. But I think CTC have a very difficult job to do. I really do. They have to be an "inclusive church". They have to reflect a very broad spectrum of views from within their ranks as to what cycling policy should be. This is in contrast to the position of the
, which started as a movement of bloggers and cycle campaigners dissatisfied with the policies and performance records (in terms of improving cycling conditions and getting more cyclists on the roads) of existing organisations, like
, and thus started from an ideological (in the best sense), not an inclusive standpoint. The Embassy doesn't have to reflect the views of those who disagree with it. They can just not support it, as they wish.
And some UK cyclists, quite a lot in fact, do not support the Embassy's, and this blog's, pro-cycling infrastructure stance. Some take a spectacularly different view. In response, I think, to my
After I retweeted his original tweet to my follwers, there developed an enormously long Twitter argument between Andy and others of the "Embassy persuasion". It would be too cumbersome to try to reproduce this here, and inappropriate, but I mention this for several reasons. One reason is that I know that this blog has quite a few Dutch readers. It is often very hard for the Dutch to understand quite what the "problem" is in UK cycling circles – to understand where the argument around separated infrastructure comes from in this country – and why cyclists here (and perhaps even more in the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) can't seem to speak with one voice to government to demand clearly what they want.
I would like them to be able to appreciate it, for the more they do, the more, perhaps, they will be able to help us.
For Andy's views, which are not that unusual amongst UK cyclists, of course, embody a total, profound misunderstanding of the nature of the Dutch cycling solution, or paradigm, and a complete misunderstanding of what the Cycling Embassy and allied groups are campaigning for. Nobody holding these views can possibly have read thoroughly, and understood, the arguments advanced in this blog, or on the
Embassy website, or on the Dutch-based English-Language cycling blogs
A View From The Cycle Path (David Hembrow) or
BicycleDutch (Mark Wagenbuur).
Moreover, they clearly can't have experienced cycling in the modern Netherlands themselves. Well I happen to know that Andy lives in Southend, Essex, which is just a shot train journey, or a 60 mile bike ride, from the port of Harwich (the ride would be partly on very dangerous and almost unavoidable trunk roads, of course, like the A120, for this is the UK). From Harwich one gets in one sea hop to the Hook of Holland, and from there, on wide, convenient, safe, fun, cycle paths, of course, to the rest of the Netherlands. I hope Andy makes that journey some time.
It can be quite difficult, because of the culture differences, not because of the reality, to deal with this "big issue" some British, North American and Australasian cyclists have about the "choice of route" and "being banned from roads", if they have not seen and experienced the reality of cycling in the Netherlands for themselves. David Hembrow has a good stab at getting over this mental block of theirs in his post on
unravelling of modes:
Should our intrepid cyclist defy the sign and cycle with this bus and van [behind the noise barriers], he/she would simply find another set of traffic lights four hundred metres from this one.
Fighting for the "right to ride" on roads such as this one would be a meaningless gesture. No-one is interested in doing so, because it makes no sense at all to prefer to ride in those conditions. This is a road which exists to deal with the consequences of cars.
Another way of putting it was stated by a Dutch person on a blog comment I read somewhere, sometime, which I recall as something like:
For a British cyclist to come to the Netherlands and say to a Dutch cyclist "How do you cope with being banned from so many roads?" is a bit like an American coming to the UK and saying: "You know that socialised national health system you have over here? Does it actually prevent you from doing open heart surgery on your grandfather in your garden shed if you want to?"
Laugh Out Loud: the point being that both questions prove to be comically irrelevant to the person to whom they are addressed, who understands the national infrastructural and cultural background.
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| Sorry, "right to the road" freaks, but cycling is banned on this road in Assen because it makes sense to ban cycling here. The road is going into a tunnel under a railway, but the excellent two-way cycle tracks on both sides of the road make the ban completely irrelevant. But such examples, away from the motorway network, are rare. |
The discussion there got on to the CTC and DfT-approved formula for cycle provision in the UK known as the
Hierarchy of Provision. I, and the Embassy, are opposed to the
Hierarchy of Provision. We think it makes no sense at all as a policy
. For a clearly-argued dissection of why this is, see
At War With the Motorist (Joe Dunckley). Here is the Hierarchy, lifted from the CTC website:
Consider first
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Traffic reduction
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Speed reduction
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Junction treatment, hazard site treatment, traffic management
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Reallocation of carriageway space (e.g. bus lanes, widened nearside lanes, cycle lanes)
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Cycle tracks away from roads
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Consider last
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Conversion of footways/footpaths to shared use cycle tracks for pedestrians and cyclists
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A correspondent on the
Alternative DfT blog questioned why Dutch-style high-quality segregated cycle tracks on main roads, which seem to to be, to so many people, the critical "missing ingredient" that the UK needs to adopt to begin to properly accommodate cycling, appear to be discouraged by CTC by being either placed near the bottom of the
Hierarchy, or not mentioned at all, depending on your interpretation of what the unclear terms in the last two rows of the
Hierarchy actually mean
. (If they are
cycle tracks, they are not away from roads, those are
cycle paths, and if they are
shared use, they are not proper Dutch-style dedicated
cycle tracks.)
