Cycling won't get Australia moving

The media pressure on the NSW State Government is relentless. Do something! They react impulsively under the heat and spend $330 million on a plan for a metro system. In January, this plan was filed away with the other expensive brainwaves which bombed. If we want the superb public transport system of Hong Kong, then we need to rebuild Sydney in the image of Hong Kong. That would take us about a century or two.

What are we going to do? The clock is ticking. If you had recorded the time that you have taken to get to work over the last 10 years, then you could draw a graph from the past data and extrapolate that to predict the year when you came to a dead stop.

Sadly - the bicycle is no solution.

There is a 40-page treatise on a publicly-funded research project titled; "Cycling. Getting Australia Moving". (The title of the publication should be Cycling, Getting Australian Cities Moving. Rural Australia only has two options; motor-driven private vehicle or horse-driven private vehicle.)

The modern bicycle with pneumatic tyres and a chain driving the rear wheel dates back to about 1890. A fit rider can travel 100 kilometers a day for the cost of what he puts in his stomach. He can park the bike anywhere and produce no pollutants. One can understand the attraction that pedal-powered Australian cities has for the green movement.

However, there is one insurmountable problem - and it is the elephant in the bathroom that the green movement refuses to see. It is that the majority of the adult population are not psychologically and physically capable of riding a bike up a hill - and never will be.

A claim in "Cycling. Getting Australia Moving" is that increased cycling will make the nation’s population healthier. That claim might seem to be self-evident, but it has no basis in reality. Those who cycle now are not healthy because they cycle. They are healthy because they are the types who move a lot during the average day, while others sit.

The person who likes to move instinctively looks for opportunities to move, while the person who does not like to move, minimises it. The proportion of the population who drive around for as many minutes as it takes looking for the closest parking spot to where they want to go will remain constant. So too will be those who never consider the stairs adjacent to the lift to go up even one floor.

As if to imply that an unstoppable revolution is on the way, there is the claim in the publication that more new bikes are sold than are new cars. That may be true, but the statement does not add that the vast majority of those bikes are hanging up in the garage or under the house. As the first venture on the road scared the wits out of the rider, and as the scenic cycleways are to most people a long drive away, the bike purchase is finally seen as a rush of blood to the head.

The lobbying of the bicycle associations have achieved a few kilometers of cycleways provided by local government and which are shared with walkers in scenic areas. They are popular. But, most of the kilometers claimed by state government to have provided for cyclists are token. These “cycleways” run along the side of sections of freeways and motorways. As they connect to no other cycleways, they take the cyclist from nowhere to nowhere. Also, the debris swept off the roadway and onto the cycleway means that only heavy-tyred bikes can use them. Few cyclists are seen on them.

Bicycles are inherently dangerous as they are designed to have the minimum of frictional contact with the ground to minimise the effort of driving them. The feeling of freedom leads to a bunching-up of riders as if they were walking along a footpath. If the front wheel of one rider touches the rear wheel of the other, one or more riders will be sent sprawling. There are risk-taking dashes at intersections. There are thin-walled tyre blowouts at speed and sudden chain jams bringing the bike to a dead stop in front of the car behind.

As a motorist I have never been injured, but as a cyclist I have left much skin on the road (two of my accidents required treatment by ambulance personnel). Those accidents had nothing to do with motor vehicles. I had simply hit something in the bitumen (such as a stone). lf millions of car drivers switch to bikes, how many thousands of extra ambulances will we need?

Is the solution a different type of private motorised transport?

Every building in this country is connected to every other building by a road, a street, a lane or a trail. That is the reason that there has been so much focus on keeping the car and giving it more respectability by replacing internal combustion with battery power.

That still leaves us with the large cubicle on four wheels - and you heading for the day when you cannot get out of your own street onto the highway because of gridlock. The roads will be still there - but useless for much of the day. How are we to then recover the roads?

It is bewildering to me that almost nothing is said about moving masses of people on light and low powered three-wheeled motor scooters traveling over truck-free roads. While sacrificing the carrying capacity and weatherproofing advantages of the car, you can still move from home to close to your destination ready for business - without physical effort.

Earlier this month a smash closed the F3 highway, north of Sydney, for hours due to a delay in putting a “contraflow” system in place (the utilisation of existing lesser roads to bypass the problem). Contraflow systems to get cars off freeways can be very difficult to organise. How much sooner could a contraflow system be put into place if commuters were on motor scooters which could be lifted over median strips and gutters?  

Scooters cannot safely share the roads with trucks. The moving of goods and services on one hand and the movement of people on the other need to be separated in both space and time. With cars gone, our major roads are wide enough to allow such separation in space - and time separation is just a matter of organisation. The obvious problems are that the rider can fall off the scooter, and the scooter would only provide breathing space for maybe 20 years, before there is a gridlock of scooters.

Conclusion

Rather than try to think of every possible objection, once we put Australians on scooters, we will sort out the safety problems then - as we did when we put Australians into cars which were no longer limited to the speed of a trotting horse. Cars have served us brilliantly, but they are simply running out of road space.

If private car transport grinds down to a speed which is less than walking pace, the public at large will find a way around the problem - as it always has with every problem it has met throughout history. (Maybe there will be less people living in the north with jobs in the south driving pass people living in the south with jobs in the north. Maybe what you buy in a supermarket will be delivered.)

Unfortunately, parliamentarians and their public service bureaucrats will still have their hands on our money to experiment with their grand ideas.