Cycling UK Forum

Sustrans are NOT asking anyone to forsake the roads, why do you propagate that rubbish?
Most of Sustrans staff are dedicated cyclists who cycle on the road as much as any one else.
Were the many little L6's out in their trailers or on their little 16" wheel bikes?
Sustrans is an EXTRA not instead of the roads.

Repeat that to yourself until it sinks in.

Pete Owens wrote:6. Textured paving. getting your wheel caught in textured paving produces a nasty tram line effect. this is particularly bad when, more often than not, they use the wrong sort of testured tiles.

I mentioned earlier the position taken by groups representing blind people. The above is dealt with by TAL 4/90 TACTILE MARKINGS FOR SEGREGATED SHARED USE BY CYCLISTS AND PEDESTRIANS.

This says "Tactile slabs ... with a ribbed surface have been used .... they are orientated to offer a 'ladder pattern' on the footway or footpath and 'a tramline pattern' on the cycle track." (My emphasis) No cycling organisation is mentioned in the list of bodies consulted which illustrates what I said earlier about the strength of the blind people's lobby.

Incidentally, there are various diagrams in this TAL showing how the layout might be used. The relative positions of the cycle and pedestrian sections (e.g. which is nearer the carriageway) are switched just to suit the purpose of the specific diagram. If this scheme were to be followed in real life there would need to be Scalectric type crossovers between sections. What you do end up with are absurd series of 'END' signs accompanied by 'CYCLISTS DISMOUNT' and another field day for the Warrington website.

meic wrote:Were the many little L6's out in their trailers or on their little 16" wheel bikes?
.

yes.

in the end, time will tell. Cycling use in London has doubled and people have simply gone from A to B by the most straightforward route.

I'll mention one thing. I used to be on something called the TfL Greenways committee. I suggested when a traffic survey was commissioned for the Wandle Path (now rather messed up by having too much money spent on it) that, at the same time, a survey be undertaken of cyclists using Garratt Lane, which runs parallel, in order, if nothing else, that we could work out how the two might work together. I was told that this wouldn't be useful. One can only speculate that the results might have proved unworthy.

I dont normally waste time on Sustrans tracks when I am going fast or far.
In those cases it is quicker by road. Sustrans has many failings like barriers and cyclist dismount signs (The founder, Mr Grimshaw said he hated them and considered every such sign a failure. These signs are the work of local councils not Sustrans.)
I also dont waste time on Council cycle tracks especially if they run alongside roads as they can cut your speed to 10 or 20% or even less of what you could do on the road next to them.
Most of the complaints that I get about Sustrans when I tell people I am one of the Rangers is about a piece of council track which is not even on a Sustrans route and nothing to do with them at all. It is also segregated with a band so narrow for cyclists that the weeds have grown completely over it and it has a speed camera and an emergency phone slap in the middle of it. So we cyclists violate the pedestrian's part.

It is not the signs that are the problem but the useless and dangerous facilities that make them nescessery in the first place. If you are riding on the pavement then you put yourself at risk at every junction and driveway you cross. The only way to do this safely is to dismount and to cross as a pedestrian. LAs are only acting responsibly by informing cyclists that the facility is unfit for porpose.

I use an off road footpath/cycle path to get to work and I would be very reluctant to go round by the road because the route I use it shorter, more direct, allows me to cycle faster, slightly less hilly, and avoids a couple of road routes that are really quite unpleasant. I absolutely accept that bikes are vehicles and road safety standards should be improved, but I don't like the assumption that off-road paths are always a second-best option. If I went round by the road my journey would be delayed by traffic lights, traffic jams, roadworks, congestion, roads too narrow to filter safely etc whereas the off-road path is a straight run with nothing more annoying than the occasional kamikaze squirrel.

Simon L6 wrote:

nigel_s wrote:

the trouble with all of this is that £140 million quid has been lavished on LCN+, which remains, to put it very kindly, a minority interest amongst London's cyclists.

Well it's time that it became a majority interest.

well, I wish you well in your attempt to persuade the ever rising number of London cyclists to forsake the wide open spaces of London's arterial routes for wiggly, winding, poorly signed, bumpy, inconvenient cycle 'routes' that nobody feels the need of. I...

I never said that. Wilfully misinterpreting my meaning. A career in politics awaits you!

...moving away from segregating vulnerable users, and have started implementing shared space schemes where cycle paths are ripped out...

Oh! Really?
http://www.copenhagenize.com/2008/10/building-separated-bike-lanes.html

Kirst wrote:I use an off road footpath/cycle path to get to work and I would be very reluctant to go round by the road because the route I use it shorter, more direct, allows me to cycle faster, slightly less hilly, and avoids a couple of road routes that are really quite unpleasant.

I used to use a bridleway (Coastal Link, Steyning to Shoreham - now the southern end of the Downs Link) to get to work, but as it's rough surfaced with a sandy material and regularly puddles at the sight of rain it was not that practical IME - but it did get me back into road cycling
Were it hard surfaced then that would have been a different kettle of herrings.

the problem with the cycle path debate is that there is a confusion of aims. There are long and short distance routes that combine off and on road that are a joy. Those with NCN in front of them suffer from fussiness, but, if you have the time and the inclination then they can be a great day out.

