Last week I visited the University of East London’s Stratford Campus to attend the launch of the Cycling Cultures report (pdf) (you can read the Cycling Embassy news story on the launch here). This gave me – and a few colleagues from the Embassy – the chance to ride the entire length of Cycle Superhighway 2, from Aldgate to Bow, and back again, as well as to sample the extraordinarily hostile road conditions in Newham, where the east-bound Superhighway simply disappears, leaving you alone on a road network seemingly designed to eradicate the bicycle as a mode of transport.
I am given to believe that the Superhighways cost a staggering sum of money – between £2 and £4 million per mile. The figure is so high it is, quite literally, incredible – so much so that the Mayor’s outgoing Director of Environment and Cycling, Kulveer Ranger, was forced to trot out the line that the Superhighways are ‘more than just paint.’
This is odd, because with the lone exception of Bow roundabout itself, where the recent attempts to improve the junction have introduced a limited degree of segregation by means of a kerb, I did not see any location along Superhighway 2 that did amount to anything more than paint. Nothing has been done here that changes the layout of the road, or actually gives any space to cycling.
Worse than that, what paint that exists is basically useless. The great majority of the length of Superhighway 2 is not even a cycle lane, bordered by a solid or dashed white line. It is simply a ‘guide stripe’, running either inside an existing vehicle lane, or a bus lane. It is consequently of no help whatsoever in moving past stationary vehicles (of which there are plenty at peak times), which will block it.
Likewise I suspect it encourages closer overtaking by vehicles; drivers doubtless imagine that you are cycling in a cycle lane, when in fact you are merely occupying a stripe within a vehicle lane. These vehicles overtook me with very little distance to spare.
The most comfortable cycling is in the bus lanes, where they exist.
They give the separation from motor traffic that is so badly lacking while cycling in the ‘stripes’ where bus lanes are absent. However, they are still ‘stripes’ and involve overtaking (and being overtaken) by taxis and buses. The half-arsed solution to negotiating past parked buses are the square ‘footprints’ painted outside the bus stops.
The other function of these ‘footprints’ is to provide a miniscule degree of continuity to the Superhighway when it ceases, passing by parked vehicles.
It would be dangerous to run a cycle lane right next to parked vehicles. But instead of creating a continuous route that would be safe, the planners of the Superhighway have essentially just given up at the first sniff of a conflict. How did this cost so much money?
Worse still is the amount of parking that exists in the Superhighway itself.
In places the blue paint is only itermittently visible.
Hopeless. Some kind of ‘continuity’ has been created here, but I’m struggling to understand the thought process involved in creating a blue guide stripe that lies under parked cars. It’s not to anyone’s benefit. A ‘Superhighway’ should surely have its own space, and not be completely inaccessible for long stretches. With the huge sums of money that have been thrown at these projects, and the amount of space available between the building frontages along the entire length of Superhighway 2, there was surely scope for moving the parking bays, or for realigning the carriageway markings, anything that might have created a useful route. I cannot fathom how we’ve ended up with what amounts to nothing, with so much spent. Quite honestly the blue paint has not made a bit of difference. It has not improved the cycling environment one bit.
This is ‘just paint’; paint that disappears whenever there’s a problem, that slips under parked cars, that gets blocked off by stationary vehicles, that doesn’t provide any margin of comfort from overtaking vehicles, that is absent just when a proper route is needed (CS2 vanishes at Aldgate gyratory).
The only purpose I can see for Superhighway 2, as it currently exists, is firstly as a ‘directional aid’ – hardly necessary, because it runs entirely along an enormous, dead-straight road. And secondly, as an apparent reminder to motorists that this is a road where, in Mayor Boris Johnson’s words, “they can expect to find cyclists.” This shouldn’t be necessary either; motorists can (and do) expect to find cyclists anywhere in London. Some terribly-designed blue paint isn’t going to make the blindest bit of difference to their standard of driving, or to the comfort of cyclists.
The LCC’s Love London, Go Dutchcampaign has again featured on the BBC Daily Politics programme, again with Mustafa Arif fielding the questions.
This time the opposing voice – instead of the incoherent Stirling Moss – is Simon Jenkins, who despite being a commentator on public space does little better in coming up with credible arguments.
Having watched the excellent film of Groningen, and listened to Mustafa Arif’s reasoned points about London’s streets being made more pleasant for people on foot and on bike by means of filtered permeability and separation on busier streets, Jenkins was asked whether he agreed with this as a future vision for London, with less dependency on the car. His very first comment is
There’s very little dependency on the car now in London.
This bears little relation to fact. From Transport for London’s latest Travel in Londonreport [pdf], published in 2010 –
We can see that the number of daily stages made by motor car far outstrips the number of stages made by any other mode of transport. Car use has been declining over the last decade, but to suggest that there is ‘little dependency’ on the car is, frankly, gibberish. The picture is even worse for outer London, where 50% of all trips (by main mode) were made by car or motorcycle between 2007/08 and 2009/10.
Jenkins then says that there is, despite this apparently ‘low’ dependency on the car, ‘a lot of traffic’ in London, remarking that a lot of the footage shot by the BBC in Groningen was taken in ‘small back streets, in small towns.’
Not so. Groningen, while by no means the size of London, is a city with a population of 190,000. It is not a ‘small town’. Nor was the footage taken on ‘small back streets’. It was – as far as I can tell – mostly shot in the city centre itself, particularly around the main railway station. Jenkins evidently has no idea what a city centre street can look like if you strip out a great deal of the motor traffic. The absence of cars and congestion does not automatically mean that a Dutch street is a ‘back street’. Yet more complacent ignorance.
Jenkins then steers the debate to his favourite subject, ‘shared space’, arguing that
The real conceptual breakthrough will come when the great Hans Monderman, who wrote the great book on traffic, a true revolutionary, is taken aboard, as in Exhibition Road in London, the only example in London of Monderman’s theories. Which is basically you don’t endlessly separate. If you separate, you allow cars to go much faster. The most important thing is you create a pattern of a street in which everyone’s using it all the time. Traffic is slowed down – drastically, often. But you don’t try and separate. You make sure that people, cars, buses – whatever it may be – and cyclists police each other. And the extraordinary thing about it is – as in Germany, in Holland, in other places in Europe – accidents reduce. Speed reduces, accidents reduce, the street is safer.
It’s hard to know where to start with this.
Hans Monderman did not write any books.
Exhibition Road is not the ‘only example’ of Monderman’s theories – there are a large number of new ‘shared space’-style environments across London, including Byng Place, Seven Dials, Long Acre and Sloane Square, to name but a few.
