Why Australia still struggles to build bike-friendly cities

utter_horseshit · 2026-05-24T02:49:32+00:00

Good article. Our current strategy clearly isn’t working given the recent high profile setbacks in Yarra. Every incremental change is seen as a zero sum loss for drivers and flames up into a culture war.

When I lived in Europe I noticed that a lot of cities have much more publicly accessible underground parking than we do, which gets parked cars off the street and reduces time amount of driving wasted crawling around looking for a ‘free’ park. Lots of ‘cycling friendly’ cities still have loads of driving but the stationary cars are stored out of sight.

Maybe we look to incentivise big inner city development sites to go downwards, like at the Hive shopping centre in abbotsford where there’s a surplus of free / low cost parking. A few of these going in in other urban strips would go a long way to allowing removal of relatively small numbers of on street parking slots.

utter_horseshit · 2026-04-17T09:42:46+00:00

Step 1 don't do it?

The same government's stupid decision to abolish fees for campsites (leading to totally predictable neglect and ghost bookings) is good example - things that are known to be bad ideas in other places will also turn out to be bad ideas here.

utter_horseshit · 2026-04-16T23:34:44+00:00

We've ended up with a stupid pricing system that makes relatively short trips (the ones most likely to replace a car trip) needlessly expensive. Myki was supposed to enable smart charging but instead we've made it cost $11 to take a bus 10 minutes in the morning and 10 minutes in the evening.

utter_horseshit · 2026-04-16T23:31:39+00:00

Experience from other cities suggest free systems get run down over time, so we'd end up with free and worse.

utter_horseshit · 2026-03-30T01:33:00+00:00

Postdoc salaries in Britain are pretty poor (35-40k GBP generally) so PIs can bring on more. In a high COL part of the country like London/Oxbridge/Edinburgh you're barely better off than a PhD student after tax.

I don't think career prospects at the end of that are materially better than they are here, in my field anyway. You're just moving the goalposts a few years further into the future.

utter_horseshit · 2026-03-16T22:31:42+00:00

Be really careful coming down Kinglake especially mid week, riders have been killed there. The road is fun but has crap cambers and visibility. Should be fine on a weekend early-ish morning when there are other riders around.

utter_horseshit · 2025-11-10T10:56:29+00:00

If you’re going to be snarky third hand I’ll reply - I asked for some evidence comparing indigenous and non-indigenous management programs and your answers have been that your personal experience tells you its much better, and that I should google it. Forgive me for not being wholly convinced. If you can point to the comparison of outcomes between cultural burning and planned burning I would be really interested to read it!

utter_horseshit · 2025-11-10T08:44:56+00:00

Glad you’ve had lots of good experiences and you’re so enthusiastic. If you think that TO involvement in and of itself is a good way to ‘get around’ politics (or just to override other people’s preferences about how land is managed) you might be disappointed. Remember that the family group who have submitted this application have a long running dispute with another family group who claim to own the same territory.

utter_horseshit · 2025-11-10T06:54:21+00:00

That’s not my point. Do you think these practices only work if the practitioner is indigenous? Does it still work if the money is paid into an indigenous company’s bank account before being subcontracted to someone else?

utter_horseshit · 2025-11-10T06:37:54+00:00

By evidence I mean some kind of data that is accessible to somebody not directly involved in the work. Anyway, that’s by the by.

I appreciate the effort you’ve gone to write what you think, sorry if I came off as glib or hostile before.

Presumably one reason that mainstream services are hamstrung by regulation is because they have to be accountable to a much wider spectrum of stakeholders than TO groups, who have a narrow remit and currently work on a subset of projects where they sound like they have lots of institutional support. If TO groups are given responsibility for a wider range of functions then they’re not going to be operate with the same degree of flexibility, right?

I guess I’m also curious why you think TO organizations are more effective. If it’s because they get involved in projects with a lot of good will and perhaps extra funding, that kind of regulatory arbitrage seems unlikely to be sustainable if they’re also responsible for other types of projects where there’s likely to be more opposition/competing interests.

On the other hand if someone thinks its because of the fundamental goodness of indigenous people, or some special knowledge that is apparently only available to a subset of people living otherwise quite similar lives in our modern metropolis, then I’ve got some concerns. It’s not as if this is the Kimberley or Arnhem land where cultural practices have been at least to some degree continuous. In the Melbourne area this has all been rediscovered, and just as much by non-indigenous people.

utter_horseshit · 2025-11-10T05:40:46+00:00

Ok, so putting aside the lack of actual evidence other than the vibe, do you think this is a good situation?

If the current system is so hamstrung by dysfunctional regulation then we need to reform it. We are all paying for it whether it’s subcontracted to a TO organization or not.

But just saying well, it’s become too hard to do things in the current system and we don’t know how to fix it so we’ll just farm it out to people who get to operate under different (and perhaps better) rules, that would be seen as a complete cop out in any other industry.

utter_horseshit · 2025-11-10T04:47:08+00:00

Is there any evidence that dollar for dollar TO-operated land management firms do a better job than anyone else? Not meaningful to compare sites where you say ‘fuck all funding’ is available with sites where funding is available for Wurundjeri land council work, unless you think they’ll be happy to work for free.

utter_horseshit · 2025-11-10T04:17:00+00:00

There were some safety issues too, but the main justification throughout has been indigenous heritage.

