Grand Avenue Cycle Lanes to be kept

Thankfully, the ludicrous proposal to to remove a cycle lane in Hove, at a cost of around one million pounds (background here), has narrowly been defeated at the annual budget meeting – by only one vote. As there are 13 Labour and 13 Green councillors, and 25 Tory councillors, mathematical logic tells me that every single Tory councillor voted for removal. Quite atrocious.

As Dave Warnock suggests, it would be nice to see a small fraction of this money that has now been saved put towards making minor safety improvements to the lane. Although figures suggest that cyclist casualties on the road in question have fallen by around 20% since the introduction of the lane (a statistic which meant nothing to leader of the council Mary Mears, who shamelessly tried to use ‘safety’ as a reason for removal), there are some quite simple measures that would make the cycle lane less hazardous.

How about painting some double yellow lines along the whole length of the lanes, rather than just across driveways (which, incidentally, speaks volumes about the priorities in place here)?

If proper parking enforcement were carried out, cyclists would no longer have to dangerously reenter the carriageway between parked cars, when their progress is blocked by thoughtlessly parked lorries like this one.

The other main safety problem seems to be at junctions, where cyclists are either ‘left hooked’ by motorists crossing their path into junctions, or are hit directly by motorists emerging from driveways. I suspect a large part of the problem is poor visibility, caused by dubiously-sited parking bays. Here’s an example, from Streetview –

The parking bays extend right up to the junction with driveways, which clearly makes it quite difficult for a left-turning vehicle to spot whether a cyclist is coming along the lane. The parking bays simply need to be shortened slightly, even just by one car length. This would be a significant improvement, and it’s not exactly as if – with four parallel lanes of parking on the road already – there’s a shortage of car parking space.

Both these measures will cost practically nothing, as they involve little more than paint. If Mary Mears and her fellow Tory councillors are so concerned with cyclists’ safety (concerned enough, let’s not forget, to propose spending a million pounds removing a facility they believed to be ‘unsafe’ for cyclists), it will be interesting to see whether they will support cheap, practical measures like these, now they are faced with the reality of the cycle lane staying in place.

I’m not holding my breath.

Horsham Cycle Routes, Route 1 – “Cycling On the Route To Nowhere”

I mentioned in this post that I would be making an assessment of West Sussex County Council’s latest Transport Plan for 2011-2026, examining just how the cheery and rather vague language about ‘sustainability’ and ‘taking on board the challenges’ of

putting cycling and walking at the heart of local transport and public health strategies over the next decade

actually matches up to the reality of what is happening on the ground, particularly in my home town. As part of this, I am going to be taking a dispassionate look at ‘Cycle Routes’ in Horsham.

The above is taken from page 88 of the ‘Provisional’ version of the Transport Plan – a document which no longer seems to be available online. Strangely, the final, published version of the Transport Plan has had these maps, which document the existing and proposed facilities of each the major West Sussex towns, removed.

Not very helpful.

Anyway, what I am most interested in are the blue and purple lines, which represent the ‘existing’ and ‘proposed’ cycle routes in Horsham, respectively.

To the south of the town, running south towards Tower Hill, we have this short ‘Existing Cycle Route’ –

Why is it so short?

Here is the start of the Route, looking south, through the railway bridge marked on the map.

As we progress under the bridge, we find these helpful signs –

The signs are slightly misleading, in that the road itself is not ‘private’ (not this bit of it, at least) – but they are completely correct in that this road only has access to pedestrian footpaths, and the few houses that are on it.

In case this was not completely clear, as we move along the ‘Cycle Route’ –

Cyclists can go no further.

This is a cycle route that literally goes nowhere. In fact, absurdly, the vast majority of the blue line on the map lies beyond this gate; if the map had been been drawn more honestly, the line should simply stop just after the railway bridge, making it more of a dot than a line.

So, having progressed this far, along roughly a hundred metres out of the kilometre or so of what is mapped as the official ‘Cycling Route’, your only option is to turn around and go right back to where you started from, shaking your head in frustration. (Or, failing that, you could progress, on foot, on the muddy footpaths that head east and west from this point, but neither of these will lead you to a road or cycle path for at least a mile).