Traffic on Exhibition Road – which is, it is true, subjectively a little slower than before – has not been slowed down ‘drastically’.
It’s all very well talking about pedestrians and cyclists ‘policing’ the space to keep vehicle speeds down, but what you are in effect doing is asking them to play chicken with fast and often heavy traffic. Nobody wants to play, and pedestrians have separated themselves, despite the ‘pattern’ of the street inviting them to do so.
Monderman himself, despite being an adherent of these types of road designs, was firmly of the opinion that separation – in the form of cycle paths and tracks – on surrounding streets was an essential corollary to sharing on a street with ‘open’ designs like Exhibition Road. Again, this is ignored by Jenkins, before he moves on to present another slice of evidence.
Intrerestingly, the Dutch don’t wear helmets. Why don’t they wear helmets? Because they know it’s safe. And it’s been made safe by the way you grade the streets. These are often mechanical things you do, just to make it easier for all people to use the street. If you have endless lights, signs, and lanes, cars think they’re safe, everybody thinks they’re safe, when they’re not.
The implication being that it is the shared space environments in the Netherlands that make cyclists feel safe, and accounts for their lack of helmets.
Never mind that Dutch cyclists tend to be viscerally opposed to shared space (their organisation, the Fietsersbond, regularly writes critical pieces about it), and that shared space is actually found only intermittently in the Netherlands, where roads and streets are designed according to the principles of subjective safety. This point is made firmly by Mustafa Arif, who also notes that Dutch cyclists tend to cycle less in areas of shared space. Jenkins is, again, simply ill-informed.
Finally, in response to arguments from Arif, and from the host, that shared space is not appropriate where there are high volumes of motor traffic, Jenkins says
The most problematic thing in London is quite simply there are an awful lot of people using the street, and there’s no way you can ultimately separate them. What you must do is simply make them safer by slowing the traffic.
This is a variant of the bogus ‘our streets are too narrow for cycle paths’ argument, which pretends that we cannot separate cyclists (and indeed pedestrians) from vehicles because there’s not enough space between the building frontages, coming this time in the form that there’s ‘too much traffic’ on the street. The argument is bogus and self-defeating precisely because London currently manages to accommodate vast amounts of private motor traffic, journeys that can and should be made in far greater proportion on foot and by bicycle. Again, Mustafa Arif makes the point that half of all car journeys in London are under two miles. There is space in London; it is just poorly allocated.
It’s actually rather pleasing that the arguments against ‘Going Dutch’ are so weak and incoherent. More please.
An extract from Bella Bathurst’s excellent The Bicycle Book, which is well worth a read. Bella visits the Netherlands.
… on a sunny day in early July I head out of Amsterdam towards the north of the country. Assen is a medium-sized town in Drenthe with a broad, wide canal leading straight into the centre of town, a TT track and the same comfortable, well-proportioned red-brick architecture that all of Holland is made from. As in every Dutch railway station, Assen has a bike rental shop which will hire you something for as long as you need it. The resulting Gazelle is heavy and strong with three gears and two baskets. Once it’s in motion, it has roughly the same momentum and stopping distance as a medium-sized oil tanker. I set off northwards along the canal towpath past the lines of trees and barges spaced at regulation intervals and then up onto the main road out of town.
But that road does not look like it would look in Britain. In Britain, roads are solely and exclusively for cars. Out in the country they sometimes have short stretches of pavement, but more usually it’s all just tarmac and road kill. Here, they have a much more elegant solution. First there’s a pavement, then a cycle path, then there are trees, then there’s a road. And the same on the other side. It all somehow fits in not because the buildings are any wider apart, but because the roads are thinner. And because there are paths specially for bikes already there, all sorts of things start to happen. The assumptions that one makes in Britain no longer apply; the whole way one cycles is suddenly called into question. Springing from the Dutch belief that cyclists have a legal and moral right to exist comes a whole series of equally bizarre notions: that you don’t have to cycle defensively, that you are not just about to get wiped out by an HGV, that you do not have anything to fear. The UK has eight casualties per 100km [sic] cycled; the Netherlands has 0.8. And since you don’t have anything to fear, you don’t have anything to prove. If you don’t have anything to prove, you don’t have to compete, either with motorists or with your fellow cyclists. Here, people cycle because they’re interested in reaching their destinations. Everyone spins along at roughly the same pace – a steady, comfortable 20 to 25 kph. Everyone rides as upright as if they were sitting at the kitchen table back at home, and everyone looks perfectly capable of pedalling halfway to Brussels if necessary. No one shows off or rides anything flashy or bangs on the bonnets of transgressing vans. It is all very strange.
I may be mistaken, but judging by her description, Bella was not heading north, but west, beside that ‘broad, wide canal’ – the Vaart.
‘A pavement, then a cycle path, then there are trees, then there’s a road. ‘ You can cycle on the path with an umbrella, quite happily.
The road itself is thin – the carriageways, unlike in the UK, are just about wide enough to accommodate a lorry, and no more.
There is no space between the carriageways, either. Motor vehicles pass close to each other. The street space, as Bathurst says, is just used in a different way – ‘it all somehow fits in not because the buildings are any wider apart, but because the roads are thinner.’
Cycling in Assen is completely different from cycling in the United Kingdom. It is entirely relaxed. There is no need for defensive or assertive cycling. The description Bella Bathurst gives is accurate – there is no fear. Consequently peopleof all ages, genders and abilities cycle at their own pace, and in their own clothes. It’s as natural and easy as walking.
Bathurst goes on to write that, in the Netherlands, cycling
isn’t a poor man’s form of transport, it isn’t a rich man’s hobby, it’s not a child’s toy or a machine for proving one’s virility. It just isn’t an issue. The main English-language bookshop in Amsterdam has three floors of books, and a transport section full of material on cars, trains, Spitfires and Fokkers, but not a single line on cycling – not route guide, not a map, not even something on mending a puncture. Cycling here is so ubiquitous it’s a non-issue. It doesn’t belong to anyone, so it belongs to everyone. It’s just a bicycle – as universal, unexciting and miraculous as a pair of legs.
Despite the decades-long proven track record of the Netherlands in demonstrating precisely how you make cycling available to all as an obvious and easy transport choice, a curious amount of effort seems to be expended in Great Britain dismissing that very same approach of the Netherlands, and instead attempting to persuade those who currently don’t cycle – including people of the same age and gender as those in the picture above – that cycling in the road, amongst and alongside buses, vans and HGVs, is something they might actually want to do. An approach that has a consistent track record of failure, principally because people already know that they don’t want to cycle alongside buses, vans and HGVs. Glossy advertising and promotional material, persuasion and marketing, is not going to address this simple fact.