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| This is the kind of thing for which the CTC/DfT Hierarchy of Provision seems to find no place, the segregated but not shared-use cycle track alongside a road, in this case, Royal College Street, Camden, London. |
Chris Juden then came up with this reply, which I quote in full:
The Hierarchy of Provision is lifted straight out of DUTCH planning advice. THEIR top priority is to create calm neighbourhoods where people can live, play, walk and ride bikes in safety and only drive motor vehicles with great caution. They call it a Woonerf. Outside the Woonerf, if the traffic speeds and volumes are low, they still don’t separate bikes from cars on quiet country lanes for example. Slightly busier low-speed roads get on-highway cycle lanes (a whole lot wider than UK ever provides of course), but Dutch PRIORITY is to make those roads less busy: interrupt them (not for bikes though) and send through traffic another way.
Separate sidepaths are a last resort for the Dutch too. They are provided where the road simply must carry significant traffic at a much higher than cycling speed.
All this is in Hembrow and Wagenbuur, but they concentrate on the separate sidepaths because that’s the most concrete difference between what they have and what we don’t have.
No actually it isn’t. There’s something else, involving a whole lot more concrete that Hembrow and Wagenbuur completely ignore. The Dutch motorway network. The Dutch can close roads to through motor traffic to create Woonerfen and reduce capacity on other roads to make room for high quality off carriageway cycle tracks because they have not been shy about building ring roads and motorways for the displaced traffic. Go onto Google maps and check out any Dutch city. I challenge you to find any part of any city that is more than 10km from a motorway or does not have a complete ring road. Now go look at London on the same scale. Or any British City. They all still depend upon general purpose roads to get traffic around through and out of the city, roads on ancient alignments that provide the line of least cycling resistance but intersect in maelstroms like Bow and cannot be equipped with good quality cycle infrastructure so long as so much motor traffic has to go that way too. It’s a problem for anyone who wants cyclepaths but opposes new road schemes, which is probably most cycle campaigners.
It's hard for me to know where to begin in trying to answer Chris here. I can live (as I have to) with the odd correspondent on Twitter, like Andy Kewell, completely misunderstanding the Dutch paradigm, but when an almost equal incomprehension is displayed by a senior policy person at the UK's largerst cycling organisation, it is deeply disappointing, and it shows all too clearly why the Embassy had to be founded.
So let's start at the beginning, and take this apart bit by bit. It's going to be a long process.
Juden:
The Hierarchy of Provision is lifted straight out of DUTCH planning advice.
Words may have been copied, but nationally-specific understandings and assumptions often underlie simple words, and mislead. Clearly a massive misinterpretation has taken place in translation from whatever the "Dutch planning advice" was to its interpretation in CTC/DfT policy, as the
Dutch do not "consider last" segregated cycle tracks as a solution for busy main roads which cyclists need to use.
Such tracks are near-universal in the Netherlands now on such roads.
Juden:
THEIR top priority is to create calm neighbourhoods where people can live, play, walk and ride bikes in safety and only drive motor vehicles with great caution. They call it a Woonerf.
Complete nonsense. The Netherlands is not some fairy-land dedicarted to "calm neighbourhoods where people can live, play, walk and ride bikes in safety and only drive motor vehicles with great caution". The Netherlands is a modern industrialised nation with everything any other similar nation has: high-speed roads, railways, tram and busways, industrial waterways and docks, and huge-scale industry, retail, and industrial agriculture. This is all accomodated by Dutch planning. It ain't a fairyland. It's a working and very economically successful country, surprise, surprise! But the overriding principle, where cycling is concerned, is separation from motor traffic. Anyone who spends any time cycling there can see that, and feel and experience it – whatever the CTC, or even contextually misunderstood Dutch planning guidance, say.
