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.

How to cycle on the footpath

It is useful to recap the actual proposal, it mostly boils down to what should be common sense. Don’t go fast. Pedestrians have priority. The proposed maximum speed is 15 although I personally think 10 is often the practical limit.

A footpath has one simple ground rule. Pedestrians can just be on the footpath.

They do not have to watch out for fast things.

If you ride on the footpath, pedestrians may not watch out for you at all. They don’t have to. So don’t go expecting smooth sailing. It will be a crawl, almost at — you guessed it — walking pace. *1 You’ll figure out quickly that this is at best a stopgap measure. You thought you’d just do your entire commute on the footpaths? Yeah, nah.

Pros and cons

Although there are legitimate arguments in favour and against, the discussion often is the same tired manufactured outrage all over again. Cyclists bad. Cyclists entitled. Many people struggle to even see cyclists as human.

There is also widespread misunderstanding about how bicycles work, and what they are. Many see bicycles as some sort of miniature car, and assume similar problems will crop up. Arguments like “hey, a biclcye and its rider can weigh a combined 100 kg”. Ummm… do you know how much your car weighs?

You know, my car can turn faster into my driveway than you can ride your bicycle.

Also, unlike cars a bicycle will not insulate you from human to human contact. Being actually in other people’s face makes it harder to be a total dick.

So, yes or no:

👍 Pro: it fills the gaps in our bike network

This is a big deal. For many people bicycling on the road would be dangerous. The official statistic is roughly 10 times worse compared to driving. That is not super bad, however our statistics are coming from places where people actually ride bicycles, which unsurprisingly are often relatively safe places. The odd bike lane or off-road path. Nobody knows how dangerous an average Auckland street is for the simple reason nobody rides a bicycle on it.

So people will sometimes have to go around gnarly situations on the footpath. I occasionaly am not even physically able to fit through congested car traffic. I have to go around it on the footpath.

Maybe there is just that one stretch of road where going between all those cars really seems suicidal.

A common design feature on signalised intersections is a short stretch of two traffic lanes just before and after the traffic light, creating dangerous pinch points where you had better not go outside of a car. So, on the footpath you go.

👎 Con: it gives an excuse not to build bike lanes

The last thing we want is another excuse to block bike lanes. But still, imagine someone actually using this argument. “But they can ride on the footpath!”

I mean, really? I find it hard to believe that would be a good faith argument. To anyone even vaguely familiar with cycling it is so obviously only a workaround, not a solution. There are so many similarly vapid arguments that one more or less will not matter.

👍 Pro: kids can actually ride to school

Ah yes. Lovejoy's Law.

But seriously: children riding to school will not ride on the road. It is as simple as that. If you ban riding on the footpath you will de facto ban riding to school. Bad move, unless you want make sure cycling mode share in schools sinks even lower.

And you know all this stuff about being careful and pedestrians having priority? Now you can actually teach that in school.

👎 Con: what about disabled people

Won’t someone please think of the disabled?

Well, maybe you live in a country of dicks and cyclists will actually run you off the path. It is still a stretch, with cyclists not being protected by a ton of steel and glass, so you can’t exactly run people off the road with impunity. But yeah there is precedent.

But more optimistically, worst case you’ll have to wait for a few seconds until that cyclist lets you pass.

And what if I tell you you can drive mobility scooters on the footpath?

Or what about all those scooters? With their little wheels that makes them legal to use on footpaths? No, if you want these things off the footpath, they need somewhere to go where they don’t die. Like bike lanes. More cyclists make this more likely to happen.

👎 Con: it is dangerous for pedestrians

There it is. Dangerous. Quite often ‘dangerous’ is a thinly veiled moral judgement. What they actually mean is it is wrong, or inappropriate. If you think cycling is evil you can get into the sea.

But really. Is it dangerous? Cyclists are indeed faster and slightly more heavy than pedestrians. However the difference between cyclists and pedestrians is much smaller than the difference between cyclists and cars. Cyclists on the footpath pose some risk to pedestrians, but cars pose lethal risk to both pedestrians and cyclists. There is an argument against allowing cyclists on the footpath but the same argument applies to not asking them to ride on the road.

🤷 But nobody is using those footpaths anyway

Oftentimes this is true. From most homes you don’t have meaningful access to anything on foot. Everything is too far away. How often are you the only human being within sight while walking? Those 10 pedestrians and 0.5 cyclists will share the path just fine.

A counterpoint is that quiet streets should also be quiet in terms of cars so you can ride on the road. This is indeed how the Dutch do it. However we’re still too lame to create low traffic streets, so no.

Of course apply common sense. Some footpaths are busy. You may have to walk your bike for a while through that town centre.

😧 Ideology

“We should push for more bike lanes rather than compromising pedestrian space”, Generation Zero said. Well, your Ideology is as useless to cyclists as Auckland Transport’s PowerPoint slides. You can’t push for bike lanes if you can’t find anyone to do the pushing. For instance look at the Devonport peninsula. The cyclists were there first, and then they got bike lanes.

But should we do it then

Build it and they will come, they said. That is probably true, but what if you can’t build unless someone is already there?

Bootstrapping cycling

This is a post which got split into 3 parts:

• The cycling deadlock.
• Best practice bicycle infrastructure or nothing?
• Cycling on the footpath (you’re here)

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