There’s some development coming to the west of Horsham, mostly in the form of new housing, being built on (formerly) agricultural land that lies between the town and the village of Broadbridge Heath. Once the development – imaginatively titled ‘Land to the West of Horsham’ – is completed, the distinction between Horsham and Broadbridge Heath will, to all intents and purposes, cease to exist. The new development is in brown.
People tend to get quite upset about green field development; countryside is more aesthetically pleasing than the forms of suburban sprawl that tend to replace it.
I’m not so sniffy about it, provided it is done properly. Urban forms can be as attractive, quiet and pleasant as the countryside. The problem we have in Britain is that our development is usually done badly; ugly, or at best generic, buildings, little local amenity, poor transport infrastructure that generally revolves around the private motor vehicle, which in turn creates an ugly streetscape, noise and pollution, and a lack of social and objective safety.
I’m reserving judgement on how this new development in Horsham is going to progress (the broad plans do not fill me with much confidence), but the early signs are far from good. The first stage of the development, entitled ‘Highwood Village’ (a strange choice of title, being nothing like a village) is virtually complete. It is the section that lies to the south of Tanbridge House School.
The new entrance to the development, from Hills Farm Lane in Horsham.
Immediately we can see that the pavement just stops at the junction; there is no continuity across it. Instead pedestrians have to cross, and then cross back, all because of a slightly absurd sliproad-style turning onto Hills Farm Lane. The junction mouth is vast. This is surely not an appropriate junction design for a residential road meeting another residential road. Anyone with push chairs or a wheelchair cannot get across the junction on the right hand side here – there are no dropped kerbs on the far side.
The pedestrian refuge for crossing the ‘main road’ of Hills Farm Lane here has been left in place. An attractive design feature for cycling. Note that there is a new bus stop in the background, hard to get to if you are walking along the right hand side of the road, thanks to the new junction.
Now into the development itself.
Here’s the ‘official’ dropped-kerb crossing point for the junction mouth, some thirty yards away from the actual junction (to the left of the photo). Convenient for pedestrians.
The first houses in the development, as you come across the bridge over the river.
Notice that there is some excellent provision for cycling here, by way of a shared use pavement. Of course, by ‘provision’, I mean that someone has put a blue roundel on a lampost, and by ‘shared use pavement’ I mean an ordinary pavement, indistinguishable from that designed for pedestrians, on which someone has decided it is acceptable for people to cycle. This particular spot – the end of the bridge – is a fantastic blind corner.
In addition to being just about the lowest form of ‘designing’ for cycling, to add insult to injury, it’s completely misguided. There shouldn’t be any need for cyclists to be pushed onto the pavements here. This is a residential road, and as such, should have a low speed limit and design features to calm it and make it subjectively safe for cycling – and indeed for the residents who might wish to let their children play in the street. Frankly this is just hopeless, awful stuff.
In any case, the ‘shared use’ pavement quickly comes to an end a few yards down the road. What was the point?
Now onto a design feature that had me hopping from foot to foot with incredulity. As already mentioned, this development lies just to the south of Tanbridge House School, the largest secondary school in Horsham District. Perfect! Your child can walk out of the front door here, and be at the school in just a short, hop skip and jump.
Except, no, they can’t, because this new development has been fenced off from the new path – built at the same time – that leads directly to the school.
There’s the school in the background, and there, in the foreground – separating this small car park from the path behind – is some planting and a wooden fence.
Really? Really? Why would you do that? Why would you fence off the direct route from a new housing development to a school? The mind boggles.
The route you have to take is therefore circuitous, heading off in the opposite direction, before joining the new shared use cycle path, that starts back out near the junction entrance to this housing development.
I got a little excited when I saw this path under construction, cycling past a month or so ago, and to be fair, the quality is reasonably good. The surface is smooth, it’s much wider than your usual shared path, and it goes somewhere. Sort of.
On the negative side, it’s already overgrown, despite only being open a week. Not a good start.
It’s needlessly wibbly-wobbly (you wouldn’t think that you could actually build a cycle path in a straight line).
Oh, and when it meets the road again, there’s no dropped kerb.Can you imagine a road meeting another road with this kind of arrangement? Would the driver of a motor vehicle have to bump his car down over a kerb simply to join another road?
Maddeningly, the pre-existing shared pavement hasn’t been remedied at all. A short stub of it still exists, with a dropped kerb a few yards back in the direction you’ve come from.
‘END OF ROUTE’
This hints at the final, most serious problem with this path. It’s a short little stub, running parallel to a road which should itself be made safe, pleasant and convenient for cycling and walking; Hills Farm Lane. You can see the arrangement in the video below, as I cycle on the road, instead of taking the path.
Hills Farm Lane is (or should be) a minor distributor road, servicing the ten or so cul-de-sacs along it. As it stands, it’s a bit of a rat run, a useful short cut for people who wish to avoid traffic lights in the centre of town when heading west. It needs a lower speed limit, and design features to keep those speeds low. Ideally, filtered permeability half-way along it would be appropriate, to ensure that the only people using this road are residents, not people speeding through on a short cut. If that can’t be achieved, then a cycle path should be built alongside it. Properly. There’s plenty of space; it’s flanked entirely by the green fields that are now being built on.
But no, if you are cycling along Hills Farm Lane, there is still nothing for you until you come to this development, where the new shared path starts some 30 yards into the turning, rather than along the road itself. Again –
If we are cycling along the main road, from the right, and we wish to divert onto the cycle path, look how far out of our way we have to come to join it.
In any case, the path comes to an end after about a hundred yards, joinig the pre-existing ‘shared use’ pavement conversion, which is rapidly disintegrating.
It’s just a complete muddle. No thought has gone into ameloriating the conditions for cycling, or for coming up with a useful route, or with how children might want to walk or cycle to their school, or with when and where shared pavements are appropriate.
Jim Davis wrote yesterday about the increasing fashion for ‘localism’ in cycle infrastructure planning –
Cycling has always been about ‘Localism’ and ‘Big Society’ with local campaigners and activists that have been bashing their heads against the wall of local democracy for years (and for free). This, for me is where the problem lies; it’s all well and good giving local authorities ‘the right tools’ with devolved powers, but what if they don’t know what to do with them (or don’t even want to know). It’s like giving a group of primary school children ‘the right tools’ to design Britain’s successor to Trident – many will be keen as mustard and will give it their best shot. The results they come up with, whilst thankfully not feasible, will be all the more wonderful as a result and fascinating.
