[davidw]

Hi there Friends of the Bicycle
I love all sorts of cycling but LOVE Cycleways and Bike Paths. We have a great (and continually evolving) network of Bike Paths here in my home town of Melbourne at the South East End of Australia.
I love being able to travel from A to B through the heart of the suburbs - along their arteries of waterways, railways and freeways - travelling on roads and streets as little as possible.
Recently I went for a trip to Sydney - and enjoyed touring new Cycleways there. Some have been there for many years - others are wide, over-the-top and futuristic. Work in progress - in ten years there will be a good network there.
I look forward to exploring other great cities of the world on their Cycleways and Bike Paths.
Does anyone else share my passion?

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[Juha]

Cheers and welcome to the Forums.

I too enjoy bike paths if they're properly planned and maintained. Cities are improving in that respect, around here at least.

This is more an Advocacy & Safety topic (more than Forum suggestion / user assistance where it is now, anyways). I'm moving this to A&S.

--Juha, a Forum Mod

[John E]

Welcome to the forums, davidw. Juha summarized my feelings well, i.e., that the paths must be well-planned and well-maintained. On the most popular multiuse paths there are severe conflict problems with walkers and rollerbladers. Intersection design can be extremely problematic, as well.

Having said that, I would passionately welcome good bypasses around many of our fast freeway-style intersections, with their high-speed free diverges and merges. I also enjoy the San Luis Rey River bikeway in Oceanside, although I tend to use it eastbound only, to avoid some nasty onramps and offramps. Westbound I prefer the shoulder of the Rte. 76 expressway.

[andrelam]

I generaly like paths as well. There are a few streets here in the Buffalo NY area that have some reasonable room to ride on, but the winters are hard on the roads and many leave no solid shoulder that you can count on. I live in the Amherst suburb and we have a few very nice Bike paths. Some of the roads here are also setup well to handle bike traffic and I am fortunate to live 5 miles from my job and am able to commute using my bicycle. The paths here seem to be used mostly by cyclist and runners. It is nice to be away from the noise of the roads and ride through the country side. One of the great frustrations has been that we have numerous nice paths, but many don't connect, so you have the insane need to DRIVE to the nearest path or risk driving on some very bike un-friendly streets. Luckily today there was great news. There is a 3.5 mile path being built to link two main paths. One path runs from where the Erie canal joins the Niagara river and you can follow it all along the Niagara river almost to where Lake Erie starts. The other side of this path runs into Niagara county and then along some secondary roads where you can pick up the old canal tow path and ride 65 miles to Palmyra NY (just past Rochester). I hope to ride the long part of the path next year as my sister lives about 2 miles from the Canal in Pittsford (a suburb of Rochester).

Happy Riding,
André

[SonataInFSharp]

I generally prefer paths, but I have found a few roads nearby that have wide bike lanes, and when I have the choice, I prefer street riding (bike lanes are a must) over paths because of what I consider to be more dangerous obstacles.

[davidw]

Hi Andre
Thanks for your best wishes
I was just looking on the net yesterday about paths along the Erie Canal - it looks (well at least from 15000 kms away) like it would be a great ride from Buffalo at the Falls thru to New York City. Do you know how much of this can be done on bike paths?
Roll On!!
Dave

[davidw]

Hi John
You are very right about the maintaining of bike paths - our local councils here often think that just putting a bicycle sign up on a 1 metre wide concrete path previously used as a footpath makes it into a cycleway.
We do have lots of purpose built (2 or 3 metre wide bitumen or concrete) paths here in Melbourne though. The great thing about the push for toll-supported freeway projects here in Melbourne and Sydney is that the cycleways are provided free!! Cyclist's justice.. or even cyclist's revenge.. Ha Hah!! All of our major infrastructure roads have bike paths along them - on both sides in some cases - and these are sometimes completed before the roads themselves get surfaced.
I went on perhaps our best cycleway in Sydney a couple of weeks ago. I went up on a course and had four days to explore the cycleway network there [bliss for me to be unleashed in a new city.. I have no doubt the rest of the world awaits but we are a long way from anywhere down here down under].
No expense has been spared on the M7 Cycleway, 40km long and following a ring road motorway to the west of Sydney. It has been built specifically to deal with the problems of the on- and off-ramps that you mention - with the bike path tunnelling under the ramps and continuing on unbroken. A very fast smooth surface with lots of futuristic bridges etc.
Ironically, though, because it is way out west of Sydney (maybe 40 km - that's 25 miles) on this gleaming Icon of CycleTech, which could move thousands, in 30 km I met perhaps three other cyclists going the other way.
Does make you think of what would be possible if infrastructure like that was built close enough to the centre of our cities and in a way that really served commuting cyclists - that a real vision of what sort of alternative cycles are would be a lot more visible to a lot more people.
Dr Dave from Down Under