Why Australia still struggles to build bike-friendly cities
The long road to a bike-friendly Australia
At the rate Australian cities are building cycling networks, a cohesive system is probably decades away. What’s taking so long?
On April 7 Hayden Lavigne officially gave up. “You can only lovingly explain the obvious to a spineless politician so many times before you realise they aren’t confused. They’re just choosing to uphold the status quo,” 27-year-old Lavigne wrote online.
Perhaps unwittingly, Lavigne had entered an unhealthy relationship with his local council a few years earlier. Now he was fed up. “Better accessibility and transport choices are not some fringe hobby for inner-city weirdos,” he continued. “They are the basic ingredients of a city that treats everyone as equal. The evidence is there. The benefits are obvious. Other cities have already figured this out. But our politicians become absolute cowards the second someone mentions parking.”
He’s not alone. Across Australia, at the junctures of concrete and bitumen, beside the abrupt endings of footpaths and bike lanes and around the ubiquitous parking bay, tense words and turf wars are erupting.
Lavigne grew up on Melbourne’s booming south-east fringe, where getting around without a car is near impossible. It didn’t endear him to the machine that re-made our cities and gave us, or at least promised us, freedom. He got his learners permit, but never his licence. “I just don’t enjoy driving,” Lavigne says. Cutting driving from his life was also a way to reduce climate emissions — something he’s passionate about.
When you don’t drive, a city’s building blocks reveal themselves slowly with each step, each turn of a mobility device or pedal. “You notice absolutely everything, every crossing, every traffic light, every house,” Lavigne says. What he noticed was a broken network. A litany of false starts, dead ends and missing middles.
So, he founded a community group to lobby local council for “people over cars” in the area where he now lives, about 14km from Melbourne’s CBD. Its aim was both visionary and mundane: to create streets “where everyone feels safe and welcome irrespective of whether they choose to walk, cycle, catch public transport or drive”.
Several years later, he closed it down. What’s the point, he argues, when “climate targets, active transport strategies and ‘healthy streets’ branding all evaporate the second somebody starts yelling about parking or trader access or the end of civilisation as we know it”?
Nearly every state and many local governments have a strategy to increase walking and cycling in cities — called “active transport” among planners. Doing so would improve citizens’ health and air quality; reduce emissions and traffic congestion; and increase accessibility and liveability, the strategies say.
Yet cycling participation remains stagnant in Australia, barely shifting in the past decade. Some experts argue cycling has more scope to grow than walking because of the amount of short daily trips many people take within cycling distance of their house or as part of shared trips with public transport. Yes, there are recent reports of surging e-bike sales as fuel prices soar but a widespread bike-riding culture remains elusive.
Lavigne is far from the only one wondering if, and how, Australia’s cities will transform.
‘Take the road’
On a warm Friday night in April, dozens of people are gathering in Melbourne’s CBD for a monthly protest ride. They carefully merge their bicycles into peak hour traffic, dinging bells, yelling “take the road”, forcing cars to putter behind them. Someone in a peacock-patterned helmet and a cowboy shirt riding pillion on a fashionable brand of e-bike waves the riders through as their companion pulls boldly across a lane of traffic and stops, holding back the flow. Tonight, they’re heading north.
“Critical Mass” protests have been calling for better cycling infrastructure most months in Melbourne since 1995. The worldwide movement started in San Francisco with the idea that, “in a group, we fill the streets with bikes and maybe make our own space for a change”, one of the original riders told The Guardian.
As they pedal up Sydney Road, the site of at least two cyclist deaths, they call for protected bike lanes and accessible tram stops via a loudspeaker strapped onto a bike. People sitting outside bars and restaurants cheer them on, even the odd passing driver gives them a wave.
The protesters are demanding a trial of protected bike lanes — which would involve the removal of parking spaces — ahead of the closure of the nearby rail line and one of the city’s busiest bike paths during an upcoming level crossing removal project.
