There’s really nothing particularly remarkable about the cycling network in Orange, New South Wales.
You’ll find a similar situation in Bathurst, a town that’s roughly the same size a half an hour drive away. You’ll probably find a similar situation in almost any medium sized regional town in the state.
In some respects, there probably should be. Orange is a prosperous town. Orange City Council charges some of the highest rates in regional NSW. The economy is diversified, being a small agricultural centre, an important health hub and a tourism destination as well as home to a small university campus, an enormous gold mine and a strong public service presence.
Orange might be seen from Sydney as a pinot sippers paradise, but like any regional town it’s much more diverse than the capital city perception belies. Like most towns Orange has a homeless population, some crime and drug problems and a pretty shocking pokies addiction.
Orange’s established middle classes and its disadvantaged residents might not seem to have much in common, but they do both tend to bike. While the prosperous denizens of (mostly) West Orange might have a double garage with 2 SUVs and half a dozen bikes (a mountain bike and a road bike for each member of the household as a bare minimum), those residing in the poorer parts of much maligned East Orange might ride because they don’t have access to a car.
Bike Town, NSW
In Orange, cycling is kind of a big deal. The mayor famously rides, there are 2 bike shops and a dedicated bike mechanic, there are 2 separate mountain bike trailheads (there was another, much larger mountain bike area in the nearby Kinross State Forest, but NSW Forestry decided to harvest that last year, alas.) and Council is even pushing an enormous new mountain bike trail system high on Mt Canobolas.
Given all this, I would have expected Orange to boast a reliable network of bike paths and a fairly stable population of commuter cyclists.
What’s interesting in Orange is that whilst there’s a lot of recreation riders and a smaller but significant number of people riding around the suburbs, it’s actually quite unusual to see someone that is obviously riding their bike into work. In fact, in the parts of Orange where much of the employment is concentrated, it’s unusual to see cyclists at all.
Take a look at this map of the bike paths in Orange:
Here I’ve marked any separated (not in traffic) cycleway I could find. Some of these are small gravel tracks through a local park, others are multi-kilometre concrete shared paths running alongside busy roads. Quite a few of them are recently built (last ten or so years) concrete shared paths that run next to creeks with lots of connections to the local street network.
In these covid times, they are extremely popular and a wonderful asset for those people ‘lucky’ enough to live near them (there’s not really any luck, they tend to run by the creeks in the wealthier parts of town).
I’m not certain, being a recent transplant to the town, but I’m fairly sure more than half of these cycleways were built in the last decade. So things are happening.
What strikes me looking at this network is how disconnected it is. Aside from a long ride from sprawling North Orange to Dalton Street, a loop around the hospital in Bloomfield or a parabolic ride through 2 beautiful creek-side paths in West Orange, there isn’t really any way to get around town using this network.
If you want to ride in Orange, you’re going to have to get amongst the traffic.
This might seem like no problem, it’s a small town after all. And that’s true to a certain extent. There are plenty of streets I tend to gravitate towards that are light on traffic and a pleasure to ride down. Autumn Street in East Orange, shaded by huge London Planes that mark the changing seasons, is one of my favourites. Franklin Street, which is closed to cars at one point, is another.
But, by and large, traffic in Orange is pretty bad. Parking is abundant, streets are wide and difficult to cross and so people tend to drive even for short distances. Council has made some attempts to address this, mostly by building multi-lane roundabouts at as many intersections as they possibly can. These have the effect of increasing the speed of cars and making the streets even harder to get across as a pedestrian. Unsurprisingly, these have led to more cars and less walking.
For even relatively confident riders, navigating an endless run of multi-lane roundabouts is hard work and feels very, very dangerous. To their credit, most drivers in Orange seem to see cyclists as something of a curiosity and tend to slow down and give way. Most drivers.
So Orange has a lot of bikes, but people only ride them where there’s no other option or for rsport. On any given weekend you’ll find plenty of families and such riding on those extensive creek side paths, or driving their bikes out of town to Gosling Creek or Lake Canobolas to ride there, but what you won’t find are people riding around town because it’s a great way to get around. I confess to being one of the stubborn few.
I can see how this came to be. The Council saw the benefit of encouraging cycling so they started putting in some new paths. There were all these green corridors around the place that seemed like the obvious place to start, so they did. New suburbs popped up on the edge of town and changing development practices meant that these areas got some sort of bike path by default. This has left the town with a lot of bike paths, but only in areas that had the space set aside at some point. In the older parts of town there’s almost nothing.
