General Category > On The Road

Cycle paths: a personal journey

(1/4) > >>

SteveC:
I've started a new thread although this is largely inspired by the Katie cycles to school thread, I've been meaning to mention my experience with (re)gaining confidence for some time.

From the age of 17 to 28 my main form of transport was bicycle. I rode the four miles or so to school. I rode everywhere at university. I rode to my first job. I did a bike-rail commute to my second. I had to get a car when I moved to Wigan to get married as the only job I could find was in Stockport.
And, of course, I largely stopped using the bike although it did get used on holidays and to get to the local folk club of a Sunday evening.

Fast forward ten years or so. I've moved twice more and now am living less than three miles from work, which has recently moved into a new building with undercover bike storage and showers. I have also discovered the internet, and in particular a strange site called the Cycling Plus Forum.
This, plus some prompts from friends, persuade me that I really ought to start cycle-commuting again.

However, and this is where the cycle paths come in, I had always been an urban cyclist. When I'd been riding before I was living in Southampton, Manchester, Farnborough and Wigan. I'm now in a small village with a national speed limit road between it and work, no street lights, no pavements (not for riding on, but somewhere to escape to if needed). The only saving grace of the route was that, once I got to the edge of town, there was a cycle path. I used to be so relieved when I got off the 60mph road and onto that path. It was by far the best bit of the journey.
If it hadn't been there, I would probably have started commuting anyway, but it certainly made me feel safer in those early days.

Of course, once I got more experienced with the roads, with riding in the country and so on, my view (not un-influenced by this place and its predecessors) began to change. I now don't use the path on my way into work (I tend to use it going home, more out of habit than anything, but partly as a gentle warm up). I now really enjoy riding on country lanes. I frequently to a ten or twelve mile loop at lunchtime. But when I started that cycle path was a real boon.

Asterix, the former Gaul.:
Delighted to hear of another returnee to cycling. 

I'm afraid I am not a fan of cycle paths.  They are usually rubbish and to prove it here is my latest 'find' in York:



I really thought I must be seeing thing when I realised I was going the 'wrong' way!  Never mind the obstacles and very poor track surface. 

Socks:
It's amazing the difference that good design makes.  I'm lucky enough to have easy access to several routes on former railway lines (in County Durham) - many of them now a tarmac surface, and most of the stupid anti-motorbike barriers have been removed.

But on my regular commute, on mostly urban roads, if there are any cycling facilities they tend to be crappy token efforts.  And they magically disappear as soon as it gets difficult; or require cyclists to dismount; or try to cross busy roads rather than go with the flow of traffic.

Makes you think that (mostly middle aged car driving) highways engineers are happy for us to use recreational routes in the countryside, but don't want to cause too much inconvenience for car drivers in towns.

Pete Owens:
This gets to the nub of the problem with cycle paths.

Even as a sceptic of segregation, I think the idea of convertind disused railways to leisure cycle routes is briliant. I have driven many miles to use these things. So long as you are not trying to go anywhere in particular - just happy to ride wherever the trackbed takes you - you can have a nice level, peaceful experience.

BUT it has generated the impression that cycle paths are cheap and easy to construct (all you need is a bit of surplus land and some tarmac). They are not cheap - they were constructed at enourmous expense by victorian railway engineers (all sustrans do is apply a surface). They are not easy - acquiring the land to run the routes will have required an act of parliament. When they go through towns they tend to be burried in deep cuttings or on high embankments to enable grade separation at every road crossing - and gentle gradients for the locomototives. Also railways provide a very course grained network - stations tend to be miles apart and interaction with the rest of the road network is kept to an absolute minimum - so there are limited oportunities to join or leave the route.

However, what cyclists in towns need is a fine grained network that goes everywhere to everywhere else. It will have frequent junctions (which present intractable design problems) and space is at a premium. The victorians did not build a vast network of grade separated routes connecting every house, school, shop, church, scout hut, park and so on - which are a nescessary precondition of a useable segregated path. Without the embankments, cuttings and bridges you are bound to end up with the dangerous conflicts at every side road crossing - and if you are not going to spend the billions needed on civil engineering then the crappy design compromises are inevitable.

As you correctly point out, the purpose of these things has never been to facilitate cycling, but to clear us out of the way of the imortant people in motors.

ian:
Well, really, you have to make the decision that the road network isn't just for motor vehicles, and perhaps they shouldn't have sole priority over that network. That's a decision that, in this country, we struggle to find the will to make. Every road and street is for cars, for driving, or parking – to the extent where even pavements are often blocked with cars. It's not really about cycling, walking is no better, unless you like squeezing along blocked pavements, stepping around dog shit and litter, and waiting an aeon to cross each road, and oh don't forget, you can't walk in winter because no priority is given to gritting pavements*. It's all about the motor vehicle and the absurd priority we've given it. I live in a small Surrey commuter town on the edge of London. It has buses, rail, and other than the hills, is pretty walkable. But there are cars everywhere, like some malign deity shook out a giant bucketful of the things over the town.

Once you make the decision to treat roads as a proper communal resource of which driving and parking are part rather than the whole, then you can ensure there are facilities for cycling and walking, and where necessary, for instance major roads that carry a large volume of traffic, there are segregated tracks.

'Vehicular cycling' in this environment is sadly, is a disaster. It's given us fewer than 1% of journeys by bike and a toxic us vs. them culture, where both parties view ceding their perceived priority as weakness, and indeed, even those cyclists who disagree are damned as 'segretionalists' as though they demand every road in the country host a cycle path. Whomever they are, I doubt they do.

*even in the US, it's often the law or ordinance you have to clear and grit any pavement outside your home – and adhered to – in Britain, people clear their drives and that's that.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page