A difference between Horsham and Farnham

Horsham and Farnham are ostensibly quite similar. Two prosperous towns in the south of England, about 25 miles apart, as the crow flies. Farnham has a population of about 40,000 people; Horsham is slightly larger with a population of 55,000.

Although, beyond these main similarities, there are presumably many differences, one noticeable difference one stands out. The number of pedestrians who are being seriously injured in their town centres.

Looking at Horsham first – just four pedestrians have been seriously injured in the town centre in the last ten years.

From Crashmap.

Noticeably, every single one of these casualties occurred on the inner ring road; a dual carriageway with a 30mph speed limit. All occurred at crossing points into the town centre. There were no serious casualties, at all, within the inner ring road.

The town centre of Farnham, at the same scale –

From Crashmap.

Rather different. 18 pedestrian KSIs over the same period, including one fatality. Four of these occurred on the A31 Farnham bypass, which has to be crossed to get into the town from the station. 13 pedestrians have been seriously injured in the centre of Farnham in ten years. News reports on two of these incidents are here and here. (The data doesn’t include last year, and so does not include this incident).

Why might this be? Why is nobody being seriously injured in the centre of Horsham, while a pedestrian is being seriously injured in the centre of Farnham at a rate greater than one a year?

Horsham is a far from brilliant place to walk and cycle around, but the town centre itself has largely been civilised. Much of it is pedestrianised, and there is very little motor traffic travelling through it. What traffic that is moving through is generally travelling at a low speed, thanks to a 20mph zone (zone, not limit) with tight corners, humps, and cobbled surfaces.

The only route through Horsham town centre.

Farnham, by contrast, is not so much a ‘town centre’, more a funnel for motor traffic.

It really is this bad.

A one-way system dominates the shopping streets in the centre, motor traffic travelling at 30mph, with tiny pavements on either side (see for yourself).

The price of this arrangement – beyond how awful it is, as a place – is a pedestrian seriously injured, at least once a year. Somehow Horsham manages not to do this to people visiting its town centre.

Interestingly enough it appears that the problem has been recognised – proposals from Jeremy Hunt (yes, that Jeremy Hunt!) for pedestrianization of some of the problematic streets in Farnham has just been narrowly endorsed. Worth keeping an eye on.

‘Culture’

Over the course of the last few years, an area of Horsham – East Street and Market Square – has seen the gradual removal of motor traffic. Five years ago East Street was a conventional ‘road’, with narrow pavements, and, with Market Square, was open to motor traffic, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

East Street was given a ‘shared surface’ treatment back in 2010, and this was combined with the banning of the use of the street by motorists, except for loading and deliveries, and blue badge parking in a handful of bays. Subsequent to that change, the council went further, and removed motor traffic completely from the street, with temporary bollards, between 10:30am and 4:30pm. Deliveries take place before and after these times. Market Square – which can only be accessed legally from East Street – effectively became pedestrianised too, as a result of these changes.

There was some chuntering about these developments from many locals. The changes the council made were driven in large part by the numerous cafes and restaurants on East Street and Market Square, who wanted to put tables and chairs out on the street and on the square. This wouldn’t be possible without removing the motor traffic.

The grumbling – presumably from people who still wanted to drive down the street, during the day – focused on how Britain doesn’t really have a ‘cafe culture’, and that it would be silly to put table and chairs on the street. That’s just not for us Britons, the argument implied -we don’t really ‘do’ that sort of thing. People on the continent, maybe, but not us.

Well, of course, the tables and chairs did go out on the street, and, lo and behold, it turns out that we do have a cafe culture!

Market Square – full of tables and chairs, with people using them

The truth is that ‘culture’ was a pretty empty causal explanation for why Britons – and people in Horsham in particular – didn’t eat and drink out and the street. Compare the above picture of Market Square with how it used to look in 2009 (from the opposite direction) –

The old Market Square. (Picture from here).

Nobody was sitting outside here, because, frankly, it was a bit shit. Essentially a car park.

And precisely the same was true of East Street. Compare today –

East Street today. People eating and drinking, on the street.

with the previous arrangement –

The old East Street. Nobody eating and drinking on the street.

It wasn’t our ‘culture’ that stopped us from sitting on the street. It was the physical environment. As soon as that was good enough, then our ‘cafe culture’ suddenly appeared.

