Cycled down to East Perth this morning, 1 hour 40 to cover ≅35km of more-or-less flat terrain from 05:10 to 06:50 (equals roughly 21km/h average) and saw a couple of things which twanged my sense of the bizarre.
One was a fitness club... almost buried under vehicles. Practically the only busy premises on Scarborough Beach Road at 06:30. Phrrrk, phrrrk, is this thing on? You’re here to do what? And you walked here...? Ran...? Cycled...? Hello...?
The other was the cycleway on the west side of the Mitchell Freeway near Powis Street. I normally scoot down the east side at this point, but decided to be different today.
If you have a look at the satellite image for it, you can see the west-side mixed-use path curve (southbound turning east) under the freeway en route to joining the splendid mixed-use overpass paralleling Main Street to the east. About halfway through the curve you can see a white patch on the outside, which is the pram-ramp for crossing Powis Street.
Follow the dotted line from there south across Powis, and you can see the light colour of the fresh (at the time) path-works as they curve westward again, run alongside Powis north of the car-park (the hairpin shape) and join up via the bitumen at the entrance to the carpark.
The problem is that the cycleway around Lake Monger runs along the other (south) side of the carpark and on down between the lake (visible to the south of the image) and the freeway at the other end of the carpark. The paths do not connect, and consequently the lawn between them has taken quite a hammering from people (like me) unwilling to go up and down a hundred meters just to make ten of meters of progress. Civic planning. Harrumph.
Comments
This is a bummer, but still leaves 99% of the yobbos out there without excuse.
The exercise they got riding to the gym (or somewhere else) would surely count as no less important than the exercise at the gym?
Also, I've seen more than a few angry-Bruce-Banner lookalikes on the cycleways already, which tends to put the lie to the specialised-forms-of-exercise argument for most people as well.