By a concerned couple from South Melbourne

Image displays the location of the issue.

We are residents of Eastern Road and parents of a one-year-old and a dog. We have lived in the street for five years and know how much of a high pedestrian area our block is consisting mostly of people coming/going to work, parents & kids going to the kids park on Park Street or people and their dogs going to the Dog park on Eastern Road/Park St/Heather St. We are concerned about the pop-up bike lanes were implemented recently on Park Street, South Melbourne.

Pedestrian issues:
The pop-up bike lane on Park Street, has made it so dangerous to cross over Park Street with no visibility of cars unless you're standing on the road (with a pram, near impossible to do safely) while watching the other connecting streets with potential oncoming cars. 

With a kindergarten & children’s park on one side of Park Street and a dog park across the road, I find it insane that there isn’t a pedestrian set of light or pedestrian crossing connecting these two streets, that now is a serious safety issue to cross - however the safety of the cyclists has been made.

Driving issues:
I have seen two near accidents and have felt so unsafe trying to turn right out of Eastern Road onto Park Street. There is NO visibility of cars coming from Kings Way and bad visibility looking the other direction due to the parked cars now sitting in the middle of Park Street (looking up Park towards the market from Eastern Road).

This means it is a constant edging out/checking for cars & it is so dangerous, we have had frustration EVERY time we have done this since these pop-up lanes & new car spaces have been shifted to make way for the bike lane. 

Planning failure:
The pop-up bike lanes on Park Street don't keep going once you are over Kings Way heading to St Kilda Road so they are redundant in keeping cyclists safe, once over the biggest connecting highways in the area and forcing cyclists to merge into a lane with cars (so what's the point in keeping you so safe in a family-orientated neighbourhood on the South Melbourne side as opposed to the city side??).

We also frequently see cyclists in the area not using the designated lane built for them (especially around roundabouts on Moray Street), which renders the question - why bother doing these at all!

We never had any kind of issue seeing cyclists in our area before, my husband and I both used to ride our bikes to work and had no issues. Now we are infuriated with what has happened on Park Street with no plan for safety of the pedestrians & children living in the area and the cars trying to navigate out of Eastern Road. Such a disappointing upgrade that we will see reflected in our next rates notice, I'm sure. 

Thank you for giving us a platform to express our feelings towards this, we knew we were not the only ones and were going to reach out to someone to report how unsafe it was!