I think there are important lessons here for anyone who mistakenly tries to attribute the differences in the amount of cycling between Britain and the Netherlands to ‘culture’. Yes, of course, the Dutch do have a ‘bicycle culture’, but that doesn’t explain why they cycle so much. Perhaps by a combination of historical accident, good fortune, strong campaigning and bold political leadership, they’ve ended up with an environment that allows cycling. What ‘cycling culture’ they have flows from that environment. Impose British-style conditions on the Netherlands and that ‘culture’ would rapidly evaporate.

Likewise it would be absurd to attribute Britain’s low cycling levels to any lack of ‘bicycle culture’. People don’t cycle here because – again through a combination of historical misfortune, poor planning, and poor political leadership – the environment for cycling is dreadful. Where conditions for cycling are – even temporarily – made good, then suddenly our ‘bicycle culture’ materialises.

Sky Ride, London 2013 – mass cycling for one day of the year, on roads that suppress cycling for the remaining 364

That’s why this quote, from Charles Rubenacker –

The Dutch have created the safest and most complete bicycling network in the world, but we need to look beyond infrastructure and into their collective souls to better understand why riding a bike is so normal in the Netherlands.

is so baffling. The true explanation is grasped in the first half of the sentence, before being discarded for an explanation that is not so much genetic, as mystical.

Do we Britons need to ‘look into our collective souls’ to understand why we don’t ride bicycles? We could do, but I don’t think it would get us very far.

‘Culture’ is an empty explanation. It asserts that the way things are is due to things being that way. Arguing that the Dutch have high cycling levels because of ‘cycling culture’ is akin to arguing that Britons don’t eat out on the street because we don’t have a cafe culture – we don’t have a culture because we don’t have a culture. It’s circular and meaningless.

The going rate

I’ve just spotted that Transport for London’s new Draft Cycle Safety Action Plan attempts to pull the same trick that Norman Baker and Mike Penning tried to pull back in 2012.

That is, it makes a comparison between cycle safety in London and Amsterdam (along with other cities) on the basis of deaths per head of population, rather than deaths per total distance travelled by bike (or by total time spent travelling by bike).

Here’s the graph in question, from page 10 of the Plan –

Followed by the helpful explanation –

Internationally, in terms of cyclist fatalities per million population (Figure 2), London had fewer cyclist fatalities in 2012 than many other cities such as Amsterdam and New York.

So, looking at this graph, you might think that London (in yellow) is fantastically safe! Just look how much lower the number of fatalities there are, compared to Amsterdam, per capita. London had just 1.7 cycling fatalities in 2012 per million population, where Amsterdam had 6.5 – nearly four times higher.

But of course this is an entirely misleading comparison. It doesn’t take into account the fact that, across London, cycling only accounts for around 2% of all trips made, whereas in Amsterdam cycling accounts for nearly 40% of all trips made. There is much, much more cycling in Amsterdam per capita, so comparing cycling fatalities purely on a per capita basis is absurd. It’s like concluding it’s much safer to cycle in London than in Amsterdam if you have a Dutch name, because many more people with Dutch names are killed cycling in Amsterdam than in London.

This is the same logic that led Mike Penning to argue

I think the Netherlands may want to come and see us, to see how we are making sure that so few people are killed cycling

And (more recently) Denis McShane to suggest

@patmcfaddenmp @KenPenton Cycle deaths much higher in France than UK and truly awful in Netherlands

— Denis MacShane (@DenisMacShane) July 7, 2014

How much of this is down to stupidity or dishonesty is hard to tell. You would certainly think Transport for London and a Transport Under-Secretary (as Penning was, at the time) should know better.

The other thing that’s worth mentioning here – beyond the failure to use an appropriate rate – is that, in Amsterdam, children and the elderly (both more vulnerable groups, for different reasons) ride bikes in large numbers.

24% of all trips made by Dutch over-65s are cycled, while in London 95% of over-65s never cycle. If people that are, in general, more frail – and more likely to suffer death than a younger person in an equivalent incident – aren’t cycling at all, that will have a further skewing effect on casualty figures.

A demographic cycling in Amsterdam, but not cycling in London 

Thanks to the Road Danger Reduction Forum, who spotted this ‘measurement’ issue.