Now admittedly, it’s quite nice cycling up and down this short stretch of tarmac on a sunny evening, but it is quite obviously a cycling dead-end. Describing this as a ‘Cycle Route’ is the equivalent of denoting a cul-de-sac as a ‘Driving Route’, and yet West Sussex County Council have seen fit to include it, with a nice blue line of misrepresentative length (because, again, most of the ‘Route’ is completely inaccessible to the general public), on their official map of facilities in Horsham.

More, much, much more to come.

The ‘Magic Roundabout’, York

Freewheeler, of ‘Crap Cycling & Walking in Waltham Forest‘ fame, has recently put up a post asking “What’s so magical for cyclists about York’s ‘magic roundabout’?”

The piece notes that the design of the roundabout seems to meet with the approval of the CTC (photos of it can be found in the ‘photo library’ of ‘CTC Benchmarking and Action Learning‘, which apparently involves a ‘commitment to promote best practice’), and that it has even won a road safety award, before arguing that

to my mind the magic roundabout is very far from being the enormous success which it is touted as being. It’s just another piece of vehicular cycling infrastructure – an attempt to make things better for cyclists without in any way seriously affecting the volume and presence of motor vehicles.

That’s my view as well. Putting some paint around the circumference of a roundabout does precisely nothing for cyclists, beyond encouraging them to take up a dangerous position around the outside of the roundabout. Competent cyclists will ignore the paint; less competent cyclists will feel compelled to follow the ‘lanes’ and unwittingly put themselves in danger. This kind of ‘infrastructure’ is going to do nothing to persuade anyone to take up riding a bicycle.

By way of illustration, here’s a recent ‘helmet cam’ video from a York cyclist, bigguychappers, showing precisely how wonderful cycling is around the ‘magic roundabout’ –

Totally substandard cycle lanes, a number of close overtakes, a dangerous pull-out right in front of a narrow pinchpoint (where the cycle lane seems to narrow even further) and then the ‘magic roundabout’ itself, dominated, in this video, by motor vehicles, where the cyclist, wisely, chooses to completely ignore the ‘infrastructure’.

And remember, this is a ‘Cycling City’.

Mary Mears, The Grand Avenue Cycle Lane, Brighton & Hove, and “Improving Traffic Flow”

In 2008, a cycle lane that largely separated cyclists from passing traffic was constructed along the Grand Avenue and The Drive in Hove, at a cost of several hundred thousand pounds. Now Brighton and Hove Council are proposing to remove this cycle lane, at an estimated cost of £1.1 million, for the purposes of improving

the visual impact and traffic flow along this important north – south corridor.

The proposal can be found, buried away on page 210-11, of the ‘Cabinet Supplementary Agenda Items’ document.

Suffice to say, this is utter lunacy, on just about any level you choose to consider it.

Let’s look first at the official reasons given. Improving the ‘visual impact’ of a street by removing a cycle lane along it only makes sense if you consider the presence of cyclists on a road unsightly, and you are willing to ignore the four parallel rows of parked cars that take up most of the street (see the photograph from Streetview below). So this isn’t a real reason, but nevertheless is a vivid insight into the thought processes of the local council.

How about improving the traffic flow on this important north-south corridor? That sounds quite serious, surely? Let’s generously set aside any scepticism about just how ‘important’ this road genuinely is, and consider ‘traffic flow’.

Grand Avenue is one of the widest streets in Hove. It is huge.

It is wide enough for four lanes of parked cars, plus two wide carriageways, and the (rather narrow) separated cycle lanes.

If the cycle lane is removed, how will traffic flow be improved? Are the council proposing to add an extra lane in each direction? If they are, then they will need to remove at least one of the parking lanes, and not just the cycle lanes. But that is not happening.

So in essence the council thinks traffic will simply ‘flow better’ if the existing carriageways are a little bit wider than their already generous width.

Draw your own conclusions.

Perhaps aware that these reasons for removing the cycle lane were not really cutting the mustard, so to speak, once the proposal had come to wider public attention, the leader of Brighton and Hove City Council, Mary Mears, has taken to her blog to… err… come up with some different reasons, the main one of which seems to be ‘safety’.

There remain serious safety concerns with the cycle lane… my primary concern as Council Leader has to be ensuring the safety of residents. In my view it was a costly mistake by the previous Administration to agree this cycle lane in the first place. I truly believe that the only responsible option now is for us to remove it and to explore an alternative, safer route in consultation with residents and all stakeholders.

The problem with this argument is that casualties on this road have fallen since the construction of the lane, as Mears herself is forced to admit –

Thankfully, the number of accidents have dropped slightly over the last couple of years but there were still 42 casualties between 2008 and 2010.

