You can forget about your Dutch-style cycling facilities

[Steady rider]

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/gall ... ies-mapped

I wonder if many workers from Stevenage have to travel longer distances and this may affect cycling patterns.

If you compare York to Selby for cycling to work, they differ quite a lot. Both are mainly flat. Good topic for a study.

[The utility cyclist]

...Even Dutch style segregated infra...

Personally I think that this is a bit of a myth, much of the increased convenience of cycling in Dutch urban areas is that lots of small streets are one way for cars, all it requires is signage and a change in road users attitudes so that cyclists can comfortably travel in the opposing direction to motor traffic. The segregated infrastructure that they have is really to keep cyclists out of the way on the genuinely fast roads, or especially busy ones in urban areas. Personally I see this as facilitating both modes of transport in a way which shared use certainly doesn't seem to in practice. What the Dutch have, and Little Britain lacks, is a sensible approach towards selecting a mode of travel which is appropriate to the distance to be travelled which is inherent in their planning system.

I keep saying that we should just turn our road system into a one way only and the other side of the carriageway for people on bikes, no need to build any 'infra' as it's already there, we just need to take it back

[The utility cyclist]

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/gallery/2016/jun/08/how-far-distance-workers-commute-uk-cities-mapped

I wonder if many workers from Stevenage have to travel longer distances and this may affect cycling patterns.

If you compare York to Selby for cycling to work, they differ quite a lot. Both are mainly flat. Good topic for a study.

Many of the big employers have gone from the industrial estate and Stevenage has a higher unemployment rate than the East region in general, the big hospital is always chock full of cars, though they've built a multi story car park so cars stay nice and dry the cycle parking is exposed to the elements and there's still no real safety factor with regards to entry and egress for people on bikes.

From what I can gather many workers in Stevenage work outside the Borough - around 40-45%, it used to be 80% in the 60s), although a fair chunk of that might only be in neighbouring N. or East Herts there are ZERO cycle network links and the distances whilst modest in some cases can be fairly big given how rural the area is,
For instance if you live in East Stevenage it's circa 8 miles to get to Hitchin town centre, crossing two busy sections of trunk road at the town boundary where it adjoins the A1 or you cycle around the back of the old town and go via gravely village. You also have the fact the roads leading out of the town are single-carriageway and generally high density/high speed or just very narrow and twisty no matter which direction.

When people can just get in their cars and drive to work in a short space of time and never have problems parking it's hardly surprising that there's a low uptake in modal share

[Steady rider]

Thanks for the info about Stevenage. Hospital parking seems to have gone to multi story - cash income, charging people to visit their relatives or friends who are sick or injured.

[mjr]

Thanks for the info about Stevenage. Hospital parking seems to have gone to multi story - cash income, charging people to visit their relatives or friends who are sick or injured.

Not what I expected to read on this forum. You only pay if you drive to it, Shirley? People can still visit for free, just not store their oversize motor vehicle for free.

[Steady rider]

Taking a cyclist prospective, it may look that way. Taken from another point of view, someone is taken seriously ill, suspected heart condition, advise to go immediately to hospital, taken by car - pay as you park, not so good, may wait for 3 hours etc.

[reohn2]

Taking a cyclist prospective, it may look that way. Taken from another point of view, someone is taken seriously ill, suspected heart condition, advise to go immediately to hospital, taken by car - pay as you park, not so good, may wait for 3 hours etc.

Or perhaps nearest and dearest being ferried by friends or relatives,not all visitors live local or would find cycling there convenient.
When Mrs R2 was in Christies Hosiptal Manchester some years back I visited her on the bike,a 40 mile round trip.But it wasn't a pleasant ride and I only did it twice,the rest of the time I used the car as it was quicker and I could take her what she needed whilst in there,I think the parking cost £3 or £4.

[MikeF]

When cycling facilities do get used, it's usually because the desire to cycle was already well established (such as in London).

So why would there be a desire to cycle in London and not elsewhere?

[Vorpal]

When cycling facilities do get used, it's usually because the desire to cycle was already well established (such as in London).

So why would there be a desire to cycle in London and not elsewhere?

Could it possibly have anything to do with... convenience?

[mjr]

Taking a cyclist prospective, it may look that way. Taken from another point of view, someone is taken seriously ill, suspected heart condition, advise to go immediately to hospital, taken by car - pay as you park, not so good, may wait for 3 hours etc.

That's not visiting a relative. Please don't change examples to pick the rare ones which, yes, probably should qualify for a free parking ticket from the hospital reception desk.

When Mrs R2 was in Christies Hosiptal Manchester some years back I visited her on the bike,a 40 mile round trip.But it wasn't a pleasant ride and I only did it twice,the rest of the time I used the car as it was quicker and I could take her what she needed whilst in there,I think the parking cost £3 or £4.

