60-50-40-30

A recent front page story in the local newspaper made the unsurprising point that lowering speed limits reduces the number of fatalities. The Centre for Automotive Research at Adelaide University (those clever people who also published a study on protective headbands for motorists) now suggest that speed limits should be cut further to 40km/h - or so the article claims.

It was met with the usual predictable howls of protest on talkback radio and in the comments section of AdelaideNow but they included some original gags about going back to horses and carts and people carrying red flags while walking in front of cars. Hilarious stuff.

Reducing motor vehicle speeds undeniably reduces fatalities and serious injuries. The difference between 40km/h and 60km/h is significant:

From the NZ Transport Agency

Having said that, reducing speed is but one way of reducing conflict and serious injuries. It works perfectly in residential streets. Unley Council has a 40km/h speed limit on most of its side roads. That policy along with blocking off many of them to through traffic has worked very well.

At the same time, we need arterial roads that can move traffic. I would love to see 40% and 50% modal shares for bikes and similarly high shares for public transport but we need to move cars too. Simply reducing the speed limit is all very well but governments can create problems for themselves when the speed limit is difficult to enforce (as it would be) and difficult to justify (which it might be given some of the comments).

In those situations, there are other ways of reducing risk. Risk can be minimised through design. For example, by separating road users whotravel at different speeds and avoiding right hand unsignalised turns and other traffic movements with conflict built into them.

How you design the road depends of course on its intended use. A higher speed arterial road is designed and treated very differently from a narrower road that leads only to where people live. A guide to potential treatments is found in the Austroads cycling guide and is similar to others:


The question is which comes first. I get the feeling sometimes that traffic is allowed to congregate on certain roads and the amount of traffic then determines what treatment, if any, is applied. I'm probably wrong but it is often difficult to tell.

Far better is to designate the street in the first place. Decide what its purpose will be then you can apply the appropriate treatments, including blocking it, narrowing it, assigning the appropriate speed limit and adding the appropriate bus, pedestrian and cycling infrastructure. Designated arterial roads should be treated with appropriate speed limits, separation of users and, if necessary, multiple lanes. By contrast, other types of road should have speed limits and physical means of lowering speeds and blocking through traffic and of course feeding traffic on to the closest designated arterial road.

The mistake we make is to treat most of our roads in the same way. That is perhaps illustrated in calls for a blanket 40 km/h speed limit. I should add that I doubt that would happen anyway. We now have a default 50 km/h speed limit but many of our arterial roads remain signposted with a higher limit.

It has been said many times but you can see this in the morning rush hour. Main roads are full but many side streets have lines of cars running parallel to the main roads - they generaly seem to be parents on the school run.

So what so we do and why would it be better?

Step one is to designate the use and purpose of the road. The categories are not just main road and side street. Main arterial roads are pretty clear. They are the yellow ones in the street directory and on Google Maps. But there are other roads that while quieter than the main arterial road still serve an important feeder role. Galway Avenue next to the ABC Building on North East Road is an obvious example.

Once you have designated your main arterials, you then work on the feeder routes inside neighbourhoods and the residential streets that should not be able to be used as through routes.

There is a very useful post on the excellent Bicycle Dutch website that deals with this. It discusses a neighbourhood in Utrecht that was built in the 1960s. What makes it particularly relevant to us is that before it was retrofitted, its streets were just like ours:

In the original 1960s street grid for this area, motor traffic was able to use all streets to get from one end to the other. Some streets were even wider than others and served as through street. Most streets were purely residential, but all streets had the same speed limit of 50km/h (31mph).

So what did they do (and what should we do):

To channel the traffic flow better, the city designated a so-called ‘neighbourhood ring’. This is the street that is designed to give quick access from the city’s arterial roads to the purely residential streets. The latter type of streets have all become 30km/h (19mph) streets. This means that no 30km/h street has a direct access to an arterial road, but that traffic is forced to use the neighbourhood ring to get to the main arteries via only very few access points.

Read the whole post here. It's short and very clear.

Second question - why is this better? Well, among other things, it is obviously safer; it encourages alternatives to the car, which is also good for car users; rat-running and neighbourhood hoon driving are all but eliminated; neighbourhoods are quieter; effort can be put into making arterial roads work properly.

And so on.

Finally, definitely watch the four minute video:



Note how once the speed limit is lowered (in an appropriate environment) it is safe for different transport types to mix. It shows how segregation without separation works as part of a wider network.

