Designing safer cycleways for Sydney

Cycling advocates are calling for safer cycleway paths around Sydney in order to increase bike riding in our transport network.

Last week’s public forum, held as part of Engineering Week, aimed to encourage governments and engineers to integrate their design plans for safer cycle paths.

“We love cycleways. They promote bicycle usage and it reduces congestion on roads and the need for parking,” said CEO of Bicycle NSW, Omar Khalifa.

‘Cycleways – Commuter Gain or Pain?’ was the topic of the night, with guest speakers discussing ways of building new cycleway paths into Sydney’s existing infrastructure. They called for engineers to design safer cycleway networks to reduce Sydney’s dominant car culture and encourage more people to ride bikes.

“It’s going to be some time for the cultural change required to get everyone used to the infrastructure and even the old infrastructure,” said Transport Planner for Cycling for the City of Sydney Council, Fiona Campbell.

“One thing you need is to actually teach people how to use the infrastructure. Education is absolutely crucial and that will ensure that the changeover happens and happens well.”

Mr Khalifa said Sydney needed to develop a sustainable cycleway network to cope with the increasing number of cyclists taking to the road each day. The development of cycleways would ease congestion on Sydney’s roads and pressure on public transport system.

Congestion costs businesses $3.5 billion a year and is expected to rise to $7.8 billion by 2030.

The NSW Bureau of Transport Statistics forecasts that in the next 10 years there will be an extra 42 per cent of traffic on the roads.

In order to cope with the demand of traffic on Sydney roads and ease congestion, the NSW Government has invested $158 million into a NSW BikePlan. The funding will go towards building cycling infrastructure over the next 10 years and encouraging an increase in regular cyclists numbers.

“I think that it is very important that we have some funding locked in over the next decade because without the funding, you don’t get a lot done,” said Mike Veysey, the RTA’s Director of Network Services.

The forum comes on the back of City of Sydney Council’s announcement to expand its bicycle network with the Inner-Western suburbs of Leichhardt, Marrickville and Ashfield.

By Vanessa Zhang