Cyclist Safety at Roundabouts – The Cairns Experience

Abstract

Tropical Far North Queensland is well known for its outdoor active lifestyle. Cairns Regional Council has sought to support cyclists and the community with broad, safe and useable infrastructure to encourage residents and visitors to use the cycle network. This attitude and focus has resulted in a continuous investment and improvement in that network over a number of years. Expansion of the cycling network is guided by the Council’s Cycling & Walking Strategy 2010-2030. The existing network consists of an extensive system of purpose designed off-road paths and on-road cycle facilities. The difficult design component of the on-road cycle facilities is of course almost always the intersections. Roundabouts are a common feature of the road network in Cairns because they effectively reduce conflict approach angles and provide an efficient circular flow of vehicles. There are many single and multi-lane roundabouts throughout Cairns. Single lane roundabouts in particular are reasonably straight-forward to design and quite familiar to road users in Australia. The problems come when we add dissimilar road users to the same roundabout. Traditionally in Cairns the cycle lane has been added to the outside of the vehicle lane circulation where technically the vehicle travelling in its lane has right of way over the cyclist who is not in the traffic lane. The other main issue is that a cyclist is a vulnerable “soft” user on a roundabout where cars and heavy vehicles are forced to undertake large deviations through the intersection. Road planners and designers in Cairns were awakened to the potential problems with accommodating cyclists on roundabouts after a traffic accident about a decade ago. A cyclist travelling in a cycle lane through a roundabout was fatally injured in a side-side clash with a truck. A subsequent coronial inquest recommended improvements in typical design of roundabouts in the conveyance of cyclists. This paper will summarise aspects of roundabout design as it relates to cyclist safety. It will also detail experience and efforts of planners and designers in improving cyclist safety at roundabouts. This has resulted in significant design improvements to upgrade existing and new infrastructure. Generally, a combination of off-road and on-road cycle paths have been built into the roundabout design. The on-road pathways have utilised a bicycle awareness zone (BAZ) solution. The off-road solution has involved special on/off ramps across the kerbs sharing the pedestrian footpaths. To date approximately 19 single-lane roundabouts have been upgraded with the BAZ type improvements. Further improvements and additional roundabouts are programmed for upgrading in the future.