Why can’t we get visualisations right?

Last night I was discussing plans for the centre of Enfield, as part of that borough’s ‘mini-Holland’ bid, during a London Cycling Campaign seminar on designing well for walking and cycling.

The plans themselves – if they are not watered down – actually look pretty good, and we were mainly discussing the best way of facilitating cycling and walking movement without causing conflict in a high street environment.

The visualisations of the scheme, however, struck me (and others) as problematic.

A burly man going mountain biking, apparently

Not just the garish, intrusive colour scheme, but also the type of people cycling. Very much ‘cyclists’ – a man in full sporting gear, hunched over, stomping on the pedals of his mountain bike.

If these plans are trying to be sold to the public – and indeed to convince shopkeepers that the removal of the road outside their shops is a good idea – then this is frankly a disastrous kind of person to be showing. Someone who looks like they are going somewhere else, and who won’t be stopping. And who also looks like a bit of a menace.

It would surely have made much more sense to use a different kind of person on a bike.

Take your pick

Or just something that has a bit of joy in it.

Isn’t riding a bike supposed to be fun?

Enfield aren’t the only people to have got this wrong. Notable examples included TfL’s ‘bus stop bypass’ visualisations, showing someone who resembles Monkey Dust’s ‘The Cyclists’ –

The Superhighway 2 visualisations, showing lycra clad, fast-looking men

And Peterborough Council’s laughable, laughable decision to use what looks like Fabian Cancellara in their visualisation of a walking and cycling route in their town centre.

A vision for the type of cycling Peterborough want in their town centre

I’m sure there are many other examples like this.

We were told that there was ‘limited time’ to prepare the bid, and the visualisations, but really, how much more time does it take to choose a suitable image of someone cycling? If you are thinking about doing a visualisation – please, please contact me and I will be happy to supply a photograph!

The bad bits

I’m just back from a week-long tour of the Netherlands, cycling between (and across) a number of cities and towns I hadn’t visited before. I travelled around 300 miles, across the entire country. I will obviously come to the good bits in due course, but I thought I would start by writing about the bad bits, for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, they demonstrate that the Netherlands has not had perfect infrastructure magically parachuted in from the sky. The country had (and in many places still has) a very British-looking road network, that has been improved and adapted over recent decades. The bad bits I encountered are either old – streets and roads where nothing has been done (or the bare minimum has been done) – or simply places where compromised designs have been put in place, because the Netherlands has exactly the same conflicts for space between motor vehicles and cycling as Britain does.

Secondly, these are the parts of my journey that actually really jumped out at me. I could cycle for four to five hours a day, completely relaxed, apart from at these locations, where I suddenly had to concentrate, and start worrying. As well shall see, many of these examples actually look pretty good from a British perspective; but in the Netherlands, they were the places were I felt most stressed, and the least relaxed.

Starting at the beginning. On my way from the Hook of Holland to Delft, a good cycle path alongside a major road just stops, and switches to being bi-directional on the other side of the road.

Oranjesluisweg, De Lier

Not a huge problem, but quite jarring to suddenly have to deal with crossing two lanes of motor traffic, without any assistance. This was early on a Saturday morning, and I can imagine this road being much busier.

Further on, and as I approached the city of Delft, another good cycle path just tapered down to nothing, dumping me on the road on the approach to a busy junction.

Woudseweg, Delft

In Gouda I came across this ‘always stop’ junction for cyclists.

Spoorstraat, Gouda

The cycle track under the railway line meets a stop line, where cyclists are held while motor traffic progresses from their left, up to and through the junction (the green signal in the distance).

Then, the motor traffic is held, and cyclists get a green light, to move up to the stop line at the junction.

Quite safe, but this arrangement, combined with long waits (well over a minute) at the junction itself, made for a bad situation for cycling. Plenty of people were jumping the lights here, frustrated at having to wait for so long.

The town of Vlijmen, in the municipality of Heusden, was very poor, with no infrastructure at all to speak of, on quite busy roads and streets. It felt uncomfortable, even on a Sunday afternoon. But normal for Britain.

Mommersteeg, Vlijmen

While Nijmegen was in general very good for cycling, it did have a number of roads and streets which were inadequate, and indeed poor. Some examples.

A British-looking ASL at a major junction

A three-lane, one-way road, with no contraflow for cycling, and only a ‘feeder’ cycle lane in the middle of the road

An old street which has not been improved (although it looks like it will be, with development at the other end)

Nijmegen was the city I felt the least comfortable on my trip; but it vastly outstrips anywhere I have cycled in Britain. And remember; these are just the bad bits I am showing here.

In rural areas, my most uncomfortable cycling was on roads with ‘advisory’ cycle lanes at the sides of the road, and with no centre line.

