Deloitte Ride Across Britain ( 2011 - ongoing )

Specific board for this popular undertaking.
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mjr
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Re: Deloitte Ride Across Britain ( 2011 - ongoing )

Post by mjr »

You might like to check what AASHTO is, but their work doesn't apply to any roads used by RAB, thankfully. 3.7m is from the Design Manual for Roads and Bridges which is used for most roads since 1992. Few roads narrower than that have been left unchanged for 26 years. Recently, the focus seems to have been on widening shoulders and hatching central areas to narrow wider lanes. Before 1992, there was Highway Link Design and before that Layout of Roads in Rural Areas.

Unlaned roads tend to have very low motor traffic levels, so cycle groups on those aren't hindering many motorists. Certainly not enough for such groups to be the root of much road rage against cyclists.
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FasterFerret
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Re: Deloitte Ride Across Britain ( 2011 - ongoing )

Post by FasterFerret »

mjr wrote:You might like to check what AASHTO is


I did, ROFL...

And perhaps we should start another thread...

How about:

In 1973, the UK’s “roads in urban areas” (“Roads in urban areas (3rd impression)” HMSO; 1973) recommended lane widths of

9 ft (2.75m)
10 ft (3,05m)
11 ft (3.35m)
12 ft (3,66m)

:lol:

So, and I ask because I am genuinely interested, how much of the UK's road network, aside from MRN roads, do you think are that wide? We have plenty of 10ft roads that have more than enough traffic on them. I genuinely think that 3.65 or 3.7 is not 'normal' even though it might be 'standard'. Maybe I just live in the wrong part of the country - it certainly explains my love of 'lanes riding'.
charliepolecat
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Re: Deloitte Ride Across Britain ( 2011 - ongoing )

Post by charliepolecat »

Those road widths seem awfully narrow, although probably right for British roads, but are you actually stating a single lane width so double for total width? In any case, I didn't think there was a standard width and roads just sort of happened developing often from muddy lanes to tarmacked surfaces wandering off into the countryside. :roll:
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Re: Deloitte Ride Across Britain ( 2011 - ongoing )

Post by rareposter »

FasterFerret wrote:So back to one of my original question, that can only be answered by someone from or has done the event:

"What kind of briefing they get about thinning out and breaking into groups to allow cars to leapfrog.?"


Every night there is a rider briefing, starting on the Friday in Land's End. The first one covers a lot of stuff and obviously people are nervous, apprehensive, a bit unsure about what to expect...
Throughout the week, as people learn the routine, what is expected / requested of them etc they start to drip-feed in more technical things around group riding.

That said, it's often quite difficult to manage to split a group - it requires some coordinated action to get one lot to push on at the front and one lot to hold back (which in turn runs the risk of pushing that group backwards into a group behind that are coming up...) It usually works out pretty well but it can take a couple of hours to thin out, espeically in urban environments where you've just got a group to split and suddenly they're held up at the lights and it all comes back together again. The other one is where a group stops for photos or a mechanical and suddenly swells in number as more groups come by. However it was possible to ride alone, I saw quite a few people very content to ride by themselves or with just one other person.
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Re: Deloitte Ride Across Britain ( 2011 - ongoing )

Post by Vorpal »

Is it really such a big deal to go a couple of miles at bicycle pace up a hill?
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mjr
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Re: Deloitte Ride Across Britain ( 2011 - ongoing )

Post by mjr »

FasterFerret wrote:How about:

In 1973, the UK’s “roads in urban areas” (“Roads in urban areas (3rd impression)” HMSO; 1973) recommended lane widths of

Sort of. There's a table and 12ft is the most common recommended, with 10ft and 9ft only for residential distributor and access roads (housing estates, essentially) and 10ft for business/industrial rear accesses.

But I don't think the posted picture or the road in the complaint that triggered this or much of the RAB are in urban areas, so the correct publication would be the sibling one called "Layout of Roads in Rural Areas" (HMSO; 1968) which says at the start of chapter 3 "The standard lane width for dual carriageways and two lane single carriageways is 12ft." It allows 11ft in exceptional situations.

That publication is rather notorious in cycle campaigns, though, as it also led to the neglect and removal of many of the 1930s cycleways which Carlton Reid is now trying to bring back, with its assertion that "as the volume of cycle traffic in rural areas has fallen by over 10% a year in recent years, cycle tracks are rarely justified." We're still seeing the legacy of that, with the DfT so far mainly funding cycle tracks only in cities and national parks despite comments about putting them on new roads.