Oh dear. Mears is understandably reluctant to supply the full figures, instead choosing to misleadingly quote the scary casualties figure, in isolation of the previous figure. So here they are.

between 2005 and 2007 there were a total of 41 accidents and 52 casualties along the entire stretch. Between 2008 and 2010 this dropped to 32 accidents and 42 casualties

That is, a drop of around 20% in both accidents and casualties, which is hardly ‘slight’, as Mears claims. Even more significantly, this is against a backdrop of cyclists casualties rising across the rest of the city over the same period, according to Russell Honeyman.

But this is not good enough for Mears.

For what was originally sold as being a safe segregated space for cyclists, to me this is completely unacceptable.

Evidently the only good cycle lane is one on which there are never, ever any casualties at all. Mears is so convinced of the rectitude of this argument she is quite prepared to spend a million pounds to make conditions on the road more dangerous for cyclists.

Brilliant.

Cycling In Utrecht

I’ve just come back from a far too short trip to the Netherlands, staying for a couple of days in the wonderful city of Utrecht. Having read – jealously! – about the conditions for cycling in the Netherlands on David Hembrow’s excellent blog, I went with pretty high expectations about what I would find, and I have to say, I was not disappointed. It was a massive eye-opener, and frankly coming back to the UK and immediately experiencing the fairly degraded conditions for cycling in the area where I live was fairly depressing.

If I had to describe succinctly how cycling in Utrecht appeared to me, I would say that it is simply a different form of walking – a slightly faster one. There was no real distinction between the types of people walking, and the people cycling. Not in their clothes, nor in their ages or gender, nor in the way they talked to each other, nor in the way they seemed relaxed while moving about the city. Everybody appeared to cycle, and they do it easily, in normal clothes, and from door to door, chatting and smiling as they progress. Cycling looked, and felt, easy.

Here are two children arriving in the centre of the city, on Mariastraat. Their mother was cycling with them.

I find it hard to imagine children this young cycling into the centre of any UK city at all, let alone cycling in and looking so happy and relaxed, and so ordinary. Yet in Utrecht, families cycling around together is commonplace. More pictures –

A father with his young daughter on his handlebars, two young children cycling with him.

A father with his children.

Father and daughter.

Now, of course, these children are cycling with traffic – but only on narrower streets, where vehicle speeds are limited, and in areas where it is very difficult to drive around. On busier streets, with faster traffic flow, there is separation, like this –

So people still feel safe enough to bring their children with them. More separation –

Note, again, the sheer ordinariness of the people on these bikes.

This is what it is all about. It’s about making cycling the natural thing to do. I suspect that is why cyclists and pedestrians mingled quite easily, even on busy shopping streets; this was something that I had not really been expecting. Even on narrow passageways between building works around the Old Canal, many cyclists did not dismount, and simply negotiated their way past pedestrians.

Again, try to imagine someone cycling like this – even ultra-cautiously – in the U.K., where cyclists seem to be irrationally viewed as the ultimate urban menace, who need to be kept away from pedestrians at all costs. In Utrecht, it’s completely normal – no-one appears to bat an eyelid. That’s probably because everyone cycles, and a person on a bicycle in the city centre is therefore not viewed as someone too poor to afford a car, or a lycra lout, or an adrenaline junkie, and so on.

A picture of rush hour commuting, on my last evening in Utrecht.

The next evening, I arrived back in the U.K., and the first cyclist I saw was a chap in a flourescent yellow jacket, helmet, glasses, lycra leggings, mounting a racing folding bike, with clipless pedals – ready to do battle with the rush hour traffic outside Horsham station. I don’t blame him – this is what you have to do to cycle here. I find that the least stressful way of getting about is to try to keep pace with vehicles, at least when I am forced to use the road – which is most of the time. And you have to wear a helmet, because you’ll probably be blamed if you get killed by a negligent motorist if you’re not wearing one. Ditto for hi-viz.

But, please, can we not start making commuting by bicycle look a little more like the picture above?

Is that not something to aspire to?

To segregate, or not to segregate?

Some opponents of segregation think that putting in separated facilities would result in cyclists losing their right to use the road.

Well, on A-roads like this, I’m not sure that ‘right’ is worth anything at all.

