Bicycle Awareness Zone
A Bicycle Awareness Zone (BAZ) is an area of road shared with motor traffic but marked with yellow bike stencils to increase motorists' awareness of the presence of bicycles on the road. The treatments are advisory only and have no associated signage nor legal effect.
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Kinds of BAZ
Bicycle Awareness Zones come in a few flavours.
Wide kerbside lanes
Where the expected location of cycle traffic is in an ordinary traffic lane, BAZ symbols tend to be located towards the left side of the lane, although in appropriate circumstances they can be placed in the middle of the lane. Where parking is common at the left edge of the lane, the markings will (usually) be placed to the right of parked vehicles.
Parking lanes
When used on a parking lane the markings are positioned straddling the white edge line, clearly indicating that cyclists should be expected on either side of the line. In many cases cars parked in the parking lane will not leave much space to their right, so cyclists need to travel in the traffic lane to avoid either the parked vehicles or their opening doors. As with other vehicles and other lanes, cyclists are required to indicate and change lanes safely.
Design guidelines
BAZs are not described as such in Austroads Part 14, but section 4.4.6 is about similar "advisory treatments". When used in parking lanes they are located fully inside the lane, at the right hand side. The result is cyclists being encouraged to cycle in the dangerous "door zone", and motorists' ire at cyclists who choose not to cycle there.
Queensland Transport is developing guidelines (Cycle Note B10) on the use of what it calls Advisory Cycle Treatments (ACTs) that appear to be based closely on the Austroads guidelines rather than current use in Queensland.
Relation to bike lanes
To casual observers (including most motorists and probably almost as many cyclists), BAZs are often mistaken for and confused with bicycle lanes.
Visual differences
The most noticeable difference is that the bike symbols are coloured yellow (the colour generally used for advisory markings) instead of white (the colour generally used for regulatory markings).
Bicycle lanes are usually 1.2-1.5 metres wide and have a solid white line down the side, with the symbols in the middle of the lane. In contrast, BAZs share space with existing traffic lanes and/or parking lanes, and have no defined boundaries. Where there's a white line the BAZ symbol will usually be centred across the line.
Finally, BAZs also have no associated signage whereas bicycle lanes need "start" and (usually) "end" signs to be regarded as such.
Regulatory differences
As noted above, BAZs are purely advisory and do not require cyclists to follow any particular action, whereas the road rules require cyclists to use bike lanes where they exist ("unless it is impractical to do so").
Relative merits
There is an ongoing debate about whether and when it is preferable to have BAZs rather than bike lanes and vice versa. Part 14 prefers bicycle lanes and suggests ACTs be used only where other options aren't possible, but in recent years they have been widely used by Brisbane City Council and other councils, with supporters often favouring them over bike lanes.
Advantages of bike lanes
The chief advantage of bike lanes is that they provide dedicated road space of a minimum width. The idea is that where there is sufficient space on the road for cars and bicycles to pass each other safely this can be enforced by separating them. Excluding motor vehicles from the lane also makes it more accessible to less experienced cyclists.
Advantages of BAZs
BAZs provide more flexibility to cyclists by not requiring them to stick to a particular part of the road. Road surfaces, especially at their edges, often contain obstacles such as grates and covers, suffer from wear and tear, and accumulate glass and other debris. Avoiding such hazards often requires cyclists to move out of the lane into the general traffic lane (indicating and giving way to do so) and rely on claiming the lane was "impractical" to use.
Planners also get more flexibility because they can provide BAZs where they would not be able to provide bike lanes, due to lack of space, funds or demand. This is also an argument against BAZs; that they allow a lower level of service to be provided where the designers might have otherwise needed to find a way to provide more space to accommodate bike lanes.
