knocksofbeggarmen
Active Member
By the way, the map you want Pete is a different one- showing bike traffic street by street, not point of origin street by street. I'll dig it up.
dumbass LCC bike lane on Stratford High Street
- Thread starter dellzeqq
- Start date
Page may contain affiliate links. Please see terms for details.
ClichéGuevara
Legendary Member
- Location
- Kingston upon the River Hull
Thanks for the reply. I'll have a read of the link later, but so far it sounds logical to me. I feel the laser lights are unusual enough to make drivers notice them. and hopefully me, which is what I'm after.
Trivially, good cycle lanes are possible if you simply ban motor vehicles from parts of the existing road network. The resulting lanes will be level, regularly swept, less likely to develop drainage problems, and wide. Wide is important because users need to avoid debris in the road, for faster cyclists can safely overtake slow ones, and there is a much better chance of not hitting unthinking pedestrians when (not if) they step off the kerb without looking. That is the standard that segregated infra needs to attain if you want my support for it, but nobody in London yet has, and I see no appetite for changing that as long as campaigners carry on pushing for veloducts with kerbs each side to hold the cyclists in
[ Edit: I should clarify that a bit: yes, I agree with the 'backbone' comment: the political will for reallocating mixed-use roads as no-motor-vehicle roads is what's lacking, and by "trivial" I mean only that it's trivial to demonstrate that good seg infra is possible in theory, not that it would be in any way simple or easy to execute on in reality ]
Last edited:
A big part of my issue with the 'crossrail for bikes' plan in London is that it's a large two-way lane, so lots of overtaking in the oncoming lane and that kind of malarkey.
Plus the fact that it will be clogged with groups tourists on Boris Bikes...
Despite the protestations of the Twitter crew, I still reckon it will actually lead to fewer people cycling in the capital - they may claim greyer numbers, but most of them will be tourists and other day-trippers who would have been walking anyway
knocksofbeggarmen
Active Member
Other than 'because I hate this' or similar, have you the slightest shred of evidence for your odd claim?
knocksofbeggarmen
Active Member
Yes. You've just expressed support for Dutch design standards. So you will want to sign this petition: http://www.change.org/p/patrick-mcl...tainable-safety-principles-on-britain-s-roads
Sorry, but I have strict rationing on my change.org activity and I've signed one petition there today already
No, I just know London intimately and the second I saw the plans it was obvious it was a bad idea...
I'll just carry on riding on the main carriageway, but I resent you and the LCC etc making it more dangerous and confrontational for me just so you can fulfil your misguided 'Little Amsterdam' dreams...
By the way, relative to London, Amsterdam is a village, as is Utrecht. All the comparisons I see are entirely spurious.
Introducing a requirement for all learner drivers to have undertaken 10 hours of observed cycling before they get their license would do more for cycling than any of your posy lanes and segregation
knocksofbeggarmen
Active Member
Walthamstow one is a good petition. Maybe tomorrow you sill sign the petition to bind them all.
knocksofbeggarmen
Active Member
OK. That's you admitting that 'I hate this' is your substitute for evidence, and that your predictions about usage demographic have no basis in fact whatsoever.
Silly for me to ask, but other than the methodology described above, do you actually have any evidence to support the claim that such lanes would have or have had this effect?
No they aren't spurious, because distances travelled are actually larger than in London, and as ferry ticket and tape measure would verify, the mixes of street widths are entirely comparable. Plus, in parts the Netherlands comprises many continguous and continuous urban areas, and it is plainly misleading to treat these conurbations as collections of villages in any different sense to the sense London is. EG, consider Delft/Den Haag/Rotterdam.
In effect, that's precisely what Mass Cycling has achieved in the Netherlands: all learner drivers will have undertaken hundreds if not thousands of hours of observed cycling.
Last edited:
It's pointless actually responding to this guy directly as it becomes yet another really boring 'show me some statistics' willy-waving contest.
I had a quick look at the Walthamstow thing. It may work, it may not, but it's the terminology that always strikes me:
'Mini-Holland'
It oozes "I went on holiday to Breda and it was lovely, I wish it was like that back home" - followed by a return to the UK, annoying everyone about how great the little holiday was, followed by a 'grassroots' campaign to make changes, which generally amount to little more than "If we build it, they will come" and a proposal that the council whack in some replica infrastructure taken from a street view picture of Dutch streets.
