The shopping precinct in High Street, Preston, is set for a long-deserved upgrade with wider footpaths, slower speeds and a design to attract more kerbside activity. But the proposed improvements come at a cost for those who ride a bike along the street.
The City of Darebin has released draft concept plans for the improvement of the shopping strip between Bell Street and Murray Road for public consultation. Details are available here.
This precinct also houses the Preston Market and has been declared one of Melbourne’s new activity centres, with accelerated housing developments to bring a much larger population of residents to the locality.
And wherever there is density, there are much higher numbers of pedestrians and bike riders as driving drops away.
Darebin City’s intentions are good: they set out to make the precinct more attractive to riders and walkers, and less attractive to car traffic.
There are plans for four new raised threshold crossings in the upgrade zone, and for a 30km/h speed limit in the street. The clearway will be history.
The preferred option, No. 4, provides additional space for landscaping, trees, street furniture and seating, but bike riders will be sharing the remaining narrow road space with vehicles.
This is particularly concerning as the council has proposed to retain the 1.5-metre concrete centre median. And because car parking has been retained in the street, bikes are trapped between the parked cars on one side and the concrete barrier kerb on the other.
Because of the mid-block pedestrian crossings, traffic will be frequently stopping, and bikes will seek to take the legal option of riding to the left of the cars and trucks.
This puts bikes into the door zone of parking spaces that the council proposes will have a one-hour time limit to increase turnover, which means more opportunities for collisions with open doors.
Faced with this risk, some riders will opt for the footpath, not exactly the improvement that the council was hoping for.
In single-lane streets where there are barrier meridians, including High Street, the wear marks on the asphalt clearly show that drivers place their vehicles closer to the kerb side than they do with standard centre-line markings, presumably for fear of hitting the median.
This reduces the space to the left of traffic that bikes typically use, and increases risk, particularly in streets that trucks use, including the supermarket semi-trailers that are using High Street.
Retaining the median will considerably increase the risk to bikes as it reduces the available road space and reduces the ability of drivers to navigate around people walking to cars, and bikes that may be stopped by open car doors.
There are many good ideas in this concept plan, but keeping the median will be a bad outcome for all who use the street.
It needs to be noted that the draft concept plan attempts to rate each of the options for bike safety in a table of design elements: regrettably, the rating for their preferred option incorrectly indicate that bike safety is ’somewhat' improved.
The design with median is above and without is below.
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