Sustainable safety – the British way

One of the principles of the Dutch approach to road safety – sustainable safety, or duurzaam veiling – is homogeneity. Homogeneity of mass, speed and direction.

Roads should be designed to eliminate, as much as possible, mixing road users with large differences in speed and mass in the same space. So, for example, relatively slow pedestrians should not have to mix with relatively fast bikes, and relatively light bicycles should not have to mix with relatively heavy buses or HGVs. Likewise road users who travel slowly should not be expected to share space with vehicles travelling considerably faster.

It appears this principle has been grasped by the Freight Transport Association, who argue

we believe there is evidence confirming that road safety will be improved if the differential between HGVs and other road users is reduced.

Sounds fantastic!

Except… the measure the FTA are welcoming involves reducing the speed differential by shifting lorries to a higher speed, so they are travelling at the same speed as smaller motor traffic.

Conveniently the FTA seem to have overlooked those ‘other road users’ who will still be travelling at around 15mph, or slower, for whom this move to higher speed limits for HGVs will distinctly worsen their safety, according to the logic that the FTA themselves accept. The speed differential between people walking, cycling and horse-riding, and HGVs, is being increased.

Sustainable safety – the British way!

UPDATE

The DfT press release similarly completely overlooks the effect this speed difference will have on vulnerable road users. It states –

This change will remove a 20mph difference between lorry and car speed limits.

… while adding a ~40mph speed difference between HGVs and people walking, cycling and riding horses. Great stuff guys.

Turbogate gets weirder

From the press release, the ‘turbo’ roundabout in Bedford will now be under construction – building was scheduled to start yesterday, Monday the 21st of July.

Pretty much everything you need to know about this strange scheme and its convoluted history is here on the Alternative Department for Transport blog. (The Cycling Embassy of Great Britain also hosted a guest blog critically examining some of the claims made for this design).

Presumably in anticipation of construction starting, the local cycling campaign for North Bedfordshire (CCNB) have put out a statement justifying the design. It’s as curious as the scheme itself. Principally it clings to the sad, failed strategy of attempting to design for two different categories of ‘cyclists’ separately, instead of the proven, successful approach of inclusively designing for everyone. 

CCNB believes that the dual use scheme will improve the safety of all types of cyclists (and pedestrians). Experienced cyclists will use the on-road carriageway around the roundabout while the less confident, new and young cyclists will use an off-road shared use route using four zebras is a good compromise.

For ‘experienced cyclists’ –

The tighter geometry and enforced lane discipline should slow down traffic over what it is at present. An experienced cyclist adopting the primary position should thus avoid being overtaken or cut-up and as a consequence feel much safer. The lane discipline should also ensure that most motorists know what cyclists are doing and in the same way cyclists should also know what motorists are doing.

Well that sounds attractive, on a roundabout that will still be carrying around 25,000 PCUs per day! And for everyone else –

Current regulations stipulate that cyclists can cycle across zebras if there is a dual use path on either side but unlike pedestrians must give way to motor vehicles. The zebras will be wider than normal and the design will allow easy modification to a more traditional Dutch style junction when the DfT allows cyclists to use them in the same way as pedestrians, hopefully sometime next year.

The experience of cycling like a pedestrian.

I am deeply, deeply sceptical about claims this design can be ‘modified’ to a Dutch-style junction, not only because a Dutch-style junction would have perimeter tracks, clearly distinct from footways, rather than shared use areas, but also because the zebras in this scheme cross multiple lanes on the approaches, at sharp angles, a design that is simply not appropriate to ‘convert’ to a crossing. (To say nothing of the appropriateness of cycling on these zebras while waiting for this ‘conversion’).

Will converting these zebras to ‘cycle zebras’ amount to a ‘Dutch style junction’?

The CCNB response also contains this strange factoid –

The roundabout is generally very busy mainly in the short morning and evening rush hours. The area concerned is fairly small and it is not possible to have Dutch style off-road cycle tracks along any of the four roads involved. [my emphasis].

Really? Looking at the four roads involved – the four arms of the roundabout – in turn –

Union Street –

Tavistock Street –

Roff Avenue –

And Clapham Road –

It is plainly possible to accommodate cycle tracks on these approaches. And you don’t even need to believe me –

In the application, the designer submitted a mocked up version of what the roundabout could look like with a ‘proper’ Dutch design, including side road priority for cyclists on fully segregated cycle tracks and tight curve radii to slow vehicles.