David Hembrow and Velo-City 2014

It is difficult to remember what made me start blogging. I used to get almost everywhere by bike when I was a child. I had a Raleigh Chopper - one of the pre-OHS ones with the funky gear stick on the cross bar. Once I got older and left home to live in other places that all stopped. When I was living in London in the 1980s, it did not even occur to me. In fact, I have no memory of seeing anyone on a bicycle. I do have clear memories of backed up traffic on Clerkenwell Road in the days before catalytic converters. I also distinctly remember finding it hard to breathe.

I came back to the idea of riding a bike when I decided I was pretty bored of getting the bus to work every day. I thought it would be far better to have a shiny new bike I could use for nothing than spend all that money on bus tickets.

Once I was riding, I began looking around at other new bikes and found a few blogs about them and cycling. That was when Copenhagenize was only a couple of years old. Since then, I have come across others and there is now a good number of very high quality blogs around. Some are in the list to the right but there are also many others. When I was first reading, that was when Freewheeler was producing a prodigious amount of erudite sarcasm and ridicule. Happy days.

And then there was David Hembrow's site - one which probably more than any other opened my eyes to what can be achieved and the nuts and bolts of how it is done. The site has become very influential, often quoted and, by the sounds of it, routinely pinched from. And now thanks to an earlier collaboration, we have the Bicycle Dutch website which continues to explain carefully and patiently how the Dutch do it.

The whole movement has changed noticeably since I started talking to myself about it. The Guardian Newspaper has its own cycling column and not long ago The Times launched its Cities Fit for Cycling campaign. It is well and truly an important issue.

Five years ago I would not have predicted that Adelaide of all places would be hosting a worldwide cycling conference like Velo-City yet it is coming here in 2014.

The organisers recently asked for suggestions for possible speakers at the conference. I wrote an email mentioning various names including David Hembrow's. I am sure I was not the only one. The mayor recently wrote an invitation but the answer was, alas, a polite 'thankyou but no'.

Bugger.

The full wording of the response is here.

Through a series of emails, someone else has already tried to make him reconsider but unsuccessfully. You could say that if his attendance at the conference goes on to change the behaviour, even slightly, of a bunch of Adelaide people, the negative entry in the ledger from his journey will be balanced. You could also ask what about the people who fly across for a study tour, especially the recent Australian group? You could say that the plane you'd be flying on will be flying anyway so you may as well just come along and enjoy the airline food. You could also suggest turning the conference into a longer trip. There are lots of things to see and do in Australia.

But the answer is no. It is about personal integrity and something very much to be respected.

David does say at the end of his reply:

If it would be helpful, I could perhaps record a video exclusively for you to show at the Velo-city conference in lieu of my own attendance in person.

All I can say is 'yes please'. Your average Adelaidean simply does not get it. To have images and footage published in our newspaper (singular!) and broadcasted on local television of something as simple as a bunch of children getting themselves to school, together with an explanation of how that is achieved, could make a huge difference to us and plant some strong seeds of change. Please make a video if you can.

I was very hopeful that David Hembrow would be able to make it to our conference but it is not to be. But hey, I know that Marc van Woudenberg is coming. He is totally cool.

Keeping the enemy at bay

Margaret Thatcher died not long ago. Love her or hate her, what cannot be denied is that she left her mark. I grew up in the UK in the 1970s and 80s and have a strong memory of her. Primarily it is through the eyes of 'The Young Ones' with Rick shouting things like "Thatcher's ruddy Britain!" the whole time.


What strikes me is how much she looked like Meryl Streep:


A bit like Lindy Chamberlain used to:


Lady Thatcher is credited with saying a few things including the mythical, "A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure." One thing she definitely did say though is, "In my lifetime all our problems have come from mainland Europe and all the solutions have come from the English-speaking nations across the world."

Really? All our problems?

When I lived in the UK, there was the ever present threat of the problem of a reliable and functioning train service intruding from mainland Europe. Mrs Thatcher successfully kept that at bay. One of their best secret weapons was the "we've had a centimetre of snow and the points have frozen" excuse. It was hugely successful. Even though she is long gone, her legacy seems to remain in England. The British have the dubious honour of the most expensive train tickets in Europe.

Another dreadful threat from mainland Europe was a functioning and high quality health service. I thought we were in big trouble with the National Health Service. However, plucky Mrs Thatcher stuck to her guns (as did Tony Blair after her) with a slow and deliberate strategy of internal markets and sub-contracting. They're slowly making headway.