Then we should push for what makes the ride unpleasant and slower to be fixed, more than grumble about what sounds to me actually a fairly low parking fee. (It's basically £1/hour in King's Lynn's small hospital, £4 flat for patients at Cambridge or about £2/hour for visitors)

[Steady rider]

Points taken.
http://library.swov.nl/action/front/fulltext?id=340421
sounds interesting 2014 paper

[mjr]

Points taken.
http://library.swov.nl/action/front/fulltext?id=340421
sounds interesting 2014 paper

Summarising its conclusions, we need:

• A road hierarchy with large calmed no-through-traffic areas encouraging motor vehicles away from where most cycling happens, called "network-level separation" earlier in the paper
• Junction treatments
• Relatively slow cyclists (! Earlier it suggests "This could be typical of countries with high levels of cycling, where utilitarian cycling is dominant" opposed to, I guess, where sports cycling is a larger proportion of cycling.)
• What we call "Safety in numbers", including many drivers with cycling experience

Is it interesting that a Stevenage-style network is merely one way of doing junction treatments and could have been a way to do network-level separation except that we can still drive straight through most of the districts of Stevenage like Pin Green or Bedwell if we want to, if the distributor roads get congested?

[Steady rider]

http://www.geonames.org/NL/largest-citi ... lands.html

Their overall distribution appears more evenly spread than in the UK.

Netherlands - Largest Cities
Name - Population

1 Amsterdam, North Holland 741,636
2 Rotterdam, South Holland 598,199
3 The Hague, South Holland 474,292
4 Utrecht, Utrecht 290,529
5 Eindhoven, North Brabant 209,620
6 Tilburg, North Brabant 199,613
7 Groningen, Groningen 181,194
8 Almere Stad, Flevoland 176,432
9 Breda, North Brabant 167,673
10 Nijmegen, Gelderland 158,732

On a board approach if good main roads are provided to connect main centres and the centres are not too large and industry mainly on the outside areas, then little need for HGV to visit the middle parts.

http://worldpopulationreview.com/countr ... on/cities/

They have 23 cities with between 100k and 1 million and 309 with populations between 10k and 100k.
Most cities or large towns will not be too large to cycle into.

[reohn2]

When Mrs R2 was in Christies Hosiptal Manchester some years back I visited her on the bike,a 40 mile round trip.But it wasn't a pleasant ride and I only did it twice,the rest of the time I used the car as it was quicker and I could take her what she needed whilst in there,I think the parking cost £3 or £4.

Then we should push for what makes the ride unpleasant and slower to be fixed, more than grumble about what sounds to me actually a fairly low parking fee. (It's basically £1/hour in King's Lynn's small hospital, £4 flat for patients at Cambridge or about £2/hour for visitors)

I wasn't complaining about the parking charge at The Christie,more saying that not everyone is within cycling distance The Christie is a specialist cancer treatment hospital that treats paients from al over the North West,and that the reason cycling to visit was slower was the distance involved.
Though I do agree about the unpleasantness of cycling in Manchester.

[Stevek76]

It's probably hills but also the convenience, carrying potential and weather protection of cars. Have car, won't cycle.

When cycling facilities do get used, it's usually because the desire to cycle was already well established (such as in London).

Well yes, this is fairly well known. The perceived 'cost' of cycling is higher than that of driving to most people. Even if the travel times are similar, and the distance fairly short and the infrastructure good (for both), the car will still pick up a greater proportion of trips.

As it is, in stevenage the car is probably faster most of the time so the complete lack of cycling is unsurprising.

I wouldn't say it's because of an existing desire to cycle as such. Where cycling facilities get used it's because it's the fastest and most convenient way to get from a to b. London's underlying desire to cycle that is being enabled through safe, segregated routes is more a product of how rubbish it is to get around by any other method.

London is a congested mess where driving is stressful and slow and parking is highly limited. In dutch and danish towns and cities, because they decided to do this before things got too congested, they typically removed direct car routes from being an option (groningen being the famous example)

Other UK cities with sporadically high cycling rates are similar. Bristol for example, has relatively poor cycling infrastructure, but driving anywhere at peak times is painful and the public transport is awful, hence still a reasonable high number of cycling trips (also the roads are largely single lane, single carriageways so on road cycling isn't quite as off-putting as it is in some cities).

Stevenage is a very unusual example in having low enough density and good enough road network that it doesn't really get any congestion, most UK cities do not have this luxury and as a result, dutch style cycling (which as is pointed out, is far from just physically segregated lanes) is the way forward as it's the only way of getting about that is space efficient enough to work in the available road space. It's that or knock houses down...