It’s an apt analogy, particularly because in the case of this development I think that we would actually have been better off letting children design the infrastructure for walking and cycling. They would have realised that putting a fence in the way of their direct route to school was a bad idea. They would have wanted a residential street that is safe to cycle in, not one in which they are forced to share a pavement with pedestrians. They would have realised that bumping down over a kerb on a bicycle is not as pleasant or as convenient as a smooth transition. They would have realised that cycle routes should form direct lines and run along pre-existing roads. I mean, it’s just obvious, if you actually ride a bike.
That’s why children would know this. Because they walk and cycle about; at least, they do so far more than the planners and designers at my local council, who only seem able to design routes for motor vehicles, and for whom routes for walking and cycling seem at best to be an aesthetic afterthought.
So less ‘localism’ please, at least until we have worked out how to compel councils to even get the absolute basics right.
UPDATE
One thing I forgot to mention – and for which I am grateful to dasmirnov for pointing out in the comments – is that this whole area flooded last week, following the heavy rainfall. Do watch his video.
This has happened before, of course – the area is a floodplain for the River Arun, which I remember regularly spilling over its banks a few years ago, when I lived nearby. Now the area has been built on, and the fields replaced with a good deal of tarmac and hard standing, the problem will surely only get worse.
As you are perhaps aware, I visited Bow roundabout recently (as did a couple of otherbloggers) to see first hand how Transport for London’s new ‘Cycle Priority Lights’ are working. My conclusion – indeed the universal conclusion – seems to be, they’re not working very well.
The principal issue is the turning conflict between vehicles turning left onto the A12, and cyclists wishing to proceed straight on. It is precisely this problem that TfL have attempted to solve, but their ‘solution’ is a complete fudge because it does not separate out sufficiently these movements. Far from being a ‘priority’ light for cyclists, the real purpose of the confusing array of traffic lights is to stop cyclists while all vehicles are moving across the roundabout, only letting them into an ASL-like area when the traffic alongside them is stopped.
The best solution, of course, would be to hold left-turning vehicles while cyclists, pedestrians (who, let’s not forget, still do not have a crossing here) and vehicles going straight on or right proceed onto the roundabout. This would allow cyclists to be segregated from traffic right up to and across the roundabout, rather than the current partial and confusing approach.
I made this point in that post; that what really needs to be done is to put motor vehicles into two separate streams, so pedestrians can cross the road, and cyclists’ movements are properly separated. That is, the Dutch approach to these kinds of road designs.
Chris Juden left a comment –
The Dutch way. It would be nice, but none of us will live to see that Utopia here. To build that stuff – and to enforce the laws that make it work – you need political will. That needs votes. And not enough people cycle for that.
The argument being that we need to get more people cycling before we can start lobbying for proper infrastructure, or for the infrastructure that is currently being built to be designed to higher standards. Forget your ‘utopias’; it will never happen until we build a mass cycling culture all by ourselves.
I’m not sure that’s true. Even if we ignore the fact that infrastructure of greatly varying quality for cyclists is already being built, and that our standards can greatly be improved, effective lobbying can work. The most prominent example is London Cycling Campaign managed to get all of the mayoral candidates to sign up to Go Dutch. Now we can doubt Boris’s sincerity, and his willingness to act, but for the first time, politicians are making commitments, rather than fob-offs, or simply ignoring cycling altogether. The same is true of Pedal on Parliament in Scotland, where, like in London, people got out on the streets and demanded change.
The correct response is surely to demand better, to show how things can and do work elsewhere, and to campaign for it, not to make Eeyore-ish noises about the likelihood of success, and to give up before we’ve even started.
As it happens, there is an example of how turning conflicts on a busy gyratory might be eliminated right here in the UK, one that will involve reducing three vehicle lanes down to two to make space for a wider cycle lane and a separate traffic phase for bicycles – the Vogue Gyratory on Lewes Road in Brighton.
I visited it in May, cycling north from the city centre out towards the University. It’s a fairly horrible road layout of the kind familiar to those who cycle in London.
The video shows the problems. Narrow cycle lanes on entry and exit, placed right up against railings, with no real protection from vehicles which can pass very close. We also have a three-lane arrangement on the gyratory itself, which presents cyclists with the choice of sticking in lane 2 to go straight on, or sticking in lane 1 and then attempting to make it back across to lane 2 at the lights; rather dangerous, but I suspect the favoured approach for those not confident enough to ‘take the lane’ on a gyratory.
I cycled from the bottom of this map, to the top right. The cycle lane will be widened to two metres. This space will come at the expense of (queuing) vehicle lanes on the gyratory, which will be reduced from three to two.
The corner on the entry to the gyatory will be rounded off, to make room for the wider cycle lane.
On the exit, again the corner has been rounded off, and the cycle lane placed inside a new bus lane, which will come at the expense of one the vehicle lanes. This is a better arrangement (although buses could encroach into the lane as they take the corner – I hope the width and angle are sufficient).
Finally, at the point of conflict, cyclists will have a separate traffic phase. Vehicles turning left will be held, while cyclists going straight on can proceed, in safety.
It is precisely this kind of separation of motor vehicle movements that is required at Bow.
The arrangement is far from ideal, it is true; cycling close to buses in the bus lane is not a great experience, especially given that the cycle lane runs outside the bus stop in the gryatory itself, rather than behind it. I would have liked to have seen more physical separation. I also wonder about the timings on the lights, which might prioritise left-turning motor vehicles over cyclists wishing to proceed straight on.
Nevertheless, it is a great step forward from the previous arrangement, seen in the video, and shows what can and should be done at Bow. Change can happen, even with very low cycling numbers (it’s also happening on the Old Shoreham Road in Brighton).
Let’s not wait before asking for more.
Thanks to Mark Strong for some background to this post
Here’s some dashcam footage taken in Southall last year. It’s a shocking incident – so shocking that there were rumours going around on the internet last year that it was faked in an elaborate publicity stunt. It is real.
The footage featured at the start of the recent Channel 5 show, The World’s Scariest Drivers. In that programme the narrator claimed that the driver, Rubia Hamid, was given a ‘lifetime driving ban’.
This is incorrect. She was only banned for three years. A short excerpt from the Times (£) story about this incident –
Mrs Hamid was found guilty at Isleworth Crown Court last month. She was sentenced to 12 months of prison suspended for two years, 200 hours of unpaid work and ordered to pay Mr Sharma, who is still recovering from his injuries, £500 in damages. She will also be banned from driving for 3 years and will have to take an extended driving test before she is allowed back on the road.