Near Veenendaal

Generally I encountered very little motor traffic on these roads (certainly by British standards), so these pictures are unrepresentative of my trip as a whole. But I was travelling in the middle of the day, not at peak times, and situations like those pictured here could, I suspect, be quite common.

Access road near Breukelen

Quite often ‘bunching’ of motor traffic occurs, and (in my experience) Dutch drivers tend to give you very little passing distance on these kinds of roads, on the assumption that you know what you are doing.

It was unpleasant to have to start worrying about whether drivers would give you enough passing distance, or whether they were going to attempt a stupid overtake – compared to the serenity of the rest of my trip. And in some places these treatments are very obviously inappropriate.

The N836, Wageningenstraat, just south of the A15 motorway

This is an ‘N’ category road, the equivalent of our ‘A’ roads, only a kilometre or so from a motorway junction. This just didn’t cut it, as far as comfort was concerned, with large lorries and tractors passing in both directions. It was a relief to get back on the cycle tracks that ran along this road for the rest of its length. Why this section has not been upgraded yet, I don’t know.

Other ‘N’ category roads were interesting, in that for the most part they had extraordinarily good provision running alongside them, but sometimes, in towns, they just gave up. In particular Doorn, near Utrecht, was exceptionally bad.

‘No space for cycling’ at this junction in Doorn

The same problem British towns and cities face – multiple queuing lanes for vehicles means there’s not much space left over for proper cycling provision (or indeed for walking). Further on in the town –

‘Watch out for bikes!’

Here an (old) cycle track simply peters out, spitting you out onto a trunk road through the town, carrying heavy traffic. That is a lady carrying her family by cargo bike.

And because there is no cycle track in the opposite direction, you get children doing this – ‘salmoning’ up the road to get to the safety of the cycle track.

Hostile

Cycle lanes like this on this kind of road would, I think, be considered quite good in Britain, but this was definitely the most exposed I felt on my entire trip.

Leaving Doorn, and glad that military convoy is going the other way

Even very wide cycle lanes could suddenly create a feeling of discomfort. Here in Nijmegen this exceptional (by British standards) cycle lane was unsettling, compared to the cycle track I had been on moments before, as traffic came past me.

Good by British standards, but not very good compared to what is around it

And there were problems in Utrecht too. This cycle lane has been put on the wrong side of the parked vehicles. The parking and the cycle provision should obviously be switched.

A fantastic superhighway from Breukelen into Utrecht sends you into an industrial park, where you have to fend for yourself amongst HGV movements, on tiny cycle lanes.

This wasn’t much fun

And some junctions in the centre of the city are in desperate need of an upgrade, like here at Nachtegaalstraat, where huge numbers of people are squashed into an inadequate central queuing lane which separates bus traffic from private motor traffic, only able to turn right. By British standards, entirely comfortable, but not really good enough in the context of the rest of Utrecht.

Not good enough

So by no means is it perfect everywhere. The Dutch have plenty of old roads and streets that need to be upgraded; they just haven’t got around to doing them yet. And in other places it looks like battles still need to be fought to get proper provision installed, at the expense of motor traffic.

But I should stress that these examples – in total about twenty or thirty places – are the only times I felt uncomfortable, or inconvenienced, on my entire trip of around 300 miles. The vast, vast majority of my trip was gloriously pleasant, easy and safe. More of that to come.

As if we didn’t already know, a cycling revolution won’t happen by itself

There is a curious opinion that often manifests itself in government and in councils – that a serious commitment to cycling as a mode of transport in its own right can’t be made, precisely because very few journeys are currently made by bike in Britain.*

One of the latest examples of this kind of thinking comes from Reading, where councillor Tony Page has recently argued

We have to balance the interests of all road users and I particularly draw colleagues’ attention to figures which indicate the huge reliance on buses for journeys into the town centre. At the moment, cyclists only constitute three per cent and even if you double that it’s still only six per cent. The dominant and most popular mode of transport is our public transport.

That is – we can’t justify doing anything to improve cycling, because it is a deeply unpopular minority mode of transport, and anyway doing so would probably impinge on much more popular modes of transport.

The problem is that these kinds of opinions are predicated on an assumption that the people of Reading – or wherever – have a free choice about what mode of transport they wish to use. That cycling in Reading is just as ‘available’ to its citizens as bus travel, and the relatively high demand for buses compared to cycling just reflects the fact that people prefer ‘busing’ to ‘cycling’.

But there is of course another way of looking at this situation. It is entirely possible – in fact it is quite likely – that the ‘huge reliance’ on buses for journeys in Reading simply reflects the uncomfortable reality that the form of cycling on offer in the town is very unattractive – unpalatable – to the vast majority of people.

