Sunday, January 5, 2014

The one bit of the Greenway we actually got.....

Someone in the state Government has obviously got an evil sense of humour or perhaps irony. The incoming O'Farrell Government saw fit to can the Greenway project, a 5km bike and pedestrian path to run along side the light rail extension between Dulwich Hill and Lilyfield:


In spite of the project being binned, they still found budget to manufacture and install the signs telling us where the Greenway was _going_ to be:


As I said, someone in the Government has an evil sense of humour or irony.

The real shame of the Greenway getting canned was it was a rather key bit of cycling infrastructure that would have made cycling to the city from the Inner West safer and gotten cyclists off the roads (which surely all motorists applaud. Believe it or not, cyclists don't actually like jockeying with cars in traffic). The Greenway would have hooked the Cooks River cycleway at the Dulwich Hill end with the Anzac Bridge cycle path, which would have given almost everyone in the Sydney's Inner West (think Tempe to Homebush) a car free ride to the CBD, not to mention something for people riding from the outer suburbs to connect into

5 Km doesn't sound like much, but that stretch is really awkward on a bike. There are no neat back street routes meaning cyclists have to mix it with cars on busy roads to go that way.

Keep in mind the light rail extension is still going ahead. With it's $176 million dollar price tag. It was just the cycling-pedestrian path which got binned. Which saved all of $37 million dollars (surely a drop in the ocean when one considers the cost of building any infrastructure in Sydney). And it was a project that would have helped both cyclists AND drivers (and probably also would have taken pressure off public transport as well)

The only good news is the O'Farrell government has come to realize the folly of it's anti-bicycle stance, and that encouraging bicycling makes sense economically.  I live in hope the Greenway project may be brought back to life. 

Good news is we already have the signs.

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