My opinion is that this is a derisory sentence for an act which could quite easily have killed an elderly man, in addition to which Mrs Hamid left the scene and further denied all knowledge of any incident taking place. Her punishment – a £500 fine, 200 hours of community service, and a short ban – does not reflect the severity of her crime.
British Cycling are currently running a campaign, with the support of a host of other organisations, calling for an urgent review of the way drivers who kill or injure cyclists and other road users are sentenced. It’s well worth supporting.
An update comes from Diamond Geezer on the state of the improvements at Bow roundabout. Both he and I pointed out last week that the purposes of the traffic lights – the plethora of traffic lights – are poorly understood by motorists and cyclists alike, largely because they are all identical in appearance, and it’s not particularly clear what purpose each set serves.
A sensible design would involve more separation for bicycles, not just a reintroduction of them into the road a second ahead of motor vehicles. This would mean separation of turning phases, with cyclists kept segregated right up to the entrance to the roundabout. The lights could then be positioned in a way that would remove all this ambiguity (although it does not help that TfL do not have a bicycle-specific design at their disposal, only the standard issue which has a light shaped like a bicycle for the amber and green phases – this may change). Cyclists would be held at a red light, which would quite obviously be for them, while left-turning vehicles moved perpendicular to them onto the A12.
However, TfL’s only ‘solution’ to the problems witnessed already is, as Diamond Geezer has written, is the addition of yet more signs telling cyclists to obey red lights. His picture –
The assumption here, on TfL’s part, is that cyclists are moving through the red lights because they are naughty. I don’t think that’s necessarily true; the more likely explanation is that they are confused, just like the motorists who were stopping in all the wrong places and going at all the wrong lights just as often as the cyclists (however, there don’t appear to be any signs telling motorists to ‘stop on red’, despite their red light jumping being just as prevalent while I was observing the junction).
The junction just doesn’t make sense. Some silly small yellow signs are not really the right way to address the problem.
Nevertheless the addition of these signs has prompted some of Diamond Geezer’s commenters to voice their opinion that the issue is the congenital law-breaking of cyclists (ignoring, of course, the fact that the police officers I was with at the junction simply did not have the time to deal with all the offences being committed by drivers passing them, be it no seat belts, fiddling with phones, talking on phones, jumping the lights, motorcycles driving in the segregated cycle lane, and so on).
why would one expect cyclists to stop on red just because three signs tell them to. Why would the assumption that no rule of the road applies to them be any different at Bow.
And
If a cyclist were clued up on his/her highway code they would probably understand this. But since there is no legal requirement for cyclists to even take a cursory glance at said document, I can see why they would be confused.
And
the people on the bikes have been their own worst enemy for years (decades). The number of times you see cyclists simply ignoring traffic laws, signals, and markings is probably greater than the number of them you see actually obeying the rules.
And
All the extra measures for cyclists are a waste of time if cyclists ignore them because it doesn’t suit them to comply or they make an arbitrary judgement that it’s ‘safe’ for them to ignore road rules and traffic signals.
In other words, the predictable comments about cyclists not being familiar with the Highway Code and hence not knowing rules, or simply choosing to ignore rules that don’t suit them.
Here’s a selection of rules from the Highway Code; ones that apply to motorists.
Rule 93Slow down, and if necessary stop, if you are dazzled by bright sunlight.
An interesting rule, in the light of a recent spate of drivers killing cyclists by driving into them from behind while apparently unable to see what is in front of them due to ‘bright sun’.
Slow down or stop? What’s that?
Rule 103 Signals warn and inform other road users, including pedestrians (see ‘Signals to other road users’), of your intended actions. You should always use them to advise other road users before changing course or direction, stopping or moving off… Remember that signalling does not give you priority.
Except over bikes. You always have priority over bikes.
Rule 112 The horn. Use only while your vehicle is moving and you need to warn other road users of your presence. Never sound your horn aggressively.
Oh really? I thought it was an annoyance-signalling device!
Rule 116 Hazard warning lights. These may be used when your vehicle is stationary, to warn that it is temporarily obstructing traffic. Never use them as an excuse for dangerous or illegal parking.
Wrong. Hazard lights are an ‘exemption’ light that allow you to park anywhere you like.
Rule 124You MUST NOT exceed the maximum speed limits for the road and for your vehicle.
Witness the well-observed 70 mph limit on motorways.
Rule 125 The speed limit is the absolute maximum and does not mean it is safe to drive at that speed irrespective of conditions. Driving at speeds too fast for the road and traffic conditions is dangerous. You should always reduce your speed when sharing the road with pedestrians, cyclists and horse riders.
Ha.
Rule 126 Drive at a speed that will allow you to stop well within the distance you can see to be clear.
No, you should always drive at or close the speed limit, and if something ‘suddenly’ appears in front of you around a sharp corner, that’s that person’s problem, not yours.
Rule 129 Double white lines where the line nearest you is solid. This means you MUST NOT cross or straddle it unless it is safe and you need to enter adjoining premises or a side road. You may cross the line if necessary, provided the road is clear, to pass a stationary vehicle, or overtake a pedal cycle, horse or road maintenance vehicle, if they are travelling at 10 mph (16 km/h) or less.
Sod that.
Rule 140Cycle lanes. These are shown by road markings and signs. You MUST NOT drive or park in a cycle lane marked by a solid white line during its times of operation. Do not drive or park in a cycle lane marked by a broken white line unless it is unavoidable.
I thought those dashed lines indicated a smaller parking bay! Who knew!
Rule 145 You MUST NOT drive on or over a pavement, footpath or bridleway except to gain lawful access to property, or in the case of an emergency.
Ha.
Rule 147Be considerate. Be careful of and considerate towards all types of road users, especially those requiring extra care. You should try to be understanding if other road users cause problems; they may be inexperienced or not know the area well.
Considerate? But I’m in a hurry! For no apparent reason!
Rule 152 Residential streets. You should drive slowly and carefully on streets where there are likely to be pedestrians, cyclists and parked cars.
Again, sod that.
Rule 153 Traffic-calming measures. On some roads there are features such as road humps, chicanes and narrowings which are intended to slow you down. When you approach these features reduce your speed. Allow cyclists and motorcyclists room to pass through them. Maintain a reduced speed along the whole of the stretch of road within the calming measures.
What!? But that will slow me down! Surely the idea is to speed up between the calming measures so you don’t lose any time at all?
