Shurdington: a typical English village

This blog is London-based, and so nearly all the cycling discussion on it is about London. I have often thought of, and intended to write, articles concerning more rural areas, but I never seem to get round to doing them, because other things happen, locally or nationally.

However, I was reminded of something when I read, through Twitter, on Wednesday, this very brief and sketchy news of the death of a cyclist in Shurdington, near Cheltenham:

A cyclist has died in hospital following a collision on the Shurdington Road in Cheltenham yesterday afternoon. 

The collision happened at approximately 3.05pm at the traffic light controlled crossing between Cotswold Van Hire and Shurdington Car Sales and involved a cyclist and a red mini. 

The cyclist, an 87-year-old local man, was taken by ambulance to Frenchay Hospital in Bristol but sadly passed away a few hours later.

This gentleman was probably the 115th cyclist to be killed on the roads of the UK this year. What I was reminded of was the fact that I visited Shurdington last year. I cycled there from Cheltenham Station, and I took a few pictures, with the idea of writing a blogpost about the standard UK rural or semi-rural  environment for cycling, and what needs to be learned from Dutch planning if we are ever to improve it. This sad death, though potentially unrelated to my points, brought this back to mind.

Shurdington is a village in the Cotswold Hills between Cheltenham and Gloucester, four miles from Cheletenham town centre. The only way to get to it from Cheltenham is on the A46. There is little more than a mile of green belt between the edge of the Cheltenham suburbs and the beginning of the village. Then there is only another mile of so of the A46 before you come to villages that are suburbs of Gloucester. The A46 is the only way to get there also. All this is so typical of so many villages in England: sandwiched between larger centres, preserved as marginally rural by the preservation of tracts of green gelt but part, in reality, of a much larger urban sprawl. Exactly the same could be said about most villages in the denser parts of the Netherlands. The overall population density is probably similar.

Map of Shurdington, from Google

Here is a Google Streetview picture of the location of the fatal crash, according to the report. It's where it says "Cheese Rollers Inn" on the map above, on the A46 towards the bottom of the map.

Since we have no information as to the causes of the crash, I will not comment further on it. The rest of this post consists of my pictures, and thoughts about Shurdington, based on my one-day's visit in Autumn 2011.

It's a nice enough village, with a very pointed church spire, a village green, and charming, almost traffic-free lanes (because they lead nowhere) that would be fine for cycling.

But what's wrong with Shurdington is the classic thing found in a thousand and one English villages: it has as it's spine, one straight, not very wide, heavily-trafficked through-road with narrow pavements: the A46. There's no other way to get anywhere,  and no alternatives for cyclists, walkers and horsesriders; there is no space for cycling, and absolutely nothing to physically slow traffic down, just "30" signs, "slow" signs, and red painted "slow" markings on the carriageway.

It's horrible to cycle on. The next picture includes the only other cyclists I spotted on my trip. The pavement is not officially "shared", but I cannot blame them for cycling on it.

In the village itself there are narrow footpaths on both sides of the road. But in the green mile between Shurdington and the outskirts of Cheltenham there is only a footpath on one side. These photos show the edge of the village, where you need to cross the road to continue on the other footpath, if you are walking into town. Note the space wasted by the centre hatching.

As can be seen, in the gap between the village and the town, there's space by the road to provide another footpath, or to provide a cycle path instead, but this is not done. In the village itself the properties are close to the road, and it would not be possible to create cycle paths.

The reaction of any English local authority to this deficiency of safe pace for cycling, if it considered it at all, and tried to remedy it, would almost certainly be the creation of shared-use pavements as defined in the 1980 Highways Act. In other words, it would just legalise, with signs, what the man and child on bikes in the picture above are doing. But this, the standard UK approach, the only one the government really empowers and encourages local authorities to adopt, would be the wrong approach.

For one thing, though not too bad on the fringes, where the man and child were when I took the photo, you would get issues in the village centre (where the crash occurred), with the many crossovers and other activities. For another thing, this would not  address the real issue: the untrammelled domination of the village by through-going motor traffic often, or perhaps usually, doing over the speed limit.

I visited Shurdington just after I had been on the study tour in Assen, in the Netherlands, run by David Hembrow, author of A view from the cycle path, with other members of the Cycling Embassy of Great Britain. It struck me as a salutory comparison to we had seen of the Dutch semi-rural environment on that tour: so typical of the UK, and so unsatisfactory by comparison. I've shown these pictures before, but here they are again, to make that comparison.

Here we have the road to Loon, a village near Assen. This road has far lower traffic than the A46, but, between the towns, where there is space, wide, excellent cycle paths are provided on both sides, well separated from the road. They could be walked on, but they are not engineered as pavements on which cyclists are allowed to ride (UK-style shared-use paths), they are engineered as cycle paths on which people are allowed to walk (or use low-powered mopeds, mobility scooters etc., a very important use of these paths, as Bicycledutch explains).

In Dutch villages, like English ones, often properties are too close to the road to allow separate cycle paths to be fitted in. The Dutch solution is not to give up, it is to control cars. Cyclists are re-introduced to the road, and they must share space with motor vehicles, but things are done differently in the Netherlands, and the effect on the perceived and absolute safety of cycling is very different.