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| Amusing cartoon, CTC, but let's have a bit less of the fairyland, and a bit more understanding of how it actually works in a real country only 127 miles away. |
True
Woonerven cover a
tiny percentage of the area of Dutch towns and cities. They are areas where the streets are dedicated to walking and play, the top speed is "walking pace", and they have nothing whatever to do with the facilitation of fast, efficient bike journeys on the high-quality, backbone cycling infrastructure, which will be elsewhere (though small cycle paths will always connect housing in the
Woonerf to that infrastructure). They are not the normal or default treatment for residential areas either. There is a total misunderstanding here of the nature, scale, and role of
Woonerven evidenced in Chris Juden's statement.
Juden:
Outside the Woonerf, if the traffic speeds and volumes are low, they still don’t separate bikes from cars on quiet country lanes for example.
Actually, they do if they need to! Go and look. It depends what you mean by "quiet", of course, but, if there is demand, if it is an important road for cycling (
especially for children to cycle to school on) and there is, by UK standards, any significant motor traffic on it at all, they separate.
Everywhere.
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| There's only a few cars a minute on this country road near Assen, but that's enough to warrant separation with cycle paths. |
Juden:
Slightly busier low-speed roads get on-highway cycle lanes (a whole lot wider than UK ever provides of course), but Dutch PRIORITY is to make those roads less busy: interrupt them (not for bikes though) and send through traffic another way.
No it's not.
Dutch priority is to separate cars and bikes. Go and look and experience. Juden is confusing several classes of solution here: cycle lanes on roads that have significant traffic (usually in suburbs,
where the roads have not yet been rebuilt to the latest fully-segregated standards), cycle lanes on
roads that have nothing except a small amount of essential access traffic on them (
usually in town centres), and
cycle lanes on "bicycle roads" that have to provide access to a few residential properties as well, and are there to emphasise the "cycle priority" aspect of the road. In all cases it's not about "making roads less busy" in the sense in which that phrase would be understood in the UK context. It's about reliable, full separation.
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| Here's a "bicycle road" with cycle lanes that turns into a totally car-free cycle path. It is only not totally car-free for the section in the foreground because it provides access to some houses, but it's virtually as good as if it were, and the advisory cycle lanes indicate cycle priority. |
Juden:
Separate sidepaths are a last resort for the Dutch too. They are provided where the road simply must carry significant traffic at a much higher than cycling speed.
I've already dealt with this one. (But I am not sure why Juden adopts the American terminology, from Forester, of "sidepaths". We call them "cycle tracks" in the UK.) It makes no sense to call something a "last resort" where it is the automatic, univeral solution for a certain type of road. To put it like this, in English, and in the British context, is simply misleading. The whole concept of a
hierarchy of provision makers no sense, from this perspective. Decisions on appropriate solutions for any road have to start from a decision on the function of a road, not from a universal template hierarchy. The Netherlands is a modern industrial nation, as I have said. It needs big, fast roads for transport. Sometimes, as in the UK, these have to coincide with the only available cycle route, for reasons of geography or history. The difference is that the Dutch always provide the high-quality cycle track, the British almost never do.
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| A cycle track like this on a major through-road like this (between Assen and Groningen) is not a "last resort" in the Netherlands, it is the only solution that is used in these circumstances. |
Juden:
All this is in Hembrow and Wagenbuur, but they concentrate on the separate sidepaths because that’s the most concrete difference between what they have and what we don’t have.
Well, no they don't, and no it's not. Read them and make your own mind up. If you search
A view from the cycle path under "segregation without cycle paths" (one of the options offered in the right-hand menu) you get
article after article explaining most carefully the other options in the Dutch cycle planning armoury. The differences in the way minor roads are organised in towns and cities is at least as profound a difference between Dutch and British practice as is the provision of cycle tracks. As Hembrow explains:
Over the last few decades, the Netherlands has unwoven the networks of car and bicycle routes. If you compare routes for the same journey by bicycle and by car, then in very many cases you will find that the two routes are very different to one another.
Again, the over-riding policy is the separation of bikes from motor traffic, whether its through cycle paths, cycle lanes, cycle tracks, cycle roads, or separated routes that use a whole battery of measures in their completion.