Rule 163 Overtake only when it is safe and legal to do so. You should not assume that you can simply follow a vehicle ahead which is overtaking; there may only be enough room for one vehicle. [Also] give motorcyclists, cyclists and horse riders at least as much room as you would when overtaking a car
No comment.
Rule 166DO NOT overtake if there is any doubt, or where you cannot see far enough ahead to be sure it is safe.
Go for it, I say. What are the chances that something’s coming the other way? Minimal. It’ll be fine.
Rule 170 Take extra care at junctions. You should watch out for pedestrians crossing a road into which you are turning. If they have started to cross they have priority, so give way.
They have priority? But they’re in the road!
Rule 178Advanced stop lines. Some signal-controlled junctions have advanced stop lines to allow cycles to be positioned ahead of other traffic. Motorists, including motorcyclists, MUST stop at the first white line reached if the lights are amber or red.
Wrong. The ASL is just an extra ‘slowing down’ area.
Rule 182 Turning left. Do not overtake just before you turn left.
Except if you’re overtaking a bicycle. Then it’s fine.
And some rules on parking –
Rule 238 Double yellow lines indicate a prohibition of waiting at any time even if there are no upright signs.
Rule 243 DO NOT stop or park opposite or within 10 metres (32 feet) of a junction, except in an authorised parking space
Rule 244 You MUST NOT park partially or wholly on the pavement in London, and should not do so elsewhere unless signs permit it.
Motorists have been made to read the Highway Code – flicking idly through it when they were a teenager – so all these rules, and others in the Code, are obviously met with perfect compliance. Except when they are not obeyed, but that’s because those rules are silly and pointless and nobody obeys them anyway. Or because the motorists are confused, like at Bow roundabout.
If some people on bicycles don’t comply with every single rule of the Highway Code, that’s because they’ve never read it! Or because they don’t have licence plates. Or because they don’t have insurance. Or because they’re selfish. It’s something to do with being on a bicycle, anyway.
Having some spare time in London yesterday, I went over to Bow to see how the new junction design on the roundabout is working.
The Superhighway (CS2) on the approach to the roundabout is deeply unimpressive. Blocked intermittently with queuing vehicles, it might as well not be there.
This really isn’t any way to privilege the bicycle as a mode of transport.
As we approach the roundabout, there is a warning sign for drivers, alerting them to a ‘new layout ahead’.
Drivers need warning, because it is very new. And unique. There is no other junction arranged like this in the UK.
The whole point of the redesign has been to attempt to eliminate conflicts between left-turning vehicles and cyclists wishing to proceed straight on at the roundabout. It was these conflicts that resulted in the deaths of Brian Dorling at the location of the redesign, and Svetlana Tereschenko, heading west on the other side of the roundabout, where there have been no changes at all.
While the intentions are good, the final result is a bit of a grotesque muddle. The untried nature of this junction design is immediately apparent from a few minutes observation, watching how bicycles and motorists move through it.
The big headline recently has been the removal of a section of kerb separation, which was so long that vehicles were bumping over it as they moved onto the roundabout. You can see where the section used to be (the darker section of tarmac) in this photograph.
This removal isn’t actually all that big a deal for cyclists. It doesn’t affect the way the junction works – or should work – for them, nor should it affect their safety, if it is working as it is intended. Nonetheless, I think it is slightly symptomatic of the way this redesign has been implemented that a kerb was built which was obviously going to get in the way of turning vehicles.
With the old kerb in place, I can’t see how it would have been possible for a large vehicle to pass safely through the junction with a vehicle alongside it. The positioning of the kerb was a cock-up; it was just too tight for drivers of large vehicles to get around, going straight on while the two lane junction flows left onto the roundabout.
Amazingly, the real issue is that space at the mouth of this junction is constrained because of a drive-through entrance to a McDonalds on the left hand side.
The pavement can’t move left because of the drive-through, so the cycle lane can’t move left, and so the kerb separator can’t move left. That’s why it’s had to be removed – McDonalds has made the junction too tight.
As I say, the removal of the kerb is not an issue in and of itself; the stop line for bicycles still lies behind the end of the kerb, as does that for motorists. These two lines should not, theoretically, be crossed simultaneously.
The real problems – the manifold problems – with this design have nothing to do with the kerb. They all stem from the fact that there are four virtually identical traffic lights in a row, with different meanings.
The first two are for bicycles only, and permit them entry into the ASL (except this isn’t actually an ASL, it’s a double stop line. This is part of the confusion, as we shall see).
My initial concern was that cyclists would not stop at this light while motorists had a green light beside them. This concern was well-founded. I didn’t see a single cyclist stop at this light while I was at the junction, and the Met Cycle Task Force police officer I spoke to said he had only seen three stop there all day. This was confirmed by a TfL chap who had been on site, on and off, for five hours that same day, doing counts.
This isn’t suprising, because the ‘main’ lights for the junction are green, and it seems obvious to progress through with the rest of the flow. The result, however, is precisely the same left-hook conflicts that the new junction design sought to eliminate. Here is what happened while I was standing at the junction.
A cyclist ignores the initial ‘ASL’ red light, joining the flow of vehicles, and is promptly in a ‘left hook’ conflict with a van turning left.
Similarly, these cyclists have passed through ‘their’ red light (two of them evidently want to turn right at the roundabout, and give up, heading across the pavement). The consequences are again dangerous, and I have to say it’s surely only a matter of time before there’s another serious, and all-too-familiar, accident here.
These cyclists are not necessarily law-breakers – they’re most likely confused. A light signal to enter another small section of road, just a few yards ahead, is unheard of, and just a bit weird; likewise, the idea of being held at a red light when you can see the ‘safe’ blue paint extending ahead of you, and vehicles progressing beside you, is odd.
Another problem – one which I had not anticipated – is that cyclists are interpreting the two ‘green’ bicycle lights on the traffic lights for entry to the ‘ASL’ as green lights to progress across the entire roundabout. Incredibly dangerous. A local PCSO at the junction – a lady who was actually present at the aftermath of the Svetlana Tereschenko incident, and described to me her horror at the scene – told me that just before I had arrived, a young lady went straight on across the roundabout, narrowly being missed by a fast car coming around it and taking the A12 exit. I saw the same innocent mistake being made by one cyclist as I stood at the roundabout; she rode straight down the separated lane and onto the roundabout, progressing on a ‘green’ bicycle signal that in reality only meant it was safe for her to enter the ‘ASL’, not the roundabout. Fortunately there were no vehicles moving around it.
There is more ambiguity. These cyclists, shown below, went through the green ‘bicycle’ lights, but then stopped at the first red light beyond it, instead of progressing all the way up to the stop line at the final set of traffic lights.
