The
Bourke Street Cycleway - World's Worst Practice?
Surry Hills is one of Sydney's most bicycle-friendly "villages".
In December 2003 Clover Moore, then merely the Member for Bligh, stated that bicycle use in Surry Hills was the highest in her electorate and praised the South
Sydney Bike Plan - introduced in 1997 and then under review - which was making this possible.
A few months later, with Clover now Lord Mayor of the combined City and South Sydney Councils, other more newsworthy political priorities dominated Town Hall and both the excellent South Sydney plan and the old City Council's infamously poor bike plan were abandoned.
Eventually, in April 2007, the City of Sydney Council released their "Cycle
Strategy and Action Plan 2007-2017".
After internet polls and focus
groups were used to gauge non-cyclists' reactions to photographs of
various types of cycling infrastructure, massive changes had been made to the "Cycle Strategy" following the close of its public exhibition period. It was - in essence - converted from a reasonably balanced, albeit not particularly good, bike plan to a scheme to build separated two-way cycleways all over the inner city and to entice non-cyclists onto them.
This drastically altered "Cycle Strategy" had been passed unanimously by a full Council meeting on 02 April 2007, on the basis of plausible but totally fictitious assurances given to Council's Planning Development and Transport Committee that the changes would "create a bicycle network that a child can safely cycle on" and a recommendation that the amendments not be put out on public exhibition as this "would delay the implementation of the Strategy".
All this came
as a surprise to anybody who had made submissions to Council on the draft
strategy put out to public exhibition in August and September 2006, in which
there was no reference to such an obsolete and thoroughly discredited
inner-city "sidepath" design. No submissions appear to have recommended any such scheme.
The startling new "Cycle Strategy" was
greeted with ridicule
by cyclists, many of whom were aware of the overwhelming body of
well-researched opinion and accident statistics indicating that, in a crowded
inner-city situation with intersections every 50 metres or so, these "Clayton's" cycleways
would be far
more dangerous than the broad shoulder lanes that they were to replace.
A press
announcement ("New bicycle lanes to improve safety") accompanied
the launch, featuring a "photomontage" of a "bicyclised"
Crown Street, with the buses airbrushed out. Nothing more was heard of such a
plan, possibly after unanswerable questions were asked by local shopkeepers and
State Transit.
Similarly impractical schemes for Missenden Road, Abercrombie Street and a host of other inner-city roads also disappeared from public view.
Informed cyclists
assumed - with relief - that the whimsical plan to build "bi-directional
separated bicycle roads" had been quietly shelved, particularly after Copenhagen
Council commissioned and - with considerable embarrassment - published yet
another analysis of the devastating effect on pedestrian and cyclist injuries
of even one-way cycleways in an inner-city situation with multiple
cross-streets.
Residents
and local businesses were unconcerned - there is no reference to these separated two-way cycleways in Council's "Inner
East Local Action Plan". They were similarly not mentioned in the
flyers for the Surry
Hills and City
East LATM meetings in November and December 2007; we cannot locate any
minutes of the LATM meetings themselves.
However,
unbeknownst to the community, Council's "Sydney Traffic Committee"
had quietly approved detailed draft
plans for a "Bourke Street Bicycle Road" on 21 November 2007. The
plans were tabled by Ms Fiona Lewis, later to be despatched into the community
to defend the concept without - it appeared - permission to acknowledge the
existence of these plans.
A press
release from Sydney's Lord Mayor, Clover Moore on 8 February 2008 stating
that a "3.2km two-way separated cycleway connecting Woolloomooloo with Zetland will commence construction late this year" went
largely unnoticed by the community. Clover went on to say - in contradiction to a vast body of international evidence -
that "this increases safety by removing the conflict between cyclists and
cars" and alluded to the Focus Group report on the sorts of facilities
preferred by "potential cyclists".
