Benefits of painted cycle lanes?

VinceLedge
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Re: Benefits of painted cycle lanes?

Post by VinceLedge »

There are quite a few of these in Edinburgh, which actually work fine, apart from areas where cars are allowed to park in them, which means they are then worse than no lanes! You wonder why they paint them in but don't make them no parking!
Bmblbzzz
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Re: Benefits of painted cycle lanes?

Post by Bmblbzzz »

Some, such as this: https://goo.gl/maps/Qsf6P8KYNprmA7eM9 appear to be scale models of cycle lanes.
Psamathe
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Re: Benefits of painted cycle lanes?

Post by Psamathe »

How wide are these lanes? because from the earlier picture they look rather narrow to me - but uncertain if that's psychological given the line of cars hard-up against one boundary.

Ian
Bmblbzzz
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Re: Benefits of painted cycle lanes?

Post by Bmblbzzz »

You might want to say which picture you're referring to?
Psamathe
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Re: Benefits of painted cycle lanes?

Post by Psamathe »

Bmblbzzz wrote:You might want to say which picture you're referring to?

this one
colin54 wrote:There's one of those 'door zone' lanes in Spencer Road, Wigan, they should have saved the paint, you have to be on the extreme right of the lane to avoid being doored, plus car driver's vision and cyclist's vice-versa is obscured coming out of drives.
Image
....
Bmblbzzz
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Re: Benefits of painted cycle lanes?

Post by Bmblbzzz »

Okay. That one does look very narrow and entirely within the door zone.

Nice socks though!
Pete Owens
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Re: Benefits of painted cycle lanes?

Post by Pete Owens »

VinceLedge wrote:There are quite a few of these in Edinburgh, which actually work fine,


Cycle lanes in Edinburgh have exactly the same baleful effects as they have everywhere else. They result in motor vehicles passing cyclists closer and at higher speeds.

If, like traffic engineers, you consider the unimpeded flow of high speed motor traffic your top priority then you will think they work fine.

Compare:
Image
to:
Image
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mjr
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Re: Benefits of painted cycle lanes?

Post by mjr »

You couldn't find a pic of an Edinburgh cycle lane of at least minimum width?

Substandard cycle lanes are crap. No one defends them.

Edit to add: I see from the milestone that it's near Warrington. Not even the same country. Warrington is already notorious for having crap cycling infrastructure. Not news and barely relevant. And the main difference between the pics is the lorry in the laneless one is much smaller, but it still barely crosses the white line and appears to pass dangerously close. The cyclist has moved almost to the gutter, about 0.6m from the kerb, less than the police minimum 0.75m that many of us criticised.
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Bmblbzzz
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Re: Benefits of painted cycle lanes?

Post by Bmblbzzz »

Substandard cycle lanes are, I suspect, the vast majority, especially as in this case we're talking about width of painted lanes. Therefore in a thread about painted cycle lanes, it makes sense to discuss them. They are what most people, cyclists and drivers, encounter and think of as a cycle lane. Not defending them doesn't mean it's pointless to talk about them; we could usefully discuss whether and in what circumstances they are better than nothing (which is going to vary from road to road and person to person) and how to put pressure on authorities to upgrade them (and what to? will they replace with a decent, standard-compliant lane, or just take it away? etc) As you point out, we also have to take into account changes in traffic composition and behaviour; a straight before and after comparison doesn't necessarily tell us much.
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Wanlock Dod
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Re: Benefits of painted cycle lanes?

Post by Wanlock Dod »

Bmblbzzz wrote:Substandard cycle lanes ... we could usefully discuss whether and in what circumstances they are better than nothing (which is going to vary from road to road and person to person) ...

Given that there is quite a lot of evidence to indicate that they encourage close passing by people driving, and also a recent study suggesting that the risk of injury is actually higher on roads with advisory cycle lanes compared to roads with no cycling facilities, there seems to be quite a compelling case that narrow (i.e. <2m wide) cycle lanes are probably worse than doing nothing, at least for people riding bikes (admittedly perhaps not so for the traffic engineers motivated by higher traffic speeds and flows, and that if you do nothing you can’t claim that you have “done something for cyclists”).

Can anybody give an example of when they might be better than nothing, and provide any evidence to support that?
Pete Owens
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Re: Benefits of painted cycle lanes?

Post by Pete Owens »

mjr wrote:You couldn't find a pic of an Edinburgh cycle lane of at least minimum width?

Substandard cycle lanes are crap. No one defends them.

Yet curiously, every intervention you have made in this thread has been on the side of those defending them, including this one. VinceLedge was clearly defending them, yet you take issue with my reply to him.

Presumably, since you have referred to LTN 1/20 by substandard you are referring to those guidelines:
LTN 1-20 wrote:6.4.3 Cycle Lanes less than 1.5m wide should not normally be used as they will exclude the use of the facility by larger cycles and are therefore not inclusive.

The cycle lane in the photo is 1.5 m wide so compliant with LTN 1-20 (although the use of the word "normally" is a bit of a get out clause for even narrower lanes). Indeed the reason I chose to study that particular cycle lane:
http://www.warringtoncyclecampaign.co.uk/report/cycle-lanes.pdf
is that it does meet the same minimum standard that applied back then. It was installed on a normal stretch of road free of parked cars, pinch points and so on - and there was an identical stretch of road beyond the cycle lane to act as a control.

I wasn't expecting to see such a dramatic effect. I thought I was going to have to take careful measurements on the photos to measure a difference of a few mm, but the photos speak for themselves. What did surprise me was the determination of cycle lane advocates to avoid the evidence of their own eyes, when it contradicted their pre-existing beliefs.