That’s right – the designer of this scheme presented a possible version of this roundabout, with cycle tracks on entry and exit. Here it is!

As the CTC report, Bedford Borough Council vetoed this design on the grounds that it would affect motor traffic capacity; having one lane on each of the approaches wouldn’t be sufficient to cope with current volumes of motor traffic.

So – faced with the intransigence of the council, and the ludicrous constraints of the the DfT’s Cycle Safety Fund – it would be understandable if the local cycle campaign admitted defeat, and grimly accepted this being forced on them, while grumbling about it. But to actually come out and support this dog’s dinner?

Why model, when you can experiment?

The junction outside the Bank of England is truly awful; a vast open space of tarmac, motor traffic thundering through in five directions, and pedestrians accommodated on tiny pavements. What should be a beautiful civic space is devoted to motor traffic flow.

From Google Streetview

To be fair to the City of London, they have recognised the problem, and are looking to make improvements. It seems they are examining the potential for closing off motor traffic from certain directions, or at certain times of day.

But here’s the method they are choosing to employ for examining the options –

At the moment we are establishing how wide the impact might be if we make big changes at the junction. This will give us the starting point of what we will need to look at in detail. We should complete this work by September 2014.

Our next task will be to build a computer traffic model to assess what is likely to happen if traffic is prevented from crossing the junction for example in certain directions or times of day. Information from pedestrian and cycling movements will also help to develop solutions. This is likely to be a big piece of work and will take some time to complete but it is very important to have credible options for alterations to the junction. We hope to have this work completed by early 2016.

They are building a computer traffic model to do so – in their own words, ‘a big piece of work’ that is going to take one and a half years to complete. Eighteen months. There is no word on how much this is going to cost.

I imagine the complexity here is due to the fact that we don’t really know how to model people cycling and walking, as described in this excellent post by smalltown2k. It’s really very difficult, and the City appear to be attempting to do so. Now obviously the ability to model these kinds of movements is going to be very important in the future, and it is valuable that we can start to assess what might happen to traffic flow if we acknowledge how people walk and cycle about, and how they might shift mode under different conditions.

But really, rather than just building a hugely complex model from scratch to find out what happens when a junction is closed to motor traffic, couldn’t the City just do it, on a trial basis? If the result is genuine chaos, then the trial can quickly be abandoned.

There are good reasons for thinking a trial of this kind – closing roads at Bank temporarily – would not result in chaos. The main one is that the area is ringed by major arterial roads, composed of London Wall to the north, Aldgate and Tower Gateway to the east, and Upper Thames Street to the south.

All are designed to carry large volumes of motor traffic, and all lie very close to Bank itself. These are the roads that should be carrying through traffic; the area around Bank should, realistically, only be carrying private motor traffic that is accessing the area. Certainly, the Bank junction should not be carrying through motor traffic in an east-west direction, as there are two major roads to the north and south – just a few hundred metres away – that were built for this purpose.

So – why not just try this? Try it now, rather than spending eighteen difficult months building a model from scratch. You’ll get results that correspond to the real world, and much more quickly!

Chipping away

The summer is the season when West Sussex County Council – and presumably many other British councils – decide to start spreading gravel on their country lanes, sticking it down with tar and hoping that motor vehicles will ‘bed it in’. This technique is apparently called ‘chip seal’.

It is simply awful to ride on, especially when it has just been laid – the gravel is still loose, and slippery to ride on. Stones get flung up, particularly by passing vehicles, which rarely stick to the 20mph suggested limit. And it’s a poor surface to ride on, even when it has been ‘bedded in’ – rough, and noisy, and far worse than a machine-laid tarmac surface.

Worse than that, chip seal appears – to me at least – to actually accelerate the deterioration of a road. Here’s an example, a mile away from where the new chip seal has been laid in the photograph above.

This road was ‘chip sealed’ in the last four to five years (I can’t remember precisely when). But as you can see, the layer of gravel has been intermittently blasted off, leaving a bumpy patchwork surface, partly composed of the remaining chipseal, and the underlying original road surface. Again, absolutely awful to ride on, but more problematically, the kind of road surface that is going to deteriorate very rapidly. Potholes are already starting to develop in the areas where the chipseal has been blasted off. The depressions are places where water is retained, perfect for the development of road damage.

