Roll out more cash for better network

I don't know exactly why it is that cycling makes me happy.

Maybe it's just the pleasure of the exercise or maybe it's the fact that I'm not stuck in deadening traffic.

Whatever it is, cycling makes me feel great. I'm one of the lucky ones - I can choose to ride to work. Many people can't.

There are few things more frustrating than sitting in a grinding traffic jam. Economists can model the economic costs of sitting in great columns of immobile traffic and planners can do their best to widen the roads to accommodate ever more lanes of single-occupant vehicles.

But ultimately it comes down to choice.

We don't sit in traffic jams for fun but because for many of us there is no other option.

Public transport is often packed or too infrequent and, in most places, our cycling networks are a broken and disconnected patchwork.

It doesn't have to be this way.

In 15 years, we could complete the half-finished cycle freeways, put in 2000km of cycle boulevards and link every railway station, school and shopping centre to the Perth bicycle network. We can do this by allocating only 2.4 per cent of our State travel budget - $52 million per year.

Scott Ludlam is a Greens Senator