Six months ago, I was in Palmerston North for a site visit as part of the Active Modes Infrastructure Group (AMIG). As well as our usual meeting, we also took the opportunity to bike around the city looking at the various walking and cycling facilities they have been working on (which is a prompt for me that I should actually do a blog showing you some of these…). But as we were sorting out our Council bikes for the journey, I also noticed this fine beast in the carpark:
In case you haven’t seen one before, this is a custom street sweeper for separated cycleways. It’s narrow enough to generally fit within fairly small cycle facilities (which are often less than 2m wide). And I think Palmerston North has had versions of these for at least a decade now – great stuff!
I’m not sure if I’ve seen any doing the rounds of Christchurch’s cycle routes – maybe I’ve just missed them? As we roll out more separated cycleways around the city, it will be increasingly important for us to maintain them from all the various detritus they seem to attract over time (my partner commented how she has seen a lot of debris lately on some of the cycleways to/from work). I understand that there is a bit of a regular maintenance programme for our cycleway network, but you can also use the Snap Send Solve app to get more immediate attention from Council (especially if there is a serious safety hazard created).
Have you noticed much debris on our cycleways around the city?