Cycling UK Forum

@Bmblbzzz
Travelling from Trumpington park and ride to the central train station our premier Cranebridge Greenway does pass under three underpasses and they are OK. This because they are line of sight and the road above ramps up and over (it was a train line). You can see straight through the underpass before entering them. Elsewhere in Cranebridge there is an underpass as you describe e.g. the Queen Elizabeth with exit ramps at right angles, crazy steep gradients etc etc.

We do have druggies, muggers, and beggars in Cambridge but they tend to be at places like Mill Road or the city centre where they can be near the revenue stream if you get my drift. They do not tend to hang around on the Greenway because cyclists would not stop.

Making an underpass on a road or roundabout is expensive agreed. Stevenage used the bright idea of making the roads ramp up over the paths. However Cranebridge is due to make underneath resemble Gruyere cheese with an autonomous metro (CAM). You have spotted the obvious design flaw with this with the druggies, beggars, and muggers. But it does show that Cranebridge has loads of money. My suggestion is for a few underpasses not a 20 year nightmare of digging up all of central Cranebridge.

What I wonder is the cost to the country of killing on his bike a world renown botanist (Newmarket Road)? I am fine with a vision-zero cost benefit analysis - lets crank the numbers. Cycling with dedicated tracks will beat CAM on every measure

@mjr Thanks for the LTN 1/20 table 5-7 reference. Do you know at which design speed you are supposed to choose when negotiating the Fendon Road roundabaout on a cycle?

I use crashmap when looking at KSIs and from memory Fendon roundabout has had deaths in the past. However it is not the worst roundabout in Cranebridge. That dubious honour goes to the Trumpington Road mini-roundabouts. From memory these are the 2nd worst in the country for cyclist deaths.

I would not trust the new Fendon Road design for young children or vision impaired. Cranebridge unfortunately has a small percentage of drivers who do not stop. I think the design is better and safer that before, but I would still not feel safe if my 23 year-old daughter used this daily let alone a 5 year-old.

This roundabout cost 3 times the initial 800k pounds estimate - moving the utilities caused more trouble than expected. The design also consumed much planning effort.

Will this new design save lives is a key question? If the design saves even 1 life then maybe it has safety benefits and can claim a cost benefit tick. One life costs the country around a million pounds but I would make this higher at around 10 million pounds. Cranebridge cyclists and pedestrians are the new labrats for the rest of the UK it seems.

My own interest is how much more expensive would it be to have provided full grade segregation for pedestrians and cyclists? In other words full Stevenagize the roundabout. Place the cycle and pedestrian paths in an underpass. Using the 3rd dimension especially would help with designs where there is very little room. So what would be the benefits of a Stevenage style roundabout:

* Enhanced safety especially for vulnerable users e.g. school pupils and hospital patients
* Vision zero definitely achieved at this dangerous roundabout for pedestrians and cyclists
* Under-road ducting for utilities available so no need to continually dig up the road/roundabout
* The route could be used by young children and vision impaired people

I note the design for cyclists involves some tight turns and I estimate some of these are 2 meters turning radius. Is 2 meters compatible with LTN 1/20? Table 5-1 is not that clear about tuning radius. Is 2 meters OK or not?

I have to say I felt reasonably safe on the roundabout on a bike. I was constantly looking right then left then right then left etc. But this was better than having to check 180 degrees behind while negotiating 2 lanes of busy roundabout traffic. So my guess is this is safer, but the statistics will speak for themselves.

This video is of interest and gives some insight into the thoughts of the PJA team that worked on LTN 1/20:

https://vimeo.com/444474942

LTN 1/20 is out. This replaces LTN02/08

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.u ... n-1-20.pdf

It has the NL guidelines of:
Directness
Attractiveness
Safety
Coherence
Comfortable

So that is a good start.

Sympathies and unfortunately you are right. If you join CyclingUK then you will have 3rd party insurance.

It may be worth using a camera. Contacting the Police is likely to be a complete waste of time - even with video evidence. But this may vary from force to force.

Folk who live in more peaceful parts of the country will disagree but we need to go for full segregation for sustainable transport (IMHO).

Contact your MP and ask for default liability for vulnerable road users. There are many drivers high as kites and driving without insurance. So you may like to request 3rd part insurance is put on petrol as an extra tax. Although 95% of drivers are fine it is time drivers started paying for their own bad behaviour.

Oxfordshire CC. Oxfordshire Cycling Standard:
http://www.oxfordshire.gov.uk/sites/def ... ndards.pdf

CROW, (2016) Design Manual for bicycle traffic ISBN 978 90 6628 494 4. Ede, The Netherlands.

