Josephine Roper @jroper@transportation.social

@CathyTuttle @kith So it turns out I was wrong, as Jake pointed out earlier. This part is not actually a legal shared path, just frequently used as such owing to being in between two sections of shared path - see pic - with a lack of signage differentiating them.

So the issue is more the absence of clarity and missing links of our cycling routes.

@jfmezei Indeed, probably needs some explanation for people overseas. In NSW, cyclists are prohibited from sidewalks (unless with children), and the network of safe cycling routes is very sparse. Some local councils try to alleviate the situation by labeling some sidewalks as 'shared paths'.

Here's another one, part of a route to my uni - in this case there's some blue paint indicating shared path status but it's otherwise indistinguishable from a regular sidewalk.

@jakecoppinger huh yeah you might be right, on the TfNSW cycleway finder this part isn't shared path at all. Only further south. Good thing it doesn't seem to be enforced as it's quite popular with delivery riders around Hungry Jacks.

@jakecoppinger Princes Highway southbound (between Sydney Park and Ikea). Not one of the City of Sydney ones.

A classic Sydney ‘shared path’ (legalised footpath) and excessive advertising combo. If it were glass you could at least see if anyone was waiting at the bus shelter or riding the other way, as it is you have to ride at walking speed to negotiate this. (The road is 70km/hr death.)

The problem is not so much that these shared paths exist - I’d rather ride them than nothing - but that they’re counted in our kms of cycling infrastructure.

@vespasianvs @bikepedantic do other people tend to read all of mastodon, ie start where they left off yesterday? I find I want to so I don’t miss the best stuff, in the absence of an algorithm. But doing so is already a bit long and restricts the number of people I want to follow.

(Maybe partly an Australian problem because I wake up to a lot of posts from overnight.)

@Transportist Woops yep that date came up in a hurry. Will flesh it out today.

@vespasianvs Bonjour Andy, je t'ai suivi pour l'angle 'utility cyclists', mais j'apprends aussi le français. Envoie-moi de DMs français si tu veux ? Je n'ai pas un haut niveau pour t'aider, ce serait juste pour practiquer à parler sur nos sujets d'intérêt.

@jedsetter unless it leads more people into that 1%. Or, just thought of this, more people may think it will apply to them than it really does, creating a more subtle negative effect.

And Labour would probably hope for that as it increases the voting popularity of the proposal...

@jedsetter Ah it looks like it's an instance setting.

Yes the Pennant Hills Rd fines are basically a really clunky, uneven implementation of differential road charging... not efficient but perhaps something that will open the window of politically feasible options later.

Yeah I don't think their objective is good but I don't think it's as obviously negative for induced demand as it seems, since the top 1% of users must be users who are already inelastic in mode choice and driving a lot. /....

@jedsetter woops, I meant 'former' here

@jedsetter in pedestrian safety & delay, noise, maybe even energy use and air quality (why can't I write comments as long as yours?)

Anyway, from the point of view that some people are going to drive either way and are better off on the M4 than Parramatta road, maybe it's not such a negative distortion. Just a big distraction from what we could be doing (improving public transport for those people).

@jedsetter agree in general. But have you thought about the angle of incentivising people to take tollroads rather than local roads being a good thing? Often these new motorways have been justified this way - Northconnex = less traffic on Pennant Hills Road for example - in theory.

I think I'm saying something like - in the absence of a rational holistic road charging scheme where we charge people more for Pennant Hills Road than the tunnel, because the latter has more negative externalities /

@tylermorganwall so, umm, it's taken me till the 4th post to realise that these were GIFs and move when I hover over them 😅 I thought they were pictures I just couldn't get the point of. Now they are very cool!

@jakecoppinger @tomflood@mstdn.social Love it. Do one for Broadway...

@glecharles @TheWarOnCars they were, but... it's also impressive how much we do trust each other with the difficult and dangerous task of driving, yet don't with some of the changes we may need to make the most of other systems (trust each other to take pets on public transport, trust each other to ride e-scooters on the footpath...). More 'motornormativity' I guess.

(2) "From the perspective of bitcreep, attempts at making peace by bending over backwards to improve modularization and try to support multiple ecosystems in parallel are nothing but self-sabotaging folly"

- helping to write a WalkSydney submission on a new motorway project, and this may be an all-too-accurate description of the project's attempts to shoehorn in an 'active transport corrider' and our attempts to improve said ATC - in parallel with 4 extra lanes of road...