Tragically on Wednesday the 13th of April. we saw yet another death of a cyclist on the streets of Melbourne. Ignoring a give way sign, the driver, allegedly high of methamphetamines, crashed into a cyclist at Melville Road in Pascoe Vale South. Immediately following this disaster, the mayor of the City of Moreland, Greens Party member Mark Riley announced that “(he) will be writing to the Minister for Roads and Road Safety to urge him to consider installing safety measures to protect bike users and pedestrians along Melville Road, and new infrastructure on nearby corridors.” It is refreshing to see that the default response in modern Melbourne is to work on improving bike infrastructure. With drug addled drivers on the road, riding a bike is terrifying thus anything to help safety by the separating 9kg bikes from 2-ton cares is welcome.
But not Oscar Yildiz JP. One of the four local councilors
for the Northwest Ward, Cr Yildiz has a different idea to improve safety in the
area. It is not the lack of safe bike lanes that is the problem, no not for
Yildiz. The true scourge of traffic and danger is a protected bike lanes on
Kent Street and Northumberland Avenue, 2.5km away from the tragic fatality. He
released this video to argue his point, just 2 days after the death of the
cyclist on Melville Road.
https://twitter.com/OscarYILDIZ4VIC/status/1514833624708702209?s=20&t=iAsccXjfIfM1JZfuL9Vy5w
One thing he says again and again is “This isn’t working”, complaining that the bike lanes have removed too much parking, and inducing traffic as motorists search for a car park.. But OK, fine. Maybe Yildiz has a point, he does seem quite passionate. Yildiz is so sure that he invites a rebuke.
“I challenge any bike rider to come here … and tell me how effective these bike lanes really are”.Well… Guess where I visited last weekend 😉
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| "Art" |
Politicising the death of an innocent cyclist?
But just before I recount my experiences, Cr. Yildiz has made a follow up
reply to some of the pushback he got.
This struck me as eerily
reminiscent of the response that the NRA gives in the USA when a mass shooting
happens, telling us not to politicize the deaths of victims of violence.
Unfortunately, this is a tried-and-true tactic to try to kill momentum for any
meaningful change, and the way Yildiz uses this argument is similar. Instead,
the appropriate thing to do is to rally against the road violence and do everything
to protect the most vulnerable road users, as Mayor Riley did. Bizarrely, in
the tweet, Yildiz makes an argument that removing the bike lanes on Kent Road
would increase cyclist deaths, presumably insinuating that the lanes are so bad
that they push cyclists dangerously into traffic. This argument is odd, as by
simply asking the question of “where would the cyclists go if the Kent Road
lanes were removed?”, the obvious answer is they would go back into the traffic
lanes, to conflict with cars, increasing risk.
Maybe there is a third option. Yildiz professes that he
himself is a cyclist but knows “what a safe lane would look like”. Could he be
suggesting that a bigger, better bike lane should be installed? This seems to
go completely against what he said in video pitch, where the main promise to
the community was to allow more space for car parking?
But before I finish pulling this tweet apart, I want to note
one final thing. Yildiz says the incident is 4km from Kent Road. Google Maps
tells me otherwise.
What's the deal with Northumberland Avenue and Kent Road?
First of all, what is the deal with these bike lanes?
This story begins in 2009, where the City of Moreland
identified a route from Glenroy to Coburg as a key bike route, however it has
really been recently during the lockdowns that proper bike infrastructure
around Melbourne has been given a second look. As people of all ages headed out
on their bicycles in increasing numbers for the trip to work, a trip to the local
store, or even simply recreational cycling, people have rediscovered how
dangerous travelling on two wheels in Melbourne is. The predominant method of
implementing these bike lanes has been the trail method, where simple to
install, easy to remove infrastructure is implemented to quell concerns, in
particular, of local traders that the reduced parking will be a permanent
fixture. However, once in trial, residents soon discover the joy of riding
apart from both cars and pedestrians, and the local businesses do better than
ever. This is the approach applied to Kent Road. Here is a map of where Kent Road
fits into the Glenroy to Coburg route.
Northumberland Avenue and Kent Road in person
On Sunday the 17th of April, I decided to take up
Yildiz’s challenge, took to my bike and headed to Pascoe Vale. I started at Northumberland
Avenue, then proceeded through KW Joyce Reserve to Kent Road. Straight out of
the bat, I want to say that I felt much safer in the protected lanes than on
the eastern part of Kent Road and Derby Street.
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| Bins out on Wednesday for Northumberland Ave |
On Kent Street, I saw another cyclist using the lanes
heading the same way I was heading, suggesting that these lanes are used (If a
sample size of one is to be trusted).
However, there were a few issues. As hard rubbish collection
week was to begin the next day, residents had already started to place junk on
their nature strips. Unfortunately, some of this rubbish was not in fact “hard”,
being pushed into the bike lanes in the wind. This kind of thing is bad for
safety, the environment and makes it harder for waste collection to deal with
hard rubbish.
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| Rubbish on Bike Lanes |
But significantly worse than this was what was at the end of
the Kent Road bike lane. A parked car in a no parking zone. I had to cut into
the car traffic lane at an angle in which driver visibility was not great. If only
the barriers had extended far enough to make this a non-issue. What’s more, the
protected lanes spit you out into a roundabout, fun.
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| Road rules being violated |
If I’m to be honest, there are valid criticisms of these bike lanes, such as why they don’t connect to a wider network, and why they are made from concrete if this is only meant to be a trial. I believe a better route might have been along Pascoe Street and Boundary Road, but such a route would require the loss of street parking. Instead, we are left with a less good, but acceptable route that should probably be kept passed the trail, as safe bike infrastructure in the suburbs is unfortunately scarce.
What this may be really about.
Upon further investigation I have discovered that Oscar
Yilniz is running for state office in the seat of Pascoe Vale as a Victorians Party candidate. He has cofounded the
Victorians Party, with others including Bill Lang, the go to quotes man for the
Herald Sun when it comes to astroturfed outrage over bike lanes in the CBD.
Oscar Yilniz makes a large point of claiming he isn’t a
politician. His narrative is that he is an ordinary working man from the
North-East ward of Moreland, and he just wants to stand up for the ordinary
ratepayer. Yet he has been the mayor of Moreland twice, and a councilor for
over a decade, I would say he is pretty firmly a politician. But I would be lying
if I didn’t like a lot of his platform. He left the labor party due to some
pretty awful stuff,
and has been campaigning for a fairer politics, and meaningful representation for
his community. But on the other hand, I’m not a big fan of his anti-lockdown stances
and focus on business owners as the people that matter.
Whatever you think of him, it is clear Yildiz has a steep
uphill battle to get into state parliament, and I suspect that the true motive
of Yildiz’s opposition to the bike lanes to be a way to build a constituency for
his election campaign. Unfortunately, this is a common pattern in backlash to
bicycle infrastructure, as fear of change is an effective way to win votes.
This has happened across the world in places such as Philadelphia and
Wellington. However, the hard facts suggest that the case against protected
bike lanes is a weak one.
Hopefully the bike lanes stay in Pascoe Vale and get extended
to Derby Street in some fashion. The larger and safer the network is, the more
we will see people using them – not just the typical tryhard cyclist demographic of people like me.
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