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Removing bike lanes is not just a bad idea, it’s economic vandalism
A “bike lane removal trial”? Now I have heard everything! In the last 55 years, Melbourne has grown from 2 million to 5 million people. The CBD has evolved from a low-rise town centre to a dense mix of residential and commercial towers. All that time, the space available on roads in the Hoddle Grid has stayed the same. In fact, available road space has barely changed since 1837.
It should be obvious that it gets harder to drive through the centre of a city the more its population grows. Yet if you listen to many of Melbourne’s media commentators and business lobbyists, congestion is a bewildering injustice engineered by ideologues in government.
A cyclist rides along Exhibition Street.Credit:Jason South
It’s time for a reality check.
Compared to similarly sized cities around the world, it is staggeringly easy to drive a car in the middle of Melbourne. That may be cold comfort to those stuck in traffic, but it’s true. It’s so easy, in fact, that 43 per cent of car trips to the Hoddle Grid don’t stop, they drive straight through – without contributing a cent to the local economy.
More than half of all street space in the Hoddle Grid is allocated to car lanes, even though cars are by far the least space-efficient transport mode available (cars take up 9.2 square metres per person based on average occupancy, compared to 1.5 square metres for cyclists, 0.6 square metres for tram passengers and 0.5 square metres for walkers). On-street parking takes up another 5 per cent of space. Footpaths take up 26 per cent, while trams take up 9 per cent.
Bike lanes punch above their weight: bike trips are 7 per cent of all trips into the Hoddle Grid and rising, while physically separated bike lanes take up just 1 per cent of the road space. Existing bike lanes still have plenty of capacity for more cyclists, while car lanes have already returned to pre-pandemic levels and full capacity.
Cars are the least space-efficient transport mode available.Credit:Wayne Taylor
The idea that we should reduce the 1 per cent safe bike lane allocation to squeeze in more car lanes, resulting in fewer people moving through the space available, is economic vandalism. Footfall, not through traffic, boosts business. Citing COVID as a reason to convert bike lanes to car lanes is disingenuous: car lanes were at capacity years before the pandemic hit, and we can’t magic up more road space after the pandemic any more than we could before.
Last year, Melbourne City Council even asked Deloitte to investigate the economic recovery potential of removing bike lanes to make room for more parking and driving. That independent assessment returned a resounding “no”. Ultimately, bike lanes are efficient people-movers, generating more customers for city businesses, and so we need more of them.
We will always have road and parking space for those whose accessibility needs require it, and we know that Melbourne’s economy relies heavily on business-to-business and home deliveries. Not everyone can or will ride a bike. But the more that do, using space-efficient bike lanes, the fewer space-hogging cars there will be on the road.
To the executives with employment packages that include private car parks under Exhibition Street offices: you are the traffic. Oh, you have a Tesla? Nice try, but electric cars take up just as much road space as cars with a combustion engine. If you are serious about electric vehicles, try the train! Or consider an e-bike: they are greatly increasing the distances that Melburnians are willing to commute by bicycle, and they’re great fun.
Melbourne has one of the least ambitious bike lane expansion programs in the world. Council boosted funding for bike lanes to record levels in 2020 and 2021, but these levels would be scandalously low in any European city, or Sydney for that matter. The Victorian government’s pop-up bike lanes investment is a rounding error, producing mostly painted lanes. We have to do better than this.
Let’s remember what else bike lanes do. They reduce road fatalities. They make it easier for women and children to move about the city (an important safety and equity indicator). They make the city’s roads usable for everyone, not just the rich. They greatly reduce the city’s carbon emissions. They make us fitter, reducing Victoria’s healthcare bill.
Put simply, bicycles are the sign of an economically, socially and environmentally healthy city.
Melbourne’s future does not lie with ever more car lanes. For the central city, that is no longer a physical possibility. The business lobby needs to deal in reality, recognise the economic boon that footpaths and bike lanes bring, and celebrate the humble bicycle.
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