I ride and I vote
How cyclists became the new ‘Howard’s Battlers’
YOU see them in their hundreds every morning on your way to work. Juddering through potholes along the kerb in Sydney Road. Lined up in single file, a dozen or more, at the traffic lights in Royal Parade. Dodging pedestrians getting off trams in the stretch between Trinity College and Grattan Street. Weaving in and out of the traffic at the Haymarket roundabout.
They ride bikes. And they vote.
In the fight for supremacy in Melbourne’s inner city in this state election, there is a new cohort of swinging voters to be wooed: cyclists.
It’s a sign of the times that the former Labor strongholds of Melbourne, Richmond, Northcote, Prahran, and Brunswick are now knife-edge marginal seats.
In each of these seats, Labor is not battling its traditional Liberal rivals but is facing challenges from the Greens instead. Three of the five — Melbourne, Prahran and, after last year’s byelection, Northcote — have already gone Green and for Labor there is a real risk that the other two will fall on November 24.
Just as ute-owning, self-employed tradies were the mythical ‘Howard’s Battlers’ who propelled the Liberals to four successive federal election victories between 1996 and 2007, commuting cyclists could hold the key to success in these five inner city seats.
The Greens have clearly identified cyclists as possibly holding the key to success in these seats, and Labor has no choice but to follow. Both parties are throwing everything at winning their votes.
But while there is only upside for the Greens in pursuing the two-wheeled vote, for Labor it serves as a neat metaphor for how the party must reconcile two conflicting constituencies if it is to win power.
This is familiar territory for Labor. Just as it is frequently torn between wanting to appeal to both an inner city constituency who want an end to coal-fueled power and its traditional blue-collar base who are mostly concerned about jobs, the danger for Labor is to strike a balance between appealing to Green-leaning cyclists while not alienating its suburban base who rely on cars to get from A to C, detouring to B in between.
And the really weird thing is that this isn’t even really about cycling.
You don’t need a degree in political science to recognise how cyclists are really just a proxy for a much larger group of progressive voters both Labor and the Greens are seeking to woo. And this is a real problem for Labor.
This article began when I was trying to make sense in my head why the Greens would be putting forward a policy so patently dumb as permanently closing a lane of Sydney Road so it could only be used by cyclists.
Why have cyclists become such a potent political force?
After all, compared to motorists or users of public transport, the numbers of people who cycle to work, school or university are tiny. Yet, in the inner city at least, cyclists wield a political influence well beyond their numbers.
This is because cyclists have become a cypher for a certain type of progressive politics. Even if you don’t ride a bike, you may recognise in cyclists, and even sympathise with them, as fellow travellers: pro-environment, anti-corporate greed, communal thinking people.
Not the lycra clad executives on their $10,000 bikes who come together every weekend to form a Tour De France-sized peloton along the roads that follow the coastline of Melbourne’s southern bayside suburbs.
Here we are talking about commuters on fixies and rusted road bikes who cycle in jeans and sneakers or work clothes. To this group, the more humble the bike, the greater the status symbolism as an indicator that the person in the saddle shares your craft beer drinking, op shopping, quinoa and kale eating values.
These are the same people who, if they own a car — most likely a battered Honda CRV or Subaru Forester — have plastered it with Stop Adani and Kids Off Nauru stickers, who buy their fruit and vegies exclusively from the organics stall at the Vic Market, and who know their local tattooed and pierced barista by name.
Yes, it’s a stereotype, but understand this: they are moving en masse into suburbs like Brunswick, Thornbury and Kensington, rapidly replacing the old Greek, Italian and Irish Catholic families that Labor could once rely on to deliver it a primary vote of more than 60% every state and federal election.
So it’s smart politics to support better infrastructure and safety for cyclists as a form of virtue signalling with wider appeal to all progressive voters, even those who don’t own a bike.
Now, as Labor seeks to stem the rising Green tide, it must find new ways of appealing to these voters, without alienating its traditional base — no easy balancing act.
This is the classic Labor dilemma, and in part it is caused by the party machine’s obsession with the Greens. Spend some time with hardcore Labor activists, and it almost seems as they are more greatly motivated by scoring points against the Greens than they are with taking on the conservative side of politics.
Indeed, you could almost be mistaken for thinking that some Labor obsessives would be happy to lose the government to the Liberals as long as they were able to beat the Greens in a handful of progressive inner city seats.
