Hi Bicycle Users,  We’ve heard that a new State Bike Plan may soon be coming down the path! It will replace ‘Safety in Numbers’ which ran its course in 2010! The Bicycle Institute is now looking for your ideas for potential ‘new Greenways’ for submission to a renewed State Bike Plan. Can you help? Read on for more information….

You may recall that ‘Safety in Numbers’ outlined an Adelaide Greenway Network in a map which – 12 years later – is now starting to take shape.

This initial map included routes that are now familiar to many such as the Mike Turtur and Outer Harbor Greenways. They tend to follow Adelaide’s tram and rail lines, making use of the ‘railway boulevards’, existing greenspace, local roads and occasionally even bits of rail and tram reserve!

Adelaide’s arterial roads act as major barriers to people dependent on walking, cycling and mobility devices. Greenways aim to overcome these barriers and allow bicycle users in particular to:
• avoid arterial roads and the hazards of heavy traffic
• provide safe crossings at main roads
• provide short-cuts and faster, more efficient and pleasant cycling routes.

The trouble is that in spatial terms, Adelaide is a large city divided up by many busy arterial roads! The Greenway routes mapped out in 2005 didn’t do a lot to assist cyclists in the north and east of the city, nor indeed in most of the outer suburbs. A Greenway Network for a city of Adelaide’s size will require many more major bicycle ‘trunk routes’ than the six or so identified in the initial 2005 map! And they’ll need to connect outer suburbs and not just all point at the Adelaide CBD!

We want to see a vision for a Comprehensive Greenway Network in the new State Bike Plan – one that will facilitate easy and safe bicycle access for everyone – ‘8 to 80 years of age’ – right across the Adelaide Metro Area!

To accomplish this will require cyclists – you and me – to identify every available opportunity we can for potential new Greenways and ’trunk’ bikeway routes. No matter how short or how long. Government can’t do it – we have to!

These new routes do not have to be long – they could include links and pathways:
• using unused drainage or plantation reserves
• along unused sections of railway reserve
• alongside major and hazardous arterial roads (including improvement of under-utilised footpaths!)
• use of pipeline reserves or local parks linking local networks and by-passing intersections.

You know your local cycling environment best! You know the unused or underutilised infrastructure. Drainage, rail and pipeline reserves, footpaths, quiet, dead-end streets backing on to parks and reserves. Things that prompt questions like… ’this could be better’ or… ‘why can’t I ride down there’?

Here’s you chance! Please let us know:
• where you think a new stretch of Greenway or bikeway would be useful?
• what existing space or reserve exists that might do the trick?
• where the new Greenway route could start and finish?
• how it would be used & how it would improve your cycling?
• and…what youwant to call your ‘new Greenway route’?

Email BISA at chair@bisa.asn.auor PortBUG at portadbug@gmail.comor…
…reply below to this ‘New Greenways?’ post or at BISA’s facebook page.

Please let us know your hopes and dreams for new Greenways and Bikeways across Adelaide!” There’s no time limit to this ‘8-80 Project’ so… keep riding, looking and thinking!