FasterFerret wrote:So, and I ask because I am genuinely interested, how much of the UK's road network, aside from MRN roads, do you think are that wide? We have plenty of 10ft roads that have more than enough traffic on them. I genuinely think that 3.65 or 3.7 is not 'normal' even though it might be 'standard'. Maybe I just live in the wrong part of the country - it certainly explains my love of 'lanes riding'.

"Normal" means "standard" - you may mean it's not widespread or commonplace. I suspect most roads have been "improved" since the 1960s to meet the 12ft standard if not the modern 3.7m, but I don't think we know for sure.

The closest information I found was a parliamentary answer that says amongst other things "The latest estimate of mean road width for A roads in urban areas is 11.2 metres" and because the narrower 9/10 ft widths haven't been standard in rural areas for 50 years, then I'd expect rural A roads to average wider... but averages hide a multitude of sins, of course, being open to distortion from a few very wide A roads like maybe the A282 or probably longer ones.
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kanvaskeating
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Re: Deloitte Ride Across Britain ( 2011 - ongoing )

Post by kanvaskeating »

FasterFerret wrote:
kanvaskeating wrote:I just bailed after 2 miserable days of the deloitte lejog


That's a lot of money to lay out for two days. Did you get any money back?

No money back .It was my decision to bail.Ive read alot of positive reviews I just wasn't feeling it.
Back to enjoying sportives and club rides.
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Re: Deloitte Ride Across Britain ( 2011 - ongoing )

Post by Paulatic »

Vorpal wrote:Is it really such a big deal to go a couple of miles at bicycle pace up a hill?

If someone goes to work five days every week up that 2 ml hill at 50mph it takes a couple of minutes so maybe that person allows 10 minutes to get to work.
One day that that same person sets off and is stuck behind cyclists doing 7 mph up that hill. Takes around 17 minutes or 8 times longer than expected. That person is late for work and has some pay docked.
Now ask that person if it’s a big deal.

Or maybe ask my OH who four years ago was stuck behind Deloitte riders for over 4 Miles on her way to work.
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Re: Deloitte Ride Across Britain ( 2011 - ongoing )

Post by mjr »

And that sort of not allowing enough time for the journey is why some motorists speed through roadworks, don't stop to correct vehicle faults like replacing failed bulbs and rage madly at farm traffic!
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rareposter
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Re: Deloitte Ride Across Britain ( 2011 - ongoing )

Post by rareposter »

Paulatic wrote:Or maybe ask my OH who four years ago was stuck behind Deloitte riders for over 4 Miles on her way to work.


Not that you're bitter about that in any way or still going on about it FOUR YEARS later... :roll:
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Re: Deloitte Ride Across Britain ( 2011 - ongoing )

Post by Paulatic »

rareposter wrote:
Paulatic wrote:Or maybe ask my OH who four years ago was stuck behind Deloitte riders for over 4 Miles on her way to work.


Not that you're bitter about that in any way or still going on about it FOUR YEARS later... :roll:


I’m not at all ( go back to 25th September 2017 in this thread if you don’t believe me ) but my OH will bring it up in any conversation about cyclists. Problem is during that four years the number of people with similar memories increases as the same thing seems to happen year on year. This year it’s the Postman on that route who is keen to voice his opinion on cyclists regarding that Thursday and bear in mind 3 of the postmen I know out of that office are keen cyclists.
I appreciate you voicing your opinion from someone who is involved with the event your feedback has been interesting although not always factually correct. You always give the impression that you move on along with the event. You don’t linger for a week to hear the criticism levelled at the riders and because you don’t hear it and appear to never see a problem it’s all good then?
I’m only a small bubble along the route and can only imagine how many bubbles there are along the way having the same conversations. Most of those conversations will be without a cyclist to inject some reasoning into it.

Just because you don’t hear those voices in your environment doesn’t mean they don’t happen and it also doesn’t mean they are less significant.
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Re: Deloitte Ride Across Britain ( 2011 - ongoing )

Post by Vorpal »

First of all, cyclists are just traffic. If I was late for work because I was held up by traffic, I would have no one but myself to blame. It doesn't matter what mode of transport I am using, or what mode of transport the traffic consists of.