The cycle path can be seen on the other side of the road here, at the point at which it enters the village of Loon. The cycle paths on both sides of the road are taken comfortably round the traffic-calming feature. Cyclists are integrated into the carriageway on the other side of this. The pinch-point, with considerable deflection, forces cars to slow down. The limit is 30kph, 18mph. The change in road surface, to the tiles, which make it slightly noisy and rough to drive a car at a greater speed, emphasises the change in the nature of the space. This contrasts with a road like the A46, which blasts through the village of Shurdington with almost no change in character between the inter-urban sections and the residential sections, and with nothing to make traffic to slow down other than optimistic signs, which even if they work will still allow traffic to travel at the excessive speed of 30mph.

The problem with making these sorts of comparisons, as we found in the Cycling Embassy group, is that British people will always say, of a place like Loon, "Well this is different, isn't it? This is not a comparable location. This is out of the way, and traffic levels are far lower here – you can't really compare it". It is very hard to compare, because four decades of radically different transport planning in the Netherlands has made everything different. There is far less traffic here, though this is a comparable village to Shurdington, in a comparable relationship to the towns of Assen and Groningen as that of Shurdington with Cheltenham and Gloucester, and this is is the comparable road to the A46 in the Assen/Loon context.

Why is there far less traffic here? It's in part because the alternatives to the car for local travel have been made accessible and attractive to all. It's also in part because the longer-distance traffic, between Assen and the other towns in the region, has been deflected onto other, bigger roads, by determined, systematic policy.

And here is the other part of the UK planning failure for rural roads. We have built the motorway and trunk-road alternatives, but we have kept the rat-runs open unaltered. The A46 is the old road between Cheltenham and Stroud. It should and could have been completely bypassed by the construction of the M5 motorway.

Traffic can get from Cheltenham to Stroud using the A40, the M5 and the A419. There is no reason to keep the old, narrow A46 through the villages of Shurdington, Coopers Hill and Painswick going as an alternative continuous through-route, with a minimum speed (not enforced) of 30mph. These villages could all be accessed by car through the grid of bigger roads. This is a fundamental difference between British and Dutch planning: the British usually allow a number of alternative through-routes between centres, and allow all the routes to fill up with traffic, no matter how unsuitable they may be, while providing no dedicated cycling alternatives. The Dutch both provide the alternatives and  restrict the motor through-traffic to the most appropriate routes, by means either of actual road closures, or re-engineering to change the character and attractiveness of the roads as through-routes, with lower, better-enforced speed limits.

It's a long way from the flatlands of the Netherlands to the rolling Cotswold hills, from the bricks of Assen and Loon to the honeyed sandstone of Cheltenham and Shurdington. There are fundamental differences in the land that mean that England will never be like the Netherlands. But there are psychological differences that are not so basic. With a long enough period of intelligent transport planning, I believe we could make cycling in the English countryside almost as attractive as cycling in the Dutch countryside – more so, if you like hills!

Quality cycling infrastructure, better planning, and a better general quality of our public built environment is desperately needed in English cities for the future health of our nation – but if there's one place it's even more needed, it's in the English countryside.

In case commenters are tempted to go down such roads, I'm not interested in pernickety debate about how big various settlements are, or in exact population densities, or how things in one place are not quite the same as in another for reasons people of a certain disposition are good at pointing out. Such debate will not invalidate the general points, so I will ignore it.

CTC in a policy muddle

There's been a certain amount of CTC-bashing here of late, and also in other places. 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 Cycling Embassy of Great Britain, 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 CTC, LCC and Cyclenation, 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 post yesterday, where I called on the new Road Safety Minister, Stephen Hammond, to

achieve far more emphasis on the provision of safe, high-quality, separated cycling infrastructure for cyclists in the UK

I had a Tweet from Andy Kewell (@VexedVeloist), who had this to say:

Sorry, but I want to ride where I want when I want by whatever route I want. I totally disagree with CEGB's segregation policy.

 I responded with:

Have you actually seen what it's like in the Netherlands Andy? How you have a great choice of routes, and they're all safe.

To which he responded:

Segregating cyclists off the roads is victim blaming, restricts choice of route and panders to drivers 'owning the road'.

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.

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.

Though I don't know if he is member of not, the CTC clearly feels it has to accommodate the under-informed views of people like Andy. Hence, I suspect, their problems and contortions around policy. These have been extremely-well illustrated by the correspondence recently on a post of The Alternative Department for Transport blog, in which I and the two senior policy-makers at CTC, Roger Geffen and Chris Juden, have had their say.

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	Traffic reduction
	Speed reduction
	Junction treatment, hazard site treatment, traffic management
	Reallocation of carriageway space (e.g. bus lanes, widened nearside lanes, cycle lanes)
	Cycle tracks away from roads
Consider last	Conversion of footways/footpaths to shared use cycle tracks for pedestrians and cyclists

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.)

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.

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.

