I’ve ridden it every day since it opened.
not sure if this has been posted yet?
Newly car-free strip finds itself in a jam
looks pretty ridiculous. at 2m22s there’s a perfect example of people standing/walking all over the “bike lane” as a bike approaches in the distance. i’m guessing bikes are still required to stop when the tram puts on its orange lights, but so many muppets on bikes ignore them anyway…
and you think tram passengers will wait patiently until the tram doors open to board? 
It’s like frenzy feeding time when a tram approaches…
i have no doubt in my mind that as soon as a tram appears, all of the pedestrians will feverishly start jostling for position so they can secure the best position on the sardine express
yes this will be when someone gets hit, I’ll put money on it.
I agree with this in theory. I’m yet to ride the new Swanston Street. and frankly i find it hard to imagine it could be worse than it already is. It’s pretty impossible to take swanston at any pace anyway given the traffic lights, trams, iZombies, rumble strips, careless trams etc.
i’ve been thinking about buying one of these for some time 
and it looks like summer 2011 will be the era of the bike rave!
(off topic, but when was the last time police actually stopped private vehicles from travelling on swanston, in the last year i have seen so many self-important jerks in their own cars deciding that swanston’s actually easier to navigate than elizabeth st.)
I disagree.
This is exactly what urban designers promote for modern public spaces- they call it a shared street where there usually no demarkation between lanes- pedestrians, cyclists and vehicles all share the space. The logic is that if you’re all travelling at less than 20km/h, peds, bikes and cars are able to negotiate the space pretty well and it’s meant to be a lot safer. They are doing it a lot out at the newly revitalised Dandenong area, not that anyone here would ever go there.
Whatever we think of it, it seems it’s aimed at changing the culture of inner city movement. Rather than segregating people according to how they are getting about, everyone is encouraged to slow down and move together. That seems to be the idea as H mentions above.
Let’s see if it works.
Not if you ride a zen fixie and can’t control your bike it aint, noobs will plough straight through those suckers.
ftfy…
from my daily experiments with the royal parade TT the largest perpetuators of ‘bike control issues’ are fully fledged members of the commuter cup, the assumption that hi-vis means you will be avoided is null and void during the ‘feeding frenzy’ of tram boarding.
sending people down russell sounds great until you get to last block and have to drop down onto flinders. good times for all, with cabs out the front of the hotel, cars changing lanes to turn left and a nice bit of gradient.
i like the idea of shared space and dont really mind not riding down swanston st for more than a block as it rates as one of my more hated streets for riding in the city. if im only on it for a block or so a slow pace or walking isnt a huge deal, especially if it results in some of the ideas that jimmy raises. ymmv…
EDIT: no need for commuter cup rant…
This is great idea if it wasn’t the main commuter highway that links the north end of the CBD to the south end.
True. I’d guess that Swanston St would be the busiest bike route in the whole country. Which means it probably isn’t the ideal street for this shared space idea to work.
I totally agree with the philosphy - we’re way too governed by signs/rules etc. as it is, and forcing people to actually think for themselves when sharing space is a good thing.
But in Swantson St? It’s kinda like putting zebra crossings for bikes on the Eastern Freeway every few hundred metres.
while i agree with your logic and comments about putting such infrastructure on a busy commuting street, im pretty sure ive seen a number of points about canning st being the busiest bike route in melbourne. i suspect people split off before they hit the CBD and reduce the volume along swanston.
im happy to be proved wrong though… and id like to know where the title holder for the whole country is.
paging IncompleteStreets!
I think its biggest fault is its slight imbalance between that Cyclist/Pedestrian dichotomy.
As it’s now designed (as I see it) the footpath has been extended to the edge of the tracks, while the bikepath now shifts to the left slightly and then goes up onto this new pavement. As a result, it’s not a shared space – it’s just a bike path running across a new footpath.
I think for it to be successful, they needed a step down from the old footpath onto the new one. This would have at least served as some kind of signal to a pedestrian that they are crossing into a shared zone, meanwhile keep the slight swerve to the left for the bike path (and those rough-hewn stones) and then both pedestrians and cyclists have a visual cue that they’re entering a shared space.
One day I will figure out how to use this word in context.
why do you think I wrote that post?
You just figured it out?
Seriously, I’ve been trying to add that fucker to my vocabulary for years… Wont stick.
Well once you’ve sorted that out try ‘unijugate’
How did you even find that word?