The City of Perth is inviting people to give feedback (until 26 July) to its draft Bike Plan via a 5-minute survey. Take a minute to read the Bike Plan, have your say and influence how your city develops! It says it will finalise its Plan by year’s end and that, “your feedback will help shape the final plan.”

WestCycle has raised the following points with the City – feel free to adopt/adapt any of them in your own feedback, especially in the ‘free comment’ box at the end of the survey.

• We welcome the Plan’s recognition that 30kph is the speed cities around the world are adopting for streets where people riding need to mix with people driving.
• It would be great to see more detail about where the CoP plans to implement 30kph speed limits, outside of Hay and Murray Street. Ideally all streets identified as bike routes would drop to 30kph.
• We are concerned that the Bike Plan apparently excludes many of the routes identified in the Long Term Cycle Network. This significantly reduces the opportunities for improving connections from some large employers (such as Royal Perth Hospital, Main Roads WA, the Road Safety Commission) in East Perth to high quality infrastructure like the Midland Train line Principle Shared Path and near-completed Causeway Pedestrian and Cyclist Bridges.
• “Well-lit riding routes and improved personal safety” was listed as one of the top five reasons survey respondents would ride more, yet lighting is not mentioned as a City of Perth action (only for Main Roads to include in its network upgrades, which we agree with). We recommend the City informs the development and upgrade of bike routes with gender-sensitive design principles, such as outlined in this toolkit from the ACT Government, to ensure any infrastructure is meeting the needs of all users.
• The City should consider the use of modal filters to quickly and cheaply create the safe bike routes they’ve identified (for example, a mid-block barrier that permits through-travel by bike but only allows people to drive cars in and out of a street).   
• We’d like to see the plan include safe places for people to lock up bikes (including e-bike charging stations) given high rates of bike and e-bike theft, to make it easier for people to commute to work when their employer doesn’t provide secure bike parking (e.g. retail and hospitality staff).
• Finally, for the 10-year Bike Plan to be meaningful, it should include a detailed action plan with indicative costs to make it easy and safe for anyone to access Perth’s CBD and its surround by bike.

Find out more about WestCycle’s Active Transport Vision here.