by huronbikes

I don’t have much of a beef with motorcyclists and scooters. Apart from the arseclowns who think it’s great to use bicycle lanes to jump to the front of traffic and then proceed to stop in the bicycle lane at traffic lights and stick their exhausts in my face, for the most part we get along fine.

In an interesting proposal, the Victorian Automobile Chamber of Commerce (VACC) have proposed that motorcycles and scooters be able to use bicycle lanes because:

Scooters are a cheap, efficient and accessible mode of transport. But they deserve the same status and respect as other vehicles on the roads.

The community and environmental benefits of scooters are clear. Scooters use smaller parking spaces than cars and leave a tiny carbon footprint. However, some people are put off from using them because they feel vulnerable riding on the roads.


Replace scooter with the word bicycle and the cyclists of Australia will gladly welcome VACC aboard something we’ve felt strongly about for decades.

To suggest that motorcycles and scooter, sorry we’re calling them “Powered Two-Wheeled Vehicles” now, riders lack respect on the roads and feel vulnerable is possibly the biggest irony coming out of a motorised vehicle transport lobby group.

For years cyclists have had to and continue to put up with a lack of respect and feeling vulnerable as hot heads rev past to prove some ideological point before having to come to a screaming halt at the next set of lights again.

Shoving Powered Two-Wheeled Vehic-(ok that’s enough of that) motor vehicles into the bicycle lane is a bandaid fix at best and diverts attention from the real problem facing our roads. Do I really want to be riding to work or from my weekend shopping and have to worry about motor vehicles whizzing past in my lane at 60km/h passing just centimeters from my body?

What about all the idiots that will crash trying to overtake cars from the left using the bicycle lanes?

Whether I’m hit by a car, a scooter, a motorcycle or an old lady riding one of those motor chairs at speed the fact remains I’m going down hard and am always going to come off second best. In addition to this being doored on a bicycle is one thing, can you imagine the carnage of being doored on a motorcycle at 60 km/h?

For those of you wondering being doored is what happens when some clueless moron opens their door and jumps out of their parked vehicle without checking oncoming traffic. 99% Melbourne’s bicycle lanes are adjacent to parked cars so this is an ongoing problem and has been for some time.

Thankfully the government today announced they weren’t having a bar of it.

The Victorian Government says it has no plans to create road lanes that could be shared by motorbikes and bicycles.


Still, I couldn’t get my head around why VACC would propose such a transparently stupid idea in the first place. However, after thinking about it some more and wondering where the logic was in this proposal it finally dawned on me where VACC where coming from.

It’s not about motorcyclist and scooterist (is that even a word?) safety, clearing congestion or making roads more accessible. No, the shared lane proposal was conceived for the benefit of one group of road users and one group only.

Like cyclists, motorbikes and scooters are a nuisance to the majority of car drivers. They require some thought and driving competence to share the roads with and being significantly smaller then a car are easy to bully around.

VACC aren’t morons and although they claim to represent the ‘motor industry’, they know as well as everyone that the bulk of the motor industry revolves around cars. So, instead of addressing the need to combat a lack of driver education and mutual respect on the roads they come up with proposals like this designed to make the average car drivers life easier.

More cars isn’t going to solve congestion problems and shoving motor bikes and cyclists into the dark outskirts of our roads won’t solve anything either.

I mean you know what comes next then right? A mandatory requirement for scooters and motorcycles to use bicycle lanes when provided.

What needs to be addressed is the ‘I own the road’ mentality expressed by motor vehicle owners that lead to motorcyclists, scooter riders and cyclists feeling pressure in using our roads. If people are reluctant to use alternative means of transport due to safety concerns make the bloody roads safer.

Squashing all non-car traffic into a one meter wide lane is not safer.

Like every other major city in the world Australia’s capital cities need to wake up and start disadvantaging cars in favour of public transport and alternative road transport. Someone is going to have to step up and get the job done or our roads are only going to get worse.

For me it’s not a problem, I don’t sit in traffic jams all day but if it means we’re going to be seeing more and more of these half baked bandaid ‘solutions’ then all of a sudden it becomes my problem.

It’s every road users problem.

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