I believe it is only Malta and Turkey that exceed us in weight but my assertion was for western Europe. The UK gets the prize and our OAPs urgently need to get out and exercise before the obesity time-bomb hits and destroys our 'anychess'.

> but cycling trips are always going to be short

This is an incomplete statement. It should probably read 'cycling trips are short in the UK because of our pusillanimous politicians'. Working in favour of building long-distance cycle routes are these factors:

* Average speed of motor vehicles between towns is plummeting (average speed for an 84 mile journey typically 29.6 mph in best conditions)
* Average speed of motor vehicles worst case within a town is slower than walking (worst case 2 mph and less)
* Woeful public transport average speed especially on weekends (cycling is faster)
* Leisure cycle tourism and the grey pound (think German OAPs and the Danube cycle route)
* Increased participation in extreme cycling events e.g. London-Edinburgh-London
* Expressways are wealth extractors from communities whereas Greenways encourage local spending
* Increased interest in UK Audax events
* The robustness of cycling during emergencies e.g. pandemics, power station failure, terrorist attacks etc
* The massive program of long distance Greenway building seen in EU countries e.g. D, NL, A
* The need to prevent UK from being fattest western European nation
* The need to prevent congestion and pollution in UK cities
* Cycling brings in less tax revenue so they have less to miss-spend

And this is a video that perfectly illustrates why a cycle route needs to be audited and why AVs are useful in doing it:

https://twitter.com/KostelecPlan/status ... 3722718208

@pedals2slowly You raised some great points. Long distance cycle paths need to be thought of as connectors which connect great places that cyclists want to visit.

I would agree with you that Sustrans NCN routes should be designed to a specification and then the route should be regularly audited to ensure it meets the specification.

On MK redways small autonomous delivery vehicles traverse the network delivering groceries. These would be perfect instruments to use to perform an audit of a cyclepath whilst they are carrying out their other delivery functions.

Cyclists probably have much in common with routes for the old steam trains. They like directness and many cyclists like to avoid steep hills!

This is really bad news. Bad experience has shown that when a cycle way is grabbed then it is 'given back worse'. Examples of this are:

Misguided busway at Clay Farm in Cambridge
Marston Ferry Road in Oxford.

The route between Winslow and MK (Bletchley) is a potentially excellent route because it is mainly off-road with few motor vehicles. The route is very direct.

BUT there were things about the route that did make it unusable for some cycle users:
1) About 3 sets of gates that are a barrier to disabled cyclists e.g. handcyclists
2) Gravel surface so the route was not used by road cyclists, HPVs
3) Poor and uneven road surfaces - so caution was needed using this route.

I really fear that East-West rail will give this cycling route back in a worse state. Bad experience shows that developers just seem to love salami-chopping potentially good cycle routes e.g. the Marston Ferry Greenway in Oxford.

If I could just moderate any links to the BBC. Please use extreme caution believing anything pushed out by this organisation. A better topic may be 'Is the BBC an anti-cycling organisation'?

Would the BBC cover cycling events either nationally or locally such as:

London-Edinburgh-London - nope
World Human Power Championship 2018 in UK - nope
Battle Mountain World cycle speed championship with teams from the UK - nope
BAME riders delivering food to sheltering people during Covid using cargo bikes - nope

Covid has seen the astonishing success story of the cycle. Europes fattest western nation has taken to the cycle in droves for essential journeys. At weekends the cycle has outnumbered motor vehicles. Any honest media outlet would be looking at topics such as:

Is our addiction to oil more deadly than Covid?

I have been looking at the Rapid Cycle Prioritisation Tool here:

https://www.cyipt.bike/rapid/

This is to inform bids for Tranche 2 of the DfT Emergency Active Travel Fund e.g. for adding new cycleways. I was curious how important or useful this tool was. I have fed back some comments of my own to the authors. How useful do folks feel this tool is?

An earlier topic requested gpx routes which supported trikes. HPVs are even more varied than just trikes so this thread is intended to document OSM tags that can be used to aid and support the routing of non-standard HPVs.

Tag Description
width Maximum practical width of vehicle e.g. width= 2.4 m
height Maximum practical height of vehicle e.g. height= 1.2 m

There are some additional restrictions to cater for but I do not know the relevant tag. I will describe the restriction (possibly with the wrong name) i.e. this is not a suggested OSM tag name. Additional vehicle restrictions:

turning_circle_radius
clearance, wheel_base_separation, front_wheel_to_front_distance, rear_wheel_to_back_distance -- this to prevent grounding
Surface_type -- if it is gravel this might be a barrier