The Greens first emerged as a threat to Labor in the inner city about a decade ago, but it wasn’t until the previous election, in 2014, that they won seats in the ring surrounding the CBD. Coincidentally, or maybe not so coincidentally, it is at about the same time that both parties began explicitly chasing the cyclist vote.
Nowhere is this felt more than Brunswick, where an estimated 10% of the voting population rides to work, 10 times the statewide average.
To be fair, the current pursuit of cycling votes, and the crafting of transport policies to appeal to bike riders, came out of a genuine desire to respond to a tragedy.
In March 2015, Alberto Paulon, a 25-year-old Italian chef, was riding south on Sydney Road when he was knocked into the path of a truck by a person opening a car door, dying at the scene.
Days later, more than 500 cyclists took over Sydney Road in a protest demanding better safety for cyclists on the roads. Whether intentional or not, the optics around the rally suggested it had been organised by the Greens.
Both the Greens and the Labor MP for Brunswick, Jane Garrett, scrambled to respond to the tragedy, and so a battle for the cyclist vote was inadvertently born.
This election has seen both parties up the ante with naked appeals to bike riders.
The Greens have advocated a dedicated bike lane to replace on-street parking in Sydney Road, which is used by 19,000 cars and just 1000 cyclists a day. This would form part of a $250 million, 17 kilometre, cycling ‘superlane’ from Elsternwick to Coburg, which ‘coincidentally’ would pass through three of the Labor-held marginals the party is hoping to capture.
Labor would retain on-street parking — a move welcomed by local traders — and would instead devote resources to upgrading the Upfield path, a shared pedestrian and bike path which runs alongside a railway line, about 150 metres to the west of Sydney Road.
Both Labor’s Cindy O’Connor and the Greens’ Tim Read have been desperate to push their own cycling credentials.
And it is not just the larger parties getting into the act. The other day a flyer arrived in the letterbox from an independent candidate called George Georgiou, and the overwhelming message was fewer cars and more cyclists on local roads.
As a regular cyclist, I am probably their target market, but the Greens proposal for a bikes only lane strikes me as just stupid.
As someone who uses a bike to commute to the city most weekdays, but also drives regularly down Sydney Road on weekends ferrying children to sport and running other errands, closing part of the road to motor traffic is both unnecessary and incredibly disruptive.
It would clog traffic in a road which already struggles to cope with both trams and cars, while barely providing a solution for cyclists. Any bike rider who wants to avoid Sydney Road already can easily and safely do so by using the quiet backstreets within metres of the main thoroughfare. The Upfield path is a little more problematic because of its narrowness and the presence of pedestrians, but with the upgrade promised by Labor would be fit for purpose.
Meanwhile, the cycling lobby — sensing its newfound political strength — is flexing its muscles by pushing the envelope even further, campaigning for relaxation of mandatory helmet laws and the right to ride on footpaths.
No doubt, Melbourne could be a great cycling city. But as cyclists grow in numbers, they also grow in arrogance.
Some of the worst behaviour I have witnessed on the road has come from cyclists. In a recent commute, within minutes I saw one cyclist run a red light and narrowly avoid hitting pedestrians crossing the road, and another change lanes with only a cursory glance at the cars around him as if it was his divine right to use the road unimpeded.
I’ve seen cyclists cut off cars, cyclists run other cyclists off the road, and cyclists scare the bejesus out of pedestrians on walking paths.
Because of this poor behaviour, the cyclists-motorists debate has become increasingly polarised. Rather than looking for better ways to share the roads, both insist on asserting their own rights without acknowledging each other’s. This plays out on social media, where my recent observations about poor cycling etiquette degenerated into a slanging match between bike riders and car users.
This is the danger for Labor as well. How far does it go to capture the cyclist vote without losing the support of motorists? It seems Labor is damned if it does, and damned if it doesn’t.
But the Greens don’t have this problem. As polling day on November 24 fast approaches, they are hoping that the cyclist vote will be enough to produce a progressive wave to deliver them victory in Brunswick, Melbourne, Northcote, Richmond and Prahran.
As I publish this article, the headline on the front page of the local weekly, the Moreland Leader is ‘Greens peddle parking ban’ above a story about the policy to create a bikes only lane in Sydney Road.
It will be fascinating to see if cyclists can influence the election result, or if the power of the cyclist vote turns out to be a myth.
But more broadly, has Labor discovered a way to stem the flow of inner city progressive voters to the Greens while holding onto its traditional base? Or will 2018 be the year when the Green tide finally overwhelms it in Melbourne’s inner city?
