Pete Owens wrote: ↑30 Nov 2021, 4:33pm
mjr wrote: ↑30 Nov 2021, 2:58pm
Pete Owens wrote:
They are not intended to save anyone - their sole purpose is to prevent us from obstructing flow of motor traffic.
You keep making that claim:
It most certainly was the original intention of segregation to clear us from the roads. Traffic engineers used to be open about this -
And yet you don't have a single example to show us? No historical notes dug up by someone like Carlton Reid? Nothing from Hansard when the first laws enabling cycleways were debated?
And there is a big difference between "original intention" and "sole purpose" so you appear to be backpedalling furiously from the outset.
Unsurprisingly it is certainly the observed effect of cycle lanes to reallocate space from cyclists to motors.
Some cycle lanes. They can definitely have the opposite effect if done well, reallocating space to cyclists on roads that had become no-go zones for all but the most stubborn riders... and those stubborn few can continue to ride on the road too, because it is very rare for cycling to be banned on a carriageway due to the provision of a cycleway. Indeed, it's far more common for cycling to be banned without providing a cycleway (locally, parts of A14 and A45 spring to mind — the cycleway bypass of that bit of A45 came years later, the new bit of A14 still has none in sight).
Back in the 1930s they assumed that use of cycle facilities would be made compulsory - as it was in the rather more authoritarian regimes on the continent. It is only fairly recently that it has been considered politically correct to promote cycling - and it is an impressive feat of propaganda to try to persuade us that the same measures they had been using to supress us for decades were supposedly for our benefit.
There are at least two obvious major flaws in that reasoning:
1. cycling has not been suppressed in continental countries which stupidly (I agree!) made cycleway use compulsory, with most seeing far more cycling than the UK, although we may differ on how much of that we think is due to the cycleways; and
2. the UK has used far more straightforward methods to suppress cycling, including outright bans, pseudomotorway relief roads and fast gyratories and other motorist-favouring road layouts. Sure, the rubbish narrow shoulder cycle lanes built by the Highways Agency 1970-2010 didn't encourage cycling, but they were largely irrelevant to the suppression because almost no-one would have ridden the 70mph carriageway if the cycle lane hadn't been there... and of the few who did ride dual carriageways like the A11, deaths were reported widely with an undertone of "he should not have ridden there".
You may feel that it is the case and it may even have been the case for a few incompetent motorist highway designers,
It is the only way to make sense of cycle facility design. Take a look at any road and imagine which part of the road Jeremy Clarkson would want us us ride on - and then look where they put the cycle symbols.
I don't think Clarkson would care much where we rode as long as it wasn't near him and I bet he would dislike us riding along the side of a road too, now that he'll need to give way to us when he turns. Anyway, who cares what he thinks? I don't ride a bike to spite the likes of him.
Reasoning like that is working backwards and making too many assumptions in order to reach the desired conclusion. It's not evidence for "sole purpose".
It is only incompetence if you fall for their propaganda and assume they are trying to help us. Once you understand that the overriding objective for traffic engineers is to optimise the flow of motor traffic then it all makes sense. These are after all skilled professionals we are talking about. They fully understand what they are doing and are capable of designing in great detail for the complex needs of motorised traffic. They are not actually trying to kill us or even inconvenience us - just keep us out of the way of the all important motor traffic.
I don't assume they are trying to help us. I've often written that I feel cycling is popular here despite government more than because of it, and that the engineers being instructed to maximise throughput of Passenger Car Units is a major problem... but I also suspect that if engineers were instructed to maximise throughput of People instead, then we would see a lot more cycleways built, in order to get the overwide obstructive motorists and their disruptive traffic signals out of our way. Cycleways built to maximise throughput of People would actually join up and flow better, instead of the discontinuous crap we often see, some of which does do the job you accuse it of (avoiding motorists slowing from 30-70mph because they are behind 10-15mph cyclists). We'd also see a lot more bus lanes, because bus lanes also have a far higher throughput of People than lanes mixed with cars, as do cycleways.
But agreeing with you about some nefarious past uses of cycleways is a long way from you having any justification to say that it is always the "sole purpose".