Cairns bike infrastructure

[Aushiker]

Sam Wainwright, a Councillor at the City of Fremantle has posted some images of bicycle treatments in Cairns on the Fremantle BUG Facebook page.

Here is a sample of the photos; the rest can be found via the Facebook page ...



Andrew

[coyote]

Sam Wainwright, a Councillor at the City of Fremantle has posted some images of bicycle treatments in Cairns on the Fremantle BUG Facebook page.

Here is a sample of the photos; the rest can be found via the Facebook page ...



Andrew

There used to be a two lane bike lane where those cars are parked top left(no car parks), but they got rid of the lane heading out of town for bikes so they could have more car parking. Now you have to be careful of people(kids) getting out of the cars, backpackers with rubbish everywhere, bike riders going the wrong way and people who think it is a foot path. The road is 30 kph and safe place to ride is in the middle, not to one side like the signs point out. Getting back onto the bike path at the bend at the end of the street stupid.

[coyote]

Had a look at the photo's, no round abouts in those photo's. The photo that you have put up is not of a round about.

[oxonabike]

I must admit, I've taken Cairns cycle infrastructure for granted after being able to make a comparison during a recent visit to Sydney. The photos featured are all on my regular commute and while it's great to the have the infrastructure (thanks to our previous mayor who was very progressive in this respect) there still is a way to go teaching the motorists how to interpret it. Especially the bike box on the Sheridan st / Florence st intersection. Even had a car with bike shop logos on it stopped in there once. Anyway things like that certainly aren't the fault of the infrastructure.

As coyote mentioned, that single contra flow lane used to be two lane dedicated cycleway. The new redneck council reclaimed it for more car parking spaces although there were some sizeable protests by local cyclists when their intentions were made known. A good and a bad thing came out of the following consultation that occurred prior to work commencing - we got our first sharrow, with the road speed reduced to 30 kph (the good) and that contra flow lane (the not so good). There is a decent demarcation line between the lane and the door zone from the parked cars, and theoretically, it is a great idea. But often you get peds, and more worryingly kids, running from the parklands to their parked cars, straight over the cycleway. Also nervous riders that won't use the sharrow, and salmon down the lane... oh and one, some fool who couldn't park or interpret the infrastructure and opened a door right in front of me. Why yes, now that you ask, I do have a video of it. The video, also shows the change point where the two lane cycleway narrows down to the single lane, and how you need to cross from the sharrow to regain the two lane path when coming from the other direction.

The curved green lane that crosses the street takes you from the Esplanade cycleway to Florence St, the main drag south from Cairns - it is not a roundabout as Coyote mentioned. However, due to low traffic speeds this works pretty well. Cairns has a number of death trap roundabouts that are infamous on the Captain Cook highway towards the northern beaches but a week or two back a major upgrade commenced to make them safer for cyclists. A new cycleway recently opened to the South of Cairns along an old railway alignment, including a couple of new excellent quality bridges over some creeks. A bit more needs to be done to this to make it truly useful (depending on where you're going it can be a bit of a path from nowhere to nowhere) but apparently there is funding allocated to do this. There are also proposals to extend the contra lane all the way along the esplanade - the only current alternative (after the green curve bit mentioned above) is a very congested shared path. Despite the abovementioned 'redneck' elected council, I think there are some very good people working in council to keep pushing the cycling infrastructure case. It also helps that we host a couple of significant cycling and tri events each year.

Pretty well all major roads up here have decent shoulders and riding from city to suburbs is quite easy. Once you get out of town a bit, the shoulders are not quite as abundant but still not bad. Be great if the road to Port Douglas was widened just a little bit...but for now I'm happy with what we have.

Here's the vid (has been posted previously - possibly MM thread):