Davey Street Bike Lane

What’s the plan?

A 200m section of bike lane on Davey Street — one of Hobart’s busiest streets. Starts at the intersection with Sandy Bay Road / Harrington Street and travels 200m uphill to the intersection with Linden Avenue / Barrack Street.

The bike lane being added to a block of Davey Street

There will be bicycle boxes added at the end of the bike lane, as well as at the intersection of Davey & Molle Streets.

Bicycle boxes being added to the Davey & Molle Streets intersection

This forms one small part of the Macquarie and Davey Streets Bus Improvements project — which is itself a small part of the Southern Projects which include adding an extra lane to the Southern Outlet.

Adding the bike lane will result in the removal of Bus Stop 5 near Heathfield Ave and about 12 parking spaces. (A further 81 parking spaces are being removed to make way for the other improvements in the larger project).

An artist's impression of a bike lane that is being added to Davey Street in Hobart. There is a green painted bike alne along the far left of the road. There is no separation between traffic and the bike lane. — An artist’s impression of the bike lane to be added to Davey Street.

A diagram showing the proposed cross section for Davey Street. It shows a 1.8 metre bike lane next to the footpath on the left. There is a 0.3 metre separator between the bike lane and the adjacent traffic lane. — Typical cross section of the planned layout (image supplied). Note that although it’s not shown in the artist’s impression, there will be a 0.3 m separator between the bike lane and the adjacent traffic lane.

Our thoughts

The good

A new bike lane, and it’s another — very small — step towards the Greater Hobart Cycling Plan.
It will be physically separated.
It’s on the steep uphill section where the difference in speeds between bikes and vehicles is largest.

The less good

It’s one block long.
It isn’t connected to any existing bike infrastructure. The end of the bike lane is particularly problematic, leaving riders with the option to continue riding with cars in a lane of Davey Street(!) or go onto the footpath. Even continuing the bike lane to Molle St — or just building it on that next block — would have significantly increased its usability as illustrated in the picture below:

A diagram showing a route using the bike lane being built and a route using an alternative bike lane in the next block — Blue shows the route using the bike lane being built. Green shows a route using an alternative bike lane in the next block.

Bicycle boxes are really only useful if there’s a lane to access them. The boxes at the Molle Street intersection don’t have that.
Apart from some bike storage at the Park & Rides, it’s the only direct improvement for cyclists in all of the Southern Projects, with a budget of tens/hundreds of millions of dollars.

Overall

This bike lane only makes sense if the intention is to rapidly extend it along all of Davey St as per the Greater Hobart Cycling Plan. Hopefully that’s the plan…