Risking William Street’s lanes of death
After another enlightening encounter with the editor-at-large, your columnist’s thoughts were further provoked riding up William Street towards Kings Cross.
Frequenters of our Grande Boulevarde may recall that strip of bicycle path running up the hill from Brougham Street to the lights. You know, where one lane departs from the open sewer of traffic and spreads to four lanes stalled beneath the iconic fizzy-black-death sign. You may have noticed the Cheery Green Stripe decorated with bicycle motifs that starts where two lanes become three and stops at the top of that hill, where my thoughts became sharply focused on survival.
My intent to turn left was thwarted by two lanes of motorised vehicles moving rather more swiftly than your correspondent’s underpowered Shiny New Bike. Across the intersection another CGS beckoned. But I was not going to Rushcutters Bay, unlike the motorists providing an unfunny lane of death for any cyclist desiring to turn right towards Darlinghurst.
As nobody else was pushing up the CGS I paused, between the four rushing runnels of cars and trucks, until the lights halted the sudden-death-dealing left lanes, and sidled across with the pedestrians to join the vehicles chugging north along Darlinghurst Road.
And it occurred to me that no-one who ever rode a bike has the final say on where these alleged cyclepaths go. Perhaps pen-pushers deep in the RTA or Town Hall sketch lines on maps, oblivious to topography or road sense. More likely [it seems to this jaundiced rider], some psychopath with a festering resentment of pedalled transport is plotting a complex boobytrap.
Hence the tendency for a CGS to disappear as abruptly as it may reappear. Thus the first section of the bi-directional separated cycleway in Woolloomooloo is a stormwater drain. Therefore the greasy grey granite.
Don’t get me wrong. I love CGSs. I want to see our City of Sydney criss-crossed by stripes of green running uninterrupted for the safe and swift passage of cyclists. But can someone who actually gives a damn be planning them?
by Peter Whitehead
