A draft regulatory framework for the commercial passenger vehicle (CPV) industry seems like a great start to making travel on our roads safer, but bicycles are being left out of the equation.
The draft framework has been released by Safe Transport Victoria for public comment.
The framework does a great job of looking after the interests of the owners, drivers, passengers, and booking service platforms but not necessarily other road users.
While bike riders are very well aware that they are sharing roads and bike lanes with CPVs, those CPVs and their regulators can seem oblivious to us.
Every trip a bike rider takes there is a likelihood of interacting with a CPV as it picks up or drops off passengers. Or worse, as it waits indefinitely for the promise of a passenger.
These interactions occur at or near the kerb, the very place that bike riders hope to safely inhabit.
In some cases, there is potential for CPVs to take advantage of rule exemptions that puts them where you expect a bike to have safe passage, including bike lanes.
The worse thing is that while taxis are clearly identifiable, other CPVs are not.
Nowhere in the draft Monitoring, Compliance and Enforcement policy and strategy documents are these risks identified or analysed.
One way of rectifying this is to create five pillars in the strategy, with “other roads users" added to the existing list of owners, drivers, passengers and business platforms.
This should be easy to do as the drafts are now in consultation phase and are open for feedback until midnight 25 August.
You can fill in a survey or make a submission here.