Indeed, it’s a bit like serving mouldy food, and when people decline it, assuming they prefer to go hungry, rather than eat.

We found that nobody wanted to eat this. So obviously people prefer going hungry, to eating bread.

The town of Reading is offering crap cycling, and when people choose a less worse alternative, its councillors appear to be assuming that means people don’t like to cycle, full stop.

Yet we know that people do like to cycle, and that there is enormous suppressed demand for it – demand suppressed largely by traffic danger and road conditions.

British people enjoy cycling in huge numbers when the conditions are right.

Waiting for cycling to materialise out of nowhere before you actually decide to start catering for it is, frankly, idiotic.

There is no clearer demonstration of this than the latest Office for National Statistics analysis of cycling to work patterns in the 2011 census, released yesterday [pdf]. It shows that cycling in Britain is largely stagnant or declining, except for increases in a small number of places (mostly cities) where small steps have been taken to improve conditions.

Before taking a look at that ONS analysis, it’s worth remembering that these are figures only for cycling to work, which will almost certainly paint a better picture than figures for cycling as a whole, for a number of reasons. Children are not included in cycling to work figures; we know that cycling rates amongst British children are lower than average. Likewise, the elderly are largely not included in cycling to work figures, and again cycling rates for this age group are below average. Both these age groups are much less likely to cycle than people of commuting age.

Equally, as Rachel Aldred has recently explained, even unpleasant cycling routes to work can be tolerated, or accepted, more than equivalent conditions for other kinds of trips – because these routes become familiar, and dangers can be anticipated and mitigated.

It seems like people are fussier about cycling environments when they’re not commuting. This makes intuitive sense if you think about it. When I’m riding to work, I know my route extremely well as I ride it most working days. I’m travelling on my own, so I only have to worry about my own safety, not that of any companions. I know where the dodgy bits are, where I need to concentrate super hard. I know the timing of the traffic lights – whether I have lots of time to get through or not. I know the hidden cut-throughs I can take to make the journey nicer. As I’m travelling with the peak commuting flows there’s often plenty of other cyclists around, creating a greater sense of subjective safety.

This certainly rings true for my commute across Westminster that I used to make for several years – I knew what kind of traffic to expect on which sections of the route, what kind of driving I was likely to encounter, where I needed to position myself on the road to avoid hazardous situations, and so on. My route got refined over time, and I became conditioned to dealing with what were initially very intimidating roads and junctions.So the picture for cycling as a whole is likely to be far, far worse than these census figures for commuting. (Indeed, we already know that cycling to work rates far outstrip modal share figures in London boroughs, usually being about three times higher).

The ONS tells us that

In 2011, 741,000 working residents aged 16 to 74 cycled to work in England and Wales. This was an increase of 90,000 compared with 2001. As a proportion of working residents, the share cycling to work was unchanged at 2.8%.

The small increase in the number of people cycling to work in England and Wales was matched by the increase in the number of people working, meaning that there was no proportional change in cycling to work since between 2001 and 2011.

The number of all trips being made to work increased by around 14% between 2001 and 2011, yet for England and Wales (excluding London) the number of trips to work being cycled increased by only 2.2%. That means that cycling to work levels outside of London have fallen from 2.8% to 2.6% over this period. The increase in London masks decline in cycling across the rest of England and Wales.

 The picture is just as gloomy when we look at a local authority level –

Of the 348 local authorities in England and Wales, 146 had an absolute increase in the number of people cycling to work between 2001 and 2011. As a proportion of resident workers in the local authority, however, only 87 of the 348 local authorities witnessed an increase.

That means 261 out of 348 local authorities – 75% – saw a proportional decline in cycling to work levels over this period. Cycling to work (reminder – much more resilient than other types of cycling) actually went backwards in most areas in Britain. And these are almost all areas that had next to no cycling in the first place. Bleak in the extreme.

Even places where there was a non-negligible amount of cycling to work went backwards too – among the most striking is (flat) north Norfolk, which had 4.8% of workers cycling to work in 2001. This fell dramatically to 2.8% in 2011. Indeed, it is quite extraordinary how the areas seeing the largest percentage points decline are grouped together in the flattish areas of eastern England.

The flatness problem – cycling going backwards in East Anglia and Lincolnshire

And the same areas show up among those where short cycling to work trips (less than 2km) have declined the most.

No, not that Holland. The Holland in Lincolnshire.

Plainly, no ‘cycling revolution’ is happening in England and Wales. Sporting glory is not persuading people to cycle for everyday trips; nor is marketing – advice, bike breakfasts, or exhortation about how fantastically green and good for your health cycling can be.

