Doors

When I was in Melbourne recently, my children excitedly told me that there was a news article on some time about cyclists and car doors. I found out afterwards that it was on the tv show called The Project. My son could not remember much about the preview other than that "both sides were blaming each other".

Eh?

How can a cyclist be to blame for someone opening a car door in their path? On The Project's website we are told that "dooring" is the most common cause of injury. Recently, in 2010, was the first recorded death by dooring. A student, James Cross, was on his way to University when a driver opened her car's door 12 centimetres. James crashed into it, was propelled under the wheels of a passing truck and killed.

The fact that this is the biggest cause of injury would suggest that perhaps something should be done. When we were near the Art Gallery of Victoria, one of my children asked me what should be done about it. I am so glad you asked, I said. We were standing on a pavement that looked like this:

I pointed out the width and the fact that it has a kerb on each side so that cyclists were kept safe from cars and pedestrians were kept safe from bikes.

Alas it is just a pavement and the raised part on the left is just dirt. It is however a great illustration of how our roads could so easily be made safer. There is a lot of talk about raising awareness but people are human and will always make mistakes. A car driver could take care with their car door every time without fail but the one time they are distracted could be the one time they clean up someone on their bike. I would have thought the smarter thing to do would be to avoid the risk in the first place. Don't put cyclists there in the first place.

Magic

I've just been on a road trip. I went over the border into Victoria. One of the first places I stopped was Portland. It's a very picturesque town but what struck me most of all (because I'm strange) were these pedestrian crossings:

They were everywhere and appear to work as if by magic. You stand on the side of the road at any time and motorists just stop for you. No pressing buttons to apply to cross the road and consequently no waiting. I must have crossed about six times on one street because it was such a thrill.


Everyone seemed pretty happy with them. Who knows? They could even work here.

My wife is hot

My wife recently bought herself four dresses from Jigsaw. They look fantastic.

The first was more formal than the others. The top half is silk and the rest is a "tulip style skirt finished in a silk jacquard print that sits just below the knee". She looks totally hot in it:

The next is a summery one. It is made of silk and has what is described as a leopard print. The silk is super soft and thin and feels fantastic. She looks totally hot in it:

The thid is a "polka strappy dress". It sits beautifully. Very stylish. After she had worn it the first time, on a particularly warm day, my wife mentioned how comfortable and cool it was compared to jeans. I haven't ever worn a frock for any extended period so I am guessing it has something to do with having a fresh breeze wafting around your underpants. I'd need to get a woman's view on that one. Anyway, she looks totally hot in it:

The last is a cotton summer dress. It's not available off the website any more so you can't get a picture of it. Suffice it to say, she looks totally hot in it.

After she had brought them home and was trying some shoes to go with them (black espedrilles also from Jigsaw), I commented to her that riding a bike in tall heels is actually easier than walking in then. My wife has a bicycle. It's an old Malvern Star girls bike that she has had since she was 12. I cleaned it and oiled it and changed all of the brake pads and cables when I first became a bike-weirdo. I've also attached a shopping basket to the front.

Regrettably, my wife doesn't ride it that often. I always tell her she should ride it to the local supermarket or if she's meeting a friend close by. Ruining your hair with a plastic helmet and having to dodge traffic is probably a bit of a turn-off.

In this country, we seem to have killed off that type of cycling culture. There are pockets of it in Sydney and Canberra but in little old Adelaide, it is rare to see women dressed like that getting around by bike. We will know that cycling is mainstream again when we do.


Charlie Winston "I love your smile" from HK Corp on Vimeo.

Audrey Toutou and a bicycle. All my fantasies at once :)

The steel jacket of rudeness

Like most people I know, I have put together a route home from work that as much as possible avoids riding on main roads. It's self-preservation really. The whole "take the lane" ideology is all very well but it still doesn't guarantee you from being driven into from behind by someone who is drunk, speeding, fiddling with their radio or just scratching their balls.

Despite my best efforts, there are places when avoiding having to navigate a main road is just impossible. On those occasions when I have no choice and it is just too dangerous to ride on the road, I take the pavement. It worries me because that apparently is what upsets motorists (if you were to go by comments on some websites) and we apparently need to "earn their respect" by obeying the road rules before any money can be spent on decent infrastructure.

I ride about 25m along the pavement before I hit the junction and cross at the pedestrian lights. Then I double back about 15m before continuing on my way along the side street. The alternative, if I were to obey the rules, would be to attempt to turn right on to the main road and cross 4 lanes of fast-moving traffic.

