Bicycle Network: Latest News
Newly available government documents show that planning for the proposed Castlereagh Street bike lane through central Sydney is beset with chaos and confusion as transport bureaucrats and consultants try in vain to design a “part-time” bike lane.
None of the advice and analysis available to the government can explain an acceptable way to combine a two-way bike lane and continuous loading zone on the same stretch of asphalt.
That’s not surprising: it can’t work.
However the Minister for Roads, Duncan Gay, is determined to push it through because he wants to close another perfectly good bike lane in College Street, and needs to be able to say he has an alternative route.
The pressure is on because the light rail projects is soon to close George Street, and so the government is looking for another alternative route to pump traffic into.
The fatal flaw in the government’s thinking permeates the document: it still thinks it needs additional capacity for vehicles even though it is planning increased capacity for trams and buses.
It seems not to have occurred to the Roads Minister or his minions that Sydney’s future will see bike, bus, tram and foot traffic increase dramatically, and vehicle traffic decline.
The role of the government is to facilitate that change, not obstruct it.
Yet its current plans will reduce bike capacity as the expense of vehicle capacity. The intent is to close the Castlereagh Street lane during most of the day so that an additional 68 parking spaces can be made available for delivery vehicles. If ever there was an indicator of the gross inefficiency of central Sydney logistics that figure is it.
The documents, obtained by the Sydney Morning Herald under Freedom of Information rules, show that there are major negative consequences to the plans, and that the government has known this since last year
Advice from transport consultant Warren Salomon was that if deliveries were important the best option would be to close a traffic lane for a loading zone.
He also suggested the retention of the College Street Cycleway: "College Street provides a better north-south connection to the proposed King Street east-west link and the gateway to the Eastern Suburbs at Whitlam Square than Castlereagh Street,” he said in the documents.
"The removal of the College Street cycleway without a Liverpool Street east-west link will sever cycle network access to the CBD for Eastern Suburbs cyclists."
A report from the former director-general of Transport for NSW, Dave Stewart, to the chief executive of Roads and Maritime Services, Peter Duncan in October last year said: "There is no precedent in Sydney for a part-time cycleway."
No comments:
Post a Comment