Wednesday, September 14, 2005
cycling in Sydney vs Vancouver
Today I rode my flatmate Kelly's bike to work. My first time riding a bike in Sydney was.. interesting...
Cycling in Vancouver: wet, rain, wet, cold. But overall very nice bike routes and generally a lack of danger. Except whan it's raining and people decide to ignore red lights.
Cycling in Sydney: dry, sunny, dry. But awfully frightening, at least to a newbie. Sure, there's a dedicated bike trail for part of my ride. But to get on to it, you have to cross 6 lanes of traffic! Also, dooring seems a constant danger (that is when people in parked cars decide to fling open their doors into the bike lane (or pseudo-bike-lane, since there aren't really very many bike lanes that I've seen)). And then there are the jaywalkers. A german would surely be completely shocked by the utter disregard for traffic signals by pedestrians. But here it just seems to be normal. It's unheard of to actually wait for the little green man. Back to biking. There is also nowhere to park downtown. No bike racks anywhere near my work, as far as I could tell. I expected there would be somewhere for me to put a bike in my building (like in the parkade or something), but no. Apparently people pay a fortune for the parking spots down there so no bikes are allowed?? The fortune I can't even imagine.. one of the guys in my office told me he parked downtown for 3 hours yesterday and it cost him $54!! I don't know if that was in our parkade or elsewhere, but I still can't believe it. It's really not a very nice parkade either - they let me put my bike down there just for the day today. Despite their utter lack of cycling amenities, the city of Sydney has some pretty spiffy little bike route descriptions with pretty little yellow bikes and all like this. "the cyclist is encouraged to use the pedestrian crossings at Elizabeth and Foveaux St to reach Mary St. No specific bicycle treatments can be proposed on-road or off-road due to very high vehicle and pedestrian movements." Thanks. Very helpful.
sigh. oh well. the biking is just fine at 6am :)
really I'm only bitter because I didn't exactly retrace my pedals coming home and ending up going around in circles for a while before I made it out of town.
according to googlefight, cycling in Sydney is more popular: googlefight
Cycling in Vancouver: wet, rain, wet, cold. But overall very nice bike routes and generally a lack of danger. Except whan it's raining and people decide to ignore red lights.
Cycling in Sydney: dry, sunny, dry. But awfully frightening, at least to a newbie. Sure, there's a dedicated bike trail for part of my ride. But to get on to it, you have to cross 6 lanes of traffic! Also, dooring seems a constant danger (that is when people in parked cars decide to fling open their doors into the bike lane (or pseudo-bike-lane, since there aren't really very many bike lanes that I've seen)). And then there are the jaywalkers. A german would surely be completely shocked by the utter disregard for traffic signals by pedestrians. But here it just seems to be normal. It's unheard of to actually wait for the little green man. Back to biking. There is also nowhere to park downtown. No bike racks anywhere near my work, as far as I could tell. I expected there would be somewhere for me to put a bike in my building (like in the parkade or something), but no. Apparently people pay a fortune for the parking spots down there so no bikes are allowed?? The fortune I can't even imagine.. one of the guys in my office told me he parked downtown for 3 hours yesterday and it cost him $54!! I don't know if that was in our parkade or elsewhere, but I still can't believe it. It's really not a very nice parkade either - they let me put my bike down there just for the day today. Despite their utter lack of cycling amenities, the city of Sydney has some pretty spiffy little bike route descriptions with pretty little yellow bikes and all like this. "the cyclist is encouraged to use the pedestrian crossings at Elizabeth and Foveaux St to reach Mary St. No specific bicycle treatments can be proposed on-road or off-road due to very high vehicle and pedestrian movements." Thanks. Very helpful.
sigh. oh well. the biking is just fine at 6am :)
really I'm only bitter because I didn't exactly retrace my pedals coming home and ending up going around in circles for a while before I made it out of town.
according to googlefight, cycling in Sydney is more popular: googlefight
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