David Penberthy: It’s stupid to make roads safer and footpaths more dangerous

WHY do we let people ride at full pace on footpaths if it makes them more dangerous for pedestrians? David Penberthy weighs in on one of our most polarising debates.

Sunday Mail Editor David Penberthy Picture: Mark Brake

THERE is no shame in embracing an idea and then admitting that in practice it turned out to be problematic. Governments can do so without suffering any enduring backlash, and can even win plaudits if their altered position is in keeping with the public mood.

It feels to me like a majority of members of the public — including many people who ride bikes — can’t see the logic in letting cyclists ride on footpaths under the road rule changes brought in last October.

Like many people I was cynical about the changes when they were announced. After spending a couple of weeks travelling solely by bike I became a convert to the key element of the new rules, namely the mandated 1m distance on city roads and 1.5m on country roads between bikes and cars.

Cyclists are extremely vulnerable, and even though it’s still hard to see how the rules would and should apply on narrow and shoulder-less roads such as Old Belair Rd, it is on safety grounds a good thing that the law now makes it an aspiration to keep cars a safe distance from the most vulnerable people on our roads.

As a motorist, anything which gets more people on bikes is a good thing, because it’s one less car to be stuck behind.

That said, it seems kind of stupid to argue in one breath that you want to make the roads safer for everyone, and at the same time make footpaths more dangerous.

This is what the government has done. The effect of their new road rules is to let bikes ride at whatever speed they desire in places that are home to babies in prams and old people on mobility scooters.

Bikes going at full pace have no place near pedestrians on footpaths.

It is the lamest form of shoulder-shrugging for the government to say that if people want a mandated speed limit for bikes, that’s a matter for councils.

This from the same Government that doesn’t trust the city council to oversee development decisions, farming an important issue out to pedants who are too busy banning cricket balls and model aeroplanes, or tormenting pubs about the arrant placement of teatowels.

The Government argues that a handful of other jurisdictions have changed the laws to let bikes on footpaths, or never had a ban on the practice in the first place.

Tellingly, one of them is Darwin. It’s also legal in Darwin to ride your bike without a helmet, probably also after you’ve drunk a slab of beer and have a topless stripper riding on your sissy bar.

The bigger and busier states such as NSW and Victoria have not opted for such an approach, and nor should we have. There have been at least three accidents since this new rule came in, and you can reasonably blame the Government for making these collisions possible by extending an invitation to cyclists to mount the footpath at whatever speed they like.

Transport Minister Steven Mullighan is one of the more impressive operators on North Terrace, and is usually on top of his brief and a solid communicator, even when dealing with contentious issues. His account the other day of the most serious prang since the bike laws were changed was a shocker.

Mulligan was clearly not across his brief when he claimed in our radio interview that the cyclist who knocked down Rostrevor woman Rebecca Bedford had somehow done the right thing. Bedford had told the Sunday Mail that when she was struck, suffering cracked ribs and internal bleeding, the cyclist had briefly asked if she was OK, and as she stopped to regain her composure, he sped off without exchanging his details.

While the minister was holding this up as some kind of model behaviour, SAPOL was getting ready to release CCTV footage of what was effectively a hit and run. To his credit the cyclist has since come forward to police, but if this situation is a model of how the new laws should work, God help anyone who dares tread foot on a footpath.

The footpath is for pedestrians. The only people who should be allowed to ride there are children, and adults on bikes at walking pace if the road is not safe and does not have a bike lane.

Not even the peak cycling body Bicycle SA seems to think that bikes need to be on the footpaths. The only reason the law still stands is government pigheadedness.

As long as it stands, it will continue to drive misplaced calls for bikes to be registered — which is both pedantic, and a precursor to charging — so that yobbo cyclists who knock people over can be tracked down by police.