Planning for everyone - 2 legs, 1 leg, 0 legs, 2 wheels, 3 wheels, 4 wheels

How was your weekend? Well I had a blast riding out from Sydney city to Harris Park to enjoy the Parramasala festival (a spicy festival of cultures) and feast on some Indian goodies. The ride was long (40 kms) mostly along cycleways, from cooks river cycleway to the M4 cycleway and some roads in between.

Riding changes when you have a cargo bike. Things that you notice when riding with someone in a cargo:

• Steep ramps aren't good for going up OR down
• Prefer to ride on the street, main roads, because they're wider and smoother than pedestrian walk ways
• The Cargo bike is wide, so it can't fit into narrow spaces, like the bridge underpass on the cooks river, we had to go up and across the busy and nasty Canterburry Road.
• Chicanes do slow down traffic but then it takes forever to manoeuvre the cargo around the bends

How should we be designing active spaces and transportation networks?

• Think about the non 2 legged user (wheelchairs, walkers, prams, and now cargo bikes)
• Go on the journey and test out the route
• Consider the ramp gradients and consider wheelchair, pram, cargo bike accessibility
• Width of path ways, obstacles, bumps, smoothness
• Consider are the use of Chicanes necessary for pedestrians, shouldn't we be designing for the less mobile first