My experience with this sort of thing is as a marshall for races where there have been signs up for a week or more that there will be a cycle event on such and such a date and that delays are possible. The event date would arrive, and I would be standing on a corner, stopping traffic for typically around 30 seconds whilst a cycle race goes by. Sometimes it was more. Sometimes we let a few cars through between between the front of the race, the bunch, and/or the back of the race, especially if they let us know that they were going a different direction from the race, or something. Other times, we'd have to hold traffic for several minutes because the whole race was strung out. If drivers were following the race, they might have the delay of the closed junction, and then going slow behind the race.

I do understand that this can be inconvenient, but it's far less troublesome than the car park that most main roads near cities become every weekday at peak times.

I would take abuse from a minority of drivers who felt frustrated or offended by being subjected to 'unreasonable' delays.

The thing is, though, that they were typically delayed by more than twice as long, travelling on the A12, A127, or A14 to get to work everyday.

Somehow, 20 minute delays on the A12 are a part of everyday life, but a 4 minute delay for a cycle race is unacceptable?
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Re: Deloitte Ride Across Britain ( 2011 - ongoing )

Post by Paulatic »

Vorpal wrote:My experience with this sort of thing is as a marshall for races where there have been signs up for a week or more that there will be a cycle event on such and such a date and that delays are possible.

I do understand that this can be inconvenient, but it's far less troublesome than the car park that most main roads near cities b.

Somehow, 20 minute delays on the A12 are a part of everyday life, but a 4 minute delay for a cycle race is unacceptable?


See what you did there...couldn’t argue with anything you say. But RAB, when I’ve seen them, has someone putting directional arrows out just in front and someone taking them down right at the back. No one is prewarned and yet rareposter informs us that Police Scotland are. Yet I still recall the last National 400 I rode out of Fife and the police when notified wouldn’t allow more than 4 riders off at a time every two minutes. I’m not saying that was a good idea btw just relating what happened when the police were forewarned.
Busy roads, cities, yes delays are commonplace and 4 minutes extra on a 30 minute journey is peanuts.
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Re: Deloitte Ride Across Britain ( 2011 - ongoing )

Post by Vorpal »

The point for including that was that *despite* prewarning, people are still taken by surprise, and abuse marshalls.
“In some ways, it is easier to be a dissident, for then one is without responsibility.”
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Re: Deloitte Ride Across Britain ( 2011 - ongoing )

Post by rareposter »

FasterFerret wrote:And was put off by:

The many memories of being kept awake at night by people snoring on various camping trips
The unnecessary 5:30 wake-up calls - even my longest day didn't need me to get out of bed that early. On your own faff is kept to a minimum, you are on your own schedule not someone else's
The thought of being constantly damp/never quite dry - I got a few good soakings, but never had a problem with getting my kit dry overnight in a B&B. I don't think that's a problem unique to RAB, anyone who camps has to face the same issue. I don't mind it for a weekend, but when the route is challenging enough in itself it is something that I would rather not deal with.



Just picking up on this point made a couple of pages back. I've been flicking through the comments on the RAB forum - most of them still full of the glow of achievement, questions around "what would you do differently next time", people discussing other events, tours etc to do. It's genuinely lovely to read most of it, people are really enthused, there have been folk get back in the sadlle after a long lay off, some who've lost loads of weight and have been inspired to do more.

The 5.30am thing is just something you have to accept and to be fair, everyone knows about it in advance. There were plenty of people on the ride who would leave at 7am and be in base camp by 2.30pm each day. You could argue that they probably didn't need to leave at 7, they could have had a long lie in and left at 10am but then that brings it's own problems with the wider ride logistics like broom wagon, mechanical support, how long each camp is "active" for before breakfast gets stopped and the crew move on to the next basecamp...
Equally there were plenty of people who would leave at 7 and take literally all day to get to the next basecamp and they required the full support of the broom wagon and chaperones. That's why it's all done within "windows" of activity - you've got to look at the overall picture.

Morning camp is active from about 4.30am to about 9.30 at which point the final chaperones and the broom leave (last riders should have left by 8.30am at the absolute latest). Next camp is active from 2pm to lights out so you've got catering staff and crew to get 100 miles up the road in the space of about 5hrs max. There are cut-off times at each feed station too.
It's just logistics and obviously for a big group it's very different to an individual rider or a small group of evenly matched people.

As you say though, some people like (and need) that, some people can put up with it and some folk would hate it!
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