Norwest Boulevard on a weekday morning is a study in near misses. Cars turning left across the footpath. A courier van reversing. Someone on a bike riding the gutter because the path was too narrow to share, then giving up and taking the lane. That was the daily rhythm of the place for years, and most people who moved through it stopped noticing how odd it was.
Walk the same stretch now and it reads differently. The Hills Shire Council has converted 2.6 kilometres of footpath along the eastern side of the boulevard, from Windsor Road down to Old Windsor Road, into a shared path built for both walking and riding. The NSW Government paid for it through the Get NSW Active program.
Start at the Windsor Road end and the first thing that registers is width. There is room for a pram and a cyclist to pass each other without either party performing a small act of courage. The second thing is the side streets. Every crossing point along the route has been reworked, with new pedestrian and cyclist crossings and refuges built where the path meets intersecting roads. A refuge in the middle of a side street sounds like a small thing on paper. Standing in one, halfway across, waiting for a gap that is actually a gap, it does not feel small at all.
Keep going and the path starts doing the job it was designed for, which is joining things up. Shared paths already existed along Windsor Road and Old Windsor Road. The middle section was the missing piece, and closing it turns three separate bits of infrastructure into one usable route. Norwest Metro is on it. So is Norwest Marketown. So is Bella Vista Farm, which is the kind of destination people drive to and then wonder why they drove.
Norwest is a workplace precinct first, and precincts like that tend to be designed around the car park. The people who work there are not, by and large, weekend cyclists in lycra. They are the ones ducking out for lunch, walking to the metro, riding in from Bella Vista or Baulkham Hills because it is quicker than parking. Council’s reasoning is that this group should have something better than an awkward strip of concrete, and that when short trips are easy on foot or by bike, fewer people bother starting the engine.
The State Government’s view runs along similar lines. The transport portfolio has said the work makes it safer and easier to walk and ride through one of Sydney’s busiest employment precincts, and that the Minns Labor Government intends to keep building infrastructure of this kind. The stated goal is safer connections to public transport, workplaces, shops and services, along with healthier and more connected communities. Get NSW Active was set up to make walking and cycling easier, safer and more enjoyable for people of all ages and abilities right across the state.
Construction was not painless, and Council has acknowledged as much, thanking residents, local businesses and road users for their patience while the work was underway, and thanking the NSW Government for backing it. Anyone who sat through the detours will probably accept the trade. The proof is the number of people already using the thing.