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2017 Holden Astra
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Melbourne City Council is keen to promote the use of motorcycles and scooters around the city’s CBD, according to a proposed new transport plan.
The 2015-2018 Motorcycle Plan would see some paid car parking spaces replaced with free scooter parking areas, while businesses and residential buildings around the CBD would be encouraged to offer lockers for motorcycle gear.
Private parking providers would also be encouraged to offer more motorcycle parking, while Melbourne riders already enjoy free parking on most of the city’s footpaths.
Council also plans to lobby Victoria’s state government to introduce laws demanding new buildings offer more motorcycle, scooter and bicycle parking to complement its proposal.
The Council hopes the move will encourage more people to ride around city areas rather than drive, thereby reducing congestion and the need for car parking spaces.
Council believes around six motorcycles or ten scooters could occupy the same space as a single car, and that the average vehicle occupancy in Australia is only 1.1 to 1.2 persons per vehicle.
The Plan also argues that more motorcycles would result in faster travel times and lower CO2 emissions.
Council has referenced a Belgian study from 2011, which found that commuting times could be slashed by 40 percent if just 10 percent of private cars were replaced with bikes and scooters.
Naturally, the Victorian Motorcycle Council (VMC) supports the proposal, but says an investment in time and resources would be required in the CBD to encourage more people to use motorcycles.
“It was good to see motorcycles really recognised as a solution to the transport problem," VMC’s John Eacott said, speaking with Fairfax.
Council plans to improve motorcycle safety in the CBD by using plastic bollards around construction sites, rather than steel barriers, while also investigating the dangers from tram separators, trees, painted surfaces and metal plates.
The 2015-2018 Motorcycle Plan is due to be voted on by Council next week.
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7 Comments
Haha, I'd like to see someone park 6 motorcycles in a standard car parking spot on the street!!! I'm not sure if anything has changed recently, but most states have laws where the back wheel must be touching the curb when a bike is parked. It's not going to happen without someone being blocked by another bike, and you won't be able to move one bike without damaging another.
Three full size cruisers like mine in one car spot would be the limit but this is a good thing we now just need to educate Australian drivers to respect other vehicles other than cars!!! and not try to kill us!! they think they are safe cocooned inside a locked cars but if they make a six foot four 120 kg rider angry they shit themselves real quick!!!
let's try again?? Three full size cruisers like mine in one car spot would be the limit but this is a good thing we now just need to educate Australian drivers to respect other vehicles other than just cars!!! and not try to kill us!! they think they are safe cocooned inside a locked car but if they make a six foot four 120 kg rider angry they **** themselves real quick!!!
Free parking is a start. And if the Govt expects 6 bikes per park but we manage only 3, who cares? The Govt should do other things to use bikes to reduce congestion. 1. Open up more bus lanes for bikes. 2. Cut motorway bike tolls to half that paid for cars. Bikes are less than half the weight and size so a cheaper toll is fair.
in many other countries motorbikes are exempt from tolls!! and that should be done in oz too, a big bike weighs 3 to 4 hundred kilos MAX and doesn't congest the roads nearly as much as cars so why do they even pay any toll???? isn't the rego enough??
Your right Rego is very expensive for bikes considering the size compared to cars. The rego for bikes should be a quarter of the price of a car.
In NSW, it's the CTP component of rego that hurts the most. How much did the NSW Govt sting the operators of Sydney's M7 for the privilege? $300 million?? Would that be a backdoor tax? Good luck encouraging the operators to give bikes a free run after that. There's plenty that Govts could do to encourage Green transport if they wanted to but they are too addicted to fuel excises. Tom Walkinshaw said as much. He claimed that we're discouraged from driving diesels as Govts know that they would radically reduce revenue from ecise. So a less refined fuel often costs more.