Cycling will not grow all by itself, and most likely it will continue to disappear in those areas where it is not being catered for. The idea that these trends can be bucked by expecting people to choose to cycle under current conditions, before we then start to take cycling seriously as a mode of transport, is nonsensical. The investment – serious investment – has to come first, along with proper design guidance to ensure that money is not poured down the drain on inadequate schemes of negligible benefit.

Without this kind of long-term strategic thinking, talk of cycling ‘booming’ in the UK will continue to ring hollow.

 

*A variant is that the Netherlands and Denmark only spend so much money on cycling because they have to cater for so many people cycling.

A small example of rural car dependence

This video was doing the rounds on Twitter last week.

It’s really quite well done, and a bit depressing that it dates from 2011. It convincingly shows how a B-road has effectively become a no-go area for anyone not in a motor vehicle, or confident enough to walk or cycle in the carriageway on a fast and busy road. That means short trips have to be made by car; all because a path suitable for walking and cycling has not been provided.

I was reminded of the video while I was out cycling at the weekend, on one of my usual leisure routes. The worst section of it is a B-road that runs into the village of Coolham. It’s a fast, straight section of road with a 60mph speed limit, where for some reason I always seem to encounter lunatic overtakes. Maybe it’s just coincidence, but this stretch of road always fills me with dread, and I exhale with relief a little as I progress through the village, and onto the quieter roads to the north.

What is most alarming is that, just like the B4044, there isn’t even a footpath on this stretch of road.

Watch out drivers – no footway. Oh, and please drive carefully.

Here we have the curiously British approach to road safety – put up a sign warning drivers that there isn’t a footway, instead of just actually supplying one. And, equally, asking them to drive carefully, rather than forcing them to.

As the houses of the village come into sight, we have a ‘SLOW’ warning. But no reduction in speed limit – still 60mph. With no footway.

‘SLOW’

The houses appear. Still 60mph, and no footway.

Reflective bollards. That’s nice

It is only as the centre of the village appears that the speed limit drops to 30mph, and still there is no footway.

The centre of Coolham

Coolham isn’t a big village, but it does have a primary school, with just over a hundred pupils – William Penn School (named, incidentally, after the founder of Pennsylvania, who lived and worshipped only a mile or so from the village).

Out of interest, I took a quick look at the mode share data from the 2011 School Census, which reveals that 85% of the pupils of William Penn were driven to school. None cycled.

Now of course some of these pupils may have come a distance to the school, from outside Coolham – this is a low-density rural area. But none more than a few miles; the surrounding villages all have their own primary schools. And surely the majority of the pupils will have come from within the village itself, perhaps even from those houses in the pictures above.

If they did, then their parents will, undoubtedly, have driven them to the school, which is less than half a mile away – about 700 metres, door to door, from the house at the very edge of the village. I certainly don’t blame them. They have no choice, forced into car dependency because of a total lack of safe and attractive alternatives.

What was once a quiet country lane has become a fast and busy road, and seemingly at no point during that evolution did anyone stop to think about the consequences for the people who don’t, or can’t, drive.

Yellow peril – our over-painted streets

By way of a follow-up to last week’s post about Zebra crossings, and how we manage to mess them up, I thought I’d address a similar common design feature of our streets that is hopelessly confusing – double (and single) yellow lines. And single and double red lines.  And double and single yellow kerb markings.

Yes, when it comes to road markings, we’ve managed to create a welter of different ways of permitting waiting, loading and stopping (each subtly different), at different times.

The humble single yellow line prohibits waiting, at certain times of the day.

The double yellow prohibits waiting at all times, when that period is at least four consecutive months.

These double yellow markings no longer need to accompanied by the yellow sign if there is no period of restriction. So feel free to modify the signs, when you see them.

Drivers are permitted to stop to pick up, or set down, passengers on these lines, or to load and unload (where it is not prohibited) – but they are not allowed to ‘wait’.

Simple enough so far, but then it gets more complicated. Holders of disabled blue badges can park (‘wait’) for up to three hours on double yellows, providing they are not causing an obstruction.

Then there are specific loading restrictions that rule out loading on single and double yellow lines. These are marked on the kerb. The single yellow line prohibits loading (either on a single or double yellow line) at the times on accompanying sign.

The double yellow kerb marking prohibits loading on a double yellow at any time.

Street art

Already we have a large number of permutations, but if you weren’t confused already, we then have no stopping (as opposed to no waiting) markings, in the form of single red lines, which are time-dependent –

And double red lines, prohibiting stopping at any time.

 Phew! And all this without even touching on the fact that cycle lanes will require forms these additional markings within them, to prevent them being obstructed.

But do things really have to be this complicated? (Things might even get more complicated if Eric Pickles has his way and allows anyone to park on double yellow lines for 15 minutes.)