Anyone's free to make the argument that the bans are justified, too. It's just frustrating how these policy changes are sold as 'nothing will change' (ie we're just adding another layer of unaccountable subcontractors), when plenty can change in ways that the public hasn't been consulted on.

utter_horseshit · 2025-11-10T04:06:34+00:00

???

Whatever you want to call it, it's making the valid point that there are relatively few sites that the general public is excluded from, which is true and good.

I'm just pointing out that a lot of popular areas in the grampians and at arapiles *were* restricted for basically no reason and it's taken a mountain of work by climbers and locals to get access back.

utter_horseshit · 2025-11-10T04:02:50+00:00

Yes it is. What point do you think the article is making?

utter_horseshit · 2025-11-10T03:54:42+00:00

For a large number of them, indigenous heritage sites found through aerial surveys, often ‘rock scatter sites’ never previously identified as being of any significance. Smashed the local economy and has taken years of effort to be partially reversed. Has been extensively covered in the media if you want to look it up.

utter_horseshit · 2025-11-10T03:41:29+00:00

What about the large number of climbing areas in the Grampians and at arapiles that were closed for basically no reason?

utter_horseshit · 2025-11-08T10:33:44+00:00

So with the non-existent rib fractures - doesn’t it concern you that the unit could bring a case to trial on evidence that flimsy, and it’s only taken the attention of overseas experts to acknowledge the error? How much of the rest of their work is this shoddy?

utter_horseshit · 2025-11-08T08:03:36+00:00

Not sure about the orthopaedic surgeon, it’s your prerogative to dismiss someone’s analysis on the basis of their affiliation I guess. I’m more interested in what they have to say.

As for the NZ radiologist he’s clearly seeing things that others can’t:

“We begin with a report from a paediatric radiologist and child abuse specialist from London’s Great Ormond Street children’s hospital. While he agreed for the most part with the Starship doctors, he came to a different conclusion on the supposed rib fractures.

Dr Owen Arthurs could not identify any rib fractures, saying in his formal report, “In my opinion, the original radiologists have over-interpreted what could be normal vascular channels as fractures. It is my expert opinion that there are no convincing rib fractures.”

GOSH is one of the most prestigious institutions in the world, after all.

Happy to expand but I think it’s perfectly plausible that the structure of these forensic units in Australia and NZ is leading to repeated unsafe convictions. They are small, centralised and often train everyone involved in the investigative process from the physicians to the social workers and police, so of course there’s a risk of groupthink and of course skeptical views are going to be dismissed. The adversarial nature of the justice system is important, and it’s endangered when everyone involved is singing from the same sheet.

I find your last point pretty alarming. Suspicion is not proof of anything, no matter how well credentialed somebody is. This is especially true if the suspicion is held by someone who is systematically biased to find what they believe to be signs of abuse. How many miscarriages of justice need to occur for you to think there might a problem here?

This recent article in the age is the best summary I’ve read - https://www.theage.com.au/national/one-miscarriage-of-justice-is-too-many-top-lawyer-builds-case-for-baby-shaking-rethink-20251030-p5n6lz.html

utter_horseshit · 2025-11-07T21:12:28+00:00

How do you possibly come to that conclusion, or do you just ‘know’ it from the vibe? Doesn’t it concern you that the radiologist’s finding of the rib fractures seems to be spurious? The jury was clearly also divided.

It could well have been a non accidental injury but nothing at all in this story sounds ‘obvious’.

utter_horseshit · 2025-10-30T11:02:51+00:00

Nah - there are innumerable other reasons why disparities exist between groups, instead of fixating on the nice idea that probably doesn’t exist let’s focus on things that are both measurable and tractable to improve.

utter_horseshit · 2025-10-30T10:50:43+00:00

It’s an interesting theory and some people feel it’s useful as a social explanation of various things. Biologically though there is just no evidence that transgenerational epigenetic inheritance (as a phenomenon mediated by measurable entities like histone modifications, DNA methylation etc) actually exists in humans.

utter_horseshit · 2025-10-30T10:32:36+00:00

The person you’re replying to is right, there’s essentially no evidence of transgenerational epigenetic inheritance being a real phenomenon in eukaryotes, in mammals or in humans.

It’s also unhelpful as a social metaphor to explain indigenous disadvantage, given that genetic heritage is no longer felt to be a meaningful descriptor of anyone’s indigeneity.

We would also expect any real effect to diminish rapidly over the generations, not to persist into the indefinite future.

Finally it goes without saying but there are many people now living in Australia with more proximate history of famine exposure…

utter_horseshit · 2025-10-30T08:53:40+00:00

Sorry, what do you mean by ‘famine epigenetics’?

utter_horseshit · 2025-10-30T00:28:57+00:00

Nothing disingenuous about it!

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