Cycle Spiral is total spin By Andrew Herington

The Linking Melbourne Authority has been working overtime with its latest round of promotion for the East West Link to emphasise it as somehow “environmentally friendly”. Aware of how disastrously unpopular the East West Link has become, the LMA is belatedly trying to change the image of the project.

The massive 20 metre high Hoddle St flyover is rebadged as “The Soundwave”. The 30 metre smokestacks are now been given “living green walls”, as if this reduces the toxicity of the emissions from them.

The Premier even donned a bike helmet and rode shakily for 100 metres to promote a $70 million package of bike paths that so people can ride “from the inner city all the way to Mornington”. (Why Mornington? Surely if you wanted to ride there you would head south and go along the Bayside trail?, And it’s not even a marginal seat – perhaps he meant to say Frankston.)

Although the LMA had specifically rejected the North East Bike Link proposal at the Assessment Committee hearings they were now not only embracing it as their own, but claiming the funding “had always been part of the project budget”.

The second iconic bike measure was the “Cycle Spiral” – a name that could only have been made up by Rhonda at the Nation Building Authority in the ABC satire Utopia. It got wide coverage in the media courtesy of this fetching illustration of what it would allegedly look like. Continue Reading…