This is serious transport infrastructure in the Netherlands, this kind of thing is a "top priority" there (to mimic Juden's language of claimed priorities) and it has absolutely nothing to do with woonerven. If you think this is not Dutch "top priority", consider, why was the canal on the right moved two metres sideways at vast expense to accommodate this cycle track?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

Some more thoughts on Dutch cycling

It is over a month since I returned from the Cycling Embassy of Great Britain study tour in the company of David Hembrow. I have referred to this tour quite a lot here already, but there are some major points that I took from it that I have not covered, and, in the light of a suddenly increased interest in the UK as to what "Going Dutch" could and should mean, I think it is a good idea to go into these.

The tour was very enjoyable as well as enlightening, and I hugely recommend anyone who has the slightest concern with developing cycling in any country other than the Netherlands to follow in our footsteps, and get over to Assen to do it. The Embassy hopes to put together another group to go next September, so start thinking about it. Or, if you want to go at any other time, David Hembrow will try to oblige.

For those "real cyclists" amongst you, don't imagine that "study tour" like this is all cerebral and nerdy. Well, it was a bit cerebral and nerdy, with plenty of photographing of bollards and videoing of traffic light sequences, but it was also physically enjoyable. Cycling 70 km in a day on a solid three-speed sit-up and beg Dutch bike with all the accessories was something the like of which I had done for a long time, and it was fantastic. Perhaps the highlight for me was the dynamo-illuminated night ride on cycle paths back from Groningen to Assen on the last day, which some of our party foolishly absented themselves from, by wimping out and taking the train! Taking the train with a bike in the Netherlands is extremely easy, and so always a temptation. I can't blame them.

How did the trip affect my views on providing for cycling? Well, the trip did not change my views in any major way, but it cemented and developed them. I had already understood the elements of Dutch cycle policy and infrastructure provision from reading A view from the cycle path, other websites, and talking and corresponding with others who had spent time cycling there. But there really is no substitute for experiencing it yourself. The cycling environment is so utterly different from what we have in the UK that we really cannot imagine it from this side of the North Sea. It is hard to adequately describe. It has to be felt, seen, and experienced. The scale, quality, ambition and complex diversity of the system developed to allow average people to cycle safely, comfortably and conveniently to anywhere they need to go in the whole country is beyond what I would have guessed, and beyond what any of us expected.

There were some situations where I thought I knew what the Dutch solution was, but what I found was that there was far more diversity in the solutions as used in different places than I expected. There are many possible ways in which cycle space can be arranged in towns and countryside, and I found that there are often several Dutch solutions to the same question. The Dutch have experimented constantly with cycle provision. So you don't find consistency, but do do find a large range of possible solutions to problems. Whatever the traffic or infrastructure problem is, that is hindering cycling, there is a Dutch solution, and, usually, a choice of solutions.

One point about which my opinions needed revising were give-ways, and the significance of them. Having gone around for a long time telling people in the UK that Dutch cycle tracks have priority over roads that they cross, if the junctions are not signalised, I found that often this is not the case. There are quite a lot of give-ways on Dutch cycle tracks and paths. Not in the way we have in the UK, where you get shared-pavement cycle routes with stupid give-ways at driveways and minor side turnings – Dutch cycle tracks always have priority over minor roads. But the Dutch paths, particularly when not adjacent to roads (i.e. when tending towards the suburban or rural cycle path model rather than the urban cycle track model) do often give way when crossing major roads, as minor roads would do, and they sometimes give way to the arms of roundabouts when encircling them. However, I discovered that in practice this is not a problem, for in an environment where motor traffic is so much lower on major roads than it is in the UK, you are not delayed much by these give-ways. They are not frequent. In addition, many drivers give way when not legally required, and a linked factor is junction and roundabout design, which tends to give motorists tighter corners than in the UK, which slows them just before many of these give-ways on cycle paths are encountered. Where cycle paths encounter very major roads with a lot of traffic on them, there are signals, or the path blithely continues on its way through a tunnel or over a bridge. Problem solved.

Before I went, perhaps I expected the achievement of the good cycling conditions in the Netherlands to be more about priorities and the law and codes of behaviour and enforcement, about what various road-users can and can't do, than it turned out to be. (Matthew Wright, writing on the Guardian's cycle blog, articulated this mistaken view recently.) But it turns out it's far more about the design of the roads, tracks and paths than about making road users behave correctly. There is actually a fair amount of chaos in how various road users behave, as there is anywhere, but the Dutch principle of "sustainable safety" has led them to design out the most dangerous conflicts. They have simply designed the environment so that it is hard for road-users to make mistakes, and the mistakes they can make are likely to be less dangerous ones.

There is a noticeable difference in approach compared to Germany, where I have also studied high-cycling towns. There, there is more freedom allowed by design, but more restraint expected though law-abiding behaviour. The German system of allowing cyclists on a cycle track to pass though a junction on a green light that is simultaneous with the green for cars on the adjacent carriageway gives cyclists on the track a high degree of priority, but their safety depends on drivers obeying the rule that they must not turn across the cyclists' path. The Dutch, on the other hand, not trusting drivers to behave in this way, completely separate the green phases for cars and bikes. However their traffic-light phasing still minimises delays to cyclists.

The Germans sometimes implement high-quality cycle tracks as well, but their junction principles are different. Münster, Germany.