From a functional stand point this means that while there’s lots of enjoyable spots to go for a Sunday arvo cruise, if you want to get from A to B it’s highly unlikely the cycle network is going to be much help.
To illustrate this point I’ve overlaid the main employment areas in Orange with the bike network. In the Centre of town is the CBD, to the very south are the Hospitals, to the far north is the University and the rest is a mix of retail and light industrial. I’d say a good 90% of the jobs in Orange would be based in these areas.
As you can see, the bike network doesn’t really go to most of these places. Where it does, it kind of skirts the edge. Not much help given these areas are going to have the most traffic, and lots of trucks at that. The only exceptions are the hospital, university and North Orange shops which have cycle paths running directly to them.
The other issue is that when you zoom in you realise that there are a lot of missing links. And I don’t mean the kind of ‘missing links’ the state government uses to justify literally any road between any 2 points. I mean missing link like you’re riding your bike along a great bike path and then it just ends only to start up again a block away. This happens a lot in Orange.
Take the trip from Orange Hospital to the CBD for example, probably the 2 main trip generators in town. There is a separated cycleway most of the way, but it has quite a few gaps.
- Turning off the Southern Distributor onto Anson Street the bike path abruptly ends. You’ll need to ride down Anson Street for about 100 metres, there’s not even a footpath for kids to ride on. I rode this way this morning and a semi-trailer went by me on what is a narrow street without any lane markings. Fun times.
- Heading North you’ll soon find yourself on a wonderful new path that runs alongside a small creek. The creek goes the whole way into town, so you’d think the bike path would too. Unfortunately, one block of it was never built. For some reason one tiny section of creek goes through a privately owned oversized backyard. In 2004 Council released a Development Control Plan outlining the possibility of acquiring just a small part of this large backyard to finish the path, but 17 years later that hasn’t happened.
- Back on the path and 2 blocks north it ends again. This time you’ll have to get onto Anson Street and pass through one of the aforementioned double lane roundabouts before rejoining the path in Matthews Park, home to a model railway!
- Finally, the path ends for real on Kite Street on the Southern edge of Orange CBD, one block short of the main drag, Summer Street. You’ll need to ride in traffic to get to your destination from here.
This is more or less how any bike trip in Orange plays out. Unless of course you’re riding through oft overlooked East Orange where there pretty much just isn’t any bike paths.
What can be done?
The thing about Orange is that the streets are famously wide. The town was laid out on a grid with all the streets in the old part of town being 2 chains wide. That’s about 40 metres in newspeak. Most of these streets are currently set up with one lane in each direction and loads of room for diagonally parked cars on both sides. There’s also quite often street trees between the kerbs. Some busier streets are 2 lanes each way with parallel parking on both sides.
The other thing about the streets in the 19th century parts of Orange is that they are on a grid. The great thing about a grid is that you can prioritise different types of traffic on parallel streets. The most obvious example of this is a one way network, but it can work in other ways, too. If there’s 4 parallel streets, you could, for example, have all open to local traffic, one also for buses, another for trucks with wider turning circles and another for bikes, with plenty of traffic slowing infrastructure and safe crossings at intersections.
Because the streets in Orange are so wide, putting in completely grade separated shared bike paths doesn’t need to come at the cost of reducing parking, let alone losing a traffic lane.
There are two streets in Orange that I think would be perfect for this treatment. The first is Lords Place, that runs North-South from the aforementioned bike path dead end on Kite Street. It’s not a high traffic street and it could easily have a bike path installed without dramatically altering existing traffic arrangements. The biggest barrier to be overcome for riders would be safely getting through the roundabouts at Kite and Byng Streets.
The other is Margaret Street, which runs East-West to the North of town. This street doesn’t have much through traffic at all, being broken by the rail line which has a pedestrian and bike only level crossing. A bike lane on Margaret Street could be easily implemented and would connect 3 separate parts of the network.
There are a bunch of other places in town that could do with the missing link treatment, but these would be a huge start. A couple of relatively minor changes using existing street or green corridors could turn Orange’s fun and friendly weekend routes into a legitimate cycle network that would give people a safe and healthy alternative way to get around town.
