The Wrong Side of my Car
The blog that wants to go obsolete
So should we ride a bicycle on the footpath then?
You may remember this ad.
With a healthy portion of manufactured outrage. Hey, it is not allowed to ride a bike on the footpath. To this day I am not sure what their real problem was. zOMG they let a kid out unsupervised. Many people never miss a chance to pour scorn on parents.
Nevertheless there is talk of allowing cycling on the footpath. Officially you’re not allowed to do it, but a lot of people do it anyway. You’d be crazy to ride on the road.
So should the law catch up to the situation on the ground?
Ideally we shouldn’t ride on the footpath. Or, we shouldn’t have to. But, as is often the case, we will have to strike a balance between idealism and pragmatism.
Armchair expert
Let’s play armchair street designer.
This is an intersection on Mount Albert Road in Three Kings. Auckland transport is planning to rebuild it. Bike Auckland quite quickly posted their opinion on it and it is not exactly glowing.
Best practice or nothing
Is it OK to settle for painted bike lanes? Often, people will say no. Cycling advocates will point out that it is not real infrastructure and they’ll point at the Netherlands. Authorities make this argument, and then conveniently figure out that therefore the cost will blow out and they’ll cancel the whole thing.
Surely the Dutch don’t bother with just paint, right?
Well, this is a myth.
Cycling deadlock
I was recently introduced to the Wheeled Pedestrian blog. He is best described as a former cycling advocate. A bit disgruntled perhaps. He was lamenting the failure of cycling advocacy to achieve anything:
Progress will remain stalled while advocates fail to reflect on the reasons why they are failing. It is too convenient to blame AT. — @MarkBracey on twitter
I have made a dot map of cycling mode share a while ago. Now also on Observable. One dot for every quantum of 3 responses to the NZ Census. If you have a strong computer you can get an idea of the sheer difference in uptake between cycling and driving:
Sometimes the simplest of visualisations is the most bluntly clear. If we want cycling to be mainstream we have worse problems than just the lack of infrastructure.