I like the way they park bikes in Melbourne

[merv]

When on holiday in Melbourne I was intrigued to see how bikes were happily parked on the wide footpaths. You'd never get away with that in Wellington. It was my first visit there and the place is full of sportbikes all riding over the rather slippery tram tracks.

[wkid_one]

Walk through central Sydney - there are bikes for africa as well!!! Out the back behind hunter street (where my old head office was) there were about 20-30 bikes parked every day - NICE

[wari]

Oi Merv .... did you go to the SBK ???

[MikeL]

Melbourne obviously got the idea from Italy, where in most towns bikes are parked on footpaths, pedestrian crossings, anywhere.
But then so are cars...
I've often wondered how so much order (and beauty, and style) can come from so much chaos, but that's Italy.
BTW most of the bikes you see in Italian cities are a strange hybrid of bike and scooter - I think the country must have some weird tax regulations.

[SPman]

I regularly park my bike on the footpath in AK and have had no troublr. Tafic wardens seem to be of the opinion that - as long as you dont obstruct the footpath, etc,etc, they dont care......of course, there will always be the exception - i just havent met the sod yet!:eek5:

[merv]

In reply to wari I didn't get to SBK. In fact what I was doing last night was still fiddling and just trying stuff to get attachments to work on this site so chose a kind of random subject because I had just been e-mailing a Polish guy who wants to emigrate to Australia and I had e-mailed him that pic and thought it was kind of an interesting topic. Impression was they treat bikes altogether with a bit more respect over there and this flowed on from the LTSA and ACC discussion where here we seem to get treated like a cash cow.

I went with the family on holiday to Melbourne for two weeks of the school holidays from Easter last year - I missed that year's SBK by one week (Easter was at the end of March last year) and we we came home just before the V8 Supercar races - bugger on both accounts but I didn't have time to holiday without my wife and kids just for the events.

We did go down to Philip Island all the same and checked out the track and the adjacent museum. The day we were there a Superbike riding school was running so bikes were buzzing around the track. The museum was good with stuff on both bikes and cars - they had some of Brocky's cars there as well as one of Aaron Slight's RC45's and Wayne Gardner's championship winning NSR500 and many other bikes and memorabilia.

If you haven't been, like I hadn't until then, it was well worth the look. We stayed on to have dinner at one of the local restaurants in Cowes before heading back to Melbourne and that was OK too. In between the circuit and dinner we took in the penguin parade too.

As for the attachment thing, after experimenting what I have found is that file size was causing me the problems even though on my system they show as below the limit, I have to adjust the jpg format to really shrink the file size down before they will attach - like to something 1/3 the number of bytes listed as attachable - or as I asked a week or too ago am I doing something wrong - I don't know but this worked in the end. The last time I resorted to attaching a linked internet file.

[Coldkiwi]

I agree Merv! I was in melbourne in Sept thought the same thing. Bikes everywhere... bloody nice of them to be on show too :)

SPman... if you wanna meet a bastard parking hitler, go park you bike on an obscure footpath at Botany centre! I had mine on a bizarre stretch of footpath that didn't really lead anywhere (it was a long cut around the edge of a corner) that no one walks on, with it sitting so it left a good clear 1.5 metres to the side of it for sasquatch to walk through and returned to find a STICKER (bastards had the nerve to put adhesive on my tank) on the bike proclaiming that I has illegally parked out of a designated carpark and that i would get towed (yes 'towed') if I didn't move it immediately!

This at a time (pre xmas) where suckers in cars often have to go round in circles for 15 mins to find a park and they want me to hold up another one with a small 250!!

Bloody idiots

 

[wkid_one]

There is an apparent law - that provided there is greater than 2m of space between the building and the edge of the curb - bikes are able to park on the footpath - not sure whether this is true or common law.

I park my bike whereever - footpath, company car park buildings, in carpark buildings free by dodging the barriers, alleys, outside brothels and have had no issues.  I tend to park right hard up against the building - mainly for safety as it means the bike can't be rolled away on steering lock and needs to be picked up.

Admittedly - I tend to only park the bike when I can see it tho.......had an interesting situation parked up near a cafe - a parent let his kid clamber all over the bike, then got shitty at me for parking the bike there when the kid grabbed the red hot header pipe - go figure.  I asked which car was his, as I wished to climb all over it as well (I wouldn't have grabbed the exhaust tho)....PRICK

[merv]

If you are interested here is the Wayne Gardner bike....

[merv]

... and the Aaron Slight bike ....

[denill]

Yeah, I couldn`t believe it when I saw the bikes parked on the Melbourne foot paths. And right up against shop windows in CBD lots of times.

I don`t think I saw ANY parked on the City streets. I s`pose that`s against the law ??

And what about the Dealers bikes on Elizabeth Street??

They would need MUCH bigger shops if they couldn`t park there!

They wouldn`t get away with THAT here.