Somehow European countries manage to get away without marking their streets with all this clutter, even in the centres of their cities. Paris –

Strasbourg –

Berlin –

Köln –

And of course any Dutch city.

So there must be a simpler way!

The principle in these European cities seems be that, rather than using an excess of signs and paint markings to show what you can’t do, it is easier just to mark out only the places where you can park, and leave the rest of the street unmarked.

Can we do this already in the UK?

Perhaps a traffic engineer could supply a definitive answer, but there does seem to be a precedent. ‘Shared space’ streets (to use the catch-all term) are increasingly common, and usually free of unsightly double yellows.

These streets come with signs, on entry, prohibiting waiting, except in marked bays.

Here’s a similar sign, on entry to New Road in Brighton, which again doesn’t have any painted markings. You can’t park anywhere here, except in the marked bays.

And of course Exhibition Road – which I have criticised for other reasons – also sets a useful precedent, in this regard. No need for double yellows, when you have this sign on entry. No waiting – except in signed bays.

Could this principle be extended to our town or city centres as a whole? That is – simply using ‘restricted zone’ signs on all entry routes, prohibiting any waiting, except in marked bays? That would allow us to remove all the unsightly yellow markings and clutter from our streets. It would also simplify the way we mark up roads for cycling.

I don’t see why not, given that this method is already being employed. Just like the humble zebra crossing, we seem to have over-legislated our way into an awful way of doing things – could we find a sensible way out?

Continual improvement

We often hear that we are ‘forty years behind’ the Netherlands – for instance, Andrew Gilligan stated last year that

It took 40 years to turn even Amsterdam into Amsterdam, with the kind of cycle facilities it has now

This statistic tends to gloss over just how quickly the Netherlands changed the roads and streets that matter. It certainly didn’t take ’40 years’, and the danger is that such a long timescale provides a justification for inaction.

More importantly, rather than closing that gap, we are falling further behind, as David Hembrow has set out – not just because there has been little or no substantive action in London and elsewhere, but also because the Netherlands is pulling further and further ahead, with constant upgrades and improvements to its network. I came across just one of these examples this week.

I’m planning a bicycle tour of some Dutch cities I haven’t visited before, using the Fietserbond (the Dutch Cycling Union)  planner to work out my routes. This is part of the route it suggests, between Delft and Gouda – the straight blue line on the map.

Examining what it looks like on Streetview, I found that this section… apparently runs across a field.

The wood on the right here is the dark green rectangle in the middle of the map above. The blue line of the route cuts straight where the sheep are. This was slightly concerning – I didn’t want to find myself taking a lengthy detour, or struggling across a field.

I don’t doubt the Fietsersbond planner, so did a bit of looking around. It seems that a huge new bicycle route has been built since the Streetview vehicle passed through. Here’s the junction in 2009 – the bicycle path just ends as it meets the road.

A year later, and construction has started on an underpass. For bikes.

You can just about see the bicycle path extending off across the field in the distance (if you want to take a look for yourself, the location is here).

This doesn’t even appear to be a particularly major road, which could have been crossed at surface level – but an underpass is less dangerous, and involves less delay. Just better, even if it costs a huge amount more. The cycle route now forms a nice straight uninterrupted line between the cities of Delft and Zoetermeer.

Here’s a local news item from October 2011, announcing the opening of this new ‘fast cycle route’, with tunnels under this road (the Noordweg) and a railway line. There’s also a pdf showing the new and improved routes.

I will enjoy riding along it!

The problem with (British) zebra crossings

Zebra crossings are, in principle, the ideal way for pedestrians to cross the road. They give pedestrians priority, and mean they can cross without delay.

But there are a number of regulatory difficulties which make them rather less than ideal. The first is the absurd requirement that every single zebra crossing has to have two Belisha beacons at either end of it, to make it ‘visible’ to drivers. Trying to implement Dutch-style infrastructure under UK rules would result in a complete forest of these beacons – amply demonstrated by the TRL trial of a Dutch roundabout.

Spot the zebra crossing

European countries are quite capable of implementing zebras without these ugly poles. In France –

In Switzerland –

And of course in the Netherlands –

Simple crossings that consist of nothing more than paint.

These continental zebras also do not have the ‘zig-zag’ markings on either side of the crossing, that are compulsory in the UK. This ‘extra’ marking not only uglifies the street, like the Belisha beacon – it also presents practical difficulties.

The minimum requirement is just two zig-zags – a ‘zig’ and a ‘zag’. Even this means that zebra crossings will inevitably be displaced from desire lines. Unlike in the French and Swiss examples, above, where the crossing goes from corner to corner, UK zebras have to be set back from junction mouths. Nor, on main roads, can they be placed by junctions with side roads, meaning extra delay and inconvenience for pedestrians.