I’ve cycled on country lanes in most of the countries of western Europe, including places where roads are subject to extremes of temperature – Switzerland and Sweden. Yet no other western European country appears to employ ‘chip seal’ – they seal roads properly, with machine laid surfaces. My guess is that these roads – while more expensive to lay in the short term – are much cheaper in the long term, because they last much longer than this strange ‘gravel’ approach.

Why does Britain do things differently? Is chip seal genuinely cost-effective? Answers please!

Asking people to behave, instead of making them

A post by Joe Dunckley yesterday – about how we keep expecting education and awareness to change driver behaviour, ahead of physical engineering – reminded me of something I’d been meaning to write about for a while. It was provoked by this sign I came across in the village of Rotherwick, in Hampshire.Beneath the standard ‘watch out for children’ warning triangle, some locals have evidently felt the need to ask drivers to ‘please’ slow down, attaching a do-it-yourself sign to the pole.

Needless to say, although the locals are asking drivers to slow down to 20mph, the speed limit through the village – and past the school – remains set at 30mph. The official limit is on the pole on the other side of the road.

But hey, drivers have been warned there’s a school here – they’ll all drive carefully, won’t they?

And there’s a similar example in the village of Partridge Green in West Sussex – again, by the village school.

A ‘kill speed not kids’ sign near the junction with the school is, of course, not accompanied by any corresponding low speed limit, or physical measures to enforce it.Although the DIY sign here has a picture of a zebra crossing, there isn’t any crossing, at all, outside the school itself – but there are some barriers to stop people crossing the road where they might actually want to.

Perhaps the pick of the bunch, though, is this DIY sign outside William Penn Primary School in Coolham, which is aimed at… the primary schoolchildren themselves. Behave!

Nice of West Sussex County Council to do absolutely nothing to make this dead straight road – just outside of a 60mph limit – safer for schoolchildren.

And it’s not just outside schools. The residents of Tower Hill – a rural road, but with plenty of housing along it, and no footpath – plainly feel that the 60mph limit through where they live is preposterous, and have made their own speed limit signs. There have been many crashes here.All this is sadly symptomatic of the British approach to dealing with traffic danger. At locations where there really shouldn’t be fast motor traffic, and where there is clear local demand for low vehicle speeds (people are making these signs and attaching them themselves) there isn’t anything to make drivers behave, or design that reduces the danger posed to vulnerable road users; only informal requests and home-made signs.

Perhaps the background assumption here is the one Joe describes in his post – that the British driver is innately well-mannered, and doesn’t really need to be told what to do; he’ll either be behaving sensibly already, and if not, polite requests will be sufficient.

the British tradition of soft measures goes far wider, deeper and further back… Motorists may moan about having been the victim of a “war” that restricts their freedom, polices their movements, or sends campaigns of severe punishment for accidental and unavoidable infringement of petty rules, but the reality is that right from the start, when the red flag acts were repealed, this country’s response (and that of much of the English-speaking world) to the problems that motorists create on the road has largely been light touch and libertarian, in which the children are simply asked again and again to play nice, even as they become ever greater bullies, and only if they’re really bad might they have their pocket money docked. We encourage and raise awareness, appeal to the legendary British sense of fair play, and still believe that the ideal road is within reach if only we can persuade everybody to get along through courtesy, good manners, and communicating our intentions clearly to one another.

But these homemade signs are symptomatic of a failure of that strategy. They wouldn’t exist if drivers responded properly to their environment; there wouldn’t be any need to exhort them to slow down to an appropriate speed if they were already doing it. Moreover, there wouldn’t be any need for barriers to stop children crossing the road where they want to, if we could rely on drivers approaching schools at a sensible speed.

What these signs demonstrate are that ‘soft’ measures – education, exhortation, awareness, and so on – don’t work. We need physical environments that make people behave, and that design in safety. If we want people to drive slowly, that needs to come from the design of the road or the street in question, not from home-made signs that plead desperately for sensible behaviour.

DB32 and ‘sufficient cycling demand’

I recently acquired a copy of Residential Roads and Footpaths: Layout Considerations. Exciting.

It’s a 1977 Department for Transport publication, perhaps more commonly referred to as ‘DB32’ (Design Bulletin 32). It has (in theory) been superseded by the Manual for Streets guidance, in the design of residential streets.

