Sydney Morning Herald, May 8, 2000

Too frequently, pedestrians are treated like trespassers in their own cities and suburbs. Sydney is one such city; a pedestrian nightmare.

While the Lord Mayor, Councillor Frank Sartor, must be congratulated for widening and improving the city's footpaths, his introduction of street furniture where it puts pedestrians in peril will almost certainly cause death and serious injury unless corrected.

Apart from the nightmare of simply crossing the road in the CBD, we are all threatened by kamikaze bicycle couriers who flout our laws. They treat pedestrians with utter contempt while the authorities fail to act.

The new Australian Road Rules, introduced last December, make it an offence for anyone over 12 to ride a bicycle on the footpath.

There have already been deaths and serious injuries caused by some of these CBD cowboys. Many run red lights with impunity and clearly believe that one-way means the direction in which they happen to be travelling at the time.

The bicycle police refuse to chase the couriers, rightfully fearing for their own safety and the safety of others. The offenders are rarely caught, yet they each average six driving offences a year, behaviour which would guarantee the loss of licence for a motorist. Many couriers are tourists earning a tax-free buck. Fewer than a third of their paltry fines ($45 for riding on a footpath) are actually collected, according to the NSW Parliamentary Staysafe Committee.

More than three years ago, representatives of this committee, the Retail Traders Association, Bicycle NSW, the City of Sydney and the Pedestrian Council called on the Government to adopt urgently the wide-ranging Staysafe recommendations.

Because of the difficulty of recognising couriers in their helmets and sunglasses, the committee recommended they have licence plates and wear identification. It also recommended they pay a substantial bond against any fines.

The four-year-old Staysafe report continues to gather dust while thousands of Sydney's pedestrians are daily threatened with injury. Many elderly people feel scared in a hostile environment, while the normally no-nonsense, safety-conscious Roads and Transport Minister, Carl Scully, keeps an eternal "watching brief."

Paradoxically, one of the main users of bicycle couriers in the city is the State Government. If Scully is not prepared to adopt and legislate the recommendations of the Staysafe Committee, he should instruct the courier companies to regulate from within and to devise a code of conduct, based on Staysafe's recommendations.

Any courier company failing to enforce the code would be denied government contracts. Responsible corporations would surely follow the government example, thus forcing the bicycle couriers to obey our laws.