The Very Best You Can do For the Motorist

[Deleted member 26715]

And breathe

 

[Gunk]

???


This was 10am yesterday morning, when I used to use this facility before lockdown you had to be there before 8am to get a spot, coming back home at 3pm it would still be rammed. Which means either lots of people in Sheffield have lost their jobs, or a huge many are still working from home




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I park in a car park on the Winchester Road in Basingstoke town centre and I’m often the only car there, maximum I’ve seen parked is three cars. I’m sure it will be closed and redeveloped in the future, I can’t see how it is sustainable

 

[classic33]

And breathe

Always important.

 

[mjr]

In the 50s & 60s, Eric Claxton designed Stevenage New-town to be a cycling utopia, with a network of separate cycle paths so that people could travel the town by bike without ever being bothered by cars, but here we are half a century and more later, and it's a failure. Almost nobody uses it: just 7% instead of the predicted 40%. Why? Because in Stevenage, the car is more convenient than even the 'utopian' cycle network, as Carlton Reid notes.

Claxton failed but because he didn't provide direct cycle routes and nothing was put in place to ensure cycle routes were built in the post -Claxton developments. In comparison, motoring routes were direct and built in later developments. With a complete driving network and incomplete indirect cycling network, it's actually impressive that Stevenage even has average levels of cycling, 14% not 7%. Still, not what was hoped.

View it as a pilot, a learning experience. Claxton made mistakes but he had few earlier mistakes to learn from. MK did better. The retrofits in London and Cambridge are better still, but will take years to complete and there will be more mistakes made along the way, but it will keep getting better.

Ultimately, motorists should be an irrelevance if cycleways are built right. And what tiny minority actually enjoy riding with a vehicle that can kill approaching you from behind in the same lane? That's why we'll never get mass cycling by telling people to ride on 40+mph roads. It's no fun.

 

[All uphill]

A first step is getting enough people cycling on the roads that motorists become accustomed to sharing, and see that there is another way to get around town. With cycling here at about 13% of local journeys I hope we are at a tipping point.

 

[Alex321]

Cycling abroad makes one realise how poorly many of us are served in the UK. we cycled the length of France a couple of years ago and were amazed by the courtesy of motorists, often stopping to allow us to proceed across their road on our cycle lane. Only when we reached the touristy areas down by Biarritz did this change.

We cycled into Vienna on another occasion and were stunned to have our own lanes with our own traffic lights.

Quite a lot of the ones in Cardiff now have their own traffic lights, and some of the cycle lanes are separated by bollards from the main lanes.
Here is one example
https://www.google.com/maps/@51.481...4!1sEdujNw7KVz8ZVUwl46rKhA!2e0!7i16384!8i8192

 

[wiggydiggy]

Many years ago a friend of mine started working in Sheffied
I went to see him a couple of times and followed his direction to his house. I queried the direction as it seemed to be a long way round

Turned out that the council - who were vilified by the Tories for being the Looney Left - had introduce a system where all the main routes into the city, especially at rush hour, were bus lanes.
Clearly bike etc could also use the bus lanes as usual
To get in my car you had to go down one specific route
At the same time they had put large 'Park and Ride' facilities all around the city with frequent buses into the centre
And the normal buses were upgraded to be more pleasant and frequent whether or not they were going to be full

As a result, according to him, the vast majority of him colleagues came into to work by bus - or drove to the 'Park and Ride' and then used the bus


Seems like a solution to me

I seem to recall that it was stopped by some sort of political manoeuvring or something but lets not go all NACA

extra note - I do not know if extra allowances were made for disabled people - but I assume there was something

When I worked in Sheffield a few years back I was luckily on the outskirts just off the parkway, so no city centre driving. I did drive through the centre a few times and it was always a nightmare.

Ive cycled West to North East across the City and the signposted route is an absolute mess, taking you almost to the M1 before it turns North to the Meadowhall centre. A direct route on the roads would be better but I wasn't sure of the way.

The one good thing Sheff has got is the tram, it's a pity more UK cities don't have one.

 

[mjr]

A first step is getting enough people cycling on the roads that motorists become accustomed to sharing, and see that there is another way to get around town. With cycling here at about 13% of local journeys I hope we are at a tipping point.

Motorists still wouldn't share in Cambridge with cycling at about 50% of local journeys, so I doubt there's a tipping point near 13%. The lesson from pretty much everywhere else is that motorists have to be forced to share, whether by 20mph zones, by no-through-motors rules or by being prohibited from certain roads or parts of roads (turning them into cycleways). Successful places are using these tools, not just bleating at people to go play in traffic.

It's cheap and easy for government to run an ad campaign or provide training in coping strategies for extreme sport cycle-jousting with motorists, but they have never worked alone. I'm amazed if 13% cycling share was achieved by only those moves.