In early 2018 PA/E’s neighbouring council, the City of Charles Sturt obtained 2 traffic counters for location on the Outer Harbour Greenway (OHG-Belmore Trc) & the River Torrens Linear Path.

Charles Sturt have now released up-to-date information on the annual, month-on-month & average daily use of these routes. The OHG data is particularly interesting because it’s a route used by many PA/E (and nearby) residents and by those visiting our Council area. Let’s have a look at the data…

Annual Use – Outer Harbor Greenway: 2018-19-20.

We can see a steady increase here since 2018 when the Woodville counter was installed (the Greenway wasn’t ‘fully open’ until October 2019). Note that the 2020 total has four zeros behind it – well over 90,000 bike trips recorded that year!

Outer Harbor Greenway – Monthly & Daily Use (Feb 2018 – Jan 2021).

Note that Jan 2021 registered the highest monthly traffic since Feb 2018 with 10,326 bikes countered. That’s about 333 bikes per day!

Rob Kretschmer from the facebook forum also shared a nice graph of selected daily-use data:

This is all important information! It provides a number of key insights – notably:

• there is steadily increasing awareness & use of the Greenway (and this is likely to continue)
• the Greenway is valued by both commuters and recreational (‘weekend’) users.

The Outer Harbor Greenway was conceived by PortBUG back in 2005 as a ‘trunk’ or inter-suburban route – that is, to provide a safe, direct & convenient bicycle (and pedestrian) route between suburban destinations and across a major section of NW Adelaide. It (and other similar-scale routes such as the Gawler & Grange Greenways) can be thought of as the ‘spine’ or framework of our Active Transport Network.

Having established (most of) these ‘trunk’ routes, the PA/E Council must now address completion of the finer & more ‘granular’ levels of the Network – what are referred to as ‘Neighbourhood Connector’ & ‘Local Access’ routes (and all the way down to your local footpaths!)

This is the challenge now facing PA/E’s new Walking & Cycling Plan. The PortBUG recently had an opportunity to comment on a draft of the Plan. As we said at our facebook forum at the time:

“There is a great deal in the new Plan that is positive and indeed, that incorporates recommendations we’ve made previously. However we felt compelled to express a number of concerns, focussed principally on:

• methodological weaknesses & an insufficient data base
• significant omissions from the recommended priorities
• an excessive focus on main-road bike lanes with insufficient consideration of alternatives 
• insufficient focus on functional network connectivity
• lack of focus on effective community engagement & participation.”

We also felt that the new Plan pays insufficient attention to the needs of pedestrians and does not actually provide a clear explanation & illustration as to how the Network should ‘work’ for those using it!

We are now told that Council will hold a workshop on the draft Plan for Councillors in June and a revised draft will probably go to Council in July, and then be made available for community consultation & comment! We look forward to providing further updates on this important new phase of Active Transport development across Port Adelaide/Enfield!

**Thanks to the City of Charles Sturt, Bike Adelaide & Rob Kretschmer for data & graphics.