Velocity Copenhagen, a miss for Canberra

The Velo-city (bicycle planning) conference was held in Copenhagen this year and disappointingly the ACT Government decided not to send any one from the ACT to this conference. I have been recent critic of the current bicycle infrastructure of cycle lanes on 'High speed-High volume' roads in Canberra, which is going against worlds best practice, particularly in Holland and Denmark, the worlds cycling nations. 

About a thousand people attended the conference and well over a hundred people from the American cities, they have now realized that current bicycle lanes on major roads do very little to encourage more people to cycle.

Monaro Highway, Canberra ACT

This type of treatment has been the feature of current bicycle planning, it is cheap and nasty. Sadly the Bicycle advocacy group of the ACT Pedal Power have been supportive of this infrastructure even though it supports only one type of cyclist.

It is said that the ACT cannot afford separate cycle infrastructure even though we continue to spend millions of dollars every year on more and more roads. With the future un-certain with peak oil and the rise in health care costs related to obesity, those arguements just do not stack up.

So to Streefilms great video of the recent Velocity conference shot by the Clarence Eckerson Jr. One of the comments made in this film was that while Copenhagen made decisions early on to support cycle friendly infrastructure, countries like America and Australia need to implement this type of infrastructure much quicker than the thirty odd years it has taken Copenhagen.