The simple truth is that they have nothing to do with transport, and very little to do with urban development. People in Milan and Amsterdam reach for a bike not because there are dedicated cycle ways (in Milan there are very few) but because travel distances are shorter and their cities are not blighted by supermarkets with vast acres of tarmac. They shop near to where they live or work. Their children walk to school.

In this country our high streets are besieged from within by the motorcar. The planning legislation of 1948 divided the city into areas for different uses. The result, combined with the massive surburban expansion of the 1930s has left us with dormitory suburbs, in which people know neither their neighbours or the name of the next street. Some town and city councils have attempted to reverse this, but most still see carparking as a guarantor of retail prosperity, and all too many have set up 'business parks' that combine spreads of office accommodation or warehousing on the outskirts of town.

Basildon, which I know something about, is a smallish town, with naff-all town centre, and employment dispersed to the main roads that ring it. The housing, built in the fifties, sixties and seventies is relentlessly low rise. Journey distances are immense. Walking is a minority interest, cycling even more exotic. Nobody can hope to run a successful business without an adjacent car park.

Cycle paths don't address this, nor do they address the miserable state of most of London's high streets (and those of other cities), which have been left to those either too rich to care about the price of things, or too poor to be able to drive to the nearest megastore. Suggesting, even for one second, that cycling can play a part in cutting the emissions generated by transport, cutting congestion, or reclaiming the public realm by spending squillions on Greenways, or 'iconic' bridges is, frankly a disgrace - and, yes, I have been at meetings where John Grimshaw has made that very claim.

For eight years TfL had a plan - the reversal of the relentless rise in trip distances and trip generation. Equally, for that same period of time, London's Boroughs, irrespective of their political persuasion, turned down almost every planning application that would make a difference, and insisted on ever more tarmac being laid to accommodate the parked car. Looking around towns in the southeast, and other cities, my impression is, with very few exceptions, town and city councils saw the motorcar as the engine of survival in the face of competition from the town down the road. Worthing, which I mentioned earlier, is the crack wh*re of car parking councils. Basildon dreams of even more town centre parking to accommodate ever more commuters into a town centre they plan to regenerate in part by closing the bus station.

That's where the real struggle to make cycling a part of the solution, rather than an ancillary problem, lies. Playing 'hide the bike' by drawing wiggly green lines across the suburbs when cyclists have discovered that the red tarmac of bus lanes is theirs for the taking may give us delightful leisure routes. It won't rescue our towns and cities. Whether or not cycling groups play a role that, perhaps, only they can play, in proposing conviviality and sustainability, is a live question, and, to be honest, I'm not optimistic that they will.

nigel_s wrote:

...moving away from segregating vulnerable users, and have started implementing shared space schemes where cycle paths are ripped out...

Oh! Really?

Yes, really:
http://www.ecoplan.org/wtpp/general/mon ... etails.htm

http://www.copenhagenize.com/2008/10/building-separated-bike-lanes.html

Note the begiinning of the sentence you chose not to quote "They take safety seriously in the Netherlands, which is why they are taking the lead in ...". Copenhagen is actually in Denmark. Though the Danes are starting to implement shared some space schemes the idea was pioneered in the the Netherlands.

Copenhagen has done a huge number of good things for cyclists in terms of reducing speeds, restricting traffic creating a city that is safe and attractive for vulnerable road users. Why on earth focus on the one small part of the overall package which is to the detriment of cyclist safety -
see the ECF report on the safety of Copenhagen's cycle paths:
http://www.trafitec.dk/pub/Road%20safet ... nhagen.pdf

Simon L6 wrote: Cycling use in London has doubled and people have simply gone from A to B by the most straightforward route.

And that is the whole point and I've lost count of the times I've said that if cyclists live at A and work at B, they are not giing to move home to C and work to D just because they may be able to ride down some fair weather bike trail. Highwaymen waffle about cyclists' desire lines and they are the same as everybody elses. A map of the existing road network (minus the motorways and some gyratory type developments) is as good a guide to cyclists desire lines as any. The big task, which highwaymen in the UK utterly lack the skillls and motivation to achieve, is to make that network safe for all users.

In my campaigning days the then (Labour) leader of Leeds City Council was Cllr. Walker. There was also a Cllr. Driver. I did once suggest to a group which included some councillors (and several officers keeping a straight face) that it would be a lot more honest if they were to make Cllr. Driver leader.

Pete Owens wrote:
and since you mention Copenhagen so much, the ECF report showing how cycle tracks reduce safety there:
http://www.trafitec.dk/pub/Road%20safet ... nhagen.pdf

Yes. And the final sentence in that report is..
The radical effects on traffic volumes resulting from the construction of cycle tracks will undoubtedly result in gains in health from increase physical activity. These gains are much, much greater than the losses in health resulting from a slight decline in road safety.


Given that nothing is, or can be, 100% safe, that's good enough for me.
Nothing further to say...

Copenhagen is actually in Denmark.

Well, there's a surprise...

This has absolutely nothing to do with segregation though.
Cycling is just as common in towns in those countries where cycling is permitted on the roads.

Of course it has. Because of the implementation of a cycle friendly infrastructure there are more people who ride bikes regularly. Which means that more drivers ride bikes as well. Which means more cycle friendly drivers...