Oxford - Milton Keynes - Cambridge

[atlas_shrugged]

Andrew Gilligan gives a preview/hint of a report which will be out soon and expected to support cycling in the above corridor:
https://www.nic.org.uk/1440-2/

I am not sure that they will go as far as proposing a cycle super-highway connecting these towns. But I for one wish they would!

Both Oxford and Cambridge have been subjected to explosive growth. The politicians have not been asleep while this has been going on. They have been busily cashing all the cheques. Some pretty urgent solutions are now needed to congestion and air-quality. Add to this that the UK is now the fattest Western European country according to the OECD:

https://www.rt.com/uk/409586-britain-high-obesity-oecd/

And so ...

[Cyril Haearn]

+1
MK is or was the future, but many people commute from there to London

People should be encouraged, forced, to live where they work!

[Toffee]

+1
MK is or was the future, but many people commute from there to London

People should be encouraged, forced, to live where they work!

They certainly do commute to London from MK.

However many thousands more commute into MK each day by car from the surrounding area.

[craigbroadbent]

Milton Keynes is one of the fastest growing cities in Europe, if not the fastest. It has reached it's design capacity 250,000 people, and so we need to plan for the future.

Probably best to concentrate on the busy commuter routes and make them fit for purpose.
I find it healthy and stress free to commute through the parks. Only time I get stressed is at the end of the journey when I have to mix with the cars as they look for a space to park.

Not sure we can mobilise househholds to move within cycling distance of their work, but electric bikes can increase cycle commute speeds and make larger distances manageable.
I like the idea of ParknPedal.


Free parking at the city edge and last 3 miles on a car free route into the centre.

The Milton Keynes Council are on the case. The original Redways (shared pedestrian/pedal) routes are pretty underutilised. I think we have about 4% commuter use which is way below Oxford and Cambridge 20%+

[Richard Fairhurst]

Andrew Gilligan did an excellent talk on this at the Cyclenation/Cycling UK campaigners' conference in Oxford this weekend. The report should be published within the next fortnight. For MK he highlighted that the Redways are badly maintained and don't actually go into the city centre, and he'll be recommending that this is addressed, but ultimately the challenge with MK is that driving has been made so convenient that it's difficult to tempt people out of their cars.

[Toffee]

Milton Keynes is one of the fastest growing cities in Europe, if not the fastest. It has reached it's design capacity 250,000 people, and so we need to plan for the future.

Probably best to concentrate on the busy commuter routes and make them fit for purpose.
I find it healthy and stress free to commute through the parks. Only time I get stressed is at the end of the journey when I have to mix with the cars as they look for a space to park.

Not sure we can mobilise househholds to move within cycling distance of their work, but electric bikes can increase cycle commute speeds and make larger distances manageable.
I like the idea of ParknPedal.


Free parking at the city edge and last 3 miles on a car free route into the centre.

The Milton Keynes Council are on the case. The original Redways (shared pedestrian/pedal) routes are pretty underutilised. I think we have about 4% commuter use which is way below Oxford and Cambridge 20%+

Thing is, if you get more people cycling on the redways you are just going to get more conflict with pedestrians. This is because the redways are also the main footpaths between most places.

[mjr]

Thing is, if you get more people cycling on the redways you are just going to get more conflict with pedestrians. This is because the redways are also the main footpaths between most places.

I think there's a lot of capacity to fill before conflict becomes much of a problem and there's a lot more footpaths which aren't redways. Some of the busier redways like the old Stony Stratford - Bletchley axis (the original which went through all the district centres, not the V4 redway) had footways along busier parts years ago, although some look to have been lost during resurfacing. I expect they could be reinstated fairly easily if needed and there's space alongside many other redways for footways too.

In the years I cycled around the redways, I can't actually remember any conflict with pedestrians... possibly because people actually generally did cycle on the left and walk on the right on the unsegregated parts and they were always wide enough for that to suffice.

[Pete Owens]

So three cities - two particularly noted for their high level of cycling and one the most car dependent town in the UK. And it seems that Gilligan thinks it is the latter that is getting thing right.

[Cyril Haearn]

Everyone knows Oxford and Cambridge but MK is not so famous in the US for example

Logically it might be renamed Oxbridge, cos it is in the middle

[Richard Fairhurst]

@Pete Owens: I'm presuming you didn't come to the Cyclenation/Cycling UK conference, because there is no way you would have got that impression from his speech.

[Toffee]

Thing is, if you get more people cycling on the redways you are just going to get more conflict with pedestrians. This is because the redways are also the main footpaths between most places.

I think there's a lot of capacity to fill before conflict becomes much of a problem and there's a lot more footpaths which aren't redways. Some of the busier redways like the old Stony Stratford - Bletchley axis (the original which went through all the district centres, not the V4 redway) had footways along busier parts years ago, although some look to have been lost during resurfacing. I expect they could be reinstated fairly easily if needed and there's space alongside many other redways for footways too.

In the years I cycled around the redways, I can't actually remember any conflict with pedestrians... possibly because people actually generally did cycle on the left and walk on the right on the unsegregated parts and they were always wide enough for that to suffice.

You are correct in that there is space in a lot of cases to build paths beside redways, but they are not there yet. Also a lot of park paths are used by cycles, which at the moment is ok as there are not too many cycles. This would cause quite a bit of conflict if nothing was done and the number of cycles significantly increased. Even the Route 51 goes along park paths in places.

[mjr]

Routes 51 and 6 through MK are among the worst examples of Sustrans prioritising population coverage over transport. Redways H8 and V6 respectively would have been better. It doesn't surprise me 51 and 6 use some of the slow park paths.

[Cyril Haearn]

The Grauniad reports that *spreadsheet-Phil* is being urged to fund reopening of the Varsity railway line, that should only take 13 years, plus a new road in parallel of course

New towns with up to 150 000 homes are suggested

If one lives in London, is Cambridge in *the north*?

[mjr]

The Grauniad reports that *spreadsheet-Phil* is being urged to fund reopening of the Varsity railway line, that should only take 13 years, plus a new road in parallel of course

Another new road? I thought the plan was to update the current, former and future A421. They've not long finished from MK to the Black Cat and I understand a St Neots bypass bypass is basically approved, then it's already an underused dual carriageway to Cambridge (the old A45). Another new road would seem like a folly, failing to learn that you can't build your way out of congestion even more blatently than the current mad fad of bypass bypasses (Huntingdon as well as St Neots) and third ring roads (Norwich, Northampton...).

Then MK seems on the route. Bypassing it to the north looks like a non-starter, adding to the already overloaded M1 through a bottleneck at Newport Pagnell, while bypassing to the south means buying some very expensive land around Woburn and Stewkley and/or possibly I think dealing with some difficult things like old brickfields and landfills.

West of MK, paralleling the Varsity line any more closely than the A421/A4421/A41/A34 historic route already does will mean cutting through some leafy shire areas like Winslow and the Claydons, including some districts that are already pretty furious about HS2. I'll be amazed if they dare.

If one lives in London, is Cambridge in *the north*?

Probably - it's north of Watford and accessed by "Great Northern" trains which go no further north than the fens!

[Stevek76]

Although Oxford and Cambridge are already Britain’s only true cycling cities

That seems generous...