Cycling UK Forum

What is misleading for a potential UK customer about the term 'gravel bike' is that the gravel roads for which they're primarily conceived, widespread in the USA, barely exist in the UK. They're properly constructed and maintained roads, built with traditional Macadam upward-grading structure, but w...

Anyone coming on our land without permission will be shot on sight. On another thread about the book of trespass I believe you said you didn't mind if people walked through your land, or something like that. Have you had a change of heart? Sorry but I remember the most useless things at times. The ...

Is that an Evans tandem? The glimpse of the name on the frame looks as if it might be. If so, it would be coeval with the bike on which I had my first cycling experience - initially in a Watsonian sidecar, subsequently as stoker with Kiddiecranks.

Navara wrote:.I've always got the impression that had bikes and horses been given the same access as walkers the Right to roam act would never have gone through.Just my opinion.

Not just yours. A near-certainty, I would say. It would never have made it through the Lords.

The Government plan for radical reform of the planning system has cropped up a number of times on other threads. The importance of this for cycling infrastructure is that, at the moment, most new local road developments, including cycling provision, are funded not by local authorities but by the dev...

One point about 'Dutch reach' which I haven't seen mentioned is that it's presumably far easier to become habitual in a left-hand drive car. That's because you use your right hand, which for the majority is the dominant hand. In the UK it will be more of a challenge to get general acceptance when yo...

Is that enough to make the old men in limos running some councils order their car-crazy highways departments to rewrite their design handbooks (or adopt someone else's) and possibly retrain a few crap designers? No, it isn't. What it does, however, is add significant power to the arguments of young...

I suspect that unless national government starts putting motorway-like sums into cycling infrastructure, most of it will continue to be funded by builders and this announcement does not appear to require councils to spend builders' funding only on standards-compliant stuff. What we really need is f...

The Panglosses of my acquaintance are rather nicer than the Jeremiahs. Most of us, I guess, are somewhere in between, and sway one way or the other as the wind blows.

Experience shows that residents want through traffic banned but to retain complete access for themselves. ie They are generally opposed to self-enforcing schemes with bollards and expect access restricted by signs, becoming very frustrated when there isn't enforcement 24/7. AFAIK, this is one of th...

Hard to keep up with today's sequence of government pro-active travel announcements. Now consultation lanched on Highway Code revision, to include: " An explicit road user hierarchy, with vulnerable road users at the top. This means priority for those walking and cycling over those turning at s...

I can't see this getting anywhere unless change is imposed. Also, as far as I can tell, councils don't have to do this unless they want to. I can very well imagine that some councils would just look at that and decide they don't need money for cycle routes, especially if they are going to be *inspe...

And guess what, Government answers a plea in a CUK Forum thread... "Active Travel England, to be led by a yet-to-be-appointed commissioner for walking and cycling, will refuse to fund paint-only bike lanes – without physical barriers or protection from cars – or routes where cyclists and pedest...

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/jul/27/residents-to-get-new-decision-making-powers-in-cycling-revolution " Residents will get powers to banish through-traffic from local streets and councils will be prevented from building substandard cycle lanes under what Downing Street has billed a...

In my view this is the key issue if any real progress is to be made towards useful infrastructure. Given that successive governments are adamant that delivery of cycling infrastructure is a matter for local authorities, there are only going to be results if planning legislation is far more specific ...