Four members of the Bicycle Tasmania committee attended: Emma Pharo, Dan Teague and Jeff Dunn from Hobart, and Richard Muir-Wilson from Wynyard. (Emma and Richard were funded by the other organisations they represented, that is UTAS and Waratah-Wynyard Council.) Bicycle Tasmania funded Dan and Jeff’s registration.

The aim of these sessions is to “give delegates access to initiatives, ideas and tools that enable cycle growth”. It is pitched at council staff and consultants and the content of this event was tailored to the interests and needs of Tasmania participants.

Bicycle Network brought 10 staff and guest speakers from Victoria. 67 people attended, including:

-          DIER:  10

-          HCC:  6

-          LCC: 5

-          Other northern Councils: 9

-          Other southern Councils: 8

-          Consultants: 8

 

Program

When to separate and how to do it well

Bart Sbeghen,
Good Design Guide, Bicycle Network

Recreation and Rail Trails – Design, Development and Promotion

Kate Butler, Bicycle Network
Ashley Pittard, City of Ballarat

Developing a behaviour change strategy for enabling cycling in the City of Sydney

Jonathan Daly, GHD. Sponsored by GHD

Implementing the Tasmanian Walking and Cycling for Active Transport Strategy 2010

Janine Pearson, DIER.

Effective treatments for road crossings at shared paths and allocating ‘lazy’ space on the road creatively for riders

Malcolm Daff

Learnings from regional Victoria – Bike developments in the City of Greater Bendigo

Brett Martini, City of Greater Bendigo

How to develop a great bike plan

Melissa Grimes, Bicycle Network

Economic appraisal of cycling infrastructure: Benefit cost ratios of bike facilities

Dr Cameron Munro, CDM Consulting

 

Participants were later sent an email with links to download all the presentations.

Summary notes on presentations

Welcome address by Minister Nick McKim

The minister announced $100K funding for preliminary work on the Humphreys Rivulet track, proposed by Bicycle Tasmania in the Creating Healthy Connections Plan.

When to separate and how to do it well

Critique of on- and off-road bicycle paths, and presenting analysis tools to determine what level of separation is appropriate for a given traffic volume and speed, and given rider type.  Discussion of one-way and two-way paths, and case studies of retrofits and new streets.

Recreation and Rail Trails – Design, Development and Promotion

Kate presented a simple step-by-step process for creating a rail trail.

Ashley described the new Ballarat to Skipton rail trail, especially showing how 3 councils successfully collaborated, and a tip about testing track surfaces.

Developing a behaviour change strategy for enabling cycling in the City of Sydney

Jonathan described innovative programs developed to bring about behaviour change around cycling, stressing the need to tailor the approach to the situation, and avoid common approaches which actually have little positive effect.

Effective treatments for road crossings at shared paths and allocating ‘lazy’ space on the road creatively for riders

Lots of great pictures showing how little thought has gone into many frequently used components of bike infrastructure. Bollards and barriers used as if riders are little children who need to be physically restrained from rushing across roads. These impediments actually cause injuries. Priority at crossings can in some cases be given to bicycles, however all indications of priority must be consistent (if install zebras then should also have Give Way signs to reinforce the priority.

Examples of fitting successful bike lanes to even narrow roads.

Learnings from regional Victoria – Bike developments in the City of Greater Bendigo

Challenges and successes in Bendigo, roundabout treatments, and trying things outside the road engineers’ usual default treatments.

How to develop a great bike plan

Step-by-step guide for developing a council’s bike plan. The “Local Government Bike Plan Workbook” is available for download from Bike Futures website.

Economic appraisal of cycling infrastructure: Benefit cost ratios of bike facilities

The difficult and important task of quantifying the benefit-cost ratio of bike projects. Many of the benefits are long-term and whole-of-community. Public health benefits can be estimated through reduction-of-risk for a range of expensive diseases and constitute very significant financial benefits of cycling. Social inclusion is much harder to quantify both in terms of effect and dollar value, but is increasingly important. Note that one potential cost of cycling is injury of riders – but a sad quirk of economics is that fatal accidents do not have a high dollar cost – graves are a once off cost, people with preventable disease can spend years in hospital beds!

Cameron has developed a database and software tool which is available for deriving the benefit-cost ratio for bicycle projects. Many major road projects struggle to make a ratio of 1, but bicycle projects frequently obtain much higher numbers, although he showed an example of a multi million dollar bike bridge in Qld which had quite a low ratio.

The Technical Bike Tour

We saw some of the many on-road bike lanes that now exist in the CBD. These do not fully join and many intersections have no special provisions for the riders, but at 9.30am a loop of the CBD was easy to negotiate (would have been more interesting to start the ride at 8.30am!) North from the CBD open space for off-road paths is provided by levee banks, flood plains and wide footpaths. The two main bridges to the NE are easily crossed on the footpath. We were shown the proposed route north using a wide low traffic street which parallels two main arterial roads. Merits of this plan were debated and disputed by some of the presenters. The plan also proposes a new bicycle bridge over the North Esk, between the existing car bridges. The benefit-cost ratio of this $2M structure would be interesting!

UTAS – Sustainability Manager

Morning tea was provided at UTAS and Corey Peterson presented some of his work as Sustainability Manager for UTAS. His team has now grown to 4 staff and has a recurring budget. One facet of this relates to sustainable transport, and this is being addressed by:

-          Steps to encourage cycling including new end of trip facilities. Further value is gained by having students design these facilities.

-          Redline buses have been contracted to provide a transport service between the Hobart and Launceston campuses.    

-          Adjusting Sandy Bay campus parking fees so that UTAS no longer subsidises staff parking by about $0.5M per year.

-          Contracting CoolPool (?) to organise car pooling

-          Setting up priority parking for car poolers

 

 

Jeff Dunn 12/7/2012