They’re silver with a yellow tail and seen in growing numbers around the streets of Brisbane. Once an exotic species and thought to be on the brink of extinction, Brisbane’s CityCycle bicycles are pedaling their way to a new life. On a recent visit to this sub-tropical city, I enjoyed a winter weekend wheeling my way around Brisbane’s inner city sights using the city’s bike-share scheme.
Bike-sharing systems allow people to share public bicycles. At the time of writing, this mode of urban mobility is available in over 900 cities worldwide. Their successful use contributes to creating sustainable cities by providing residents and visitors a transport option with low environmental impact. The specific features of each bike-share system vary from city to city.
Known as CityCycle, Brisbane’s bike-share scheme has been reinvigorated to make access to public bicycles easy and affordable. As visitors to the city, we easily registered online for a Casual Pass, costing A$2 each and valid for 24 hours. The next step was to find a CityCycle bicycle station where the share bikes are docked. With 150 stations, this is easy. You’ll see the bicycle stations throughout the CBD, West End, Toowong and Newstead.
Because I like using technology, I downloaded the ‘All Bikes Now’ smartphone application which helped me locate the stations and told me how many bikes were available at each station. This was helpful because another revision to Brisbane’s CityCycle is that you can ride for thirty minutes, return the bike to any station, pick up another one and ride for another thirty minutes for no fee. The app allowed me to plan where we’d return our bikes.
The thirty-minute-free option works best if you want to ride from ‘a to b’, say from your CBD hotel over to Southbank, which is what we planned. However, if you want to stop along the way to take photos (like we did) or look out over Brisbane’s iconic river snaking its way towards Moreton Bay (like we did), then thirty minutes passes very quickly. We found ourselves rushing to dock the bikes within the free half hour. For future visits, I’d pay the extra AUD$2 fee so I can have up to sixty minutes to return the bike to a station.
If you’re a Brisbane local, CityCycle would be very useful for travelling to work, meetings, cafes, university and between workplaces. For access to this style of urban mobility (and healthy exercise), you’ll pay a monthly access fee of A$5. For students, the fee is A$3.
As cyclists in Australia are required by law to wear helmets, bike-share schemes must provide helmets. This fact has dampened the uptake of our bike-share schemes compared to other countries where helmets are optional. On our visit to Brisbane, we took our own helmets but at each station I noticed the bright yellow CityCycle helmets were readily available in the hire-bike baskets and ready for cycling.
On our winter weekend in Queensland’s capital, we rode through the leafy Botanical Gardens, across the Goodwill Bridge, along Southbank Parklands, and enjoyed a morning at the Queensland Art Gallery. Brisbane gave us its best blue sky, mild temperatures and gorgeous sunshine for free. CityCycle gave me transport and exercise for a very affordable two dollars.
Riding through Brisbane’s Botanical Gardens on a CityCycle share bike.
CityCycle bike station near the Queensland Performing Arts Centre at Southbank.
The bikeways around the river are well-signed.
A screenshot of the All Bikes app showing bike station locations, capacity and share-bike availability.
Stopping on the Goodwill Bridge to look out over Brisbane’s iconic river.
This September, I’m riding in Cycle Queensland for the first time. Each spring, about 500 bicycle riders pedal their way through this nine-day cycling holiday. The route changes each year. And each year I’ve been tempted to register but taking time off work, as well as doubts about whether I’d make the distances, has stopped me. Not so this year.
Having ridden in the GreatVic bike ride last December, my first long-distance tour, the distances are no longer daunting. Plus, being able to choose a four-day option makes getting time away from work easier.
There was another incentive too. The 2017 Cycle Queensland is finishing at Currumbin on the Gold Coast, where we live! The prospect of seeing hundreds of bicycle riders streaming jubilantly into Currumbin on the last day of their cycling holiday was just too much. There was no way I was going to miss out.
This year the tour starts in Goondiwindi in western Queensland and weaves its way towards the southern Gold Coast. Jane and I have registered to ride for the final four days from Stanthorpe to the Gold Coast. As Bicycle Queensland put it in their recent blog post about our adventure, that’s 271kms of riding too good to miss!
If you’re interested to know more about Cycle Queensland, go to: www.cycleqld.com.au
The Currumbin yarnbombers have struck again. First, it was the beachfront banksia trees that copped it a couple of years ago. Knotty tree trunks covered with colourful threads knitted with naughtiness. Now the creekside pelicans have been hit. I rode over there on my bike to take a closer look.
Yarnbombers take to the streets and cover objects with knitted or crocheted yarn. Most yarnbombers are women who cloak trees, lampposts, bollards, bicycle racks and hand railings with crazy, colourful patterns of thread. Yarnbombing is playful protest. But the issues embedded in this peaceful activism are serious.
Beautifying bland public spaces, challenging norms about women and their homemaker crafts, and bringing attention to a specific issue, can set the yarnbombers knitting.
In 2013, the Knit Your Revolt Tricycle Gang threaded their yarn around their tricycles and bicycles and took to the streets protesting the assault on civil liberties posed by the Queensland Government’s “anti-bikie” laws. (These laws made it illegal for motorcyclists to ride in groups of three or more.) In July 2017, Knitfest knitters and crocheters will be yarn bombing the small rural town of Maleny in support of refugees seeking a new life in Australia. The focal point will be a very large tree where yarnbombing will reflect the idea of ‘Safe Harbour’.
However, yarnbombers are not always so public in their intentions. For some, being the anonymous yarnbomber, secretly spinning their threads to cover public objects, often under the cover of dark, taking the risk to engage in some public naughtiness, is part of the yarnbomber ethic. And it looks like this variety of anonymous yarnbombers have visited our creekside pelicans.
In 2004, after the annual Swell Sculpture Festival, eleven pelican sculptures were installed beside Currumbin Creek. Each sculpture sits atop a timber post and portrays a pelican composed with machinery parts. Since last week, the pelicans have been wearing knitted hats and scarves!
After quizzical looks subside, a local whodunit emerges. Who is the pelican yarnbomber? This, I admit, is one mystery I hope stays unsolved. The more interesting question is: ‘why?’
We can only guess at the yarnbomber’s motivations and message but if it’s something like looking after our local pelicans, the fish they eat, the waterways they swim in, then the yarnbombers have won my respect. But then, maybe it’s just a little reminder to rug up for winter. Either way, I’m happy to see our yarnbombed pelicans as I pedal by.
Thanks to:
- The Conversation for unravelling some of the mysteries of yarnbombing,
- Artist, Richard Moffatt for The Pelicans, a wonderful piece of public art that is much enjoyed; and
- Our mysterious yarnbombers.
a bike for all seasons 