I tended, before I went, to buy the line that is often believed in the UK that because only 10% of the roads in the Netherlands have segregated cycling on them, there is still a lot of interaction between cyclists with motor vehicles on all the other roads, but that this is safer because of good behaviour from the motorists in an environment where "everybody cycles". In fact that 10% statistic is highly misleading. Its implication is, in UK cyclists' minds, that 90% of the time you are sharing space with motor vehicles. But this is not so for several reasons. 

Firstly, the roads where you do have segregation are the long ones, the important ones, and the ones on which you spend most time cycling. They are the critical "backbone" routes. Secondly, at least in the towns we visited, you spend a lot of your time cycling on totally separate cycle paths that are unrelated to the road network. Thirdly, you encounter few motor vehicles on the unsegregated roads. So, with this combination of factors, you find that the separation of cyclists from motorists in the Netherlands is astonishingly complete. Cyclists rarely have to "negotiate" with motorists in the UK vehicular cycling sense. We did find places where they did, have to, kind of, particularly in the busier Groningen, as opposed to smaller, quieter Assen, but these places were exceptional. So, with this degree of separation,  it is not necessarily for motorists to be remarkably well-behaved towards cyclists for cycling to feel very safe.

One should bear in mind that a large part of the unsegregated 90% of roads are the narrow residential streets and cul-de-sacs that are irrelevant to transport (except for the few minutes you spend riding on them to leave or return to your home or other destination on them). One should not confuse traffic-calmed or traffic-restricted areas in the residential "Home Zone" or Dutch Woonerf sense with the cycle routes used for transport. They are separate, as they must be. The last thing you want in a Home Zone, where children should be paying in the street, is commuting cyclists rushing through it. This is a frequently-misunderstood point in the UK.

With the fact that the separation between cyclists and motor vehicles is almost complete in the Netherlands, it follows that the common (not universal) 30 km/h, or 18 mph speed limit, though it certainly makes towns and cities more pleasant for pedestrians and cyclists, is not so critical a factor in the safe cycling environment as is believed in the UK, where extending 20 mph is the main plank of campaigning for many organisations. Hence Roger Geffen, of the CTC, quite thoroughly misses the whole point of the Dutch model where he writes:

Even in the most cycle-friendly countries such as the Netherlands, most urban streets simply have a 30kmh limit, perhaps with some nicely-designed traffic calming, and no cycle-specific provision whatsoever.

And Matthew Wright is also far off the mark to say:

In reducing the Dutch approach to being mainly about paths, LCC is misrepresenting it. Their campaigns for a 20mph speed limit (widespread in the Netherlands), and the crucial issue of strict liability would make a more sensible centrepiece for Go Dutch.

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It is very difficult to give an accurate and complete picture of what the Dutch cycling environment is like to those cyclists in the UK who have not experienced it. So again, I do encourage them earnestly to come and see for themselves. The trouble is that the context, the background of what we are working with, is so different. When you have spent 40 years implementing Dutch policies, which have led to so many more bike journeys and so many less car, bus, train and taxis journeys, everything in the landscape is transformed, and nothing seems directly comparable with what you see in the UK. 

When we sent back pictures of what it was like cycling on a main road linking Assen with an adjacent village, a correspondent in England, well-known cycle campaigner, kept arguing that we were not showing something that had relevance. "That's not a distributor road" he said. "Go somewhere busier and take a photo". He thought we had found some traffic-free country lane leading nowhere to show him and hold up a false comparison with main roads linking towns and villages in the UK. But it was a true comparison. Analogous roads in the Netherlands and the UK, having exactly the same function, and linking settlements of comparable populations, look totally different. That 40 years of prioritising the bike has changed everything, and those who have spent their whole lives campaigning for change in the UK, with only very limited success, just cannot, without seeing it, imagine the Dutch environment, and understand how it has been achieved.

Is this a distributor road or not? Gasterenseweg, Loon, Assen

Likewise, many campaigners who cycle on busy roads in London and other UK cities just cannot imagine how their roads could be transformed if Dutch policies were to be implemented. They see problems everywhere: lack of space, competing demands from parking, buses, taxis, deliveries, pedestrians. "What can you possibly do here?" they often ask, in a despairing tone". But there is a huge range of Dutch solutions, as I have said, and implementing them widely through a city changes the whole background context, and makes things possible in "difficult" places that could not have been imagined before. Suddenly you don't need to find all that space for parking and for buses and other motor vehicles, and you can start improving the "difficult" streets. But you can't change everything at once, and it is important to realise how the Dutch got to where they are now. They started by doing the easy things, and that is what we will have to do in the UK. They then kept working on it and improving things, little by little. As David Hembrow always says, you just have to start, and then keep working on it, like the Dutch did. But you do have to start.

Before I went I had already formed the impression that 90% of what British cyclists say about cycling in the Netherlands is wrong, but I was not certain which 90% was wrong and which 10% was right. Now I know. Indeed, most of what is believed about cycling in the Netherlands, and how the cycle culture there has been achieved, on this side of the North Sea, is dead wrong. Here are some wrong ideas that I have encountered, and the answers to them:

1. The Dutch have encouraged the bike by making it very difficult to drive and park

Not so. You can get everywhere by car in the Netherlands, with fair convenience. The Dutch have fast roads, motor access to everywhere that might be needed, and plenty of inexpensive or free parking where it is needed. The Dutch seem to have fewer traffic jams than we have. An argument can be made that driving, using and owning a car in the Netherlands is actually easier than in the UK.

