When too many cycleways are never enough: council attacks driving again

"And the rest of you can go to hell," is what they mean.

Newcastle council is persisting with its war against motoring, to satisfy its cycling fetish.

Having strangled traffic on Darby Street and part of Hunter, it's going ahead with butchering the rest of Hunter Street in the West End, extending a minimally used cycleway as far as Islington.

It's using your money to make driving harder for you, all in pursuit of its hopeless and destructive dream of turning Newcastle into some kind of Amsterdam on the South Pacific.

In 2021 it used a state grant to reduce Hunter Street between Union and Bellevue streets from four motor-vehicle lanes to two, impeding people who wanted to drive.

It installed a cycling lane on each side and called the exercise a trial.

Transport for NSW, an anti-car government agency if ever there was one, cut the speed limit to 40kmh.

Simply by sitting at a coffee shop during a peak hour in September, I discovered that, for each person using the cycling lanes, about 200 were crammed into the slow space left for automobiles - an utterly unjustifiable imposition on that great majority of Novocastrians who don't share the council's cycling fixation.

The council suggested it was too soon to judge. The cycleway still needed to be extended, it said, implying that eventually there would be riders galore on Hunter Street.

And so, by a council vote last month, the extension is going ahead - as a stage-two "trial". The road changes are due to be designed by April, with construction proceeding soon after.

Again, two motor-vehicle lanes will be abolished, this time out to the intersection of Maitland Road and Ivy Street in Islington. That will restrict car access to the city centre from well-populated localities as far as Mayfield West while also hindering traffic flowing to and from busy Tudor Street.

The project will cost an estimated $3.5 million, of which $1.5 million is coming from Transport for NSW and $2 million from ratepayers.

It's as if lord mayor Nuatali Nelmes's council, noting how the tramline had ruined Hunter Street east of Union street, said to the state government: "Hang on. You've stuffed up only half of it. Give us some money and we'll finish the job".

Does anyone think that, after the cycleway is built, the council will say that the "trial" was a failure and the motor-vehicle lanes should be restored?

In fact a "trial" is a familiar ruse used by Newcastle council and Transport for NSW to impose some anti-car measure.

The full-frontal attack on driving in Darby Street that began in 2022 was also a supposed trial. Food-and-beverage seating replaced parking, the speed limit dropped to 30kmh, yet more speed humps appeared, new road markings directed cyclists to ride in the lanes, and the irritating signs went up.

In effect, that part of Darby Street entirely became a cycleway. If you're driving on it, consider yourself to be a tolerated guest.

To no one's surprise, the "trial" was declared a success in February, so it's now supposed to be permanent.

Beneficiaries include people who want to ride bikes down Darby Street instead of taking a back street, as they easily could. Others are business owners, who get access to former carriageway space and can also offer quieter conditions to patrons - and perhaps put up prices.

The losers are the vastly more numerous people who must slow to unreasonably low speeds in cars and buses, taking more time to get to where they're going. Their time matters, even if the council couldn't care less.

We shouldn't count the patrons of the Darby Street businesses as benefitting, since they can choose one of many places in town to go for coffee and an expensive breakfast.

There's a debate about how to interpret "Cyclists claim the lane". It looks like a triumphant, up-yours declaration: "Cyclists are claiming the lane!" But it's probably an instruction: "Cyclists, claim the lane."

Or: "Cyclists, get in the way of other road users as much as you can."

And there are, of course, a lot more other road users, even 16 months after the council started repelling them from Darby Street.

On Wednesday, I sat at a coffee shop for another round of peak-hour vehicle counting. As in September, the weather was lovely for cycling.

From 8am to 9am, 15 people rode bikes along Darby Street, including two boys who whizzed by on an electric one a good deal faster than 30kmh. And there were 412 motor vehicles (including seven buses), carrying about 600 people.

So 40 people were hindered in their travel for each person who cycled.

It was a quiet week for commuting, so the normal weekday ratio is more likely to be 60:1.

And yet the council's concept pictures of Hunter Street after its stage-two mangling hilariously show lots of bikes and hardly any cars. As if.

The council tries to claim public support for its anti-car zealotry.

Deputy lord mayor Declan Clausen says: "Through our community engagement survey we found that 90 per cent of respondents support stage two of the Hunter Street project and they're happy with improvements to the network in stage one, particularly with the focus on safety."

But who were those respondents, we may ask. Well, most would have been people who had strong reasons to respond - most obviously cycling enthusiasts, a notoriously noisy, gimme-gimme lot.

There's little chance that the respondents represented a reasonable cross-section of people in the Newcastle local government area, who vastly prefer to drive when they go somewhere.

Yet those are people whom councillors are elected to represent.