About the best we can do – two ‘zig-zags’ back from the junction

And, from a cycling perspective, this ‘zig-zag’ rule is also inconvenient. It means that  crossings for cycling cannot be placed directly adjacent to zebra crossings, either across main roads, or across side roads.

Main road crossing, with zebra

Side road crossing, with zebra

Under the current rules, placing cycle tracks and zebras around the perimeter of a roundabout means that the zebra crossing is significantly displaced from the natural desire lines, as shown in this mock-up for the Cycling Embassy of a legal perimeter track.

From the Cycling Embassy blog

So these rules about zebras really need to be simplified, so we can have straightforward crossings without all the paraphernalia of beacons and markings.

The other serious problem with zebras involves the rules governing their use. Here’s the relevant passage from the Highway Code, with what I consider to be an unhelpful rule underlined.

Highway Code Rule 193

That is, drivers have to give way only after the pedestrian has moved onto the crossing, not before – not, for instance, when the pedestrian is waiting to cross.

What does this mean in practice? To give an example from just yesterday, I watched an elderly lady waiting to cross a road, standing on the pavement at a zebra. Because she didn’t step out onto the crossing, no driver stopped. About five cars passed, despite her clearly waiting to cross, as I approached.

As someone who cycles in traffic on a day-to-day basis, naturally I had no qualms about striding out straight onto the crossing the lady was waiting at (it helps if you have a bicycle with you, to wheel out in front of you), commanding, or rather daring, the oncoming drivers to stop, which they did – just about. She didn’t follow me, however.

But this is the problem with Rule 193. Because priority only arrives after you step onto the crossing, Rule 193 expects people waiting to cross the road on a zebra to effectively play chicken with approaching motor vehicles. This is not something people are willing to do. Given the choice between just waiting for a gap in traffic to materialise, and stepping out in front of a driver and hoping they will stop, I suspect most will simply wait for a gap, as the elderly lady did yesterday. Indeed, this (quite rational) preference is reinforced by official advice.

Thanks TfL

‘Never assume traffic will stop’ (or rather ‘never assume drivers will stop’) means zebras only effectively become useful when there are gaps in traffic. People simply don’t want to chance it. They wait on the pavement – and that means no driver has to yield for them.

Rule 19 in the Highway Code effectively encapsulates this gaping hole in the rules.

The gloriously contradictory Rule 19

Wait until all traffic has stopped before you step onto the crossing. But traffic doesn’t have stop until you step on the crossing. Right… that makes sense.

It’s not surprising therefore that, as I understand it, pelican or toucan crossings are preferred by the general public, because while delay is  involved, the signals give a degree of certainty that drivers will stop – albeit a certainty that is often misplaced.

So, in essence,  Britain’s traffic rules have managed to seriously wound a sensible and straightforward way of crossing the road. I suppose we should pat ourselves on the back.

Dealing with a historical failure to consider cycling

Way back in the 1970s, Horsham built a stub of inner ring-road, a dual carriageway that was later extended in two stages to (almost) encircle the town centre. It’s called Albion Way.

Albion Way – Horsham’s inner ring road

It involved almost entirely demolishing a church…

The remnants of St Marks

and blasting a dual carriageway through a high street, to link up with a new Sainsbury’s, built on school playing fields (you can see the car park by the ‘A’ on the map above).

Frankly, it’s a bit of a monstrosity – overkill, given that it duplicates a bypass that encircles the town. The severance is crap for people walking and cycling, who only have a few places they can cross it, which are (with one exception) pretty awful.

Lovely

Motor traffic on Albion has consistently fallen over the last decade, and it needs to be resolved. But even in its current form it represents a bit of a mixed blessing. The town planners who initially set about building it were quite clear that motor traffic should be removed and displaced from the town centre – and that has been achieved, pretty well. The area enclosed by the ring road has only one route through it, as shown below.

The route through the town centre

This is a one-way road – all the other streets in the town centre have been pedestrianised, or are dead-ends, or do not form useful routes to anywhere, and are only used for access. And the centre of Horsham as a whole was one of the first 20mph zones in Britain, dating back to 1992. As well shall see, the only route through the centre has traffic calming in the form of humps and a cobbled surface, and  is deliberately tortuous, in an attempt to discourage people from using it as a through route, rather than the longer ring road (although in my experience many people still try).

It’s pretty good, and I have sung the praises of the town centre before, which has been improved further over the last few years by the progressive removal of motor traffic from more streets.