2. The Dutch have encouraged the bike by good planning, putting everything within easy cycling distance

True only to a limited extent. What is "easy cycling distance?". Everybody's mileage varies. But if you make cycling really pleasant and relaxing, people, even the unfit, may be willing to cycle surprisingly long distances. There are dense developments in the Netherlands, and there is urban sprawl. There is good planning and less ideal planning, such as you find anywhere in the UK. There is no strong relationship between cycle uptake in the Netherlands and planning characteristics of the towns, cities and suburbs. There is high cycling in some very low-density regions, and less cycling in some higher density regions that might be thought to be more amenable to bike use. The strong relationship is between cycle facility provision and cycling levels. In other words, a city or region with a high standard of infrastructure, but more need to travel, can have more cycling than a city or region with less good infrastructure, but smaller typical distances to travel. It's more related to subjective safety than distances.

3. The Dutch have ensured that motorists behave well through "strict liability" and other laws

As in the UK, you sometimes encounter motorists behaving stupidly and selfishly. There were occasions in our travels where we encountered motorists driving at us, and we might comment on those occasions, "He didn't seem to be particularly worried about his strict liability, did he?" Dutch motorists are not all brilliantly behaved towards cyclists. The real and subjective safety of cycling in the Netherlands comes from good design, and from the general separation from motor traffic, not through having made motorists saints. Therefore the stress that is being placed on campaigning for Strict Liability now by some UK cycle organisations and commentators is a mistake. Strict Liability might be a good thing to have in the longer term, but it should not be a priority (and it is very far from general political acceptability in the UK anyway). The efforts would be far better spent on campaigning for good infrastructure, which is far closer to political achievability in the UK. The effectiveness of the infrastructure should not be seen as depending on any changes to the law.

A further "it depends on the law" argument is around priorities at junctions. Roger Geffen of CTC again, in the article mentioned earlier:

Another important pre-requisite for segregation to work is legal priority for cyclists at junctions, given that this is where around 70% of cyclists' injuries occur. In countries like Denmark and the Netherlands, if you're on a cycle track and travelling straight ahead at a junction, the law says you have clear priority over drivers turning across your path, even when the driver has a green traffic light.

Apart from conflating different countries which do things differently (I have mentioned differences between the Netherlands and Germany), this is simply wrong in the Dutch context, which I believe provides the best model that we should follow. Most modern Dutch junctions use the simultaneous green for cyclists system, where all motor traffic is held at red twice in the full cycle, while all cycle movements are allowed, the cyclists turning in different directions negotiating with one another (this takes practice, which, of course Dutch cyclists get plenty of). So there is no potential conflict with motor vehicles, and no role for the law in defining priority. Again, the viability of translating infrastructure to the UK should not be seen as needing changes to our laws. Waiting for these will probably delay us for ever. The favourable position enjoyed by cyclists in Dutch law followed the establishment of the infrastructure-based mass cycling culture, came as a political consequence of it. That was the way round it happened.

4. Dutch cycling culture is just about slow utility cycling

When you have created such good conditions for cycling as the Dutch have, and cycling becomes normal transport from kindergarten to dotage, non-utility cycling also mushrooms and blossoms in every conceivable direction. Far from there being a lack of "enthusiast" or "sports" cycling in the Netherlands, the country is full of racing cyclists, time-trialists, Audaxers, long and short distance touring cyclists, leisure and enthusiast cyclists of every description, even, would you believe it, mountain bikers (there are specially constructed rough and muddy mountain biking courses, to make up for the lack of true mountains, or even hills). Every town of consequence has a racing bike track (far from the case in the UK), and you see all these breeds of leisure and sports cyclist far more frequently than you do in the UK. While the vast mass of cyclists is not really that interested in their bikes, as they are not enthusiasts, merely people using a machine, that they have limited understanding of, as a tool for transportation, this mass is in addition to the enthusiast cadre, which is itself much larger than in less favourable cycling countries.

Assen's cycle racing track

And another thing, another huge misunderstanding: cycling in the Netherlands is fast. As fast as you want it to be. Cycling through Dutch towns on cycle infrastructure is much faster than cycling through British towns on roads, because of the junction priorities, the planning that has reduced the frequency of junctions (in old urban areas achieved through closing many of them), the "clear space for cycling", the lack of obstructions and hazards to watch out for all the time, the separation from traffic, and the quality of the surfaces. A critical point, never commented on in the UK: unless you separate cyclists totally from heavy motor vehicles, you can never have decent smooth surfaces for cycling on, because the heavy vehicles will always mess the surfaces up faster than it is economic to repair them. Segregated cycle tracks and paths can have perfect surfaces: they are indeed the only economical way perfect surfaces can be achieved. And that means speed, as well as safety. In the countryside, unrestricted by frequent junctions, the cycle paths allow cycling at any speed you want. Joe, in our party did indeed attempt to attain 40km/h on the cycle path, on the flat (well, everywhere is flat), but narrowly failed, saying it was because the rest of us were in the way.

