you’d have to spend $2524.50 just to take an interest in your city and it’s environment.
Community consultation indeed.
Update: Pedaller asks a few questions, as does Steve Edney.
Technorati Tags: cycling, transport, sydney
What others have to say…
Probably, particularly where governments, councils and priorities change after elections.
Policy continuity is a problem when it comes to these problems. Remembering of course that the only policy that is allowed to continue is one where people get to stay in their cars.
It is simply amazing that the provision of bicycle paths and public transport is still being seen as an economic cost in terms of Treasury Departments.
Given rising petrol prices and the well-documented negative externalities caused by excessive car dependence one would think that Treasury Departments and State Governments would finally see the provision of sustainable transport and economically beneficial.
Alex makin
If only because they are tied to the now standard economic orthodoxies.
It may be too much to ask for modern day economists to actually do a proper accounting for all those externalalities, I don’t think they know how or where to start because it doesn’t fit neatly into the texts or the politics of the day.
While on the one hand, yes this plan does continue the Sydneycentric focus of NSW transport … on the other, it is hopefully an extremely visible improvement to the state’s cycling facilities.
And there’s definitely something to be said for improving the visibility of cycling as a legitimate transport option: if commuter/transport cyclists aren’t visible, then it’s easy to say that there’s no need to provide them with facilities.
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While I applaud the City of Sydney’s bike plan, I’m a bit worried that the level of funding set aside won’t be enough to cover the vision. Bicycle Victoria estimates that it costs $20,000 per kilometre of on-road bike lane markings and $150,000 per kilometre of off-road bike path. There is just barely enough money in the budget to create the bike lanes and paths, before you even consider the costs involved in the other cycling facilities proposed.
What happens to all those wonderful end-of-trip facilities, bike hire etc when the money runs out? Does it all just stop?