To their credit, the whole way through my childhood, the Government showed steely resolve in steadily eliminating the European threat of providing all citizens with the freedom of getting around at low cost and under their own steam. In the late 1970s, kids my age were probably the last of misguided generation who thought that it was somehow appropriate to ride a Raleigh Chopper around the neighbourhood. That sort of ridiculous behaviour has rightly all but been eliminated.

Australia (another English-speaking nation full of solutions) did the same but just to make sure, it carpet-bombed the problem with an all ages mandatory helmet law. Genius. And that is one of the reasons why you never see this type of crazy foreign mainland-European threat:


(Borrowed from here)
Children on bikes? Pfft. Look at them. They're clearly on drugs.

I do not know why but it seems to be mainly English-speaking countries that have the problem with this.

I have never understood why. Without too much effort, it is possible to think of a number reasons why it is beneficial to develop a transport and planning system that does not have the car at its heart for every single journey no matter how short and no matter how many other people may be going in exactly the same direction at exactly the same time. They include:

• it is cheaper;
• it is safer;
• it is more democratic;
• it is healthier in so many ways;
• it is better for business - both through exposure and to the fact that there is more disposable income available;
• and so on.

How a transport system with the private car as its primary focus was allowed to develope is clear. Back then, it seemed like it would work. Nobody seems to have predicted that the system would eventually suffocate under its own weight. We now know better and slowly but surely the public opinion seems to be turning. Despite that and true to form, we still have two recent announcements for huge pointless road projects - one in Melbourne ($8 bn) and one in Queensland ($6.7 bn). To put it in perspective, that total is more than the entire Gonski reform. They have 'barely raised an eyebrow'. On top of that, the Australian Automobile Association is demanding better roads (in other words, more money). The claim is that it is for "all Australians" but have a look at the sample petition letter to your local MP and you see it is for the minority of the population with access to a car - "As a motorist, ..."

Why do we persist with a system that excludes well over half the population? One that not just encourages the least efficient way of getting around but actively discourages others? There is no reason other than the type of thinking that led to that ridiculous and embarrassing comment for which Margaret Thatcher will always be famous.

Sudden realisation

Adelaide is weird.

We have just finished the school holidays. If you did not read in the paper all of the tips for keeping children entertained during the holidays, you probably wouldn't have noticed. Actually that is wrong. You know it is the school holidays because the number of cars drops by a third in the morning rush hour. Regardless, whether it is the school holidays or not, whether the sun is shining or not, you almost never see children in the street. That is, hanging out and playing and being normal.

It dawned on me the other day that while you may see adults walking around, the vast bulk of them are doing it not to get anywhere but solely to keep fit. That is not a criticism of course - merely an observation.

People who walk places in Australia are just like people who ride bicycles.

You get a tiny minority who make a conscious choice to walk places, perhaps holding a calico bag or shopping basket on the way. On the other hand, some do not make the choice. It is left to them because they do not have access to the dominant and almost exclusive form of transport. They are the utility walkers and are seldom seen.

For a couple of hours in the morning and afternoon on a weekday, you'll see people walking to work too. Often they are in their work gear but with sneakers on. Others will be in their fitness gear. They are the commuter walkers.

But far and away the biggest group are the fitness walkers. It struck me the other day when I was in Golden Grove. That is a 1980s housing development that is totally car-centric. Great wide arterial roads and car parks are everywhere. It was the evening and there seemed to be a good number of people just walking the streets. You could tell they weren't going anywhere. They were just walking for the sake of it. All were dressed in tight pants (lycra - what else?), sports tops with reflective stripes and specialised walking sneakers - with little reflective swooshes on them. And they were walking with purpose. And breathing heavily.


A pair of "walkers" as found in Australia
As with people on bikes, the biggest group of walkers consists of the people who come out at the weekend specially dressed to go nowhere in particular but to go up lots of hills in the process.

We are weird.

In the news

Since the Australian Formula 1 Grand Prix moved to Australia all those years ago, outside of the country very few people have actually heard of Adelaide. Sydney and Melbourne are generally well known but not so much the other cities, especially ours.

Occasionally though, we do make the news. Now that news spreads quickly through the Twittosphere, that can happen quite quickly and the news can spread fast. Regrettably, it is often for the wrong reasons. We all remember those 'lose your licence and you're screwed' adverts from the MAC and the reaction to them. It was not a good look.

