StuAff
Silencing his legs regularly
- Location
- Portsmouth
Well, what do you expect from someone who refers to himself in the third person?
dumbass LCC bike lane on Stratford High Street
- Thread starter dellzeqq
- Start date
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w00hoo_kent
One of the 64K
- Location
- Maidstone or Greenwich
If his vision becomes reality then compulsion will mean you won't have the right to ride on the road anyway. We'll all be doing 12mph in the cycle lanes where we belong.
StuAff
Silencing his legs regularly
- Location
- Portsmouth
And getting doored. And colliding with suicidal peds. And dodging illegally parked cars.......
mjr
Comfy armchair to one person & a plank to the next
- Location
- mostly Norfolk, sometimes Somerset
Wow, some people really love making stuff up to disagree with! David Hembrow's vision would surely be cycleways away from car doors and peds with enough policing to deal with illegal parking, no?
I don't agree with DH and especially not his communication style, but making stuff up about him seems rather unnecessary and rude.
So now these wonderful lanes require a special police force too? Brilliant!
Lanists = reality denialists...
StuAff
Silencing his legs regularly
- Location
- Portsmouth
I wasn't talking about Hembrow. Neither was @w00hoo_kent as it happens.
mjr
Comfy armchair to one person & a plank to the next
- Location
- mostly Norfolk, sometimes Somerset
Not a special police force. Just the current ones to do their jobs properly, which would benefit everyone, whether they ride on roads or cycle tracks, or drive or walk or... www.RoadJustice.org.uk is one campaign by some cycling groups, but there are others.
It's particularly annoying to have "Get In The Cycle Lane" abuse when the lane has been blocked by a bad motorist. I've even had it when the lane was closed by the police following a collision... and the onlooking police did nothing. :-/
Sorry the quoting in post #446 confused me. I doubt whoever you were talking about holds the views you've made up, either.
Fair enough, but overall, we are never going to agree. I loathe cycle lanes and strongly believe that taking it further and littering the roads with segregated cycleways will only make things worse for cyclists. Journey times will be increased, there will be more confrontation, and the numbers cycling will fall.
w00hoo_kent
One of the 64K
- Location
- Maidstone or Greenwich
That's fine.
My comment is based on my expectation of what will happen if loads of money is spent on these shiny new space taking cycle lanes. As has been mentioned a lot here, look to the Dutch experience. I've ridden in Amsterdam a bit, you don't ride on the roads and the cycle lane riding experience might be safer, but it is not better. Average speeds do drop and there is conflict with peds. Out of town they are quite nice, but then the roads are also pretty empty so they aren't really needed and they are still slower (and glass is a thing.)
I think that it is possible segregation will increase the number of bicycle users, but it'll be to the detriment of the number of cyclists (Feel free to interpret those terms to whatever degree you fancy, but I'm not intending either to be derogatory) and the riding that a lot of us do around town at the moment will suffer for it. Spending the equivalent money on policing the roads using the existing laws could have a better effect, it's where I'd prefer efforts were directed. Although unfortunately it's unlikely to gel with the agendas at work. There is a difference between a good campaign, and a campaign that is likely to be approved. I believe sometimes bodies campaigning for change lose sight of the best option because they are busy focusing on the option most likely to win and that is not always the right thing because they end up following the wrong persons agenda and refusing to admit it.
mjr
Comfy armchair to one person & a plank to the next
- Location
- mostly Norfolk, sometimes Somerset
Well, you're probably right that we won't agree about cycle lanes completely. I think a few, done well (which is usually how they fail) and used sparingly on major roads will improve things. It's unlikely that rider numbers there will fall further because those few still riding on those roads will probably continue despite anything, including attempts at legal prohibition I suspect. Cycle lanes there should shorten journey times overall because of the riders who are currently taking indirect routes to avoid those roads... or joining the traffic jams in cars instead.
If someone doesn't want to use a cycle lane then I'll defend their right to ride in the mixed lane to the end. I've spoken out at a council meeting (technically heckling I think, but that council isn't great at enforcing procedure) against a councillor who asked the police "how can we force cyclists to use the cycle path?" (that one is unsuitable for an unladen hybrid above 10mph average speed, so the racers going to/from the local TT circuit would do themselves a mischief if they used it) and it sucks that police officers either don't know or aren't willing to explain the law to councillors, or explain that this is a problem basically caused by past councils cutting corners, building shoddy junk and ultimately wasting their money.
On most roads, it'll be far better to have more "no through motors" and 20mph zones than to build cycle lanes. Maybe we can agree on that, at least?
Yup!
Have been meaning to write a lengthy post about my experiences in the USA, might get round to it in light of this thread!
mjr
Comfy armchair to one person & a plank to the next
- Location
- mostly Norfolk, sometimes Somerset
I'd agree with that. I'm trying to balance campaigning for better policing with for better infrastructure and I suspect many other groups are doing the same. At the moment, the money is going into infrastructure, but the basic design changes are lagging behind, so we're essentially spending a lot of effort trying to stop councils building good-looking badly-designed stuff for a while until the "cycle-proofing" idea helps to fix the Design Manual for Roads and Bridges, and first do the cheaper but more useful infrastructure that is possible (20mph, "except cycles" and so on). Where they won't stop, we're trying to mitigate the worst dangers of either the new bits (Lynnsport Access roads) or what's currently there (the notorious "please wait here while an incoming bus runs you over" bike lane in the Lynn bus station entrance).
I don't know all campaign groups, but I don't think ours is good at predicting which campaigns will win (I didn't expect Norfolk County Council to start removing "motorcycle" barriers at last, for example), so the active campaigns are often determined by which ones cyclists are willing to work on, as long as they're on-message. Our current headline efforts are RoadJustice and space4cycling (which includes 20mph, "except cycles" and more, as well as cycle lanes on major routes) partly because we share them with sister groups like LCC and CTC, and so they take up less of our local resources.
space4cycling is taking up more resources than Road Justice, but that's because the highway authorities are doing more infrastructure stuff and we have to react, else what we will get will be even worse (we've seen this in the past - what Norfolk builds now isn't good but it's less awful) and the police don't seem to be doing so much traffic policing.
LCC is probably different because 1% or whatever of London is a lot more than 1% of any other group's area, and CTC is national, but elsewhere it's as much a do-ocracy as a democracy. If you want to shape cycle campaigns, get involved. You probably won't convince enough campaigners that cycle lanes are never a good option, but if you know the evidence then you can probably encourage restraint where something else would be better.
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Fab Foodie
hanging-on in quiet desperation ...
- Location
- Kirton, Devon.
Cock puppets ....
StuAff
Silencing his legs regularly
- Location
- Portsmouth
Nothing made up there. Genuine risks I see and experience on segregated lanes.
