Proposed Cycle Facility Help?

[AndyBSG]

Hoping someone can help me with this.

I live in Chelmsford and there has recently been a huge raft of road improvement schemes approved among which are a host of cycling lanes and facilities.

However, as is usual, most of these new cycle routes appear to be nothing more than putting a few signs up and there doesn't seem to have been any real cycling experts involved in drafting them.

Am I correct in that there is a template/blueprint listing the criteria that new cycling facilities should be attempting to adhere to and who would be the organisation/government department who normally get involved in these sort of things in the same way LCC usually getting involved in similar schemes in London?

Cheers.

[Vorpal]

https://www.cyclinguk.org/campaigns/briefings

Has some summaries & links to resources.

https://www.cyclinguk.org/local-campaig ... mation-kit

Is the 'information kit'.

I would contact the national office. I don't know who is campaigning in Chelmsford these days, but when I lived in the UK, I often rode around Chelmsford, and I found both the local council, and ECC extremely frustrating to deal with. I hope you have better luck with them than I did.

[AndyBSG]

Cheers Vorpal, that's a great help

[thirdcrank]

From a quick look at Vorpal's links, it's not clear to me if CUK publishes a list of local campaigners but that's central to this. There's no point in either duplicating effort or, unfortunately, finding that what you don't like has the support of somebody already campaigning locally. There's the "Right to Ride" organiser's contact details in there and I'd recommend that as a starting point.

[mjr]

I found www.chelmsfordcycling.org.uk on www.cyclenation.org.uk but one page on there makes me think you're right that Essex County Council aren't involving cyclists in the designs: "As illustrated above, the last formal meeting between CCAG and ECC was in 2013. ECC discontinued the meetings. Since then there has been no formal way of keeping in touch with ECC. Liaison is now by occasional contacts between the CCAG chairman and ECC officers on a thoroughly unsatisfactory ad hoc basis."

[mjr]

Am I correct in that there is a template/blueprint listing the criteria that new cycling facilities should be attempting to adhere to and who would be the organisation/government department who normally get involved in these sort of things in the same way LCC usually getting involved in similar schemes in London?

The lovely thing about guidance is that there's so much to choose from. There's lots of guidance (Local Transport Note 2/08 updated by 1/11 and 1/12, the Manual for Streets, the Design Manual for Roads and Bridges Interim Advice Note 195/16, ...), as well as some standards that Essex could choose to follow but isn't required to (London Cycling Design Standards being the most local).

The Cyclenation groups I mention are the siblings of LCC. The problem is that we're all only advisory consultees, so we can't block anything, only tell them what's wrong and what would be better and then local government can ignore us just as easily as national government, unless we manage to start embarrassing them... and all LCC's siblings are far smaller than it, so less able to embarrass government as often and we end up picking our battles carefully.

CTC/CUK, BC and Sustrans seem to concentrate on lobbying national government (annoyingly forgetting to involve cyclenation often), but they're rarely a factor at local government around here any more and national government basically leaves cycling to local government. Even when it's national money, it gets handed as project grants to local government with minimal requirements or control. So I'd look to your local cycling campaign for help, only expecting briefings and technical documents from the national organisations, rather than much practical help. If you're lucky, the nationals might endorse a letter or statement drafted by the local campaign and give it a bit more weight, with Sustrans doing that most often of them, in my experience.

[Cyril Haearn]

*Farcility* is a word we like to use a lot in this connection unfortunately

[mjr]

*Farcility* is a word we like to use a lot in this connection unfortunately

Only when you want to annoy people. If it was a successful tactic, Warrington would be a cycling paradise. Use it carefully.

[Cunobelin]

This is a good guide if a little out of date

It is useful as when plans are shown as you can ask informed questions and quote things like minimum widths or illustrate good design

[Cunobelin]

The other good book is Cycle-friendly Infrastructure: Guidelines for Planning and Design




Expensive to buy, but as above enables informed opinions and may be available through the local library

[thirdcrank]

... However, as is usual, most of these new cycle routes appear to be nothing more than putting a few signs up and there doesn't seem to have been any real cycling experts involved in drafting them. ...

This highlights a fundamental problem. You can have all the guidelines imaginable - and we are not short of them - but implementation is crucial. This means that cycling has to be considered from the outset in every scheme. That was recognised decades ago, and a system was devised to achieve it. It was called Cycle Audit and Review. When the big misters who provide for motor traffic got wind of it, they killed it off by insisting it should only be used for cycling schemes ie the very system it was intended to replace. The result is that schemes are implemented - some of which have been on a highway authority wish list for years, with blueprints filed away ready - and some junior "cycling officer" tacks on things and "puts up a few signs."

I'm not saying it's universally like that, but it seems to be the case where you are.

CycleAuditCycleReview.jpg (7.58 KiB) Viewed 860 times

http://www.ciht.org.uk/en/knowledge/pub ... eview-1996

One of the primary objectives of the Notional Cycling Strategy (NCS), which was published in 1996 and supported by the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions, is to encourage and enable planning and highway authorities to create a cycle-friendly road network, supplemented by cycle routes, which enables people to reach destinations safely and conveniently by cycle. ...

(Regular readers will notice that I will have my little joke: if I didn't have an occasional laugh, I'd spend a lot of time weeping.)

[Vorpal]

Essex County Council actually have a half decent guide to cycle infrastructure design.

https://www.amazon.com/Designing-Cyclis ... 186081896X

[gaz]

... Local Transport Note 2/08 ...

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/s ... design.pdf

... the Design Manual for Roads and Bridges Interim Advice Note 195/16, ...

www.standardsforhighways.co.uk/ha/stand ... ian195.pdf

[AndyBSG]

I've contacted Cycling UK and had a reply saying someone will be in touch.

If not, I'll have a stab at going through the proposals myself and pointing out everything wrong with them to ECC!

Only looked at one of them in detail so far, the Great Baddow To City Centre Scheme and it is a bit of a joke.

The most direct route for cyclists from Great Baddow into Town is down Baddow Road but ECC's proposal is that all cyclists actually take a lengthy detour through a residential area that is a notorious rat run with very heavy school traffic and notorious double parking issues.

The only 'provision' for this that I can actually see is that they're going to put a few signs up and not actually put in any dedicated lanes or even the half hearted magically painted lane that some councils do to at least pretend they've provided a cycling facility!

If I can find those issues with just one of the proposed schemes after a simple 5 minute scan I can imagine those a bit more clued up about the correct provision of cycling infrastructure will have a field day pulling the proposals apart

[thirdcrank]

A few things to bear in mind:

Guidelines and the like are only general: I say with only a touch of irony and no self-contradiction that individual cases generally form exceptions.

Be alert to the possibility that some cyclist(s) has / have already been consulted. Highwaymen tend to cut-and-paste the bits they like and then dress them up as support for their proposals. eg lengthy detours round back streets have "Sustrans" written all over them. A favourite phrase among highwaymen is that "the trouble with cyclists is that they don't know what they want."

In any event, once something is in place, there's no obvious procedure or money for getting it out, or even reviewing its success. If it's demonstrably a failure then that's easily dressed up as demonstrating that there's no real demand for cycling provision, rather than demonstrating failures in the provision and those who have provided it.