Now it is the turn of the town of Clare and its newspaper, the Northern Argus. This has been retweeted more times than I could remember. The article is all about a crossing outside of the Clare Medical Centre. The problem has been rectified, you will be pleased to read, and "near misses should be a thing of the past".

Here's a picture of the crossing thanks to Google Streetview:



The "problem" is that elderly people are leaving the medical centre and crossing the road "in front of cars". They mistakenly think they have right of way.

So what do we do about it?

The road itself runs parallel to the main highway running through the centre of town. You can see it runs between Wright Place and Lennon Street - a distance of about 450m. The medical centre is helpfully pointed out:

You might think a pedestrian crossing could work there. You would be wrong of course. Even though one was installed on Pirie Street in the city recently, we are told it was "the first in South Australia" (not true) and "South Australian drivers aren’t used to zebra crossings".

Luckily, "the council has implemented a plan to avoid future accidents." The solution? Give way signs for pedestrians.

I kid you not.

In addition to the obligation to give way on a narrow and short road, pedestrians have other obligations too. "High visibility vests, tabards, arm bands or clothing will highlight your presence for a significant distance."

And my favourite to finish the article:

Clare neighbourhood watch are giving away high visibility vests for people who walk in early hours or at night, free of charge, thanks to the support of Clare Auto Centre.

Vests can be obtained from the Clare Police Station.

Now what's that saying about the inside of the lunatic asylum appearing normal to the inmates?

The 40 year excuse

One of my favourite blog posts to refer people to after a conversation about transport and urban planning is David Hembrow's much linked-to "all those myths and excuse in one post" post. They are all there.

A common one is the 40 years ahead excuse. It is even the subject of a widget:
As the post says, it is wrong anyway. The actual figure (assuming it is even relevant) is more like 15 years. What was done 40 years ago has long since been replaced and improved.

Not that long ago, part of the Parade in Norwood was resurfaced. It must have cost a fair bit. There was lots of serious machinery and a lot of tarmac. It took a couple of weeks. It was quite depressing to watch. Here was an opportunity to make some changes to the road layout as part of ongoing maintenance but it was left exactly the same. There is bountiful off-street parking but the few on street parks were kept there, blocking buses from pulling out and providing a door zone for anyone game enough to ride a bike along there.

More recently, part of O'Connell Street in North Adelaide was resurfaced:



and a close up:



Again, no change whatsoever to the road layout. I wondered how long it has been since that road was last resurfaced and so I asked by making a Freedom of Information request.

I spoke to a very helpful fellow at the council. He explained that the asset life is generally estimated to be around 25 years. However, it quite often ends up being shorter than that. The stretch of O’Connell Street that was just resurfaced was last done 15 years ago. That is no uncommon. For example, the council is finding that Grenfell Street is wearing out more quickly since the bus lanes opened. That seems to me to be a good thing. It shows that the buses are now able to travel along that stretch of road at a decent speed instead of crawling along stuck behind a line of traffic as they used to be. The drawback of course is that the road wears out more quickly.

Another thing that determines the life of the road is its foundation. On busy roads, you need a decent 50cm foundation. Where you start seeing potholes, like there are on Jeffcott Street at the moment, that is often because the foundation is a bit inadequate for the level of traffic that the road is experiencing.

A quick but important aside: different levels of government are responsible for different roads. The vast bulk of our roads are in fact council run and maintained. It is only really main arterial roads that are the responsibility of the State Government. This map shows which ones



You can see that Adelaide City Council is responsible for everything inside the ring road. That includes very busy roads like North, South and West Terrace, the café strips, Grenfell Street with its bus lanes and everything in between. The paltry amount that motorists pay for registration (not to be confused with compulsory third party insurance which is the bulk of the payment) does not go towards any of those roads. It is all paid for by local residents and business paying their rates. All those many motorists who come into (and through) the city do not pay for the roads through registration and petrol tax. Someone else pays. Granted, the city workers indirectly contribute by supporting the businesses that own the buildings for which rates are paid but it is far from a user pays system. Those motorists who simply pass through do not contribute at all.

Rates provide less than 50 percent of the revenue of the Council, with other revenue gained from fees & charges (including parking fees that are the subject of so many complaints), external funding, borrowings and commercial operations.

