Levelling up?

User avatar
mjr
Posts: 20308
Joined: 20 Jun 2011, 7:06pm
Location: Norfolk or Somerset, mostly
Contact:

Re: Levelling up?

Post by mjr »

drossall wrote:
mjr wrote:
drossall wrote:Yes. But they don't go everywhere, and cyclists do.

People are more likely to tolerate crap connections/starts/ends if the bulk of their ride is good cycleway, rather like crap gravel driveways for the first or last leg don't deter motoring if the bulk of the journey is on flowing fast main roads.

I'm not really speculating on what people feel about it, nor arguing for or against provision, which can be good. I'm just observing that, in London, I've seen loads of on-road riding by cyclists of all types. My route into work, for example, uses the Liverpool Road from Finsbury Park to Angel. No real cycle provision apart from some lanes that get used for parking near the Arsenal stadium, and one well-thought-out bit of broad shared-use pavement that lets cyclists avoid a detour.

Yes, if you ignore the cycle lanes, shared-use pavement, 20mph motor limit, HGV ban, cycle bypasses of traffic calming, cycle-only turns off it and its plan designation as Cycleway 38, there is no cycle provision on Liverpool Road whatsoever.

More seriously, the likes of the central London kerbed cycleways are not the only ways to good quality routes, as your example shows. I'd be happy if we get more 20mph no-HGV cycle-only-turn roads too, but few are as wide as Liverpool Road or as effectively paralleled by another A road, so sometimes hard choices to take space away from motoring will have to be made and enforced with stone, metal or concrete.
[...] And lots of the bike routes just use back streets with no actual modification, for example heading into the City from St Pancras/Kings Cross.

There are quite a lot of Quietway-style routes and I wouldn't be surprised if cyclist numbers on the old routes across the Barbican area are fairly stable, but the dominant mass route from St Pancras to the City now appears to be Cycleway 6 (Faringdon Road) followed by Ludgate Hill to Bank (LCN 38), although I think that is from traffic counts more than trackers or surveys, so it might be underestimating back street cyclists. I was surprised more weren't using Newgate Street and Cheapside or Gresham Street but on closer inspection, the Smithfield and St Paul's one-way systems look annoying enough that I can appreciate that many would travel an extra tenth of a mile south to avoid so many turns.
MJR, mostly pedalling 3-speed roadsters. KL+West Norfolk BUG incl social easy rides http://www.klwnbug.co.uk
All the above is CC-By-SA and no other implied copyright license to Cycle magazine.
Bmblbzzz
Posts: 6261
Joined: 18 May 2012, 7:56pm
Location: From here to there.

Re: Levelling up?

Post by Bmblbzzz »

mjr wrote:More seriously, the likes of the central London kerbed cycleways are not the only ways to good quality routes, as your example shows. I'd be happy if we get more 20mph no-HGV cycle-only-turn roads too, but few are as wide as Liverpool Road or as effectively paralleled by another A road, so sometimes hard choices to take space away from motoring will have to be made and enforced with stone, metal or concrete.

Yes. But, as in the Boardman quote earlier, those hard choices should not be just to take space away from motoring and give it to cyclists and pedestrians. They need to be to take it away and give it to people. This means streets need to be for a whole variety of uses, with motorized traffic as a subsidiary function, accepted in so far as it does not degrade the qualities of the street as a place to live. There will still be a need for arterial through-routes, and those will be where we need segregated cycle and pedestrian space enforced by concrete and so on, but those routes shouldn't be the streets we live, work, go to school and meet our friends on.
Post Reply