The only problem… is that cycling has been forgotten about.  The town centre is impenetrable from most directions by bike, because of the one-way route through it (that doesn’t have an exemption), and pedestrianisation. There is no useful, direct route across the town from north to south, nor from east to west, nor from west to east. The only route through the town centre is by following the existing one-way street. This lack of permeability is really quite poor.

This may change. West Sussex County Council won some Local Sustainable Transport Fund (LSTF) cash in the last round of bidding, which has to be spent by April 2015 – some of that cash is coming to Horsham, to construct (amongst other things) a cycling route across the town, from the station (which lies to the north of the town centre) through to the south. This will obviously have to tackle the one-way system.

This direct route, from the railway station (to the north) to the town centre, is currently impossible by bike, without taking an unpleasant and/or lengthy diversions

The planned route will come from the station, over the inner ring road on an existing shared walking and cycling route (running along the bridge in the picture earlier in this post). It then arrives in the Carfax, where it is confronted by the one-way road in the centre of the town.

Horsham’s Carfax, looking south. Currently no cycling in this direction

The route will have to run from where the photograph is taken, to the red brick building in the distance. There is a huge amount of space available here, but there probably isn’t going to be much money to play with. That means relaying the street (playing with the cobbles!) to make the carriageway wider is unlikely.

My instinct tells me a simple contraflow would be the most straightforward (and cheapest!) approach – simply legalising cycling in a contraflow direction. But there are issues. The carriageway is not especially wide, and while the volume of traffic is not very high, at all, there are potential conflicts with a loading bay on one side, and a combined bus stop/loading bay on the other. This picture gives some idea of the potential difficulties.

Not particularly brilliant to be cycling the other way under these conditions

The other alternative is to route the contraflow to the left (as we look at it) of that loading bay, but this is not particularly wide, and would obviously impinge upon walking. It’s probably a non-starter.

Not a huge amount of space for cycling and walking here

I’ve taken a short video of this section of road, at one of the busiest times of day, 5:30pm. This is when the density of people driving through the town centre tends to be highest – to pick up friends or relatives at the end of the day, to grab some cash from the banks nearby, or simply to use it as a shortcut. This is obviously combined with the buses – the frequency is not especially high, but it could be a problem.

See what you think – it gives a flavour of how difficult it could be to cycle in a contraflow direction, and also how easy it could be!

Outside of the morning and evening, I think a straightforward contraflow could work absolutely fine. The street is very quiet. Indeed, in the evening, and the middle of the day, it can be absolutely deserted. It’s also a low speed environment, with pretty good (by British standards) traffic calming.

Lunchtime

But it could obviously present difficulties at peak times. The street is awkwardly designed, as far as two-way cycling is concerned – the narrow bits are in precisely the wrong place. Optimistically, if it is made obvious that there will be people cycling in a contraflow direction to people driving through the centre, my hope is that people will exercise common sense and not crash into each other.

The advantage of this approach is that will cost next to nothing, beyond signage. If, as I fear, it’s not good enough, and people simply can’t behave, then it will have to be changed.

My ideal solution would simply involve cutting out much more of the motor traffic – stopping the use of the Carfax as a route, by installing a bus gate halfway through it. Buses could still pass through (this is an important bus stop, right in the centre), but private motor traffic could not. The roads would be returned to two-way, for all vehicles.

This would stop people driving through, but would still allow access for people loading and delivering, and to the disabled parking bays in the town centre. Indeed, we have already had an (accidental!) trial of this system last year, when the humps in the Carfax were being repaired, and the route was blocked.

The closure of the Carfax to through-traffic – by accident

This closure point here would be the natural position for the bus gate. While these repairs were taking place (for over a month) people could still access all parts of the town centre, but couldn’t drive through. I even have a picture of a taxi driving the ‘wrong’ way down the section of road that will need two-way cycling!

Legal two-way driving on this narrow section of road, during the repair works. This could be the way forward.

This would be the ideal solution, but it would represent a bigger change, all for a mode a of transport that people around here don’t really think exists. It would be a much harder sell. The contraflow would be easier to implement, but sub-optimal.

I’m wondering what you think.

More motorway ‘idiocy’

So another person cycling on a motorway has been stopped by the police.

The last time this happened – just a few weeks ago – Beyond the Kerb succinctly described the different types of ‘idiocy’ involved here.

I don’t for one moment condone the idiocy of venturing onto a motorway on a bicycle. And I suspect nor do you condone it. It’s insane. It’s incredibly dangerous. And it’s illegal, and in this case a fine was levied.

But nor do I for one moment condone the idiocy of highway engineering that directs people to behave in precisely the same manner (with about a quarter of the width of tarmac to cycle on and far fewer safety criteria for the road as a whole). Yet, most people do condone it. It’s insane. It’s incredibly dangerous. Yet it’s legal, and people get paid for it.

