I arrived home from work yesterday and was informed I was on the news – there was a report about a proposal by our obese, Lord Mayor of Melbourne to ban bicycles from certain city streets on grounds of safety.  One thing that really irritates me is when something is proposed or implemented when there is no data to support the change or practice.  That is the case here.

I think Robert Doyle could do with some excercise (photo ripped off Facebook)

Figures are quoted over 5 years making the figures sound much larger than they really are.  As an example, 95 bike incidents over 5 years = 19 per year.  This Age article shows the popularity of cycling in Melbourne and each day, there are about 81 500 bike trips in Melbourne (source The Melbourne Bike Plan 2012-2016).

The same goes for this Herald Sun article.  1800 injuries between 2009 and 2013 (assuming the full years) is 450 a year or a little over one a day.  A bit steep in my opinion, but in the grand scheme of things that’s not a whole lot. Additionally, the statistics for the three reportedly dangerous roads are much better than the overall cycling accident statistics.

81 500 trips a day for one incident is a rate of 0.0012%

Not enough room on Flinders Street?  My eyes must be deceitful.

I’m shown riding along on Flinders Street using one of two lanes on this “too narrow” road.  You can clearly see I have a lane to myself, there are no cars behind or in front of me and I’m riding sensibly in an uncrowded manner.  safety concerns?  None I can see. Here’s the news report webpage which includes the video report which I discuss at the end of this post.

For those interested in a break down of cycling accidents, you should read the Melbourne Bicycle Plan 2012-2016. Page 22 is most revealing on the cause of cycling accidents around town.  Table 3 reveals the major accident contributors – those who have no idea how to operate a motorised transport.  Figure 15 shows the most incidents take place on Swanson Street – an area that is supposed to be devoid of cars.  Collins Street looks to be the next most popular road for an incident.

Location of bicycle crashes in the City of Melbourne 2008–10
(Source: VicRoads CrashStats)

The three proposed bicycle ban roads are Flinders Street, King Street and Lonsdale Street.  Each in the figure above look pretty incident lacking to me (this is 2008-2010 so perhaps things have gotten worse – ahh Melbourne, the livable city.

The draft bicycle plan 2016-2020 also shows Flinders Street and King Street are relatively free of crashes.  Most of the incidents along Flinders are right outside the train station, suggesting pedestrians are the hazard here (that’s backed up by my regular commutes along here).  That the Lord Mayor would make such suggestions when he would have been privy to such data is a tad curious.

Crash Data from 2012-2014

On the flip side, here are just two sites of many that tell you how many “accidents” and “incidents” are happening right now!  You can see, any time of day, many many problems.  Sounds like motorised travel is much more dangerous.

• Latest Traffic Incidents for Melbourne
• RACV’s Melbourne Real Time Traffic Incidents

Some statistics related to road trauma and incidents.

• The Road Toll to date.  I’m sure some asshole mowing down a 70 year old cyclist out near Geelong was totally the cyclists fault.  Perhaps he wanted to push cyclist deaths up to 6 for the year.  The “defense” lawyers will probably say the driver had a bad childhood, was on ice and had mental problems.  Boo fucking hoo.  All I hear these days is people making excuses.
• One can do a search of historical road trauma and a whole lot more on the TAC site.
• The Australian Government’s Department of Infrastructure and Regional Development website has quite extensive data that shows just how dangerous roads are.

A look at the data shows most “accidents” are the result of one or more of the following:

• fatigue
• alcohol
• speed
• being distracted by things INSIDE the vehicle

One thing you can see from my commuting video taken on Friday 17 July 2015 (see below) is, with the exception of about 40m of narrow lane (with correspondingly slow traffic), Flinders Street is wide enough for two lanes of traffic.  This stretch of road even has a speed limit of 40kph, which is easily done on a bike.  As you can see, there is minimal traffic and the only dangerous actions are taken by pedestrians (jay walking), one nut on a foot scooter (in bicycle lane going the wrong way) and motorised transport operators (running reds and straddling lanes).

Where there is a black spot that affects motorists, the Government spends 100’s or 1000’s of dollars fixing it.   That’s my taxes at work.  Shame the same is not done for the more vulnerable road users.  The following twitter post I found quite lucid.

Sane comments from @_philBrown on Twitter

An examination of the news report

Riding poorly or not wearing helmets properly does not do cyclists any favors in the eyes of their critics.

Another comment made by the Lord Mayor was that cyclists are not permitted to ride on freeways (in a text article).  That is incorrect.  Within the metropolitan areas, this may be true, however once you get about 30km out of town, bicycles are allowed on freeways.

Vic Roads says this about bicycles and freeways,”Cycling is not allowed on urban freeways. However, cycling is allowed on the shoulders of some parts of rural freeways…These include the Western Freeway, the Calder Freeway, the Hume Freeway and parts of the Princes Freeway to Traralgon.”

Here’s a good article in the Herald Sun from 24/07/2015 discussing why bikes are good for Melbourne.  Pdf version here.

Apparently the Lord Mayor backed down on his proposal the afternoon that he made it. None of that got into the news however.  Such a proposal is poorly thought out and the announcement reeks of headline grabbing.

Below is the sort of evolutionary throwback that should be banned from driving. Their actions could be deadly.  Me, I’m just minding my own business.

Change log

• 20161026 – image from Draft Melbourne Bike Plan 2016-2020 added.
• Woeful spelling errors corrected.