Juden:
No actually it isn’t. There’s something else, involving a whole lot more concrete that Hembrow and Wagenbuur completely ignore. The Dutch motorway network. The Dutch can close roads to through motor traffic to create Woonerfen and reduce capacity on other roads to make room for high quality off carriageway cycle tracks because they have not been shy about building ring roads and motorways for the displaced traffic. Go onto Google maps and check out any Dutch city. I challenge you to find any part of any city that is more than 10km from a motorway or does not have a complete ring road. Now go look at London on the same scale. Or any British City. They all still depend upon general purpose roads to get traffic around through and out of the city, roads on ancient alignments that provide the line of least cycling resistance but intersect in maelstroms like Bow and cannot be equipped with good quality cycle infrastructure so long as so much motor traffic has to go that way too. It’s a problem for anyone who wants cyclepaths but opposes new road schemes, which is probably most cycle campaigners.
No, Hembrow and Wagenbuur don't ignore motorways. You can search
A view from the cycle path again for references to motorways, and a
huge number of illuminating articles come up, often on topics most British cyclists would never have thought about, such as how noise from motorways is kept away from cyclists (and residents). And you can read
BicycleDutch's explanations of how cyclists are
guided through,
over and
under motorway junctions and networks.
But once again, here, there are errors and misinterpretations in terminology leading us astray. For while the Dutch do have the huge roads that we in the UK call "motorways", of course, most of their "motorways" are not this.
They are the equivalent of a certain type of British A-class road. The Dutch do not have an equivalent category of road to the UK "A" road, because the UK's category would be too broad for them, covering, as it does, such a vast range of road-types, from six-lane, "motorway-in-all-but-name"-type trunk roads, through densely-active shopping streets in towns, down to heavily-trafficked two-lane country lanes and little-used single track roads in remote areas such as the Scottish Highlands.
The Dutch have built the bypasses and ring-roads as the British have. But they did something crucially different at the same time. They
made motor traffic take those new roads, and didn't leave the old roads open, without altertation, in the fatally-flawed way that the UK did, so just adding motor capacity. At the same time, Dutch planning, over many decades, separated roads by their function, so those roads defined as "motorways" (which need not be very wide roads) were specialised only to take through motor traffic, not to provide direct access to shops and schools and workplaces. The category of "access roads" was developed to do just that, provide that access, but not to transfer traffic at the same time between districts.
The doctrine of the mono-functional road became part of the framework of
sustainable safety, and cycle networks were enabled in large part by the removal of much traffic from roads defined as outside the motorway network by this ongoing programmne of the separation of functions of the diffrerent classes of road. The process is not complete of course, and is not perfect. But it has created "main roads" strikingly different from their UK equivalents, where so many functions are attempted to be accommodated on such roads simultaneously: through-traffic movement, access to shops, schools and businesses, bus routes, cycle and pedestrian routes.
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| The DfT website has this picture as a banner on their "roads" pages as I suspect illustrating something they think well-designed, but it's a typical British multi-functional road (The Cut, London SE1), attempting to do too many jobs ineffectively. |
So nearly everything now seems to be different in the Dutch road and street fabric from how it is in the UK's. It is hard to adequately summarise the differences in a short essay, and, again, I urge everybody to go and see it for themselves. The huge contrast, with so many things being different at once, poses a challenge of interpretation and explanation to UK audiences, and it becomes remarkable to reflect that these nations are only separated by 130 miles of sea. People like Juden are confused because so much is different, and they pick out certain things which they think are critical differences, when they need to better interpret the whole.
Where Juden says:
I challenge you to find any part of any city that is more than 10km from a motorway or does not have a complete ring road. Now go look at London on the same scale.
I do so, and I find that because of the separation of functions on Dutch roads, large and small, and the differences of road definition, this is not a meaningful challenge. There are places in London more than 10km from a motorway (but not my house, which is 2km from the M1). But they are not more than 10km away from a road that Dutch planners, in all probability, would have re-interpreted and planned as a "distributor road", gradually removing its direct access functions, over time, had they been in charge here since 1950. So we've got a long-term planning challenge here, of that there is no doubt.
I am certain that we will never make the UK's roads quite like Dutch roads. It's a different country, and differences, including some major differences, are certain to always remain, for reasons cultural, topographic, geographic, economic and political. But we could start to take parts of their best practice and interpret them as best we can into what we have. As I have seen done in some of the very different cities of Italy, Switzerland, and Germany, and has no doubt been done in many places that I haven't visited. To start with, we need to stop so strenuously finding reasons "why it can't be done here". Come on, CTC, let's have some vision!
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| Segregated cycle track on main road, near Geneva, Switzerland. It's not flat here. And it's not Cycletopia, but it's much better than the UK. |