Perfect surfaces are standard on Dutch cycle paths, making for no speed limit other than that imposed by your legs

So if you want to, you can cycle very fast in the Netherlands. But of course most people don't wish to. The fact that you don't need to cycle fast or assertively to be safe, or to make the mode work for you, to benefit your life, is key to the universality of Dutch cycling – the fact that you cycle at the speed you want, that there is no pressure. It's the reason so many Dutch people go on cycling into their seventies, eighties and nineties. Despite the health benefits of cycling, we all have to die some where, some time, and many Dutch people literally drop dead on a bike – one reason to be very cautious about the meaning of cycling fatality figures compared between the Netherlands and other countries. People commonly die on bikes, or after falling off them, with no involvement of other traffic. An old person suffering a low-speed fall from a bike is much more likely to die as a consequence than is a young person. But this kind of cycling fatality, though sad, is an indication of success of Dutch cycling policy, not failure.

No pressure: cycle gracefully through middle and old age in the Netherlands (and I'm not referring to Sally)

I am glad that I now understand far better how the Dutch achieved the highest cycling rate and the safest cycling in the world. I hope these posts help in the understanding of this in the UK other countries. For understanding is the start of change, and though change takes time, and can be difficult, if it proceeds through accurate understanding, it is easer. Let's get to work.

Picking cherries and other low-hanging fruit

There are plenty of videos on the internet showing large numbers of people cycling in high-cycling towns and cities. Here's a nice example from Copenhagenize, showing morning traffic on Nørrebrogade – allegedly the busiest cycle street in the world.



There always seem to be people of a certain persuasion, writing on the internet in English, who react to these videos with the cry of cherrypicking. You are creating a distorted impression of the scale or nature of cycling in these places, they claim, picking deliberately unrepresentative locations or times at which to make these videos.

Of course anybody making any kind of political point cherry-picks what they present. When the Cycling Embassy of Great Britain decided to go on a study tour this year, we cherry-picked the nation of the Netherlands to visit. We did not pick Russia, or Berkshire, or Los Angeles. And there was a reason for this. And, strangely enough, a staff team from the London Cycling Campaign soon after cherry-picked the Netherlands to go to, to study cycling policy as well. Coincidentally – nothing to do with me. Surprising?

The point about cherrypicking surely is this: one can only do it where there are cherries to be picked. The sort of cherry seen in the Copenhagen video can only be picked in a couple of countries in the western world. There is nowhere else this could have been filmed, that's the point. There is something special going on here, that those other countries, where this could not have been filmed, need to understand.

One needs to look for what is common to those countries, regions and cities, where this sort of scene can be witnessed at all. I've stressed this before, but it seems to be one of those things that needs saying again and again. So here is the graph again, a few years old, it has to be admitted, courtesy of CTC, "The UK's National Cyclists' Organisation".

From CTC's Safety in Numbers

It's a pity I can't find a more up-to-date presentation, and one that includes Germany and Switzerland, which have both developed their cycling cultures in the last few years. But here we see how the Netherlands and Denmark stand out "by a mile" (or 1.61 km) as Europe's leading cycling nations, despite being not all that culturally similar. We see how the other Nordic countries, plus Austria and Italy, cluster far behind, but still significantly ahead of the others.

And we note that what these high to moderate-level cycling nations all have in common, across major cultural differences, and differences of climate and physical and human geography, is the provision of networks for cyclists separate from motor traffic. Cycle paths and cycle tracks, as you see in the video. And we see there is a perfect correlation. The Netherlands and Denmark have far more cycle-specific infrastructure than the other countries, and they have far higher cycling rates, and genuinely safer cycling. The cluster of nations further to the left all have a significant amount of quality cycle infrastructure, but far less than the Netherlands and Denmark. The nations on the left of the graph have hardly any proper cycle infrastructure (though the city of Paris at least seems to be making some progress on this).

The CTC wanted to demonstrate in this graph a relationship between cycling safety and numbers of cyclists, which clearly does exist, but they have largely ignored the most important lesson of this data, which leaps out from it: that you get safety and high cycling numbers simultaneously from high quality dedicated cycle infrastructure. Their document from which this graph is taken has nothing to say about infrastructure!

I can't cherry-pick a scene in London to video, comparable to the bicycle rush-hour on Nørrebrogade . The closest I can get is this scene in Bloomsbury, which I have shown before. And, funnily enough, the infrastructure in this picture, exceptionally for the UK, looks a little bit like Dutch or Danish cycle infrastructure.



But, such rare exceptions notwithstanding, the UK, by and large, continues on a strange cycling path of its own, a path of trying to "promote" cycling rather than actually accommodating it. Here's some "low-hanging fruit", that I snapped in my garden in June:

Low-hanging fruit in Brent

What's this got to do with anything? Well, here's another picture from this summer. It shows a slightly sad stall that Gerhard Weiss of London Cycling Campaign was manning for Transport for London at the Gladstonbury Festival in Gladstone Park, Brent.