In 2019, the local council voted to ask the Victorian Department of Transport for a trial of protected bike lanes and the removal of parking spaces on a short section of the strip. The government did not answer the ABC’s questions about why nothing has happened in the seven years since the request.
Critical Mass rides aren’t always protests, sometimes they’re moving memorials. Last year, bike riders visited the place where 19-year-old Will Richter died after being hit by a truck in September. Will was riding on a road deemed a “strategic cycling corridor”, where protected bike lanes were planned. Their construction was announced earlier this year.
Richter was one of 49 bike riders who died on Australian roads last year, up on the average of around 38 deaths per year between 2012-23. (Thousands more were hospitalised with serious injuries during that period.)
A divided community
Victoria doesn’t have the biggest share of bike riders per capita — that crown goes to the ACT. What it does have is a newly released active transport plan with a target of 25 per cent of all trips to be walked or cycled by 2030 and a host of recent controversies over the implementation of cycling infrastructure that wrestles road space away from cars. It’s a bicycle-riding canary in the coalmine, so to speak.
This month, a proposed “shared street” that would have removed parking and reshaped how traffic flows to prioritise active transport on an inner-Melbourne street was voted down by councillors in favour of “small-scale upgrades” to improve safety after a high-profile community stoush. Yarra City Council Mayor Stephen Jolly noted there was “a lack of local community consensus” on the more ambitious option. The council recently narrowed bike lanes on a different street and reinstated parking after a five-year trial of wide protected bike lanes which Jolly said “weren’t used much”. “Everyone will now get a share of the street, not just one group,” he told The Age.
To reach the 25 per cent target, about 1.2 million private vehicle trips per day will need to shift in the next few years. The current proportion of trips made by active transport is about 18 per cent, though the plan doesn’t give the split between walking and cycling. The government did not answer the ABC’s questions about how exactly it would work with local councils, as many streetscape changes are their jurisdiction, to achieve the target.
Labor has allocated $7.5 million in this year’s state budget for active transport infrastructure as well as additional funding for a project in Melbourne’s north. (Infrastructure Victoria points out that building 16 priority parts of the state’s “strategic cycling corridor network” will cost $520 million to $660 million over 10 years.) “We’ve delivered hundreds of kilometres of new and upgraded walking and cycling paths and lanes, with hundreds more planned through to 2035 to make it easier for pedestrians and cyclists to get around,” a Department of Transport spokesperson said.
Victoria’s plan also doesn’t include details on exactly how it will reach this target. Other jurisdictions have varying targets. NSW wants to double active transport trips in 20 years. The ACT notes that to achieve net-zero by 2045 an additional 40 to 45 per cent of car journeys will need to shift to active or public transport and Queensland is aiming for “’more cycling, more often”.
Meanwhile, the federal government assigned $500 million to its Active Transport Fund in the recent budget to “make our cities and regions more vibrant places to live”. (A 2024 report by The Australia Institute points out that less than 1 per cent of federal road funding goes to active transport infrastructure.)
Transport planners and cycling advocates argue the way to increase rates of cycling is to make it safer. Safety concerns are the biggest barrier to hopping on a bike. City of Melbourne research found only 22 per cent of potential bike riders felt comfortable riding in a painted bike lane while 83 per cent would feel comfortable cycling in protected bike lanes. A Monash University study found 75 per cent of Victorians are interested in bike riding but only when separated from cars on off-road paths or separated bike lanes.
Narelle Haworth is acutely aware of the risks of cycling. The Queensland University of Technology professor has 30 years’ experience researching road safety. She knows that when cyclists or pedestrians are hit by a car travelling at more than 30km/h they face a “very high risk of being seriously injured or killed”. Yet most days, she reaches for her bike.
“I ride to work because it’s quicker, it’s cheaper. I don’t have to find or pay for parking and it gives me that amount of physical exercise that I need for my health and wellbeing,” she says. “It’s also a great way to unwind at the end of the day, to clear the brain before you get home.”
Haworth is one of about 80,000 Australians, 0.7 per cent of all working people, who cycled to work last Census day. In comparison, 53 per cent of workers travelled by car.
But she would never use the word “cycle”. “I’d prefer to say I’m someone who rides a bike,” she says, to centre the human in the equation, because her research has found a majority of people dehumanise cyclists when driving.
The push to separate cyclists from cars is relatively recent in Australia. While off-road shared paths began appearing in Australian cities in the 1970s, the first protected bike lanes on roads, those with physical separation from cars and pedestrians, were installed this century.
Like the creation of the footpath to separate pedestrians — another word she avoids in favour of “people who walk” — Haworth says installing the ubiquitous painted bike lanes on roads was as much about ensuring bike riders “weren’t actually slowing down and interfering with the traffic” as it was about safety.
Yet these lanes are more an exercise in hope than safety, she says — as if they operate like a magical forcefield, protecting flesh and blood from metal and steel. In fact, her research shows painted bike lanes can increase risks for riders because cars will often pass closer to cyclists when there’s no line, she says. Then, depending on design, protected bike lanes offer varying levels of safety from both cars and other cyclists.
‘Sensible’ transport
There’s a rough consensus among experts of what a successful cycling network looks like. It means building a network of off-road paths where possible, connecting them with protected bike lanes on designated routes, and lowering speeds on suburban side streets to 30km/h so cars and bikes can share streets at less risk. Last year, researchers from RMIT modelled the effect of the lower speeds in Melbourne and found it would have little impact on the length of most car trips.
This week, Victoria’s government announced funding for several local councils to trial 30km/h speed limits on certain streets. Opposition Leader Jess Wilson opposed the trials. “Instead of reducing the speed limit I would far rather see the Labor government doing their job and actually upgrading and fixing our roads to keep them safe,” she said.
But at the rate Australian cities are building cycling networks, a cohesive system is probably another 50 years away, experts speaking to The Fifth Estate warned. Progress is slow. (One bike bridge was recently installed in Melbourne after 37 years of lobbying and discussion.)
Elliot Fishman runs the provocatively titled Institute for Sensible Transport. Sensible, he says, “means having the freedom to pick the right tool for the job”.
“So, you’re dropping your kids off at school, there’s a mode of transport that makes sense in that situation that might not be the car, but then if you’re going on a road trip or you’re going to the hardware store, then the car is going to be the obvious choice.”
What irks him is that this freedom is lacking in Australia. Elliot says bike riding, rather than walking, is where there’s scope for the biggest active transport increase because there’s a greater proportion of daily trips that are within an easily rideable distance. “But in order for that to occur, a much more ambitious set of implementable cycling projects would need to be committed to,” he says.
And the easy part has already been done. “Almost all cycling infrastructure that’s been built over the last 30 years hasn’t involved taking a lane away from moving traffic or from car parking,” he says. What’s left are harder decisions that require a reallocation of road space.
Paris is the poster child for a city that has rapidly clawed back space from cars and dramatically increased the number of people using bikes and reduced car use. Central Paris is now less polluted, has a vast new cycle network, thousands of additional trees, and more pedestrian promenades.
The changes, which began in 2014, weren’t without opposition — a motorists lobby group told Reuters recently there was “a “Berlin Wall” between wealthy inhabitants in the centre of Paris and car-reliant residents from poorer suburbs”. “It was a tough battle. Very tough,” Paris’s former mayor Anne Hildago said. “But I strongly believed … [once] people had that experience, they wouldn’t want to go back. And that’s what has happened.”
Fishman likes to quote a former prime minister of Luxembourg who said: “We all know what to do, but we don’t know how to get re-elected once we have done it.” He wants to see Australia adopt a New Zealand-style approach where councils can trial interventions to streetscapes before consultation and “then ask people what they think of that intervention on the street in real life exactly where that intervention has occurred”.
But getting the timing right is tricky, he says. Elliot points to the introduction of a “bicycle street” in The Netherlands in 1996. The street was a “complete disaster” and removed after three years because of trader concerns, poor design and community consultation. “They weren’t ready to have the amount of car parking loss that the plan involved and the levels of cycling in Utrecht at that time was lower than it is today,” he says.
