Cyclecraft is "destroying" UK cycling
- Thread starter downfader
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On the contrary, he had a perfect right to be there. The individual's death, without going into details as I believe the case may be on-going, is a result of sharing roads with fast moving vehicles which sooner or later, especially on slip roads, will conflict with slower ones. You can legitimately come at the problem from slowing motor vehicles down, or providing quality alternatives for cyclists. If you slow traffic, I've asked repeatedly at what point outside 'the city' do you allow them to maintain their current speeds, if at all. If a cycle track is the answer, why the institutional resistance?
The idea there's always an alternative route doesn't wash for the same reason urban cyclists don't want to be diverted through housing estates and country parks when there's a perfectly good road. In hilly areas a valley route will often be the only realistic way to get around, unless you want to negotiate 20% inclines and quadruple your journey times. I'd like to know what progressive cycle campaign thinking is on roads where the cyclist has been designed out, because if it's to slow traffic down we might be talking a third of the country's roads? Is that realistic? Is it just too hard to think about so we'll do the easy stuff of city roads where everyone lives?
In case anyone's still in doubt, I don't think the idea of cycle safety in such places has been thought through further than Franklin's primary line and robust hand signals. And if that gets the general public on bikes I'm a Dutchman.
Why not? Health, cost, cost to the health service, fewer cars, less pollution, more sociability. What's to hate? The 'who said everyone should ride a bike?' defence is the most recent strategy in maintaining the status quo. I find it absolutely remarkable that people question the idea that society wouldn't be better if many, many more people rode bicycles, wherever they live.
Richard Mann
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I've absolutely no objection to segregated cycle tracks alongside big roads outside urban areas, especially on the sort of roads that have slip roads, if (for whatever reason) people on bikes are likely to use them.
But my priority is the right of potterers to ride in cities.
Which is your prerogative. The problem is when people like me point out the absurdity of fundamentalist attitudes towards such obviously needed separation of trucks and bikes, we get called names like 'segregationist' and worse. A cynic would say the campaign agenda is being lead by a particularly visionary impulse to what a city should be and the countryside is by inference, no more than a playground where cyclists take to lanes and search out quaint tea shops.
I fail to see any good argument against quality cycleways alongside high speed trunk routes that is anything more than thin end of the wedge rabble rousing. Unless someone wants to tell me where these marvellous 20mph zones end?
Richard Mann
Well-Known Member
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- Oxford
I also support the right of people to ride ridiculous lightweight bikes on trunk roads in the early hours of Sunday morning. If that's what they like doing. Not my kinda thing, though.
Seriously, I don't think many people object to cycle tracks alongside trunk roads (as long as it's someone else paying) - all the debate is about city streets.
There is a class of big roads within cities where there is some debate: if your only objective was bums on saddles then you'd build cycle tracks. But if you want to change things a bit more fundamentally, you'd probably put in bus lanes, with a view to getting a modal switch from car to bus, rather than getting people on bikes. Those people on buses means less traffic elsewhere, which means more space to do other things (etc etc etc).
I've mentioned I live by one of those. I'm about to go shopping, and I'd prefer to take a parallel cycle path than mix it with the 60mph+ traffic. It would be subjectively safer and more pleasant. If someone finds the half million quid to do it, we would increase the cycling modality share from just me to just me and a few others.
Isn't that blatant stereotyping? How do we know many more people might use them if traffic was doing 30mph or there was a Dutch style cycle path?
Only because the most vocal elements keep telling us it is. If the rights of city dwellers extends to telling me where cycle tracks are appropriate I shall take the debate into their back yard.
Flying_Monkey
Recyclist
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- Odawa
Yeah, but as a sociologist (I hate doing this!), I can tell you that changing culture by policy is pretty damn hard and can be counterproductive, and the results counterintuitive. It can end up being far more expensive and difficult than infrastructural changes. In any case, as in most of these kinds of arguments, I can't see that it is an either / or. Britain has terribly-designed roads: dell has already mentioned roundabouts, which are one of the curses of contemporary Britain; and, the British style of government is obsessed with posts, poles, signing, instructions, orders, and petty rules which turn our cities into cluttered unfriendly, Orwellian spaces. So we need infrastructural change, even if you aren't a segregationalist or any stripe. In the end, there are places where it is entirely appropriate to ban motorized vehicles (almost) completely, places where mixed traffic works and places where segregation works. I think this is part of what Blockend is trying to say, and I can't see anything wrong with that aspect of his argument at least. Sometimes we are too close to the subject, too passionate, and we don't step back in the way that we would on just about any other subject.
Well, we could make some assumptions about the upper limit on that number: it's not going to be more than the number of people who need/want to make that journey by any possible mode of transport. Which relates quite strongly to the number of people living or working there, which I am fairly sure is going to be fewer in the countryside than in the city. Population density being one of the things that defines the urban environment, after all.
That's precisely what I've said from the beginning. There are no formulaic answers, unless the formula is flexible enough to take in glorified Roman roads, Georgian towns, post-war concrete suburban speedways and the ad hoc, half-cocked palimpsest of routes that passes for Britain's highways.
There's a much worse British version of that at the Newmarket Rd roundabout in Cambridge. Complete with double back ramps down and up for cyclists, sharp unsighted turns into narrow tunnels with divider railings at the tunnel entrance and all sorts of other horrors.
One among many. Where does London end heading west? Where does the north east conurbation finish if you arrive from Northumberland and head south to the Yorkshire coast? What about the West Midlands or the North West in any direction? How can you tell? There'll be the usual mix of ribbon development, swallowed villages and small townscapes that are all but indistinguishable, each with their own orbits and transport priorities. How can the correct solution to W1 translate to Hillingdon or Havering, let alone Hillsborough?
Where has anyone suggested it should?
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