When will they ever learn?

What do cycling "advocates" have against transportational cycling?

Off-road bike paths were bad enough, but at least they didn't interfere with the transportational cyclist who relies on the roads to get from point A to point B (neither of which are usually accessable by the path "network") in a timely fashion. Now there seems to be a fad in Melbourne to build what they call "Copenhagen-style bike lanes", which are basically glorified bike paths that involve putting a contrete median strip somewhere on the existing roadway, and declaring one side of it to be a "bike lane" They seem to serve no other purpose than segregating cyclists from the road.

This proposal in particular seems to be upsetting a few people. Similar schemes have been tried here on the 'Coast in the past, and abandoned after it took a week for the thing to be filled with debris, and for cyclists to simply give up on the idea and just use the traffic lanes instead. Does anyone out there seriously think that reducing road access for cyclists is somehow going to increase the number of cyclists? Does anyone seriously think that adding concrete "median strips" to the existing roadway (which is usually all that's involved in these proposals) is actually going to increase space for either cyclists or motorists? It's just another non-cyclist solution to a non-problem.

This sort of thing, along with some of the hair-brained proposals that come out of Bicycle Queensland everytime someone needs votes at an AGM make me wonder about the real motives of the people involved in this game. It's a well-known fact that cycling "advocates" tend to shun the opinions of experienced, regular, 365-day cyclists, especially if those opinions happen to be different to the ones they already hold. The regular cyclists are the ones who will be most disadvantaged by this proposal (and others like it). They will be left with the choice of either mixing it up with the broken glass, dog walkers and roller-bladers on the glorified path, or mixing it up with the traffic in lanes that are now several feet narrower.

Most "advocates" just seem to be in the game for themselves. They just want a place they can go and ride their bike without the presence of cars -- irrespective of whether it suits anybody else or not. A far more utilitarian option would be to simply campaign for greater law enforcement to make the existing roads (which already go everywhere a transportational cyclist could ever want to go) more cycle-friendly. This option, however, does not seem to suit their agenda, and probably lacks the "visibility" to win AGM votes.

Oh well, a few places to avoid adds an interesting challenge to my next visit to Melbourne in January.