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Marv’s April Bike Log

Dear Rouleurs,

April was a crappy month for cycling.  They say bad luck occurs in threes, so here’s MMT three reasons for having a generally crap month on the bike.

    1. Ride the Bellerine 2017 had some really horrible weather that included wind up to 100Km/h and heavy rain.  Marv thought better of doing 105km ride in those conditions and chickened out.
    2. MMT’s darling daughter AJ, contracted enfant syncytial respiratory virus which she gave to her dad, which resulted in 2 weeks of feeling like crap with bronchitis, which
    3. Wiped out the Easter holidays.  MMT had a Canyon booked through RCC Sydney for 4 days and was really looking forward to cruising around the inner west and eastern suburbs beaches.  MMT was too sick get on the plane.

All in all, this left MMT about 85km short of his monthly objective as evidenced by the gap between the green and red lines. Boooooo 🙁

Not surprisingly my suffer scores for April were pretty sketchy.

My ride log is found here.  Fortunately May is looking like a huge month with at least one week getting close to 250Km.

Until next blog, ride safe.

Marv

The Mean Streets of Melbourne

Dear Rouleurs,

As an adopted Melbournian and born again road cyclist, I always feel a bit twitchy when I read a heading on the front page of The Age that said something like “Melbourne’s worst streets for bike crashes”. This appeared in the Age on the 26th February, and immediately had me scratching my head and assessing this list.

20160229-DangerousRoads

But its this commentary that caught my eye:

“Five of the top 10 streets for crashes are in the City of Melbourne – St Kilda Road, Elizabeth Street, La Trobe Street, Collins Street and Swanston Street. Others in the top 10, including Chapel Street and Brunswick Street, mostly share the common trait of cyclists riding on busy streets beside parking spaces that have a high turnover of cars.”

The key common factor being the movement of motorists across where the bike riders are going, is creating these hazardous situations. That’s a fair point, it is a point that is also supported by the Strava Heat Map of Melbourne CBD.

20160229-StravaMelb

The bright blue ‘lanes’ of Swanston St, St Kilda Rd, Latrobe St, the top ‘end’ parts of Collins and Elizabeth St at clearly heavy use cycling areas. Elizabeth St just baffles me as there is no cycling path, the same is true for most of Collins St. Why any cyclist would use these streets is just beyond me. Same goes with Chapel St and Sydney Road. It seems to me that a cyclist’s best survival strategy is to avoid these corridors.

Of all these streets, Latrobe St is by far the biggest disappointment. It’s really clear that the ‘so-called’ Copenhagen lane, hasn’t worked. That’s probably no surprise to commuter cyclists who use. It simply doesn’t cover the entire street and offers no protection to cyclists to motorists turning left.

 

So what’s the answer?? It is the unthinkable – remove all non-public transport and non-commercial vehicles from the CBD in the hours of 7.00-9.30 am and 16.00-19:00 pm and implement a London-style congestion zone for the period in between. Then build car parks outside the CBD and next to tram ways to house cars driven by commuting motorists. It makes no sense to keep supporting the use of cars in CBD.

So that’s my 2016 leap year anti-car rant. Until next time, stay safe.

Marv