Typically entrenched advocates of segregation would look to point out irrelevant details to distract from the blindingly obvious point that the cycle lane causes very much closer overtaking. Exactly this sort of thing :
Red Herring #1:
mjr wrote:Edit to add: I see from the milestone that it's near Warrington. Not even the same country.

Indeed so, but unless you are proposing a mechanism for latitude to effect motor traffic (the Coriolis effect maybe) then that is entirely irrelevant. The same intervention will have the same effect in Edinburgh as it does in Warrington.
Red Herring #2:
Warrington is already notorious for having crap cycling infrastructure.

What you mean is that Warrington Cycle Campaign is famous for highlighting how crap cycle infrastructure is - wherever it is. The facilities featured in facility of the month mostly come from outside Warrington, indeed, as a resident of Warrington, I would say that the standard of cycle infrastructure here is generally less awful than most other places.

However, whatever you may think about the quality of cycle facilites in Warrington in general is irrelevant because we are talking about this particular cycle lane, which at 1.5m standard is as wide or wider than 99% of cycle lanes you will encounter. It is crap because that is what cycle lanes are like.

Red Herring #3:
Not news and barely relevant.

Any minuite you will be breaking in to all caps and shouting FAKE NEWS, FAKE NWS.
This is simply head-in-the-sand denial.

Red Herring #3:
And the main difference between the pics is the lorry in the laneless one is much smaller,

Oh come off it, you are making a fool of yourself now - everybody can see the photographs and see for themselves that THE main difference between the photos is the gap between the cyclist and the trucks. Is close passing really such a trivial issue to you that that doesn't immediately strike you as the significant difference?

There may or may not be a few mm difference between the width of the trucks, but that is trivial compared to the difference in passing clearance. If you look at fig 3 of the report:
http://www.warringtoncyclecampaign.co.uk/report/cycle-lanes.pdf
You can see the same photographs scaled to the height of the cyclist

In any case the width of the trucks is completely and entirely irrelevant. What matter is the amount space they leave between the truck and the cyclist - and that is very much less when the cyclist is riding in a cycle lane.

Red Herring #4:
but it still barely crosses the white line and appears to pass dangerously close.

I would say marginally too close. Though certainly more than the west midlands police or the highway code recommends.
The road is 9.5m wide so with a 2.5m truck crossing the centre line by about 0.5m leaves about 2.75 to the left. With the cyclist at about 0.75m from the kerb this is a clearance of 2m.

However, whether or not you consider that clearance sufficient the effect of the cycle lane is to reduce it by a nearly half.

Red Herring #5:
The cyclist has moved almost to the gutter, about 0.6m from the kerb, less than the police minimum 0.75m that many of us criticised.

Actually she was aiming to ride at about 0.75m so that her position corresponded to the centre of the cycle lane in both scenarios. This was to keep the two scenarios as similar as possible since the aim was to study the effects of the cycle lane without confounding effects caused by the cyclists road position.
Stevek76
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Re: Benefits of painted cycle lanes?

Post by Stevek76 »

Pete Owens wrote:The cycle lane in the photo is 1.5 m wide so compliant with LTN 1-20


Except it isn't as the road it is on is clearly neither 20mph nor <=4000 pcu/day & <=400pcu/hr.

Further, despite LTN1/20 having a narrow window of tolerance for paint it's fairly clear from this thread that basically no one here is supportive of it. The conspiracy stuff is frankly nuts. There isn't some grand plan to get cyclists out of the way, rubbish paint is simply the result of no political leadership from the council and a box ticking exercise from the staff working on the project who likely mostly aren't cyclists and, if they are, they are only of the sportsing kind and thus have no understanding of utility cycling or that by people who are not of above average fitness.

If you think the people responsible for schemes like CS3 or CS6 in central london, or some of the main road treatments in Waltham forest did so to 'get cyclists out of the way' then I'd really like to know the reasoning behind that.
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Pete Owens
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Re: Benefits of painted cycle lanes?

Post by Pete Owens »

OK, so unusually for cyclists, it seems we all agree: Cycle lanes are a bad thing. The next thing is to work out how to persuade the authorities to remove them from the roads. I have been trying for 15 years without success. Has anyone else managed to get a cycle lane painted out, and if so what arguments did they deploy?
hemo
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Re: Benefits of painted cycle lanes?

Post by hemo »

From my point of view, none.
FatBat
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Re: Benefits of painted cycle lanes?

Post by FatBat »

Pete Owens wrote:OK, so unusually for cyclists, it seems we all agree: Cycle lanes are a bad thing. The next thing is to work out how to persuade the authorities to remove them from the roads. I have been trying for 15 years without success. Has anyone else managed to get a cycle lane painted out, and if so what arguments did they deploy?


Sort of.

In Selby, North Yorkshire, there was an exceedingly narrow (probably 50cm) cycle lane on the A19 Barlby Road. It was installed by the Highways Agency. When the Selby Bypass opened (c. 2004), responsibility for this stretch of road transferred to North Yorkshire County Council. I was Right-to-Ride rep for the area at the time, and after much to-ing and fro-ing about this ridiculous lane, the message I got from NYCC was that they wouldn't paint it out, but they wouldn't maintain it. So, over the years, the lane markings have faded into non-existance.

The Google Street view shows the situation as far back as 2008.

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@53.7884932,-1.0493661,3a,75y,283.48h,73.15t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1shYeOV-LvsJ5EAlrXEnFVkA!2e0!5s20081001T000000!7i13312!8i6656
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