On the A3, just a few miles from where our first idiot had his collar felt, is engineering that designs in the exact behaviour he exhibited; behaviour that attracted widespread and vociferous criticism from the police, the media and an angry public. And this is far from an isolated example of such engineering.

The latest example of motorway cycling is even more delicious, in that the motorway the man was stopped on is, objectively, far less dangerous than the A-road he had previously been cycling on, which simply ‘becomes’ a motorway at Sunbury.

Where the A316 becomes the M3

Lets take a look at these roads.

The A316. No shoulder. Legal to cycle here.

The M3, effectively the same road. But with a shoulder. Illegal to cycle here

The chap was ‘surrounded’ by police vehicles and escorted from the motorway with a £50 fine.

The cyclist apparently joined the motorway after riding along the A316, but “didn’t think to stop and walk off,” as the police put it.

Well, quite. Given that the objective conditions on the M3 are superior to the A316, and  that the two are essentially the same road, I can see where he’s coming from.

Junction capacity

The cycling schemes in Bedford and Southampton – the ‘Turbo’ roundabout, and the Itchen Bridge junction, respectively – have been hitting the headlines recently. A post by SmallTown2K (who has been taking a thorough look at the Southampton scheme) goes some way towards explaining why what has ended up on the ground is so compromised –

In traffic engineering parlance, the junction does not operate satisfactorily in the AM peak. What this means is the junction is over capacity. I have no baseline Arcady (roundabout modelling software) for the roundabout to compare to, but the signals are likely lower in capacity and this indicates liable to cause congestion.

Obviously, traffic will readjust and vehicle congestion isn’t the be all and end all, except, in Southampton, almost everyone drives and angry drivers don’t re-elect people. Further, and perhaps less dramatically, as a highway authority, Southampton CC is bound to a Network Management Duty which means they must secure the “expeditious movement of traffic”, albeit that traffic is defined as all road users. In that vein it should be noted for non-locals that the Itchen Bridge is a key bus corridor and congestion over the bridge would affect all these routes and the large number of people thereupon (which offhand I would guesstimate outnumber cyclists in the order of 10:1).

It is this intersection of ‘keeping the traffic moving’ (conceived in terms of motor traffic) and political unwillingness to do anything that might disrupt ‘traffic’ (again, motor traffic) that has seen the removal of the ASLs from the original plans, the extra length of stacking lanes, and so on. The quality of the junction was sacrificed.

There’s a similar story behind the Bedford ‘Turbo’ roundabout. The council simply didn’t want to do anything that might have reduced the volume of motor traffic on the roundabout, resulting in the bodge that is finally going to see the light of day, with cycling effectively pushed onto shared use pavements, with a roundabout design that has the stated intention (whether it will succeed or not is another matter) of increasing motor traffic capacity.

The problem is that cycling is, as always, seen as something ‘extra’ to be accommodated around existing motor traffic, rather than a way of reducing congestion on the network as a whole. In a post yesterday Herbert Tiemens, of the Dutch Cycling Embassy, commented that

congestion easily evaporates with only a low percentage changing cars for bicycles

But we don’t seem to appreciate this in the UK – perhaps because we can’t get our heads around the fact that ‘ordinary’ people could actually switch from their cars to cycling, for short trips, if the conditions were more acceptable.

The truth is that designing junctions properly for cycling hugely increase the capacity of these junctions in terms of the movement of people, even if capacity for motor traffic is reduced. 

I dug out an old video of mine, shot in Groningen in 2011, just to demonstrate how efficient junctions can actually be.

This is the north-west corner of Vismarkt, right in the centre of the city, at about 5:30pm.

The video is only 3 minutes long, but I managed to count around 350 people passing through this junction in just that time – almost certainly an underestimate, because the video doesn’t capture people crossing on the arm to the right. This is a rate of 2 people every second, which amounts to at least 7000 movements per hour. It’s hard to say how many people might pass through here over the course of a day, but quite obviously the junction could handle a huge amount of people in a 24 hour period. All this in a small space, with no need for signalisation, or delay. And very little danger!

By comparison, busy junctions like the Bedford ‘Turbo’ roundabout currently handle 25,000 vehicles per day, as does the roundabout at the northern end of Lambeth Bridge – in a much bigger area, with much more delay, and with much greater danger. This junction in Groningen is much, much more efficient at moving people about.

I’m not suggesting that the motor traffic on these roundabouts can, or even should, disappear. The broader point is that shifting people out of their cars and onto bikes would serve to reduce congestion, not increase it – even if that means taking junction capacity away from motoring. But it has to be done properly, so that cycling is a genuine, attractive alternative.