A legible cycling network for Ballarat

Satellite image of City of Ballarat's proposed cycling network (source)

In 2017, after extensive consultation, the City of Ballarat released its Cycling Action Plan. I did quite a bit of work on it during the feedback period, and have tinkered with it in the years since, but never posted about it publicly. My time in Amsterdam is making me think more about Ballarat's cycling infrastructure, so I figured now's as good a time as any.

My train-style network map of the City of Ballarat's proposed cycle network (click to embiggen)

Broadly I was pretty happy with the network of infrastructure they proposed. It is worth stressing that this is just a first step - first we start out with this high-level network, then once that's finished and the number of people cycling around Ballarat starts to grow, we can add more and more routes to make the grid denser. Ultimately we need to move towards a situation like Amsterdam where you can safely and easily cycle literally everywhere in the city - but the Dutch didn't get such a comprehensive network overnight and we won't either, so this represents a good first step.

The generous bike lanes in suburban Amsterdam

In terms of proposed infrastructure, the only real change I suggested they make was to add an extra north-south route in the middle of the map, centred on Drummond Street. There was really quite a hole in the network here, between Lake Wendouree and the railway line - and being such a central location, the network really should be densest around here. If it were me, I would essentially link up the existing paths near the Showgrounds and the Old Cemetery with a VicRoads proposal for the hospital precinct (which was floated after the CAP was released, and which has since fallen by the wayside), and CoB's proposed routes along Sebastopol Street and the Yarrowee - and in doing so, fill that crucial gap in the network.

I only recently realised that they took this feedback on board for the final plan, but didn't use Drummond Street - they created Route 2a to go down Lyons Street instead (you can see this in the satellite screenshot at the top but not in my network map, because it was based on an earlier draft). Lyons Street probably works best from a "quiet street where it's safer to ride on the road" perspective, whereas Drummond Street probably works best from a "sufficient space to build protected bike lanes" perspective; honestly, though, ¿Por qué no los dos?

Revised map with reorganised, renumbered and recoloured routes (click to embiggen)

The other things I've proposed are more cosmetic, but arguably just as important - and very cheap. Some of the choices City of Ballarat has made in terms of which infrastructure is classified as part of which "route" strike me as odd - for example that the route going down the Yarrowee (their Route 10) branches off to the west to go to Woolworths, and then to the east to go to Midvale. When it comes to cycling routes, it is of course less rigid than with railways or bus routes - you can cycle whichever way you like, you don't need to follow the route the planners put down - but to my mind it would help legibility if the routes were a bit more strictly broken up into north-south routes and east-west routes. So I've rejigged a few bits and pieces for this reason - for example, the north-south Yarrowee path just goes straight down to Magpie, and the spurs off to the sides were incorporated into nearby east-west routes. In doing this I've also incorporated infrastructure that was marked as "existing" rather than as part of any route; what City of Ballarat did probably makes sense in a document for prioritising future investment, but the people who'll eventually ride on it just want to know where it goes, not how and when it was funded.

The USA interstate network's useful numbering system

The other change I made is to renumber them. The principle is based on that of US interstate highways - routes that are predominantly north-south are odd-numbered, and routes that are predominantly east-west are even-numbered. US highway numbers start in the northeast and work their way down to the southwest, which probably makes sense because of their population distribution, but I flipped this and started at the northwest - basically because English-speakers read left-to-right, I figured it would be more intuitive. Because Ballarat is growing west and the plan doesn't include any definite routes for the undeveloped areas yet, Route 1 is kind of a placeholder for a future route.

Finally, I redid the colours, so that for example Route 7 and Route 7a would be the same colour, rather than different colours as they were on the original proposal. This reduces the total number of colours on the map, helping the visual simplicity, and it also helps signify that they're both spurs of what is fundamentally the same route, and emphasises the continuity from one to the other.

Proposed colour-coded wayfinding for London's cycle network (see Londonist)

These kinds of changes to route groupings, numbers and colours may just be cosmetic, but I'd argue they can be quite important. If you want people who don't cycle very often (or ever) to start using your new cycling network, you want to make sure it's as visible and easily-understood as possible. You want them to see a network map and immediately understand that they can go directly from home to their workplace, or directly to the station, or whatever, without having to stop and pore over the map for ages.

A decent chunk of the infrastructure is likely to be well away from major roads, following creeks or rivers - which is great for safety, but also makes it a bit "out of sight, out of mind" for non-cyclists. You ideally want them to see signage, or sections of coloured pavement, indicating that the shared use path near their house - the one they walk or drive past every day - is part of Route 13 and can take them all the way into the city or out to Buninyong, for example.

Building safe, segregated infrastructure is the highest priority - but this kind of legibility matters too.

Because all the legwork on the Cycling Action Plan has already been done - and because construction on parts of the network has already begun - it will be incorporated into the City's Integrated Transport Plan without further consultation, and I suspect with minimal changes (except perhaps to reflect what's happened on the ground since 2017). But hopefully when it's all built, we can have really clear, legible wayfinding to ensure it gets the buy-in from the travelling public.