Incidentally, in case you can’t tell from the video, Hargreaves Services have

a proactive approach to Safety, Health and the Environment, and are committed to the highest practicable standards of safety and health management

And it shows!

Video ’15 cm from death’ from Darrell James Whittle

A Reality Check

“Is cycle commuting about to go MASSIVE?”

This is the kind of statement you can routinely find on internet cycling forums. Now, I don’t doubt that some commuting cyclists are seeing a few more people cycling when they are heading to and from work. Perhaps this is a result of fuel being a bit more expensive (not very likely), or congestion getting worse (more likely), or people on a bit of health drive after New Year (likelier still).

What I would hesitate to do is to suddenly proclaim that we are about to enter a golden age of cycling, on the basis of little more than anecdotes.

Here’s one of the main junctions in my town, Horsham, at commuting time, a couple of weeks ago.

Has cycling gone MASSIVE on this evidence?

If you watch carefully, you will see me spot one solitary cyclist passing through this junction, at about eight minutes in. How many motor vehicles do we see during the rest of this nine-and-a-half minute video?

441.

I make that a “modal share” of 0.2%, which is absolutely pitiful, especially considering that cycling levels at commuting periods are generally higher than during the rest of the day.

Out of fairness, I stood at this junction for forty minutes, from 5 until 5:40 pm. Assuming, reasonably enough, that the rate of motor vehicle flow did not alter significantly, we can say that around 3100 motor vehicles pass through this junction in that period. I saw seven more cyclists during these forty minutes (all of whom, incidentally, were riding on the pavement, unlike the intrepid commuter in the video clip). So eight cyclists, versus 3100 cars. That’s a slightly better, yet still pitiful, modal share of 0.3%.

Cycling is not “going massive” in Horsham.

Welcome To Your Advanced Stop Line

Brought to you by Cavendish Construction.

Tavistock Place, yesterday.

And a few moments later –

“Shared Space” – East Street, Horsham

Over the next few weeks, I plan to examine West Sussex County Council’s Transport Plan 2011-2026, looking in particular at how it is going to affect cycling and walking in my area, Horsham, and at how what has actually happened here matches up to what was proposed in the previous transport plans.

We are met, very early in the document, with this bold paragraph –

The Department of Health and Department for Transport have jointly published a new Active Travel Strategy. The strategy highlights plans to put walking and cycling at the heart of local transport and public health strategies over the next decade. The guiding principles for the strategy are that walking and cycling should be everyday ways of getting around – not just for their own sake but also because of what they can do to improve public health, tackle congestion, reduce carbon emissions and improve the local environment. The Local Transport Plan takes on board the challenges this sets.

WSCC Transport Plan 2011-26, p.10

That seems, on the surface, like a commitment to put cycling and walking at the heart of local transport policy. But I suspect that what will actually happen is that the “challenges” will be “taken on board” (note the flexibility of this sentence) while the Council carries on with business-as-usual – that is, putting the motor vehicle first, with token bits of tinkering around the edges for genuinely sustainable modes of transport. The rhetoric, in other words, is probably not going to match up to the delivery. Judging by what the County Council seems to think qualify as already existing ‘cycle routes’ (of which more, in gruesome detail, over the next few weeks) I think my pessimism is well-grounded.

But to show that I am not a complete miserabilist, I am going to start with a positive. A genuine improvement to the Horsham environment – East Street.

Up until last year, the street looked something like this –

That is, a narrow, one-way street for motor traffic, with a cycling contraflow, and a large number of on-street parking bays, set up against narrow pavements on each side. For motor vehicles, the road does not actually go anywhere – the one-way system that the road meets effectively places any vehicles that travel down this road right back where they started. So the road  was primarily used as a quick route into the town centre, usually to drop off/pick up passengers.

The cycling contraflow itself was very useful indeed. Although it was actually impossible to legally access the start of it by bicycle, it provided a quiet route eastwards out of the town centre. Unfortunately, due to its proximity to parked cars, the narrowness of the road, and the failure of many oncoming drivers to appreciate that there actually was a contraflow there (I have virtually been driven into on at least one occasion), it was rather hazardous. So for both pedestrians and cyclists, the street environment was not particularly pleasant.

A large number of the shops on this street were rather fed up with the condition of the street – they felt, quite rightly, that the narrowness of the pavement was not justified, given the infrequency with which the road was actually used, compared to the number of people on foot. So an experiment began, in which the street was closed completely to motor traffic between 10 am and 4 pm. For most shoppers, this was a genuine improvement. The street was quiet, and safe, and they were free to wander rather more calmly than they could when previously confined to the pavements.