The same again with this lady, stopping at the first set of the two ‘vehicle’ lights.
This means that when the lights go green, cyclists are setting off adjacent to the vehicles. Another source of left hook conflicts.
Drivers were also confused by the double/triple/quadruple set of lights. They should be stopping at the first solid white line, but a further solid white line, and a final set of lights, without any indication that the area in between is ‘for bikes’ (like with a traditional ASL), meant that many just rolled up to the final set of lights. It’s hard to see because they are shielded, but they remain green after the first set have gone red. This van driver was evidently driving to the second set.
Naturally when a vehicle is positioned like this, cyclists have no positional or temporal advantage to get them through the junction safely.
Here’s another driver driving to the final set of lights.
The whole concept of having two stop lines for vehicles, with two different sets of lights that go red and green at different times is, to me, utterly baffling, and it is proving to be so for drivers. There should just be one stop line, the initial one, and one set of lights. That would remove the ambiguity at a stroke, and also ensure that vehicles are held back. The final set of lights should be for bicycles only, although it is hard to see how this could be shielded to prevent confusion. Another problem. Finally, some confused drivers were stopping well short of the junction, at the red light for bicycle entry to the ‘ASL’.
The timings, as things stand, are not generous either. The final set of lights – which, remember, should be for bicycles only, and not for the vehicles that through confusion have ended up at the final line – turn green only about a second before the ‘vehicle’ set.
With such a small difference, vehicles that accelerate quickly will surely get into just the same left-hook conflicts with slow-off-the-mark cyclists as existed before.
It’s nice that TfL have attempted something here, but unfortunately it’s a bit of a mess. There are too many signals, too many lines, and far too much ambiguity. The exact same turning conflicts that gave rise to the deaths that prompted the work still exist.
The most sensible solution would, of course, be a dedicated, clear, phase allowing bicycles to progress east across the roundabout, and pedestrians, likewise, to cross the A12 sliproad, with left-turning vehicles held explicitly at a red light. Those left-turning vehicles could then move off while bicycles and pedestrians are themselves held at a red light. This is not rocket science – it’s how the Dutch have safely designed large junctions for bicycles and pedestrians for decades.
What we currently have at Bow is a sorry compromise that isn’t really going to work safely, a compromise that has been wedged in because junction capacity for motor vehicles seemingly cannot be reduced, even marginally. Until that changes, pedestrians and cyclists will continue to be treated shabbily.
UPDATE
One thing I forgot to mention in my post is the difficulty of conventional ‘filtering’ through the traffic here.
This is a basic problem across much of London; filtering is difficult and unpleasant when vehicles are jammed up against each other. A couple of motorcycles decided to use the cycle lane, and were swiftly told off by the police.
To my mind, this makes an unanswerable case for space for cycling, protected space that cannot be invaded. ‘Primary’ position is all well and good, and is almost certainly quite a safe way to cycle around if you are confident; however in situations like this it is almost always far quicker and more pleasant to use cycle tracks and lanes, even for experienced cyclists, as well as being less unnerving.
The issue then becomes one of how to plonk cyclists into a primary position at junctions, when you have delivered them there at the side of the road. I don’t think that is ever going to work, not least because the vast majority of people don’t want to plonk themselves in front of buses and HGVs around a busy roundabout. The solution must surely involve keeping those cyclists separated from fast and heavy traffic in the junction, as well as along the roads leading to it. This is what has been proven to work; a way of allowing people riding bikes of all ages and abilities to negotiate junctions like this one.
Unbeknownst to me, the excellent Diamond Geezer has also visited and blogged about these very same ‘improvements’, reaching pretty much the same conclusions, and in more detail. Well worth a read.
Jim Davis of the Lo Fidelity Bicycle Club has already visited the re-working of the Old Shoreham Road in Hove, and has provided twoexcellent reports about it.
The aim of the scheme involves taking space from the carriageway – which, as you can see in this photograph of an unmodified section of the road, is ample –
and reallocating it for wide cycle tracks on either side of the road.
I took the opportunity to visit the road for myself in the middle of May. It should be stressed that the project is (quite obviously) not finished; both Jim and I were visiting what amounts, in many places, to a building site. A true impression of how the scheme will function may not necessarily have been obtained. Some of the minor problems that I think exist may be addressed before the road is formally reopened towards the end of June.
The signs are very promising. While not up to the standard of a Dutch cycle path, the scheme is certainly streets ahead of the usual UK off-carriageway provision. For the great majority of its length, the path is very wide, as wide as a van.
It’s certainly wider than this car, the driver having decided to pull over onto the cycle track to continue his mobile phone call.
This brings me, however, to my first minor concern. Although the tracks are separated from the road by a kerb, they will prove to be a very tempting parking bay. They even look like a parking bay. There is, it seems, nothing in the physical design of the scheme that will keep cars and vehicles from parking on the tracks.
This four-car household are already spilling out onto the pavement.
In the absence of the construction lorry, the cycle track – where the lorry is parked – might be the obvious place to park ‘extra’ cars.
Ideally, I would like to have seen some more demarcation between the track and the road, perhaps a small raised kerb, like this Dutch example –
Which would make it more obvious that the cycle track is not just an extension of the road. It would also serve to keep the corners at junctions sharp, and consequently the speeds of vehicles turning across the track low (about which more below).
The space for this kerb could come from the track itself, or from the carriageway, which strangely still has a hatched ‘separation’ area between the traffic lanes, to discourage overtaking – this shouldn’t really be necessary on a suburban road.
Long term, it would make sense to replant the trees along this road – which currently lie in the pavement – where the cycle track meets the carriageway, providing a further barrier, and removing them as an obstacle from the pavement and the cycle track. As things stand, I suspect that there will have to be some vigorous enforcement on the part of the council to ensure that the tracks are kept clear of parked vehicles – there does not appear to be much in the design itself that will keep cars and vans out.
Where the cycle tracks pass residential side roads, it was pleasing to see that the kerbs separating the track from the carriageway extended as far as they could go, right up to the width of the junction mouth at its narrowest point. These are very sharp corners.
Judging by the height of the kerb above this grating, there is a reasonable height difference here, which should discourage fast corner-cutting. (This is, of course, where a raised kerb separator would help even more). I suspect some drivers might be willing to bump up across a kerb of this height.
I would also like to have seen the pavements continue across the junctions, which would further have given the impression to drivers that they should yield. The tracks do continue at the same height, meaning drivers have to turn up and over them; but continuation of the paving would have been an extra visual signal.
