Red Letter Day

[mattsccm]

You'll never get people cycling until they have no choice. A war maybe. Too many people are just lazy slobs.

[rareposter]

Too many people are just lazy slobs.

Rather ironically, it's because so many people are lazy that if you make driving the difficult, expensive, PITA choice (through fiscal and/or infrastructure measures) and make cycling easy, they'll take the cycling option.

It does require a LOT of nudge though. LTNs, parking pressures, cost, congestion... But eventually (combined with a bit of behaviour change), it can be really positive.

[irc]

Too many people are just lazy slobs.

Rather ironically, it's because so many people are lazy that if you make driving the difficult, expensive, PITA choice (through fiscal and/or infrastructure measures) and make cycling easy, they'll take the cycling option.

It does require a LOT of nudge though. LTNs, parking pressures, cost, congestion... But eventually (combined with a bit of behaviour change), it can be really positive.

Parking pressures up to a point. Parking on the street in the west end of Glasgow is £4.80 an hours. As a result many of the parking bays are empty. The majority in some places. My wife is not a cyclist, well not up to 5 miles each way in city traffic, so we more or less stopped going there. I'll still bike it down myself. Or if I am going for a few beers take the bus. Bike is about 25m bus is about an hour. So even when it is free it is a last choice.

Most families have cars - if there are shopping centre just off the motorway with free parking and easier access few will pay expensive parking.

Bikes are all very well but for plenty people they are not a choice. No good for carrying much luggage or dogs. No good when the roads are icy etc.

Definitely scope for increasing the numbers who commute for short commutes especially though.

[Cowsham]

Cycling in winter here can be outright dangerous with the heavy rain and 100MPH gales ( not to mention gettin a bad dose on ye cos it's wile cowl ) so some safer method of getting around is necessary.

[pjclinch]

Cycling in winter here can be outright dangerous with the heavy rain and 100MPH gales ( not to mention gettin a bad dose on ye cos it's wile cowl ) so some safer method of getting around is necessary.

Getting around in heavy rain and 100 mph gales is actually a bad idea irrespective of mode, hence weather warnings advising not to travel unless strictly necessary...

(Netherlands is actually very good at strong winds and heavy rain, see e.g. )

Pete.

[Cowsham]

Cycling in winter here can be outright dangerous with the heavy rain and 100MPH gales ( not to mention gettin a bad dose on ye cos it's wile cowl ) so some safer method of getting around is necessary.

Getting around in heavy rain and 100 mph gales is actually a bad idea irrespective of mode, hence weather warnings advising not to travel unless strictly necessary...

(Netherlands is actually very good at strong winds and heavy rain, see e.g. )

Pete.

We get many days of high winds and rain coming in off the north Atlantic so we just have to get on with things. 100MPH days I've still went to work cos our factory has machines that run 24/7 otherwise a lot of very expensive damage is done to the machines not to mention product ( into the £millions ) so engineering teams have to be on site even when operators are told to stay at home.

[mjr]

100MPH days I've still went to work cos our factory has machines that run 24/7 otherwise a lot of very expensive damage is done to the machines not to mention product ( into the £millions ) so engineering teams have to be on site even when operators are told to stay at home.

The factory owner should provide accommodation on/near site in that sort of weather, not expect workers to ignore weather warnings.

[mjr]

"Build it and they will come" was shown to not work quite a long time ago, e.g. in Stevenage and MK where making cycling easier was in parallel to making motoring easier.

Or MK shows it does work, because it still achieves average or slightly above cycling levels despite motoring being so easy there.

It's worth remembering that in both MK and Stevenage, motor routes got top priority, then bus routes (which almost totally failed in MK because people didn't want to walk 500m and wait at a big road bus stop, but cycling still suffers the consequences of this today), and then cycleways got threaded through the leftover space, with MK in particular having awful gradients, curves and detours almost everywhere. Stevenage has a few oft-photographed junctions where the cycleway got the direct route such as under a roundabout, but they're the minority.

Those new towns show that even building on the cheap and fitting in around other things is enough to keep people cycling, but not enough to lure people out of cars if motoring is made easy.

[Bmblbzzz]

That is the problem. Cycling (and buses, and walking) all are expected to fit into the space not taken by cars.

[mattheus]

You'll never get people cycling until they have no choice. A war maybe. Too many people are just lazy slobs.

