Because so many Australian drivers are actively hostile to cyclists.
this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2024
55 points (98.2% liked)
Australia
3613 readers
55 users here now
A place to discuss Australia and important Australian issues.
Before you post:
If you're posting anything related to:
- The Environment, post it to Aussie Environment
- Politics, post it to Australian Politics
- World News/Events, post it to World News
- A question to Australians (from outside) post it to Ask an Australian
If you're posting Australian News (not opinion or discussion pieces) post it to Australian News
Rules
This community is run under the rules of aussie.zone. In addition to those rules:
- When posting news articles use the source headline and place your commentary in a separate comment
Banner Photo
Congratulations to @[email protected] who had the most upvoted submission to our banner photo competition
Recommended and Related Communities
Be sure to check out and subscribe to our related communities on aussie.zone:
- Australian News
- World News (from an Australian Perspective)
- Australian Politics
- Aussie Environment
- Ask an Australian
- AusFinance
- Pictures
- AusLegal
- Aussie Frugal Living
- Cars (Australia)
- Coffee
- Chat
- Aussie Zone Meta
- bapcsalesaustralia
- Food Australia
- Aussie Memes
Plus other communities for sport and major cities.
https://aussie.zone/communities
Moderation
Since Kbin doesn't show Lemmy Moderators, I'll list them here. Also note that Kbin does not distinguish moderator comments.
Additionally, we have our instance admins: @[email protected] and @[email protected]
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
The heat in qld. The humidity in summer cannot be understated.
People whinge about all kinds of things as excuses for why cycling doesn't happen. In Canada it's "it's too cold". In the UK it's "too wet". In Brisbane I alternately see "too hot" and "too hilly" brought up as excuses.
It's all bullshit.
The evidence tells us pretty clearly. Infrastructure is the whole thing. With good infrastructure, people will cycle in any weather. It's what happens everywhere in the world, every time they build actual good infrastructure.
And for what it's worth, I find it much easier to cycle in Brisbane's summer than its winter. Our winters are an awkward in-between temperature where you can't rug up properly because if you do you get too hot while riding. But it's too cold to go out in shorts. Speaking objectively, those Canadians are closer to having a good point. Warm weather doesn't make your tyres slip; doesn't require snow to be ploughed off of the path.
If I ride in summer to a meeting, I'm going to need a shower and a full change of clothes. That's not practical. Sure, at can implement infrastructure (showers) everywhere, and places to store our sopping wet sweaty clothes maybe, but it's just not going to fly.
Definitely introduce infrastructure, and get people on bikes.
But let's not live in fantasy land that the humidity makes riding to work in summer a no for most people, who need to be clean, dry, and have non sweat soaked clothes at work.
load more comments
(10 replies)
load more comments
(5 replies)
load more comments
(2 replies)
Reforming mandatory helmet laws, by either abolishing them altogether or making them applicable only on busy roads, would help. The laws deter mass uptake of cycling by framing getting on a bike as a dangerous extreme sport rather than a form of active mobility. The fact that they are applied to advertising as well, with tourism ads for Amsterdam having helmets photoshopped onto all the cyclists, further reinforces this framing and deters casual cyclists.
I agree that the helmet laws are unnecessary, but I think they're far from the most important thing compared to having good infrastructure to ride on.
load more comments
(6 replies)
- Better cycling infrastructure. Yeah, no shit. We need more paths, more direct paths, and more connected paths. You should be able to go anywhere you want using a route that it at least as direct as the most direct driving route, by bike, without ever sharing a road with cars above 30 km/h, and with a minimal number of road crossings where the cars get priority.
- Use AI to identify where cycling infrastructure needs to go. 🙄 Or you could just ask cyclists. We've got no shortage of ideas of places that are severely lacking already. Maybe the AI could be useful once most of the basic network is done, but not today.
- Improve transport modelling to include cycling. Yes! Add in induced demand effects on infrastructure for cycling, public transport, and cars. Use models that understand traffic evaporation when reducing road widths or adding modal filters. Our transport engineers are currently woefully behind the times.
- Politicians need to actually care about cycling. Yeah, no shit.
- Make active transport funding a priority. Yup. Our councillors love to harp on about how they spent X amount on cycling infrastructure, but they never put that in context of how much is spent on roads. But also, let's make sure that money goes where it's most useful. Spending billions building one green bridge is great, but is still much less useful than building many kilometres of good separated bikeway for the same price. (The real answer is to do both!)
- Recognise the health benefits of cycling. Yes, but this isn't really an actionable item. It's just more reason to do the above items, particularly pointing to 4.
Use AI to identify where cycling infrastructure needs to go. 🙄 Or you could just ask cyclists.
I guess you didn't finish reading that section:
A big advantage of AI is it can be scaled up. Once trained, AI models can be replicated across many neighbourhoods to identify urban design features that support cycling. It’s even more useful when combined with citizen science and rider experiences, as we plan to do.
No, I just think it's silly to talk about applying AI to something that just manifestly does not need AI. It's a dumb buzzword at best, an excuse to spend less money actually building infrastructure because more money is going to AI consultants at worst.
Like I said, if it were about filling in the little cracks once we have a really good overall network, I could maybe get behind it. But right now there's just zero need for it, because the stuff that's missing is so obvious and there's so much of it. At least in Brisbane, the Council could decide to triple its spend on bike infrastructure and still take a decade before the big problems we've been calling for action on for years are all exhausted.
an excuse to spend less money actually building infrastructure because more money is going to AI consultants at worst.
How will using AI in a privately funded research project take money away from government funded infrastructure projects?
How is the government (who has to end up building the stuff) getting this AI data? They're paying some AI company for it. Money that would be better spent directly on infrastructure we already know we need.
The better question is: without the technobro hype, what do we actually have to gain from this AI technology?
How is the government (who has to end up building the stuff) getting this AI data? They’re paying some AI company for it.
No...? The research project the article is based on is being privately funded. The data and tools will be shared with stakeholders to assist with advocacy and policy making.
load more comments
(2 replies)