One thing I didn't see written on the butchers paper on Tuesday night (20 June 1998) at Leichhardt (Town Hall) was how much responsibility the various Bike Planning Consultants used by Councils should take for the state of bike facilities we find ourselves with.
There are a few consultants that seem to get most of the work throughout Sydney, coming from the big consultancy groups like Arrups and Geoplan and GHD etc.
They seem to do mostly the same sort of things - identify a few bike routes and suggest treatments like line marking or sign posting, and put in a few bike racks here and there. They rarely recommend anything radical as they know who is paying the bill and what Councils can afford. Anything too controversial or expensive gets cut out in committee stages or by the councillors. There is usually no integration with other traffic or transport or town plans, and any bike plan will have a lower priority than almost any other scheme that the council might have.
The main result is a patchy lot of bike routes on back streets that often don't go where cyclists want to go, and don't connect with adjoining Council's bike routes and are of dubious convenience or safety. Meanwhile the rest of the street network is progressively made worse for cyclists through all the usual things like angle parking, roundabouts, one way streets, street closures, S lanes, lack of shoulders, new high speed roads etc.
Cyclists are expected to stop complaining because they now have a few bike routes. The consultants get paid and depart and Councils may or may not implement any of the Plan over the next few years. No one bothers to check on the usage of the bike routes before and after to see if the Plan was any good.
So much is well known, but I don't think anyone questioned the quality or the abilities of the consultants working in the Bike Planning field, or what could be done to improve standards or get consistent results across Sydney. Councils could save quite a bit of money by writing their own bike plans, which often consist of slabs of text and diagrams taken from Austroads 14 plus a few maps of bike routes which most cyclists could supply for free. Detailed designs and costings are quite often left to the council engineers and aren't that difficult anyway.
Perhaps it is not the consultants to blame. Councils often don't have any vision as to what a better bike plan might look like or enough expertise or, more likely, guts to implement them.
My feeling is that more would be achieved for cyclists if Bike Planning became integrated with general road and Traffic Management planning. Cyclists should just be considered normal road users (not IMHO as riders of special vehicles as has been suggested) to be accommodated through generally accepted engineering practices in any and all traffic management schemes, and new road construction, etc, that might come up. This is basically the Include the Bike philosophy, or Think Bike! Or as the doctors oath says "first, do no harm".
If councils don't have the expertise amongst their traffic engineers they could hire it when needed or make sure their engineers have the required skills (- this might lead on to exactly what do traffic engineers learn when qualifying?). Regional Groupings of councils like Imroc and Wesroc could probably afford to have a specialist bike planning engineer to coordinate or assist individual council's efforts. Consultants might have a more useful role in examining Council's procedures and philosophy as regards bike planning, and suggesting improvements.
As far as funding goes, Councils (and the RTA) would have to show that any road or traffic project proposed did cater adequately for cyclists, or at least did no harm, before it was funded. Funding for bicycle facilities would then come out of the general roads funding, maybe up to some percentage of the total. Councils would have to decide how much to spend on bike paths versus on road works. Special grants for major connecting links or one off expensive projects like a bridge could be sought from the State Government. Special remediation funds could also be set aside to try and reverse some of the poor designs and unsafe works that have been foisted on us in the past. A role for consultants here, to provide independent audits of safety.
No doubt there are lots of problems with that sort of funding system,
and my analysis, but the present system of 50/50 funding and separate
bicycle budgets doesn't seem to be working.
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