"Catch up with the bicycle", Gladstone Park, Brent, London

The family-friendly bikes and bike attachments on display here are things not often seen on the streets of Brent. I didn't see them getting much serious interest from locals either. When I asked Gerhard what the purpose of this was, he replied that TfL were paying LCC to take this stall round various community festivals in London, particularly in the outer London Biking Boroughs. TfL's purpose here was to target families with children in these suburbs as "low-hanging fruit", as they chose to put it: people who needed just a little nudge, perhaps as little as being shown the existence of the right type of family-friendly gear, to get them cycling.

Well, with no criticism intended to Gerhard or the other staff of LCC, but plenty of criticism intended for TfL, I have to say I think this is utter bunkum. When bureaucrats come up with crappy phrases like "low-hanging fruit", you know you are in fantasy-land. They should have taken cognisance of what Griet Scheldemen of Lancaster University said, commenting on the  Understanding Walking and Cycling study of which she was a part:

Regrettably, we did not find this mass of people on the threshold of change, who only needed a little push to start cycling as a daily means of getting around...

For the truth is there is no way that many families are ever going to cycle the main roads of Brent with their kiddies in these cycle trailers or child seats, without an infrastructure revolution in London of which there is absolutely no sign. There is no way these families using these contraptions will "take the lane" through the deadly concrete tunnel in Neasden under the North Circular Road, or ride on the equally terrifying motorway-style flyover across the North Circular at Staples Corner: the junctions on that road that lie immediately to the north and west of this park. And, if they want to go the the areas of Brent to the north and west of this park, if they live in Neasden, Wembley or Colindale, these two roads are where they are going to have to cycle. Because there are no other crossings of the North Circular Road for miles in either direction that you could get these bike trailers through.

Staples Corner

Because the only other crossings of the North Circular near here are a footbridge that you are not allowed to cycle over, between Kenwyn Avenue and Neasden Recretion Ground, and a preposterous "shared" pedestrian/cycle tunnel at Neasden Lane. Here is the first of these:

The approach to the footbridge across the North Circular Road at Kenwyn Avenue

It wouldn't be legal, but just try cycling your bike trailer loaded with its precious cargo round the tight square bends on the ramp up to that footbridge. Just try to get your bike and trailer there in the first place, round those (perfectly legally) parked cars which thoroughly block access to the ramp from the road. And if you do manage to get across, and you land up on Neasden Recreation Ground on the north side, try getting anywhere else from there without cycling on pavements. You will find you get sucked into the Neasden northern roundabout, a nasty place, of which more later.

Here's the second off-road option I mentioned, the horrible Neasden cycle/pedestrian underpass. Try getting your Bakfiets or Christiana round those barriers and corners. The lady with the pushchair is having enough trouble.

The pedestrian/cycle underpass of the North Circular Road at Neasden Lane

If you just have a normal bike, which you can squeeze past these barriers, and you try to access this underpass from the south, from Neasden shopping centre, you find you have to cycle the wrong way along a stretch of slip road coming off the North Circular, as in this picture. The entrance you are aiming for is marked by the archway in front of the white house.

One-way slip road at Neasden shopping centre that makes it impossible to legally cycle to the official bike underpass of the North Circular

If you take this route, by illegally cycling on the pavement, or wheeling your bike, or ignoring the no entry sign and hopping a kerb, and negotiate the barriers, curly ramp and steep slopes, you end up in this delightful tunnel. The pink slippery tiling is the part specially reserved for cyclists (the part you see all the pedestrians on). I met a woman who had broken her shoulder through a fall from a bike in this tunnel, as the paving is treacherous when wet.

The shared pedestrian/cycle tunnel under the North Circular at Neasden

Supposing it is not too wet and you make it through here without injury or collision with pedestrians, what do you get when you emerge from this tunnel on the north side of the North Circular  Road? You get this:

The Neasden cycle/pedestrian underpass exit into Neasden Lane North

You can't rejoin the road here because (1) there is no dropped kerb, (2) there is no way to cross this busy section of Neasden Lane North, which feeds southbound traffic from Neasden Lane North on to the North Circular eastbound and eastbound traffic from the North Circular off it in various directions, and, (3) if you did cross the road and tried to go north you would immediately be fed on to the northern Neasden roundabout, a terrifying, fast, multi-lane gyratory, seen here in a view from the north, with Neasden Lane North and the underpass exit in the distance. 

Neaden northern roundabout

There is a theoretical alternative to all this, indicated with short green and purple lines on the TfL London Cycle Guide No. 3, which is to take another leg of the the underpass diagonally under the Neasden Lane North–North Circular junction, and then a footbridge to a small road called Vicarage Way, which at least gets you on the correct side of the Neasden northern roundabout, though you still end up very close to fast heavy traffic, to its left. But (wait for it) there are a couple of problems with this: (1) you are not allowed to cycle into and out of this exit from the underpass, as shown by the sign in the view below, and, (2) you are not allowed to cycle on the footbridge leading to Vicarage Way.

Exit from Neasden cycle/pedestrian underpass on the west side of Neasden Lane North

In any case, with your tagalong child bike, or Christiana, or Bakfiets, that you have bought, inspired by the TfL Catch up with the Bicycle display, I'll wager you won't be able to negociate any of this pathetic "infrastructure". You'll HAVE to use this road, that we are looking down on to here. THERE IS NO ALTERNATIVE.

