Do on-road cycle paths slow traffic?
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El coche nos (H/T Paul Barter)
According to NSW Roads Minister, Duncan Gay, on-road cycle paths in the centre of Sydney are in the wrong place and exacerbate traffic congestion. However his Department flatly contradicts him. It reckons they’re not only in the right place, they don’t slow traffic either!
The prospect of increased traffic congestion from road space “sacrificed” for cycle paths is a common fear of motorists. The Roads Department’s view that the fear is misplaced is therefore an important one for anyone interested in promoting cycling.
In a great piece of reporting, Jacob Saulwick of the Sydney Morning Herald used FOI to access Departmental briefing notes prepared for Mr Gay on the controversial issue of City of Sydney’s on-road bike path network. As I discussed here back in March, Lord Mayor Clover Moore wants more cycling in the city but the NSW Government wants less.
Mr Saulwick searched through 467 pages of departmental documents and briefing notes signed by the CEO and given to the Minister, going back to January 2010. He found a consistent theme at odds with the stated view of the Minister. For example the Department advised Mr Gay:
Given that the bi-directional paths do not occupy previous general traffic lanes, no significant delays to other road users arising from the cycleways have occurred
The RTA did not identify or advocate the use of alternative routes for any of the cycleway routes selected by council
The Minister singled out College Street and Kent Street, arguing they were “inappropriate” locations for bicycle paths. He proposed the College Street path be shifted to Hyde Park. The Department however did not support his view, arguing instead:
Observations by RTA Network Operations and Sydney Region Traffic Engineering Services personnel indicate that recent changes appear to have had little or no impact on the capacity or operation of College Street and its intersection with William/Park streets…. The option of relocating the function of the College Street bicycle path to Hyde Park is not recommended…. in any event, removal of the bicycle path on College Street would have limited benefits for traffic flow if the western lane was then to revert to car use.
The reason the City of Sydney’s on-road bicycle paths don’t slow traffic is they didn’t require traffic lanes to be given over to cycling. They replaced parking spaces, not traffic lanes. The traffic capacity of the affected roads accordingly remains unchanged.
In fact traffic flow might improve a little due to fewer delays from vehicles reverse-parking. Fewer vehicles cruising for parking spaces might also improve traffic flow. And over time some motorists might elect to cycle instead given the existence of bike paths.
The losers here are motorists who want to park in the city centre and adjoining residents and businesses who now have less on-street parking available. However their loss has to be balanced against the benefits.
Council is aiming for bicycles to win 20% mode share and it says its counts show cyclist numbers increased 80% over the last two years. Turning on-road parking spaces into traffic lanes to increase road capacity has a long history in Sydney – constructing a bicycle lane is exactly the same thing.
The City of Sydney is responding to an increasing demand from its residents to prioritise amenity over traffic flow. Cars have a shocking impact on amenity because they’re noisy, polluting and dangerous.
This is the centre of Sydney, not the suburbs – cars are less valuable here. It’s dense and pedestrian-intensive. There’s relatively good public transport, good walkability and now there’s the beginnings of a good cycling network.
Parking should no longer be the priority. A bicycle path provides a higher and better use than under-priced on-road parking spaces. Moreover the conversion can be constructed at relatively low cost.
Responsibility for cycling was transferred from Mr Gay to the Transport Minister, Gladys Berejiklian, earlier this year.
Kudos to Jacob Saulwick and the Sydney Morning Herald for ferreting out this information.
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i’m looking forward to getting up to sydney in october–i might even try riding a bike around town–something that was too daunting last time i visited–before city of sydney’s efforts
I drive about 1km down Kent St every night to get onto the bridge (yes, bring on the flame war). The cycle path certainly hasn’t improved the traffic…..but it’s fine. If it has slowed the traffic then the impact has been, at worst, very marginal. It’s also been great to see the dramatic increase in people using the path since it first opened.
What’s the actual speed of cars in city traffic anyway Alan? When I cycle I get to work quicker than all the cages. I also reckon that Melbourne traffic moves at a lower top speed but seems to get there in about the same time. Melbourne drivers seem happy to cruise at 40kmh through narrow streets where as in Squidders that would cause trouble but I wonder if there’s much of an overall difference.
Sydney’s lanes and roads were not built for cars.
They were built for pedestrians, horses, carts, bullock drays, bicycles, omnibuses.
The big mistake was allowing the cars.
Some of the recent motorways were built for motor vehicles, and are no place for pedestrians and bicyclists.
Serious severity of impact damage to the human body in a car accident is a direct function of speed. (The amount of kinetic energy to be absorbed by the skull or whatever is a function of speeds at the instant of impact). It is challenge to kill at car speeds of less than 15 km/hr. At 40 km/hr the outcome for survivors usually involves a long painful hospitalised recovery. At 60 plus km/hr the outcome is nearly always a dead certainty.
Any road geometry change that slows down traffic including the provision of bicycle lanes could possibly be regarded as a positive outcome to the community when using the key performance indicator (KPI) for changes to the transport system that reduce mortality rates
The unfortunate thing about this type of debate is that, about 40 years after the problems of cars in big cities became obvious,there is still no shared understanding about how to deal with them.
So we get Edward Mandla, Liberal candidate for Sydney City Council, saying, : the department’s ”bewildering” logic [on the location of bike lanes] had deprived the community of car spaces along College Street. (SMH 21 August)
Or Christine Forster, ditto: ”But what is the impact on the bakery down the street of the fact that people can no longer pull up in their cars outside that bakery and buy a baguette?” (SMH 1 August).
As if kerbside parking in College St should be a priority issue for the City of Sydney. As if park-at-the-door trading is a priority in Glebe or Surry Hills – about the most pedestrian-oriented residental neighbourhoods in Australia.
These folk presumably grew up in 1960s-70s suburbia, and they are still living in the world of their childhood in which good planning meant first and foremost, a parking space for everyone, everywhere.
They don’t understand that you can’t plan the central activities district of a city of four million the same way as you planned a suburban mall in the 1960s.
And the planning professions do not have enough prestige, and do not speak with a unified enough voice, to set them straight.
SMH columnist Elizabeth Farrelly weighs in on Duncan Gay in today’s issue.
Let’s not forget that many Australian car lanes are unnecessarily wide and that bike lanes can be added without the removal of parking spaces, or traffic lanes.
It also seems logical that if bicycle riders were choosing to ride on these routes before the new bike lanes, then bike lanes most likely would have increased traffic speeds, by getting the bikes out of the car lanes and into their own space.
Ika Ink, Very good point about lane widths. Yarra Council in Melbourne has been using traffic lanes as narrow as 2.8 m in order to fit bike lanes in on both sides of the road, a much more useful layout than Sydney City two way paths on one side only, although they may have their place. See paper presented at the Australian Cycling Conference in Adelaide in 2012.
http://www.australiancyclingconference.org/
Awaiting the day when there is a bike lane along Broadway between Sydney University and Glebe and the City.
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