The Federal Government has its ‘Roads to Recovery’ program which provides road funding to local councils but it is funding that must be applied for. It does not come automatically. I was told Adelaide City Council receives $850,000 a year. It is not a great deal. Roads are very expensive.

With such limited funding sources it is perhaps not surprising that it takes a while for holes to be fixed and roads to be upgraded.

Getting back to my point, 15 years is not that long ago. Titanic won the Oscar for best picture, Microsoft released Windows 98, Google was founded and season 4 of Friends was broadcast. However in other respects it is a very long time. 15 years ago, most of today's children were not alive. It is topical because of what this recently posted video shows:


A whole bunch of children in the last 15 years have been denied independent mobility. That is a whole generation.

There is no excuse for such a crap and undemocratic system. The frequency of road maintenance shows that genuine upgrades could easily be part of that budget. And there is no excuse for crapness either. Bus lanes, well designed intersections, roads and neighbourhoods that stop rat-running and quality cycling infrastructure are all part of the same road transport system. They should all be paid for out of the same budget.

Melbourne Bike Share

So I had another romantic weekend away in Melbourne a couple of weeks ago. I highly recommend it. This time round we saw the Australian Ballet do a triple bill of modern ballet pieces. Just beautiful. See it if you can.

Next morning we went to the Art Gallery to see the Monet exhibition. Being a philistine I never knew that Monet spent many years developing his garden in Giverny, about 70km north east of Paris. That then led to Monet's many paintings of lilies, his green bridge and other flowers:


Our hotel was opposite the MCG. Below is a map of the area. The orange arrow points to the hotel (I fear I am fairly crap with graphics programs so a dodgy arrow is the best I can do). The Art Gallery, as I am sure you know, is where the purple arrow is pointing:


On our first day, to get to the arts centre, we walked along Wellington Parade and then picked up the free city circle tram near where the Hotel Lindrum is. That took us to Flinders Street station and then we walked across the bridge to South Bank.

The next day I was determined to have a go on the bike share bikes and luckily there was a station near the hotel (where the blue arrow is pointing). Had it not been that close, I would not have been allowed. The system is very easy to use and very cheap. You pay $2.70 for the whole day and as long as each journey you make is less than 30 mins you don't pay anything else. Just climbing into a taxi is more expensive than that.


As we all know, Australia is one of three countries in the world with all ages helmet laws. There were about 6 bikes at the station but only one helmet. However a sign where you pick up the bike tells you they are closer than you think:


The 7-Eleven I was directed to was about 800 metres away in the opposite direction from where we wanted to go. Also, when the system was introduced there were a number of complaints about a lack of helmets at the 7-Elevens. I didn't fancy a wasted walk so I broke the law instead.

The bikes themselves are great - comfortable and smooth with a functional little luggage rack on the front. The gearing makes the bikes quite slow even in top gear but that kind of works because you end up spending a lot of time on the pavement and journeys are quite short.

We passed another set of bikes near Federation Square and I was able to pick up a helmet there. That meant I was no longer a criminal. I have to say though the helmets are probably the cheapest crappiest examples I have ever seen. And they make you look like a total goob. Before that I had been rolling through the streets looking all debonair with my linen jacket flapping in the breeze. The image was totally destroyed once I put the plastic hat on. A total turn off.

And completely unnecessary. I'd been on the pavement the entire time. Everyone we passed was fine about it. I was doing maybe 12 km/h tops. Is the plastic hat really necessary? There was no way I was going to walk to the 7-Eleven and back. Had I not had a specific intention to use the bikes, like most people, I would not have bothered.

Now it may be that there are other reasons for the woeful performance of Melbourne's bike share compared to other cities. I doubt it though. Dublin uses the same system - with fewer bikes. It is just as hilly and the weather is much worse. Yet it easily outperforms Melbourne by a mile. A combination of ditching the blue hat requirement and setting up a decent grid of safe bike lanes would transform it.

After Monet's exhibition, we took the bikes to see Legally Blonde the Musical (of course). This time, although there were plenty of bikes, there was not a single helmet. Again, the 7-Eleven was "closer than you think" but really? For a 5 minute journey? We both broke the law initially and then found some again near Federation Square. So after a brief spell of feeling just a little bit European, we went back to looking like the two guys off the Motor Accident Commission advert:



Not sure I'll bother next time.

When we dropped the bikes off, there were 3 helmets for 7 bikes (the largest ratio we'd seen). Something tells me they would not have been there a couple of hours later.