As of the 26 April 2016, the state government in Western Australia made it legal for cyclists to ride on footpaths. As a father of a six year old boy this is fantastic news for me as I can now ride with him on the path instead of riding on the road while he travels on the path. But as a traffic engineer this raises some interesting challenges particularly in the temporary traffic management space.
Temporary traffic management is notoriously bad at managing pedestrians and footpaths through work sites. The average pedestrian walks along a path at 5km/h giving them plenty of time to react to obstructions on the footpath. Now add cyclists, the average cyclists would be expected to ride at 10-20km/h on a footpath! This means that they will have little time to react to a poorly managed work site impacting on the footpath with potentially catastrophic results. As people responsible for the design and implementation of temporary traffic management on our roads and paths we need to be giving special attention to the management of footpaths impacted by our work areas, taking into account the changing nature of our path users.