A small number of the shops, however, were not exactly in favour, feeling that they required continued 24-hour vehicular access, either for deliveries, or for customers picking up items. So what has eventually transpired? Well, this –

Shared space.

I have to admit that I was sceptical when I heard that the road was going to be turned into a “shared space” environment. I was doubtful about how carefully vehicles would be driven down here. But I think that it has worked out rather well. As you can see, there are a large number of hard objects that anyone who wishes to drive down here has to carefully negotiate. In the six months since the road opened in its new form, I have not witnessed anyone driving down here at anything more than a fast walking speed (in fact, a number of drivers progress with their hazard lights on). The street is usually quite busy with pedestrians, and this, combined with the furniture, has effectively neutralized the street.

So I was wrong. Shared space can work. I still don’t think it can work everywhere – it remains to be seen how it will work on much busier London streets, that do actually go somewhere (Exhibition Road, for instance). With heavier traffic flows I’m not sure how much of a look-in pedestrians are going to get. East Street, on the other hand, works because a “pedestrian majority” was already in place. Where motor vehicles dominate, I’m not sure how merely rebranding the space as “shared” is going to make much of a difference.

One final point of note is that the contraflow for cycling has been maintained*, although it is not marked anywhere on the road. The road is officially two-way for cycling (with pedestrian priority) and one-way for motor vehicles. This works – I can happily cycle up and down this street, carefully avoiding pedestrians. When it’s too busy, I just dismount. I am happy to sacrifice just a little bit of my time in getting to my destination for the good of the street environment.

*I have it on good authority that this is, in fact, largely due to local cycling campaigners, who helpfully pointed out that the contraflow had effectively been removed from the initial plans to convert the street to shared space.

Letting People Use Bicycles In Sydney

Crossrider, the author of the excellent Cycalogical blog, has just put a piece up about the city of Sydney’s attempts to increase cycling levels. The plan is ambitious – to increase the number of trips made by bicycle, between 2 and 20km, to a 20% share of all journeys of that length, by 2016. These are journeys of a length that probably won’t be made on foot. The target for overall modal share (of all trips) made by bicycle is 10% by 2016. Cycling’s modal share in 2006 was only 2%, so this would clearly be a massive transformation.

How are they going about achieving this? Well, let’s refer to the City Of Sydney’s Cycle Strategy And Action Plan, 2007-2017. On the very first page, we find that

The Strategy will provide the infrastructure to ensure a safer and more comfortable cycling environment and the social initiatives to encourage more people to cycle as a means of ordinary transport.

Infrastructure.

Why has the City Of Sydney adopted this strategy?

Social research undertaken by the City in 2006 and 2007 has indicated that many potential cyclists are discouraged from cycling due to the necessity to cycle on the road near parked cars.

The social research undertaken by the City has also indicated that the greatest barriers to cycling within the City is lack of safe, off road bicycle facilities connecting to local parks, shops and entertainment facilities. Potential cyclists are daunted by the potential for riding a bicycle near parked cars or moving traffic. This Strategy seeks to address these concerns.

(page 19)

Yes, remarkable as it may seem, Sydney is actually listening to people who don’t currently use a bicycle to get around the city. They are actually using their responses as a basis for implementing policy that will encourage them to use those bicycles.

Incredible!

So what’s happening?

The City will develop separated bicycle roads within the existing road kerbs to provide safe cycling facilities for all cyclists.

(page 4)

Note – for all cyclists. These paths (or ‘roads’) are now being constructed. Here’s an example, on the busy College Street –

And here’s how College Street used to look –

Yes, the City of Sydney are taking out parking bays on wide roads, and replacing them with a bicycle path that is separated from the heavy traffic. Cyclists no longer have to cycle with the traffic, trying to stay out of the door zone.

Sydney is listening.

Other examples can be found on the Sydney Cycleways facebook page. The full details of the works programme can be found here. Have a look through and see what Sydney are doing.

The incredible thing is that this whole project is costing 76 million Australian dollars, or about 46 million pounds – this sounds a lot, but as Crossrider reports, this is only twice as much as the first two “Cycle Superhighways” in London.

I suspect that Sydney’s strategy will prove far more successful. Time will tell.