It is perhaps most notorious for a fairly ridiculous visibility splay recommendation – that the SSD (sight stopping distance) on a road with a speed limit of 30mph should be 90m. That is, a driver on a minor road arriving at a major road with a 30mph limit, waiting at the junction, should have a clear view for 90m, up the major road. This inevitably creates big, open junctions, and the temptations for drivers to travel faster, and with less care – because it feels safer for them to do so. John Dales has written recently about how this guidance is still being adhered to.

But I was really more interested in what a 1977 DfT document about roads and streets in residential areas had to say about cycling. And it’s really quite depressing.

Here it is –

Provision for cyclists

3.18 The need for the provision of a separate cycle network rather than the use of the urban road network is a matter for local authorities to decide in the light of their overall transportation planning and considerations of cyclists’ needs and safety. In some areas the use of cycles is well established whilst in other areas the terrain may be discouraging to their use.

3.19 Where there is likely to be a sufficient cycling demand in new housing schemes and where an existing cycle network terminates at, or is adjacent to, a new housing development, consideration should be given to the need to link the scheme to it, or to extend it.

3.20 In addition the provision of comparatively short lengths of segregated cycle routes may be sensible in the immediate vicinity of schools or shops to allow cyclists to disperse in a variety of directions in greater safety than would otherwise be possible, provided the use of cycles is sufficient to warrant such provision.

Paragraph 3.18 contains the now familiar ‘up to local authorities to do as they see fit’ mantra. If you are a council, and you don’t want to bother with designing for cycling, go right ahead!

And because the vast majority of local authorities didn’t want to do anything to cater for cycling, consequently nothing happened. The DfT guidance here shrugs and looks the other way; it just doesn’t care, because cycling is a mode of transport they didn’t care about. It could be forgotten – and was.

The next two paragraphs betray a form of thinking that unfortunately lingers to the present day – namely, that local authorities and planners only need to cater for the cycling that might currently exist, and need not cater for it at all, if there isn’t much of it. Paragraph 3.20 is particularly awful, with its comment that cycle provision ‘may’ (may!?) be sensible, ‘provided the use of cycles is sufficient to warrant such provision.’

If only a handful of people were cycling in an area in 1977 – well, tough luck, no cycle provision for you!

Similarly, paragraph 3.19 ponders whether there might be ‘sufficient local demand’ to merit catering for cycling, without apparently stopping to consider whether the designs being advocated in DB32 might do anything to increase or suppress cycling levels, in and of themselves. It’s almost wilful blindness.

It is this failure to recognise that the transport choices people make are not innate, but are instead a product of the environment that people are confronted with, and that has been designed for them, that persists today. We’ve had decades of planning that has assumed that people want to drive for short trips – indeed, that children want to be driven for short trips, rather than cycling independently – without ever stopping to consider whether those choices are really choices at all. Planning that hasn’t considered that many people might be driving these short trips not because they have freely chosen between driving and cycling (for instance), but because the quality of the alternatives has been eroded so much they have become too unpleasant to bear.

People are free to cycle here. Unsurprisingly most choose not to.

Cycling was rightly seen as unpopular by the authors of guidance like DB32, but the actual reasons for this unpopularity were misdiagnosed, or completely overlooked. In truth, cycling had become unpopular by 1977 because it was a pretty awful experience. It wasn’t that people had realised that driving was innately superior, and consequently logically discarded their bicycles; driving isn’t, for many types of trips. Cycling had just been squeezed out of the way roads and streets were designed, and by the amount of motor traffic that was arriving on them.

And it is this same form of thinking that has to be battled against today. Cycling is a mode of transport that, by and large, doesn’t exist in Britain. But that’s not because it’s innately unpopular. It’s because it hasn’t been catered for, for decades. By analogy, bus travel in London is, today, immensely popular, but it is easy to imagine a parallel world in which bus lanes didn’t exist, in which buses were smelly, and slow, and dangerous, and socially unsafe – a world in which very few Londoners used buses, at all. We created a system in which bus travel was made attractive and obvious, and people flocked to them.

Let’s not be like the authors of DB32 and imagine we can’t do the same for cycling.

What cycling can look like, if you design for it.

Do Dutch pedestrians get a raw deal?