But you've seen the 1970s-vs-now pics of Utrecht, Amsterdam etc, right? That's in a country where you can still drive cheaply.

[I don't deny there will always be a lazy slob minority!]

[rareposter]

It's worth remembering that in both MK and Stevenage, motor routes got top priority, then bus routes (which almost totally failed in MK because people didn't want to walk 500m and wait at a big road bus stop,

Runcorn had quite a bold and ambitious bus priority system which suffered the same issues. It was supposed to be a town-wide bus rapid transit network of bus-only roads - but then they went and built a load of freeway too, the result being that everyone drove everywhere, bus patronage was a tiny fraction of what was envisaged and the network got progressively cut back and back because hardly anyone used it.

Meanwhile, active travel was completely omitted altogether so the place is now a mass of dual carriageways and flyovers and they're wondering why the congestion is so bad.

[TrevA]

You'll never get people cycling until they have no choice. A war maybe. Too many people are just lazy slobs.

But London shows that it can be done. Using the carrot and stick analogy - the stick being the Congestion charge and the carrot being lots of new cycle infrastructure, hire bikes, etc. Not everyone will cycle even then.

In my previous example of Nottingham and the WPL. In our office, out of 100 employees, those cycling went from 2% to 20% when we moved to an office with no free parking. Probably 50% of the staff still drove in, paying to £5 per day to park their car in the council run car park, and the other 30% used public transport. Our previous office in the suburbs had plentiful, free on site parking, so 95% of people drove in, 2% cycled and 3% used public transport (office was not well served by public transport unless you lived in certain places).

[Pete Owens]

Meanwhile, active travel was completely omitted altogether so the place is now a mass of dual carriageways and flyovers and they're wondering why the congestion is so bad.

I used to work in Runcorn. And like ALL post war new towns from Stevenage onwards, Runcorn was built with a comprehensive network of separate cycleways. And like all post war new towns from Stevenage onwards, this comprehensively failed to incentivise cycle travel. Thus disproving the build-it-and-they-will come hypothesis that has dominated post war town planning.

Yes, there is also a separate network of high speed expressways (AND another separate network of dedicated busways that similarly failed to generate bus ridership), but Cyclists do not need to interact with these at all, meaning you can ride to anywhere in the town without the need to interact with busy or fast traffic anywhere on the way.

[pjclinch]

You'll never get people cycling until they have no choice. A war maybe. Too many people are just lazy slobs.

But you've seen the 1970s-vs-now pics of Utrecht, Amsterdam etc, right? That's in a country where you can still drive cheaply.

[I don't deny there will always be a lazy slob minority!]

Thing about Utrecht and Amsterdam and cheap driving is driving between one and the other you will find lots of fellow travellers on the motorway, for which the car is fairly well suited. Driving around the town centre there's bikes everywhere because they work significantly better thanks to planning policies that don't start off with "so of course everyone needs to drive..."

When we've visited family in Den Haag by car (typically picking up or dropping off large items that are not very bike compatible) the majority of the journey on motorways is no great problem, getting into town it starts to be a PITA and when we get there we park the car for the a few days and don't touch it again until it its time to leave.

There's loads of driving in NL, but there's substantially more short journeys by other means compared to the UK. It's not so much there's no choice, but it is very clearly a worse choice to do all your short urban journeys by car there.

Pete.

[rareposter]

Thus disproving the build-it-and-they-will come hypothesis that has dominated post war town planning.

Town (and transport) planning operated on a "predict and provide" method where DfT / National Highways would say "road traffic is predicted to increase by 20% over the next decade" and then they'd proceed to provide new roads to accommodate this predicted 20% and sure enough, that'd make it easier and cheaper to drive so more people drove and that generated the additional 20%.

As mentioned above, people will take the easiest option presented to them. In this case it doesn't matter how much wonderful cycle route you put in because if driving is easier, people will drive. In Runcorn (and MK, / Stevenage etc), driving was easier than both cycling and the intended bus rapid transit network. So everyone drove, no-one got the bus or cycled.

If you'd have built a BRT system and a cycle network and then restricted the roads to long-distance only (by creating LTNs, traffic free residential streets etc) and generally made it more of a pain to drive, most people would have got the bus or cycled locally.

It's very much build it and they will come - it's just that as well as building cycle routes, they built roads which were easier to use alongside things like out-of-town shopping precincts designed for access by car.