Rachel Smith: ''Brisbane needs to normalise cycling.''

“If we are really going to get people out of their cars and make cycling contestable ... for people who don’t cycle at the moment ... we need to do what Copenhagen and Amsterdam are doing,” Ms Smith said.

“[There bicycles are] completely separated and protected from parked and moving cars so you don’t have to stop at every intersection. We don’t ask people to get out of their cars and push it across the intersection, but we think it’s perfectly acceptable for people to push their bikes and walk.

“We’ve got to stop making it a marginal transport mode – stop kind of stigmatising it that it’s ‘just for Lycra’, and we have to make it so that people can ride a bike, and it’s easy and it’s safe and it’s something that they want to do.”



But schemes like CityCycle weren’t necessarily the answer, Ms Smith said, who has recently returned from a stint in Berlin where she was recognised for her planning work in southeast Queensland as a participant in the leading international urban think-tank BMW Guggenheim Lab.



“I’m a firm believer you can’t take a concept from one city and plonk it in another,” she said.



“We took the [CityCycle] bike hire scheme because it was successful in Paris and we plonked it here, and it was never right for Brisbane.”



Instead, the city should look to developing bicycle superhighways with the same enthusiasm devoted to infrastructure for cars, with the North Brisbane Cycleway she planned as part of Brisbane’s northern transport corridor standing as an example.



Though funding for big, new infrastructure projects is limited at a state and local government level, Ms Smith said the best way for the city to harness pedal power began with people power.



Crowd-sourcing ideas and donations should be seriously considered as a means of seeing public works delivered that the public really wanted, she said.



“Nobody has ever crowd-funded a bicycle-way before so I’d like to see if that’s possible,” Ms Smith said.



“I’ve already been approached by a crowd-funding platform and I’d like to see if we can possibly look at crowd-funding a cycling superhighway in Brisbane.



“I have this fantastic idea to build my first bicycle superhighway as a floating bicycle superhighway, linking St Lucia with Hamilton Northshore.”



Floating, because it would be made of polymer, Ms Smith said, inspired by a presentation at the Guggenheim Lab from UK firm Vertech which manufactured bridges and rail-sleepers from recycled waste plastic in Europe.



“Waste never goes away ... so we need to start looking at our landfill as the new minefield for infrastructure,” she said.



“Years ago people would have laughed, but when you’ve got the Guggenheim backing you people take you seriously.”



Ms Smith said these ideas and more would be discussed at a AECOM forum slated for October, which would serve as a local follow to the exclusive Berlin lab which saw plans for a series of public programs under the theme ‘Confronting comfort’.



The mobile laboratory, designed by Tokyo-based architects Atelier Bow-Wow, debuted in New York in August 2011 and will culminate with an exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2013.



Ms Smith was nominated for the project by former Mayor of Bogota and international urbanist Enrique Penalosa and selected by the BMW Guggenheim Lab advisory committee and curators Maria Nicanor and David van der Leer of The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.