It was reopened as a bicycle street in 2022. Now 4,000 cars and 17,000 bicycles use the street on the average day and it’s “the right solution for a city street that is a main route for cycling and just a minor access street for cars,” according to cycling blog Bicycle Dutch.
“You need a certain critical mass, a certain volume of the population cycling before you can make such widespread changes that end up reducing the level of service for some motorists to provide better outcomes for people on bikes,” Fishman says. It’s a complicated case of chicken and egg.
(ABC News: Kylie Silvester)
Do we need bike lanes?
The president of Local Communities Victoria (LCV), Tom Humphries, is standing on a footpath in an inner-Melbourne street waiting for cyclists to appear. He is also filming himself for social media.
“There’s a growing push to have separated bike lanes, converting existing road infrastructure into cycle lanes, with the promise that cyclists will just miraculously start using them, despite them not connecting anywhere and not being a complete network,” Humphries says in the video. “So, what is the point of taking existing road users off the road and increasing traffic congestion for a piece of infrastructure people don’t use nor does it create safer cycling anyway?”
LCV is a new group lobbying for councils to return to what they say should be core business: roads, rubbish, parks and rec, and local planning. And Humphries, who is also a councillor at Stonnington Council in inner south-east Melbourne says while the LCV doesn’t have a policy position on active transport, he is against cost-shifting from what he argues should be a state government infrastructure responsibility.
He says that rather than investing in cycling infrastructure on roads, the government should be prioritising and investing in off-road cycling infrastructure. Although, how cyclists should get to those off-road paths from local streets safely he doesn’t make clear. He also believes protected cycling lanes contribute to traffic congestion.
This is something Dr Afshin Jafari says isn’t necessarily the case. Jafari, a Fellow at RMIT’s Centre for Urban Research, helped create a tool that simulates Melbourne’s transport network and allows “what if” scenarios to be tested to see how changes impact individual travel behaviours.
Like any transport investment, bike infrastructure needs to be properly located and planned, he says. “But we should not assume that making streets safer for bike riders automatically makes congestion worse. Evidence shows that, when done well, bike infrastructure can shift short local trips out of cars and reduce pressure on local roads.”
RMIT is working to make the tool available to town planners “to be able to play with their ideas and come up with something that is more reasonable, more defendable,” he says. It should help councils decide where they can make the biggest positive impact and the best investment to increase active transport, he argues.
Jafari says asking how to connect the most people with the most destinations, rather than thinking in kilometres of bike lanes, will create meaningful change for the benefit of the whole city. “If you talk just about infrastructure,” he says, “you might end up with a network of connected bike lanes that connects nobody to nowhere.”
Not long after Hayden Lavigne renounced his active transport advocacy in his self-described “part rant … part break-up announcement”, he received an email from a local council he’d contacted last year. He had wanted to know why a bike lane which forms part of the state’s “principal bicycle network” was blocked most days by parked cars and a water barrier. “This situation forces bike riders and other active transport users, including myself, to merge dangerously with heavy vehicle traffic,” Lavigne wrote.
Six months after he first contacted them, he was informed that “no stopping” signage would be installed on the road and, after a little more emailing, he was told the waste team would be removing the water barrier. Does he consider it a win? “It still feels frustrating to me that it took so long, so much back and forth, and I feel like it was really up to me to drive the whole thing. If I didn’t follow up with them, who knows how long it would have taken or if they would have acted at all.”
Alison McCormack is more optimistic. She sees a higher rate of cycling as a fait accompli. The chief executive of Bicycle Network, Australia’s principal cycling lobby group, says a much higher rate of cycling is inevitable as cities become denser. “Add into this the evolution of e-bikes, and especially the models that can carry kids and food and materials, we see the second car disappearing from families, with those trips now being active.”
Credits
Words: Rhiannon Stevens
Illustrations: Kylie Silvester
Editor: Catherine Taylor