This is the view from the crossing. It was taken early in the morning. Hence the shadows. The street I come out of is on the left just beyond the clearway sign. The road I take after crossing at the junction is on the right just next to the green truck:

In years of taking that route, I have never come across a pedestrian. Today was the very first time. I met her just as I came around the corner. I was going very slowly and could easily stop. She stopped too - abruptly. I apologised repeatedly. "That's ok", she said cheerfully. I admitted I should not have been there and explained that the road was just too busy to ride on. She said understood perfectly ("I know, it's horrendous") and we went on our way.

I have to wonder whether the reaction would have been the same from a motorist. There is something about being cocooned inside that steel and glass jacket that makes people shout and gesticulate rudely in a way that they never would if they were face to face with someone. I don't think I would have got quite as friendly a reaction if I'd been in the wrong place on the road. After all, that is not how you earn respect.

Sure enough, once I was on my way I came up to a small junction with a side road to my left and a white Commodore came charging towards the intersection stopping with its nose sticking out into my path. As is so often the case, it would have hit me had I not slowed just in case. He did wait but it was obvious that the driver was in a tearing hurry so instead of taking the next right (which was the way I was going) I waited for him to pass. Sure enough, he sped around the corner with his rear tyres smoking and then sped to the next junction 120m away at the perfect speed to clean up anyone who accidentally crossed from behind a parked car and just loudly enough to annoy every single resident on the street. He's one of the people whose respect I apparently need to earn.

He drove that way because he could. He took two side streets to get himself from one main road to another and use the neighbourhood as a thoroughfare. That is what the road layout told him was appropriate. The speed limit on the side streets was the default speed limit of 50 km/h. There was no calming and no blocked road. The entire set up sent the signal that the road was for him to speed down rather than a place where people lived.

And that is the problem.

By the way, it was a VR Commodore. Registration number WBM-240. Ride carefully.

The crime of the century

A friend of mine has gone to live and work in Canada for a year. It's the same friend who wrote rude things about the Dutch some time ago. Currently he is in Calgary. He had a strange experience the other day. he wrote:

I was almost going to text message you - get this - in Calgary, Alberta, pedestrians have the right of way.

My friend and I (she lives here) needed to cross a main road, downtown. She just starts walking across and all the traffic stops! What a trip!

I have heard rumours of these strange faraway places that actually treat pedestrians with a little respect rather than total contempt. Until now I thought they were a myth, a bit like the legend of dry land in the film Waterworld.

Meanwhile, back on planet earth in Adelaide, police officers are being sent out to fine people for crossing empty streets. It is of course for our own safety. If it were not for them and the little red man, we would all walk blindly into the path of a bus.

Remember if you want to cross the road, you have to apply by pressing the button. If you forget to, well tough. You still have to stand there even while the traffic is at a standstill. You can jolly well press the button and wait for another traffic cycle - even though that could take 15 minutes.

It's for your own good.

A tip: Rule 231(2) of the Australian Road Rules makes it a crime to start to cross the road when the pedestrian lights are on red. If you are within 20 metres of the pedestrian crossing, rule 234 requires you to cross at the crossing - otherwise you commit another crime. If you're more than 20 metres away, you're fine. The only requirement is that you cross by the shortest route and not stay on the road longer than necessary. I think we should start painting pink blobs on the pavement 20 metres away from crossings so that we all know.

The Beatles potentially commit a crime

Small towns

I took a trip to Port Pirie not long ago for work. It's a two and a half hour drive north of Adelaide. It has a population of about 14,000. Its biggest employer is Nyrstar which operates the lead smelter there.

It has a few things of interest to visit such as the museum that used to be the railway station. It faces the road because trains used to run down the main street:

I find Australian country towns generally have a great deal of civic pride which is often refected in their parks and war memorials. Port Pirie is no exception:

Like almost all Australian towns though, Port Pirie seems to be built for the motor car. All of its streets are wide with free car parks on both sides:

If there are not enough car parks on the road, there are plenty behind the shops:

A little less thought is given to pedestrians. This is the side of the Woolworths supermarket in the centre of town. It's not exactly inspiring:

If you're interested in riding a bike around, you might have to be prepared for a bit of a walk. This is the bike shop:

Nobody rides a bike there (other than the odd teenager on his bmx) which is a surprise really. A number of people who work in Port Pirie would come from smaller towns such as Laura to the east but the bulk live in Port Pirie itself. This is the town map:

It's about 4km across and 5½km north to south at its longest - distances that are easy on a bike. Yet everybody drives everywhere. I wasn't there at school opening and closing time but I have no doubt there is a long line of cars in the morning and afternoon.

How can that be? Why would people spend money on petrol and wear and tear when they could get most places free of charge? Imagine the boost to the local economy if all of the money tied up running cars was freed up to spend on local shops, businesses and restaurants.

You can see from the photos that the town suffers from the same problem as other Australian towns and suburbs. If you try to bike or walk anywhere, it is only a short distance before you hit a huge, wide, fast-moving road. There is no safe place to cross and riding a bike along it is unpleasant and dangerous. Not only that but driving is made so easy by the bountiful supply of free car-parking.