No attempt to account for London's size, character and other peculiarities, just a bourgeoise desire to feel wanted and listened to.
All rather 'Ever Decreasing Circles'...
I had a quick look at the Walthamstow thing. It may work, it may not, but it's the terminology that always strikes me:
'Mini-Holland'
It oozes "I went on holiday to Breda and it was lovely, I wish it was like that back home" - followed by a return to the UK, annoying everyone about how great the little holiday was, followed by a 'grassroots' campaign to make changes, which generally amount to little more than "If we build it, they will come" and a proposal that the council whack in some replica infrastructure taken from a street view picture of Dutch streets.
No attempt to account for London's size, character and other peculiarities, just a bourgeoise desire to feel wanted and listened to.
All rather 'Ever Decreasing Circles'...
knocksofbeggarmen
Active Member
I'm sorry you regard this as "willy waiving" but, ahem, you have not supplied any evidence that size is a factor. I've already pointed out 1) that distances travelled are larger in the Netherlands and 2) that the extent of a conurbation called by a single name is neither here nor there where both the Netherlands and the South East of the UK comprise a large number of entirely contiguous urban settlements. (A rose by any other name...) Pop. density, too, is entirely similar.
If you cannot think of a relevant response to points 1&2, you could always think of some rude words ("willy waiving").
knocksofbeggarmen
Active Member
I was alive then and got the reference, but not everyone was.
For the information of the Yoof:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ever_Decreasing_Circles
mjr
Comfy armchair to one person & a plank to the next
- Location
- mostly Norfolk, sometimes Somerset
Clearly not. That's naughtily taken unattributed from the website of our sibling campaign group in Cambridge which said those lanes were "Wide enough to deal with the threat of opening car doors, though really a gap ought to be provided" http://www.camcycle.org.uk/events/visits/netherlands/Perhaps this sort of thing?
Except we're not restricted to it. My usual arrival points in central London are King's Cross or Paddington and usually I choose to ride in that lane along Torrington Place and nearby streets. Sometimes at busy times, I ride in the mixed lanes for some or all of it instead. More than once I've decided I can't be bothered with the bonkers switchover at the east end and joined/left the lane early... but still, I often ride in the cycleway or on that route.
Whether in the lane or not, I don't feel suffer more abuse there than I do elsewhere. Rather less in London than in Norfolk or Somerset and about the same as in Cambridge. Abuse from nutters in motors seems largely independent of whether there's a cycleway anywhere nearby.
I don't consider it consistent with vehicular cycling as described in cyclecraft, but I don't see how you could possibly consider them consistent with protected space either. I think protected space would be a decent width with-flow lane on each side. What's there is a half-done thing and yes, the danger at some of the junctions is unnecessarily high.
I'm surprised Mark Treasure gave it as an example of best practice, but I've not found any verification of that. At best, I'd say it has some elements (eliminating most turns across cycle traffic at signalised junctions), but there are the sadly-typical mistakes (Byng Place and the give-ways!).
Come on, this isn't a difficult argument to understand: putting forwards arguments that all cyclists should use the mixed lanes rather than building cycleways results in development of a dual network where mixed lanes are for the fast and the brave so cycleways don't need to be built to cope with fast travel because they're for slowcoaches.
I don't think that's what's happening. I think Pete Owens, DZ and other anti-infrastructure campaigners are a voice slowly dying on the margins. I think we get crap cycleways because it's cheaper to build crap, they look as good as proper ones to the casual observer in press releases and by the time the usage or crash stats show otherwise, the politician responsible will have moved up or out. To cover this cost-cutting compromising, pro-infrastructure campaigners are told that there's dissent and cyclists don't know what they want, which is a red herring. As far as I can tell, all of the major cyclist groups (CN/LCC, CTC, BC, BA, ...) are currently pushing in the same direction, with the non-democratic Sustrans as the last major organisation that seems to accept substandard provision by action if not policy - routing its National Cycle Network along it, publishing how-to guides for cycleway barriers and berating roadies for actually wanting to ride at the speed they're able to.
Yet, where are the riders who live in Hackney riding to? They're riding south-west into Camden... http://commute.datashine.org.uk/#zo...TT&mode=bicycle&direction=both&msoa=E02000361
But that doesn't tell us much about their routes. I'll be interested to see the street-level map @knocksofbeggarmen mentioned.
Last edited:
