In April 2011 BIKESydney submitted a response to the City of Sydney’s Draft City Plan.

Overall BIKESydney was very supportive of the Draft City Plan which we saw as a progressive and ambitious planning instrument. We did have some concerns with elements of its constituent Draft Sydney Local Environmental Plan 2011 (LEP) and Draft Sydney
Development Control Plan 2010 (DCP) and encouraged the City of Sydney to review these items.

In particular we urged the City to minimise on-street parking in precincts of high human occupation.

“Car door lanes” (bicycle lanes situated immediately adjacent to lanes of parked cars) are a significant impediment to the uptake of cycling. Approximately 40% of cycling injuries relate to “car doorings”. The road is a valuable resource for the movement of people, and is often wasted on the storage of vehicles. (The City has already embraced this progressive view as exemplified by its Memorandum of Understanding with the State Government which seeks to remove on-street parking from critical city thoroughfares due to the severe, disproportionate impact on peak hour bus flows caused by only a few parked cars.)

BIKESydney recommended that the DCP encourage all developments to:

1. capture all its vehicle parking provision within the building envelope and
2. provide all its parking provision below street level where feasible (as is the current practice in Copenhagen, for example).

While we were generally very supportive of the End of Journey Floorspace provisions in the City Plan, we were concerned by two sections which limited access to end of trip facilities to occupants of the buildings in which the facilities are provided. While access to these facilities should be prioritised for occupants of the building, we believe it unnecessarily restrictive to limit use of the facilities to only the occupants of that building. We recommended that this restriction be removed.

We were pleased to be advised today that both of these recommendations have been accepted and the City Plan will be amended accordingly.