The first
that most of the community heard of this was in late March and early April
2008, when a glossy
leaflet was slipped under their doors announcing that "The City of
Sydney is introducing a dedicated separated bicycle route along Bourke
Street". The leaflet featured another "photomontage", this time
of a three-lane part of Bourke Street with the new cycleway and an extra traffic
lane airbrushed in.
Local
residents and businesses were not impressed, particularly when they unearthed
Ms Lewis' detailed
plans and saw that most of the pretty plane trees - and the pedestrian
refuge - in the background of the shot were earmarked for removal, along with
much of the street parking around Arthur Street outside two popular restaurants
and a pub.
Local
cyclists, accustomed to cruising down Bourke Street with the current light
40Km/hr vehicular traffic and not being obliged to stop every 50 metres or so
as they passed a sidestreet, decided that they would stick to their old habits
even if the shoulder lanes were removed and the cycleway's existence meant that
they would be breaking
the law.
Pedestrians
were dubious about Council's promises that cycleway users would patiently stop
at every intersection, and that cyclists on the sizeable "shared pavement"
sections of the cycleway would comply with their "obligation to always give way
to pedestrians and to use their bells".
Safety issues
apart, the fundamental flaw of this proposal is that its 12.8 metre
cross-section (the minimum allowable under RTA
guidelines) is up to two metres wider than much of the narrow, twisting,
Heritage-listed part of Bourke Street that runs through Surry Hills. Even if a
parking lane is removed and/or the main carriageway is narrowed by 2.8 metres
to wing-mirror-threatening dimensions, the "potential cyclists" that
Town Hall wishes to lure into this dangerous cycleway
risk hitting the ancient kerbside trees with their handlebars and crashing to
the tarmac.
Local
cyclists, pedestrians, residents and businesses have showered Ms Lewis,
Councillors and Clover Moore with letters, but have received no concrete
answers whatsoever to their specific questions - which revolve around safety,
damage to the streetscape, and the loss of street parking.
Council had
been inconsistent and evasive on these issues, but it appeared that at least 12
trees (Monica Barone's undated letter to residents) and "approximately
13" west-side parking spaces had to go. Residents were understandably
alarmed and unconvinced by Council's assurances that the lost parking spaces
could be "relocated" to existing "No Standing" zones in
narrow and already overcrowded sidestreets.
A "detailed
map" released on 14 May added fuel to the flames of resident anger by
showing little detail, echoed the dangerous nonsense about creating replacement
parking spaces in "No Standing" zones, and continued to overstate the
width of the "narrow" bit of Bourke Street. Residents with
tape-measures drew this last fact to the attention of Council's
"Community Liaison Officer" David Robinson and the maps
were reprinted with this detail removed.
A packed
and noisy public meeting at the Medina (359 Crown St Surry Hills) on 24 May saw
Council officers present no evidence whatsoever to support Council's repeated
claims that the new facility would be safer than the excellent cycling
infrastructure which currently exists in Surry Hills.
Attempts to
question the presenters on this issue were suppressed by the hired professional
"facilitators". The meeting was then broken up into small groups, at which cyclists and residents were allowed to table their questions and objections.
Assurances were publicly made that this community feedback would be consolidated and placed on Council's website within "two or three weeks".
To nobody's surprise, this promise was broken.
Clover
Moore returned to Australia in early June and issued several
letters and press releases promising that "no trees will be removed from Surry Hills".
This is to be applauded but provides no comfort to Redfern residents and - given Council's recent public statements that three additional parking spaces will be lost each time the cycleway has to "wiggle" round an unruly kerbside tree - suggests that 60 or more kerbside parking spots will be removed to accommodate the full length of the proposed cycleway.
Attempts by
local cyclists and residents to privately discuss safety issues with Council
staff face-to-face have generally been dismissed - often contemptuously - with
the claim that the voluminous international accident data is "anti-cyclist".
In an
attempt to rebut this, cyclist Friends of Bourke Street approached the renowned
American cycling expert John Forester
and asked him to investigate Council's proposal. John's report, which broadly
shares all the cyclist and resident concerns described above, is available here.
