This is a significant story as much for the reversal of position by the state government as the scale of the proposal for Sydney, Australia. From Bicycle Network:
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O’Farrell barrels ahead on bikes
Central Sydney is poised for a massive expansion of its bike network following the decision of the O’Farrell Government to dump its anti-bike politics and place cycling at the core of its new City Centre Access Strategy. … Infrastructure provision in central Sydney has been at a standstill since the O’Farrell Government blocked plans by Lord Mayor Clover Moore for major bike linkages through the central city.
However Transport Minister Gladys Berejiklian realised pro-car policies were choking the city and set out to align the Government’s thinking with the Lord Mayors vision of a central city served primarily by public transport, walking, and bikes.
Clover Moore has had her large bike budget in cold storage waiting for the State Government to see the light: now she can plough ahead.
The new strategy is clearly signalling that the private car is not part of central Sydney’s mobility future. On street parking on Sydney’s narrow streets will go to make room for bike lanes.
“Within the city centre there will be a clear prioritisation and allocation of street space for public transport, general traffic, pedestrians, cyclists, taxis and service vehicles,” the strategy says.
“In most cases, cycleways will be provided in street space currently not used for traffic movement, including parking and loading zones and some areas of wide footpaths.”
The Lord Mayor said the Government had set an ambitious target of doubling local and district trips by bike by 2016.
About time. Central Sydney is unattractive in so many ways, including the prevalence of cars and the choking diesel of buses and trucks. It has a CBD so big (compared with Vancouver’s little one) that bike sharing would really work well, too.
Not knowing anything about Sydney, it appears that the many of the routes indicated don’t meet Jarret Walker’s definition of a high performance (bus) route, i.e., pretty straight and direct.
Bikes aren’t shared vehicles, so cycling networks are not optimally structured as a grid of intersecting lines. Both types of networks should be designed to minimize aggregate trip time, but cycling networks do not need to be designed with a constraint on total route length nor is anyone’s trip lengthened by an additional route segment. Cycling networks are improved by the addition of shortcuts, diagonals, duplicate parallel routes, routes that stay in valleys or on hilltops, etc. The service on a bus network is spread thinly by these same additions, producing less frequent service on each line. A grid helps with the legibility of the network, but I’m not sure it’s possible to go very far without turning in Sydney.
I found Sydney’s centre to have a bit of a Seattle feel, except with hills that are much less steep and with much more bustle. The shape of both is long and narrow. The two cities were laid out at about the same time. Both have downtowns that are terrible places to bike.
The more interesting proposal in Sydney is for the transit mall on the central street.