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Favoured Frome St bikeway design “a fail for everyone”

The Adelaide City Council has released a paper containing its favoured option to redesign the controversial Frome Street bikeway – and cyclists say it would be the worst possible result.

Nov 21, 2016, updated Nov 21, 2016
The council plans to replace the Frome Street bikeway with a thinner model. Photo: Tony Lewis/InDaily

The council plans to replace the Frome Street bikeway with a thinner model. Photo: Tony Lewis/InDaily

In a paper produced for “noting” at a council committee hearing tomorrow night, the council has produced six design options for completing the north-south and east-west cycleways in the city, all of which are narrower than the current section of separated bike lane which runs from Carrington Street to Pirie Street.

The paper, however, stipulates only one option for redesigning the much-criticised completed Frome Street section: an option which reduces the current 2.7-metre-wide lanes to two metres, with high kerbing on either side.

However, cyclists say this option effectively means riders can use only 1.6 metres of the lanes – to avoid their pedals striking the kerb – which would make it difficult to overtake.

As a result, it would push faster commuter cyclists onto the road system, making the whole exercise counter-productive.

The council has produced the new bikeway options after it resolved to pull up the existing Frome Street bikeway, which was built at a cost of $1.6 million.

In a route map produced for the meeting, the council identifies one option for the existing section, but offers four different solutions to complete the next part of the north-south bike route, which runs from Pirie Street to Victoria Drive.

The chair of the Bicycle Institute of South Australia, Fay Patterson, said several of these options were acceptable to cyclists because, despite a narrower lane width, the low height of the kerbing would allow overtaking.

However, she said the single recommended design – dubbed “treatment six” – for replacing the current separated bikeway was the worst possible option.

“If this was a treatment to discourage cyclists – then yeah,” she told InDaily. “But how does that make sense?

“Treatment six doesn’t even cater for the cyclists that are already there.”

The council's favoured option for replacing the current separated cycleway.

The council’s favoured option for replacing the current separated cycleway.

She said the problem was the narrowness of the lane and the height of the kerb.

Anything over 50mm represented a risk of “pedal strike”, meaning the effective width of the lane was only 1.6 metres.

“Our key concern is that it has high kerbs on both sides – that reduces the width that cyclists can use. What that means is that all of the fast cyclists – the commuters who want to get to work quickly (and overtake slower cyclists) – won’t use it.

“The council will spend all of this money and it won’t get used.”

While the option creates extra lanes for cars on Frome Street, it is likely that some cyclists will choose to ride in these lanes.

“It looks like it’s a fail for everyone. Why are they putting it up?”

Patterson said some of the other treatments presented as options for the yet-to-be-completed sections of the bikeway would be acceptable because of the lower kerb heights.

However, she notes that these options would have a high impact on stormwater, which is expensive to fix.

InDaily understands that treatment six is the most economical of the options presented. Most of the others treatments present different variations on a separated 2-metre lane.

The council paper says $11 million has been allocated to cycleway projects – half of that to come from “external sources”. The State Government has committed to helping complete the north-south bikeway, and construct the east-west route, but  InDaily understands it has no intention to help get rid of the existing Frome Street cycling infrastructure.

The paper makes it clear that the council will respond to community views before producing its final option.

The document – which can be read in full here – also recommends “treatment six” for parts of the yet-to-be-built east-west bikeway.

It includes a map with three options (see below) to run the cycleway on either Pirie-Waymouth streets, Flinders-Franklin or Wakefield-Grote.

Options for the east-west bikeway.

Options for the east-west bikeway.

The first completed section of the separated Frome Street bikeway opened in May 2014, and was under fire from within the council from the start, despite internal studies showing little disruption to traffic flows and a significant increase in cycle use.

The section of Frome Street, which has wide bike lanes in each direction and two lanes for traffic plus car parking, was variously described as over-engineered and a “tank trap”.

As a result of ongoing disquiet within, the council decided to redesign it to accommodate two peak-hour driving lanes in both directions, meaning the current concrete barriers separating cyclists along the southern end of Frome Street will have to be ripped up and replaced with something more modest.

The options to be presented tomorrow night, if approved by the full council, will go out for public consultation before a final design is decided by the council early next year. Construction is expected to begin in March or April 2017.

The paper says the council will also have to finalise negotiations with the State Government on funding.

 

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