Geelong council says it wont be answering questions on decades of policy inaction.
Bike Geelong is taking the city to task for meeting less than a third of its cycling strategy goals, despite them being set 16 years ago.
Directed to the sluggish adherence to its own benchmarks, council declined to respond.
Bike Geelong’s Ashley Goldstraw says the result is a dangerous and difficult networks for the regions riders, who are being directed from paths on to roads with head on vehicle traffic.
Other examples include signage directing riders into parked cars.
Mr Goldstraw has either cycled, or taken a journey through the city’s proposed bike routes using Google street view, and concluded that 28 per cent of council’s goals as laid out in its 2008 Cycle Strategy have not been met.
“It seems to be a lot of talk, and not a lot action,” he said.
The city also appears to have reneged on a key benchmark that would likely have highlighted earlier its poor progress on rolling out cycling infrastructure, that of five year reviews.
“Nothing has been reviewed on the strategy in all that time in 16-years…(it) was meant to be updated every 5 years, there’s been no update to it since then,” Mr Goldstraw said.
He now says the policy is outdated, and wants focus to shift over to the G21 Integrated Transport Strategy that’s seeking to avoid a 491 per cent increase in road congestion around Geelong by 2041.
