Life in the slow lane: Is this really the best way forward for Canberra?

This little section of the lake is one of the busiest paths in Canberra and so improvements are desperately needed.

The government is rolling out new infrastructure in two stages - first by constructing a temporary pop-up lane on Bowen Drive between the Kings Avenue underpass and the Bowen Park carpark for cyclists, and then building permanent cycling infrastructure from Bowen Park to Canberra Avenue.

This is a good plan.

Yet, I have been left scratching my head wondering, why has it taken so long to get here, and why will it take so long for this to come to fruition?

Pop-up cycle lanes are exactly what you may imagine them to be - the installation of temporary barriers that separate cyclists from motor vehicle traffic.

Particularly during the pandemic, many cities rolled out such lanes, creating safe, cheap, and quick to install infrastructure. They have done so with huge success.

Lanes rolled out in Paris, London, and even Sydney and Melbourne were highly popular, with governments now transitioning them to permanent infrastructure.

Pedal Power have been pushing for the installation of such lanes in Canberra too. We did so during the pandemic, and since I started working here in late 2022 I have been telling the government to make them a priority.

We are facing a huge increase in construction costs and a lack of supplies. So pop-up lanes make a lot of sense. The government has said, both to me, and publicly, that they agree.

So where are these lanes?

Like so many other projects in the ACT they have taken forever to get off the ground.

This Kingston lane was first mentioned to me as a possibility back in November last year, and it is likely it had been an idea for a lot longer than that. Yet we're unlikely to actually see it until early to mid-2024.

Even then it is going to take two months to build, which seems like a long time to construct something that could feasibly be done by a government maintenance team.

This is true for so many projects. The government is heralding the Garden City Cycle Route as its major piece of active travel infrastructure.

Yet planning for this has taken years and we still have no shovels on the ground. Current approved funding is only for the first stage, and runs across three years, meaning it may take a decade to build the whole length of it (I hope it is faster, but we don't know).

The same goes for the much-publicised Belconnen busway, which was agreed upon in a motion by the legislative assembly recently. But we're unlikely to see that built until 2028.

Let's not even talk about the light rail to Woden, which may take close to 20 years to be built from the day it was announced.

I would love to be able to tell you why this is the case, but looking in from outside it is impossible to know. Bureaucratic processes in this city have become mind-numbingly slow, while the government has become risk averse and overly cautious.

No matter the cause however, this is just not good enough. We are living in the critical decade to address global warming.

While the ACT has done an incredible job in reducing our carbon emissions so far, we still have work to do. Sixty per cent of our emissions come from transport, and the uptake of personal electric vehicles will not be enough to solve this problem.

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We need to be promoting more use of active and public transport, and fast. We can only do this with actual investment that leads to better infrastructure and more services. Instead, we have a government that makes a lot of announcements, but then drags its feet when it comes to actually doing anything.

It does not have to be like this. Cities around the world have shown that it is possible to transform very quickly.

In the past 10 years, for example, Paris has shifted from a city dominated by cars to one that has become a paradise for cyclists, walkers, and rollers. Sydney is doing the same.

Every time I visit, which is quite often, I notice new changes in the city centre, with cycle lanes being rolled out, public transport installed and communities thriving. It's not just money that is making this happen. It's the result of real political will.

It should not take us years to plan, design and build one pop-up cycle lane. If this is the best this government can do then Canberra is really going to struggle when we are truly hit with the multiple crises of climate change and growing inequality. We need to do better and much faster.