My post last week – about vehicular cycling being enabled by Dutch infrastructure – prompted a tweet from Jon Usher, wondering where the pedestrian infrastructure was in the Netherlands.

@steinsky @lofidelityjim Where’s the pedestrian infrastructure in the Netherlands? Honest question – have they prioritised bikes too much?

— Jon Usher (@jonusher) July 2, 2014

It’s a reasonable question, because (looking at that post again) nearly all the photographs featuring the Netherlands do not contain ‘pedestrian infrastructure’ – they only show cycle tracks. Only one photograph in the post has a pavement beside a cycle track.

Why is this? Have the Dutch forgotten that pedestrians exist? Are they just thinking about bikes, and not about people walking?

The short answer is – absolutely not.

But in longer form – the Dutch don’t bother to cater separately for cycling and walking where there is no need to do so. There is no need, for instance, to build a pavement alongside the cycle track here, because not many people are using it.

People walking can use the cycle track without any problems, sharing with people who happen to be cycling. This jogger doesn’t need a separate footway, because the two-way cycle track is perfectly adequate.

Likewise a a new 4m wide cycle track in Nijmegen can easily accommodate joggers, walkers and cyclists, together. There just isn’t any need to build a footpath alongside it.

This approach means that – particularly in rural areas – the footway is a cycle track.

This isn’t a problem for people walking – the surface is very smooth (smoother than a standard paved footway), and the number of people walking and cycling is so low that conflict is minimal.

It is important to note that this is very different from British ‘shared use’ provision, which is pedestrian-specific infrastructure on which people have been granted permission to cycle. By contrast, the Dutch design for vehicular cycling, which is (by default) suitable for walking on.

Of course, if there were more people walking along these paths, then there would be a problem, and a footway would have to be constructed, to deal with this lack of comfort. Indeed, as you cycle from the countryside into a town or a city, you can quickly see the point at which the numbers of people walking necessitates separation. For instance, the path just outside the town of Veenendaal has no footway – it’s effectively a country lane, albeit one that has no motor vehicles on it.

But as soon as this same path enters the built-up area, so a footway appears alongside it. The number of people walking justifies this separate provision.

And again, here’s an example of where a footway suddenly begins alongside a cycle track, as the path enters a built-up area –

This isn’t accidental. The CROW Design Manual for Bicycle Traffic has clear guidance on when it is acceptable to mix pedestrians and cyclists, and when they must be provided for separately. Table 20 in Chapter 4 –

What this table shows is that, if more than 100 pedestrians, per metre of width, are passing along a path per hour, then they must be provided for separately. So – to take an example – if we have a 3m wide bi-directional cycle track, then 300 people walking along it, per hour, exceeds the limit for sharing. These pedestrians should be provided for separately. Under 300 people walking along it per hour requires no separation.

This is fairly intuitive – a 3m wide path can easily accommodate 5 people walking along it per minute without much difficulty. And – interestingly enough – this pedestrian flow, per metre of with, per hour, corresponds very closely with high levels of pedestrian comfort in TfL guidance, which suggests that 180 pedestrians per metre of width, per hour, would have an A+ level of comfort.

Sometimes it appears that the CROW guidance is stuck to a little too rigidly. For instance, the new ‘The Crossing’ bridge in Nijmegen (which Mark Wagenbuur has blogged about) has a stunning cycle track running across it, but no separate footway.

I imagine this is acceptable; it’s a long way to walk, so probably not many people will be walking here, and those that do can share this path happily. But… it would have been nice to have it, especially given the cost of building this bridge, and the difficulty of adapting it if, at some future point, pedestrian flows increase.

But all that said, it turns out that the Dutch treat pedestrians rather better than we do. They ensure that they are not forced to share footways with people cycling in areas of high pedestrian footfall, as Surrey County Council appear to be attempting to do in Walton-on-Thames. They would never mix pedestrians and cyclists on footways in busier pedestrian environments – the above guidance table would rule this out. More than 100 pedestrians per hour per metre of width requires separation.

Where pedestrians aren’t catered for separately, there really isn’t any need to do so, due to the low usage levels of the paths in question. Wide paths can be shared happily when the volume of people walking and cycling is low.

Read more about the general way in which pedestrians are catered for in the Netherlands on the Cycling Embassy blog.