Thank you to Australian Cyclist for the article and photos

• Read article as PDF: Clearer Advocacy – Australian Cyclist (November 2006) by Nick Bone (1.57M)

Marcel Lema has been riding Beach Road in Melbourne since he was 14. Those training rides along the picturesque bayside route was with his local club, Carnegie-Caulfield, eventually set him on a path to Europe when he was 21 to race professionally for a French team.

He represented Australia at the 1991 World Championships in Stuttgart, and after retiring due to injury, Lema coached at the VIS and with the National Disabled Olympic squad.

So it’s not a glib aside when he says that Beach Road is the best riding road in the world.

“I know the rest of Australia won’t necessarily believe this, but Beach Road is the best. You’ve got a road that snakes along the bay from Melbourne to Portsea which is almost 100 kilometres, and on the right hand side there’s no road; there’s ocean and therefore you don’t have any cross intersections – which means there are very few traffic lights.”

Most cyclists are proud of their local route but after the past four years Lema has actually earned the right to boast. In 2002 proposals were raised that would have restricted cyclist’s access to the road.

Tensions along the road were high with frequent clashes between cyclists, motorists and pedestrians as a result of the explosion in popularity of  cycling and the road regularly featured in news reports and current affairs programmes.

But rather than joining the battles on the road, or simply leaving the fight for cyclist’s rights to someone else, Lema and a small band of volunteers began campaigning to improve conditions along Beach Road.

Four years later he and his team have taken the local councils from actively discouraging cyclists to use the road, to recently seeing weekend parking bans introduced along Beach Road to allow a free-flowing path for riders.

Considering it’s taken the co-operation of three separate local councils and the support of various state government bodies it’s a minor miracle and an example of how methodical, professional and passionate lobbying can work for cyclists.

“Fifteen years ago, there were 400 bike riders on Beach Road and on a Sunday you were lucky to have 200 riders with of them club riders,” says Lema. Now the numbers are in the thousands – often out numbering cars – and several local businesses exist almost solely on the road’s cycling popularity.

“Ninety per cent of the bike riders on Beach Road now don’t belong to a club. Most of them are people who have bought their bikes from a bike shop, off the rack, and found out what a fantastic sport it is, in a social sense of it.” Lema says.

“What’s amazing is how many of these cyclists are 40-plus professionals: they’ve got families, established jobs and instead of playing golf or jogging, they’ve found you don’t have to belong to a club, you can just get on your bike, go down to Beach Road, get on to any group and have a great day.”

The result is up to 200 bunches of riders have started using the road every weekend morning, and when you put a couple of thousand cyclists with wildly varied experience and fitness in a pack at speed and add cars and pedestrians to the mix, even the open flowing nature of Beach Road was struggling to cope.

Much of the original source of conflict on the road was the infamous Hell Ride. As part of Melbourne’s cycling culture as Beach Road itself, the Hell Ride started as a tough Saturday morning training session from Black Rock to Mount Eliza and return more than a decade ago.

With world-class cyclists including it in their training schedule the difficulty of the ride quickly became legendary and cyclists organically populated the bunch to test themselves against the best.

Competitive instincts took over and the Hell Ride became an unofficial race: with the front of the bunch hitting 60 kmh, riders at the back of the sometime 200-strong pack took insane risks, running red lights and ducking under descending boom gates to stay in touch.

Harry Barber, General Manager of Bicycle Victoria agreed there was a problem and that, despite improvements, it still exists today. I think there’s a few riders who give the rest a bad name, and we encourage the police to book people who go through red lights. We want the culture there to be a strong culture and we want the riders to speak up themselves and say “I don’t want to go riding with you if you’re going to ride like that.”

The problem of large groups riding aggressively on the road with tragically highlighted in September (2006) when a cyclist taking part in the Hell Ride ran a red light and collided with an elderly pedestrian. The pedestrian later died and behaviour of cyclists was once again questioned in the mainstream media.

Long before this tragic accident Lema and his riding friends recognised that someone had to take action: that the volume of cyclists had changed so much it was causing clashes with other road users and that if road cycling on Beach Road was not to be banned altogether then road cyclists needed advocates.

They got organised, and got a name: Beach Road Cyclists (BRC).

The spark that ignited the BRC was the proposal by the City of Bayside to add 10 extra traffic lights and road narrowings along a five kilometre stretch of the road in an attempt to direct cyclists off the road and onto the new shared path the council was building between the road and the beach.

The BRC’s first task was to address the common misconception that cyclists would choose a bike path over the premier road riding venue in Victoria. Lema and his partners had to make it clear to the council why road cyclists, especially those who ride over 25kmh spurn bike paths. “We’ve got dogs, we’ve got prams, we’ve got people running. It’s not a bike path, it’s a shared path.”

Barber, who was involved in consultation groups to resolve the issue, puts the wrangling down to a basic misunderstanding by non-bicycle users.”People don’t understand the different speeds of riders and in simple terms – bike path riders are going at 20kmh, commuters at 30kmh, and the Beach Road gang are going at 40kmh – it was never going to happen, these 40kmh cyclists on a path.”