The overwhelming overseas accident data and the Forester report were dismissed as "foreign" by Sydney Council, and the entire issue of these dangerous cycleways was suppressed until the September Council elections were over.
In November and December 2008, Sydney Council's formidable ratepayer-funded marketing team re-launched the Bourke Street plan and announced an expanded cycleway scheme, shamelessly ignoring the overwhelming evidence that it is unsafe and seeking Federal Government funds to create create over 160Km of inner-city cycleways, at a cost of over $240 million, without providing any credible economic or environmental justification for them.
On 15 December 2008, ignoring many of the undertakings made by Council staff during the community consultation and disregarding the objections raised by hundreds of local cyclists and residents, Council approved new plans for the Bourke Street Cycleway which - inter alia - will remove between 65 and 95 on-street parking spaces.
Thus, in
mid-2009, we find a demonstrably dangerous
intersection-riddled cycleway design which was never put out to public exhibition being shoehorned into
Surry Hills' undersized, Heritage-listed streetscape by elected officials who
have - as far as we can ascertain - refused to meaningfully address any of the questions
raised by the cyclists, residents and businesses affected by the scheme via thousands of letters, petitions and emails.
Issues
repeatedly raised by cyclists and residents south of Cleveland Street, and by the Pedestrian Council of Australia, have been similarly
ignored. For example, the "cycleway" between Phillip Street and Green Square is, in fact, a
plan to force cyclists and pedestrians to share an already crowded footpath,
but letters and emails to Council querying the safety of
this continue to go unanswered.
Similarly, businesses and residents between Green Square and Gardeners Road were given less than a week in February 2009 to comment on plans for an "Alexandria Cycleway" along Bourke Road, Bowden Street and Mandible Street.
Council intends to remove a huge amount of on-street parking, making the usual fictitious claims about safety, and has subsequently dismissed the overwhelmingly negative petitions and submissions with which the local community bombarded Town Hall.
Sydney City Council's insensitive attempt to force their na•ve and unsafe cycleway design upon cyclists, residents and businesses is an absolute disgrace. The scheme should be abandoned
immediately, before more ratepayers' funds are frittered away on this
dangerous, destructive, undemocratic and poorly-researched flight of fancy.
We believe that the safe solution for Surry Hills may well be to slow Bourke St to 30Km/hr or less,
resurface and colour it appropriately (green would complement the trees...) and
run it as "Narrow Profile Shared Traffic/Bicycle Lanes" per S5.3.3 in
South Sydney Council's well-researched 2004 "South
Sydney Bike Plan". A recent report from Rutgers University encouraging
the promotion of cycling - "Making Cycling
Irresistible" pp 514-516 et al - describes the great success of this
treatment of "lightly travelled residential streets" in many Dutch, Danish, and
German cities.
Angle
parking (as currently exists in Great Buckingham Street et al) on alternating
sides of the street could further calm traffic and reduce
door-opening-on-cyclist injuries, which the proposed cycleway does little to
prevent.
Cyclists,
local businesses and residents would be overjoyed. This sort of photogenic "Bicycle Boulevard" probably should have been created immediately after the Eastern Distributor banished through traffic from the street.
This would
presumably be a good deal less expensive than building the cycleway, and would
allow funds to be allocated to genuine and proven schemes which would increase
cycling safety and participation - such as building the long-promised
"missing links" between bicycle-friendly parts of Sydney.
We
sincerely hope that this shambles is not representative of the quality of
research, design and management behind "Sustainable Sydney 2030".
The above
report represents the research and opinions of the Friends of Bourke Street to date.
References have been given wherever possible.
We
have been unsuccessful in our attempts to have Council staff confirm or deny
the conclusions we have drawn from the facts that we have unearthed.
We
urge you to check the references provided and email us (with URGENT in the
subject line) if you discover anything we've got wrong, or if you have any
additional information.
Thanks!
<The Friends Of Bourke Street>
A Dangerous Ride For Child Cyclists
FRIENDS OF BOURKE STREET WEBSITE