Never mind how many people want to use cars, Newcastle council puts bikes first

But, if you do, you'll have noticed that cycling paths replaced two motor-vehicle traffic lanes on Hunter Street from Worth Place to Bellevue Street two years ago.

Those cycling paths, funded by the state government, sum up the council's transportation policy: to achieve its utopian vision of Novocastrians pedalling around on bicycles, it will happily penalise people for driving.

It will penalise them in great numbers, if necessary, even to get just a few more hopping onto bikes.

For almost no one is using the Hunter Street cycling paths, whose installation is meanwhile depriving a great many more people of access to road space.

Anyone who has paid attention to those bike paths has noticed their emptiness. To prove the point, I sat at a coffee shop on Monday and counted how many people used them between 8:10am and 9:10am.

Six did so. Four rode westward and two eastward. On a weekday. In a full hour at the height of the morning peak. In absolutely perfect spring cycling weather: sunny, cool and windless.

Just six.

Meanwhile, about 900 motor vehicles passed, including a few buses. Probably 1200 people travelled in those vehicles.

To make room for the cycling paths while preserving parking spaces, those 1200 were squeezed into one traffic lane in each direction. So everyone's progress was impeded when someone drove slowly, when a bus pulled out from the kerb or when a driver stopped to reverse into a parking space.

In what mentality is it justifiable to inconvenience 1200 people an hour, even if only slightly, to provide a minor benefit to a mere handful? Well, in the mentality of Newcastle council, of course.

The council has a monomaniacal obsession with bicycles, even though the people it represents will almost always choose cars for travelling beyond walking distance.

No figure for cycling's overall share of travel in Newcastle seems to be available, but the council's commendably well researched (though misguided) cycling policy reports that 1.9 per cent of people here ride bikes to work. It doesn't say how often, however, and we know that an average cycling trip is far shorter than an average car trip.

So probably less than 1 per cent of travel in Newcastle is done by bike.

Asked about the negligible use being made of the Hunter Street bike paths, a spokesperson for the council pointed out that they were only part of a still-incomplete cycleway that is to continue down Hunter Street and onto Maitland Road to reach Ivy Street, near Wickham Park.

"This will provide an improved dedicated cycling connection, providing a linkage from the CBD into the Wickham/Hamilton precinct to support increased cyclist usage in Newcastle," the spokesperson said.

The implication is that when the cycleway goes farther, more people will use it.

In fact, its extension is nothing to look forward to. It will mean more throttling of traffic capacity on a major route into the city centre. Even more people will be inconvenienced.

Even if extension lifts peak usage of the cycleway to 200 riders an hour - and I bet it won't - they will still be vastly outnumbered by people in cars: people who aren't interested in the council's bicycle fixation, who just want to get from A to B quickly and comfortably, and who won't appreciate being impeded by removal of lanes.

The likely construction of many residential towers in the West End this decade will lift demand for cycling in the area, but it will intensify the need for motor-vehicle lanes a great deal more. In a locality that's about to massively densify, ripping out road capacity, even if only by removing turning lanes, is just madness.

Novocastrians like travelling in cars because the city's size and mostly good arterial road network makes driving easy. No one should stop them nor foul up those valuable roads, least of all council busybodies who want to decide how people exercise.

We're not Melbourne or Sydney, let alone one of those cramped European cities where driving is so miserable that locals are forced onto public transport or bikes.

But the council is planning to give Novocastrians a bit more misery. One example is the planned cycleway extension. But the larger threat is the council's intention to ask Transport for NSW to set extremely low speed limits to improve on-road cycling safety.

Indeed, it has already begun doing so. I'm not talking about the increasingly common 40kmh limits, though they are frustrating enough. I'm talking about those infuriating 30kmh limits on Honeysuckle Drive, Wharf Road, Shortland Esplanade and Darby Street. For each of those roads, promotion of cycling has been the reason for inflicting inconvenience on the great majority of people who choose to drive.

There's worse coming. The council's cycling policy expressly states that if bikes can't be separated from cars on designated cycling routes then speed limits should drop to 30kmh. And it's planning to designate an awful lot of cycling routes.

What it boils down to is this: the council is willing to punish people who stick with a 99 per cent preferred activity, car travel, in order to promote a 1 per cent activity.

Think about that next time your trip by car is hindered by loss of a lane or by imposition of an outrageously low speed limit. And look around at all the other people in cars who are also being inconvenienced.

Then look for the people on bikes who are benefitting.

You won't see many.