The Greens are today announcing a Brisbane City Council election commitment to install bus and transit lanes on key Brisbane road corridors, as part of our B...
We actually did get that…on two streets. Elizabeth Street and Edward Street now have a bike lane with a physical barrier.
Unfortunately, it turns out that just one lane for two-way bike traffic is uncomfortably narrow, so ideally we need to be closing two lanes, which shouldn’t be too much of an issue considering Elizabeth Street was 4 lanes before this anyway. And obviously having it on only two streets is pretty useless for creating an actual network for people to get around. Elizabeth Street is particularly ridiculous, because to get onto it at the southern end you’ve got to wait for two whole cycles to get from the southern end of William Street followed by crossing the almost-perpetually-empty eastern end of William Street in a two-stage crossing, and at the northern end of Elizabeth Street it randomly dumps you onto an island with nothing but a big fig tree on it, with nowhere else to continue on to safely.
And for pedestrians, in some areas they have plenty of space…in theory, but then the frequent advertising billboards taking up space on the footpath restrict how much you can move. Damn billboards that were first allowed to pay for Council’s CityCycle initiative, but for some damn reason are allowed to stay up even though CityCycle has been axed.
So yeah, we definitely do need to be doing a whole lot more for active transport in the inner city. It’s pretty abysmal at the moment.
We actually did get that…on two streets. Elizabeth Street and Edward Street now have a bike lane with a physical barrier.
Unfortunately, it turns out that just one lane for two-way bike traffic is uncomfortably narrow, so ideally we need to be closing two lanes, which shouldn’t be too much of an issue considering Elizabeth Street was 4 lanes before this anyway. And obviously having it on only two streets is pretty useless for creating an actual network for people to get around. Elizabeth Street is particularly ridiculous, because to get onto it at the southern end you’ve got to wait for two whole cycles to get from the southern end of William Street followed by crossing the almost-perpetually-empty eastern end of William Street in a two-stage crossing, and at the northern end of Elizabeth Street it randomly dumps you onto an island with nothing but a big fig tree on it, with nowhere else to continue on to safely.
And for pedestrians, in some areas they have plenty of space…in theory, but then the frequent advertising billboards taking up space on the footpath restrict how much you can move. Damn billboards that were first allowed to pay for Council’s CityCycle initiative, but for some damn reason are allowed to stay up even though CityCycle has been axed.
So yeah, we definitely do need to be doing a whole lot more for active transport in the inner city. It’s pretty abysmal at the moment.