The Neasden North Circular Road underpass , looking north-west

This is the view looking from the non-cycling footbridge into what Brent cyclists call "Death Valley": the vehicle route, the A4088, under the North Circular at Neasden for all traffic heading north-west from the Willesden area. The picture was taken with a good camera in good daylight, but look at the motion blur on those vehicles. Do you fancy keeping to the right of the traffic turning left on to the slip road with all your family in tow? And, by the way, there is another slip road that merges from the left, coming off the North Circular, at the other end of Death Valley. And, if you are going this way, cycling north or west from Gladstone Park, Neasden Station or Willesden, this is not the first barrier you will have encountered, for to get to Death Valley, you first have to negotiate the southern Neasden roundabout, seen in the background in this view, looking the other way from the same footbridge.

Neasden's "Death Valley" looking towards the southern Neasden roundabout

If you make it through the southern roundabout, and Death Valley, with its slip roads, in one piece, you are then led onto the next section of Neasden Lane North, where you are crammed into two narrow lanes of heavy traffic:

Neasden Lane North junction with Verney Street

To continue north-west to Wembley or Kingsbury you carry on over the River Brent, where this road becomes Blackbird Hill. This is another route to which, in Brent, the borough of infrastructural Thatcherism, there is no alternative. For this is where the tiny stream of the Brent (plus the Grand Union Feeder Canal) is first bridged downstream of the Brent reservoir, and this bridge, Kingsbury Bridge, which has stood here since Saxon times, and was last widened for the British Empire Exhibition of 1924 (for which the old Wembley Stadium was built), still carries all the traffic between the north and south parts of the borough: another great environment to cycle in with your kids on their tagalong bike.

Blackbird hill, the meeting-point of Neasden, Wembley and Kingsbury

And beyond that... well, "the world's your oyster". As you would expect from Brent, there are a few nasty junctions and viscious mini-roundabouts at the top of this hill where routes fork between Wembley to the west and Kingsbury to the north, but I think that is enough of this safari, you'll have got the idea by now. And that ideas is: 

It is not the slightest bit surprising that families cycling with children are seen round here less frequently than UFOs.

Much less frequently, in fact. If anybody wanted further explanation of why, as mentioned in my last post, the wards of Brent to the north of the North Circular have true cycling mode shares probably below 0.5%, here it is. When TfL come up with this crap about just needing to put a bike trailer under the noses of their "low hanging fruit" of Brent parents who are just dying to cycle their kids on these monstrous roads, or trying to negotiate these impossible, crappy, tenth-rate cycle "facilities", I have to despair.

What the Dutch and the Danes teach us is that, with cycle facilities, you have to engineer for everybody to make it work for anybody. You have to build your cycle infrastructure to a quality that works safely and efficiently, simultaneously, for 8 year-old children on their own and fit young adult commuters and for everybody inbetween, including every kind of bike and bike trailer. If you under-engineer, or try to cheaply adapt already inadequate pedestrian facilities with just a bit of lining or surfacing, or try to get away with something that some idiot in the council thinks might be "OK for slow cyclists or novices or those afraid of the traffic", you just get unusable rubbish. If TfL can't get together the money and political resolution to implement sensible, safe cycling infrastructure, they should stop trying to promote cycling at all with these ridiculous tents at community festivals. For doing so is simply a waste of money.

The Dutch do not seem to waste their money in this way. They actually build things. They are strange, like that. The nation of dyke and dam and sluice builders and drainers of polders actually build stuff all the time. While the infrastructure of Brent, and most of outer London, seems frozen in a time-warp as it was left by the road and flyover builders about 1972, with seemingly all further change impossible, or impossible to afford for the UK, the eighth richest nation in the work, apart from putting in the odd stainless steel anti-cycling barrier, or putting down of two colours of slippery paving in a narrow, wet, horrible pedestrian subway, the Dutch constantly build high-standard bridges, tunnels and underpasses everywhere, from one end of their country to the other, to separate cyclists from motor vehicles and pedestrians and let cyclists travel in safety, speed, and style, to all the places they could want to go. If the North Circular Road were in the Netherlands, cyclists would go under it like this:

Dual carriageway and two-way cycle track go under a motorway in Assen, Netherlands

Or they would be taken over it like this:

Cycle bridge over a motorway in Groningen, Netherlands

But, to end with, I'll indulge in a little fantasy. Maybe we could soon get a decent crossing for cyclists of the North Circular Road in Brent: something the Dutch would recognise as cycle infrastructure. Because the North Circular Road–A5 junction at Staples Corner is due to be rebuilt – and not with public money. The developers of Brent Cross Cricklewood have to pay for a total rebuild of this junction, as part of their new out of town shopping centre regeneration scheme. The main company behind the Brent Cross Cricklewood scheme is Hammerson PLC. Hammerson's Development Director during the planning of this scheme was Michael Bear, who now has been elected Lord Mayor of London. (That's the largely ceremonial Mayor of the financial "square mile" of the City, not the post held by Boris Johnson, for my foreign readers.) And he seems to have got quite keen on cycling.

So are Hammerson going to give the cyclists of north-west London something like this? I'm afraid I'm not holding my breath.