A continued pavement would have been good for pedestrians too. As it is, the pavements halt at these junctions with residential roads.
Curiously, one junction on the length of the works is treated rather differently – Radindnen Manor Road. I’m not sure why the treatment is different.
The kerb, unlike at the other residential junctions, is rounded off and is of a larger radius. Likewise, double yellow lines continue around the corner. The impression given is of a ‘smooth’ corner for vehicles turning into the road.
Indeed I noticed that is not smooth enough for one driver, tyre marks visible across the corner of the cycle track –
I think this junction is problematic, and should have been treated like the others. The priority is not clear. Drivers should give way; however, the current arrangement is deeply ambiguous, especially in the context of the rest of the cycle track, where cyclists do have priority. The kerb should be as sharp as the other junctions, and the track should be much more ‘visible’ across the junction mouth.
A side street, Chanctonbury Road, is closed off (to motor vehicles) where it meets Old Shoreham Road.
This closure predates the construction of the tracks; you can see the former arrangement in this photograph by Jim –
It’s pleasing to see that the horrible pinch point, and the pedestrian cages and fences, have been removed and replaced with a zebra crossing, a solution I have suggested should be employed much more widely. The new arrangement is much better for pedestrians and cyclists.
A minor quibble is that the cycle track becomes a ‘shared’ area around this junction. If Chanctonbury Road is closed, the track could surely continue across the junction, with a pavement at left. The zebra crossing could extend across the cycle track, to make priorities clear. But with a school on the other side of the road, I suspect the planners feared conflicts with plenty of pedestrians crossing, and wanted to ‘slow’ cyclists by creating an area with sharing. Perhaps the current arrangement is too ambiguous; time will tell. But I should stress again that this is only a minor concern.
If we look at a map of the area –
we can see how Chanctonbury Road is closed to motor vehicles at its northern end, at the junction with the Old Shoreham Road.
It would make a great deal of sense to close all of these residential streets in a similar fashion at their northern ends, with access remaining from Highdown and Montefiore Road. Turning conflicts would be eliminated at a stroke, and the side streets themselves would become quieter and more pleasant, as they would no longer be through routes. Perhaps this is something for the future. (This is how filtered permeability and cycle tracks can work hand-in-hand).
The other ‘shared’ area of the track has been born out of necessity, as it passes over the railway bridge.
This is location where there genuinely isn’t the width available. The carriageway has been narrowed as much as possible, and the remaining space reallocated for pedestrians and cyclists. Given the width, sharing is the best solution for this short stretch. It will not be a problem. (If we want to dream, it might possible to imagine the carriageway narrowed to a single lane, with alternate priority for motor vehicles and the space given over to pedestrians and cyclists – although restrictions like this should be careful not to inadvertently divert through traffic onto residential streets).
I am sorry to say that the bus stop treatments – unless they are going to be changed – are not ideal.
The cycle tracks should pass behind the bus stop, to avoid conflict with waiting pedestrians – this would naturally involve moving the bus stop, something that hasn’t been done. At the very least there should be a waiting area for passengers to the right of the cycle track, something like the arrangement on Royal College Street (picture by David Arditti).
As things stand, passengers queuing to get onto a bus will be doing so in the cycle track, which is not brilliant. Indeed, the bus stops along the improvements are marked as ‘shared areas’ on the plans, and this is how they are being implemented, marked as such on the pavements/tracks.
My final concern, and perhaps the most serious, is the light-controlled junctions. It is at these points that provision seems to disappear. As Jim noted, these ‘scheduled’ junction improvements are not part of this plan, and will arrive later; Mark Strong confirms this. However, my impression, from the kerbing put in place so far, is that the tracks will halt some distance before the lights, and cyclists are left to fend for themselves through the junction. The kerb slopes down to road level underneath this car, returning cyclists to the carriageway about 30-40 metres from the lights.
This might be, I suspect, because ‘junction capacity’ has to be preserved, and cycle tracks, or a cycle phase on the lights themselves, are not compatible with the necessary two queuing lanes needed to get as many motor vehicles through the junction as possible. Cyclists are put into the queue.
The same arrangement – with the kerb disappearing, and the track merging into the left-hand queuing lane – is present at the eastern end of the scheme.
I hope that the tracks will not disappear in this way once the works are completed, and that some solution is found, because the disappearance is a problem in two respects. Firstly, making right turns on a bike will involve negotiating out into the second vehicle lane. This is more daunting than simply cycling along a road, a problem the cycle tracks address. The road has been made more pleasant for cycling, but the most serious impediment has not been dealt with. It’s a little analogous to securing your house with a fancy new burglar alarm, but leaving the front door open.
The second problem is that left hook conflicts – where left-turning vehicles move across the path of cyclists trying to go straight on, or right – remain unresolved. By way of an illustration of the potential problem, here’s a video of me cycling up from the seafront, towards the Old Shoreham Road, on the existing cycle track on Grand Avenue.
The cycle track disappears before the junction. As I approach the lights, which are on red, I am initially thinking about moving into the ASL area, in front of the vehicles. But then as I go to move past the white Micra, the lights change. I decide, sensibly and correctly, to hang back, and the driver also appears to have been aware of my presence, turning left quite cautiously. So no harm done. But this is an issue typical of junctions with ASLs; turning conflicts are a real problem.
Cyclists wishing to go straight on should not have to negotiate with vehicles turning left. Paths crossing like this is something Dutch design seeks to eliminate, with left-turning motor vehicles held at a red light while cyclists progress straight on, and cyclists wishing to progress straight on held at a red signal while vehicles turn left. Whether we will see something like this in the treatments on Old Shoreham Road, I don’t know, but I am sceptical. I suspect that the junctions will be similar to the existing treatments along Grand Avenue and the Drive – that is, without much or any protection for cyclists at all, despite the cycle tracks between the junctions.
Having said all that, the scheme as a whole is bold, and a great step forward. The tarmac is smooth and continuous, the paths are wide, the carriageway has been narrowed, and most of the junctions with minor roads have been designed sensibly. The quibbles about shared areas and bus stops are, I think, minor ones. Hopefully at some point in the future we can finally get around to making sure that cyclists get through light-controlled junctions in as safe, calm and secure a manner as they will progress along the tracks themselves.
I leave you with a video of me cycling along the stretch of track between The Drive and The Upper Drive, which includes crossing the worst side road treatment, Radinden Manor Road.
RT @OxonCyclingNet: No consultation and against national standard LTN 1/20, Oxford's only central traffic-free cycle lane (Parks Rd) has be… 3 days ago
A triumph of hype over substance.