On top of that, you cannot just get on a comfortable bike (often because they're difficult to get hold of and expensive) and go on a brief errand. You are forced to sweat under one of those plastic hats - another disincentive.

So how could it all be changed? Well to quote a favourite website:

• You ensure that riding a bike is a pleasure;
• Ensure motor vehicles are somewhere else;
• Design streets so that conflict with motor vehicles is rare;
• Make bike routes shorter than car routes;
• Make it so you can skip past traffic lights;
• etc.

Small towns like Port Pirie which are quite self-contained and far from the next town prove that excuses such as population density and length of journey are myths. People respond to their built environment and that is precisely what they have done in Port Pirie.

Copy-enhagen

I think with many people, if they hear Copenhagen held up as an example city one more time they'll probably scream. This isn't Copenhagen, they say. You can't just take all of that and plonk it here in the same way that you can't install Windows on a Mac (they don't really say that but it is a good analogy).

It's not a case of simply transfering things though. Rather, what we can do is look at those things that work, not just in Copenhagen but other cities around the world, and adapt them to suit our own needs.

Copenhagen has a few similarities with Adelaide. They are both spread out, they have similar populations and both have wide streets. The spread out point is one to note. The centre of Copenhagen has a fair few apartment buildings (as does Adelaide increasingly) but once you get out of town, you see a lot of single family houses. Have an explore on Google Streetview (and if you ever watch Anna Pihl, look at where the character Mikala lives. There are lots of areas like that).

I visited Copenhagen some time ago. I remember being distracted by how good-looking everyone was so I did not take a great deal of notice of the cycling infrastructure although I do remember a lot of bicycles around the place. Also, back then, this sort of thing was not really on my radar as is the case with many people.

I found a good post on a blog called Rambers Highway. It seems its author took a trip to Europe and wrote about their travels but then stopped abruptly in December 2010. In any event, the post is all about Copenhagen and its particular style of bike lane. It's a good read and fairly accurate I think. What it shows is what we can learn.

We have all seen pictures of Copenhagen's bike paths. They are very different from Dutch ones. They are not quite as separate from the road for one thing but intead are a half height lane in between the road and pavement. There are some exceptions of course but that seems to be a common look. The lane is subtle but from what we have seen and heard, highly effective. It is something that would be very easy to copy here on our wide roads. There is plenty of space. The problem is that it is so often taken up by parked cars - and often not very many of them. This is on Wright Street:

And this is on Frome Street:

In both cases, all of that useful space is blocked by one car.

Central Adelaide has about 68,000 car parks and so the removal of a few like this on some wide arterial roads would surely not bring the city to a standstill.

The need for clear wide bike lanes was brought home to me on my way home last night. I forget which street I was on but it was one of the many with two lanes of moving traffic on each side and a third lane on each side blocked by parked cars. For of us were waiting at a traffic light in the turning lane (you do that to allow the motorised traffic to pass you on the intersection as you pick up speed). Once we had crossed the intersection, as is so often the case, our way was blocked by a parked car. A great big fat minibus was approaching on our right and did not seem to want to give more space than about half a metre. Unsurprisingly everyone stopped. It was all very polite though - lots of "no, after you". So much for taking the lane though. Self-preservation won over that this time. Not surprising when a Toyota Coaster is looming over you.

In side streets (particularly residential areas), the approach of the Danes is again quite subtle. If Ramblers Highway is correct, there are not separated lanes on every single side street. Rather, the practice is one of properly categorising the street and installing traffic calming devices that alert various different road users to each other's presence. Again, that is to generalise but it certainly matches my recollection of my visit there.

Junction design is a constant source of frustration and fear for Adelaide Cyclists. We can again learn from the Danes and adapt. The Copenhagen blue seems now as well known as Cadbury's purple colour. It's not used on every intersection though because if it is used everywhere, people get used to it and ignore it. And so it is used only on key intersections. For me though, the important thing to learn from the intersections is that the bike paths remain until the reach the intersection. In some cases, depending on how busy the intersection is, the bike path intersects with the turning lane for cars. In other cases, it lowers to road level but that width continues over the intersection and into the bike path on the other side. The consequence is that even though strictly speaking the bike path does disappear, provided both cars and bikes proceed in the same direction, there is no conflict. It's simple but ingenious.

You can see how they do it in this picture. It shows the lane ending and being shared with the turning lane for cars. It is far from ideal but seems to work where the traffic is low enough to permit it:

On busier roads the treatment is different again. There the lanes are properly separated:

This is a rather long-winded way of saying you can achieve a lot without much effort. We're practically set up for all this and it will only take some small changes to have a profound effect.