The growth of cycling along Beach Road had already lead to a cluster of accidents in the area and as head of Emergency at Sandringham Hospital Doctor James Taylor too often had to deal with the results of cars, bicycles and pedestrians coming together.

In the four and a half years, from 2000 to the midpoint of 2005, there were 147 seriously injured cyclists from incidents on Beach Road, a figure Dr Taylor believes is under-reported by as much as 50 per cent.

“I’ve called it an adult cyclist epidemic because clearly there are lots of cyclists out there, they’re injuring themselves, they’re injuring other people or being injured by motor cars in increasing numbers.

A cyclist since the 1970s when he could be found pedaling into the city wearing an open-faced motorbike helmet, and now a triathlete, Dr Taylor has road safety on the forefront of his mind when he cycles Beach Road.

For Lema the knowledge and experience of Dr Taylor would prove invaluable in assessing what changes would occur if Beach Road was made safer for cyclists “We had a clear problem here with all these people being injured,” says Dr Taylor, and in trying to find out why they were injured, I became more involved with the local ambulance and the police, and finally the councils, and we had meetings with councils as representatives and it then became apparent that while the councils were aware of the increase in cycling, they were not so much aware of the number of injuries.

So before millions of dollars was squandered on a bike path cyclists weren’t interested in and would probably only increase the number of injuries, the BRC urgently needed to get some figures to back up their opinions. They gathered a motley crew of volunteers and started counting bikes. “We had riders from the St Kilda Cycle Club, the Bandidos, the Bayside Cyclists, Carnegie-Caulfield club, over 200 people putting in their time to counting bike riders” says Lema.

The end result was a 46 page report written and presented to Bayside Council in 2003, which has jurisdiction over the largest piece of Beach Road. The report found 85 to 95 per cent of riders in the area used Beach Road – numbering over 4500 – on weekends and 50 per cent of these riders rode in groups.

Road bike usage on the nearby Bay Trail bicycle path was 5 per cent or less of total users. The report was a turning point for the road cyclists. With facts to back them up, they demanded acknowledgment that the relevant authorities had to adapt to road cyclists, not simply try to push them onto inappropriate bike paths.

A major recommendation of the report was that parking be prohibited along Beach Road at times of peak cycling use.

As a four lane road (two lanes each direction) for almost all its length, the large groups on Beach Road were creating mobile traffic jams as they moved into the middle to pass parked cars.

A parking ban along Beach Road between 6 and 10am on weekend mornings would, the BRC report said, make the road safer and ease traffic congestion. Once the report was out, Lema kept up the pressure on the parties, pushing for the involvement of other lobby groups while keeping in touch with the councils, Victoria Police, Sandringham Hospital, Vicroads and Roadsafe Victoria.

But with one stretch of road crossing three council zones he faced an enormous amount of bureaucratic red tape and repetition. Though all three councils acknowledged that some action has to be taken, none wanted to make the first move until the increasingly cycle-centric City of Port Phillip announced the clear-way would come into effect along their section of the road in the last week of September.

“We feel we’re pretty close to the cyclists, we’re pretty close to Bicycle Victoria, the Port Phillip Bicycle User Group, to cyclists in Cafe Racer. We’re all cyclists so we’re aware of the issues”, says Paul Smith, the City of Port Phillip’s Coordinator of Sustainable Transport.

“We’ve sort of been waiting, our strategy to date being that we should all (Port Phillip, Kingston and Bayside) do this together, so it’s all connected. I think given the fact that it’s dragged on a bit now may be an opportunity for us to take a lead, get our section in and that may provide the momentum for the others to follow a bit more quickly.”

Smith may be right. Since the announcement by the City of Port Phillip, the City of Bayside has included the promotion of cycling as part of their strategic plan and Mayor Derek Wilson announced that, “we strongly support the ‘weekend no stopping’ zone, and we will be consulting the community to ensure all views are taken into consideration”.

The City of Kingston has also recently agreed to take the parking bans proposal to community consultation, with a final vote set for September 25. There is still work to do for both the BRC, Bicycle Victoria, and Dr Taylor not least of which in light of the recent fatal accident, is improving the current image of road cyclists.

Both Lema and Barber advocate penalties for those cyclists who infringe the rules. Dr Taylor agrees, suggesting that recently enacted hoon legislation that empowers police to impound motor vehicles could be adapted to cyclists.

A 24 hour confiscation of an expensive bike could be the type of deterrent needed. The next step is improving the education of all users of the road cyclists and motorists.

It’s a balanced approach that Lema and his colleagues feel is vital if cyclists are to lobby effectively for improvements.

“It can’t be all about what cyclists want, you have to respect the views of the other parties and that we may have to change too,” he says.

The results achieved by the BRC are, Lema feels, an example to how advocacy can work:

“The community has given up some of its parking, now the cyclists have to give something back. Beach Road is such a good venue to start, so it’s important that we protect that road and protect the image of bike riding along that road so it can be an example for the rest of Australia.”