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.

A day at the seaside, and the ghosts of the city

I saw a lot of people on bikes on Saturday. Many of them were on National Cycle Network (NCN) Route 2 along the Sussex coast, between Worthing and Brighton, explored by the group I was with on the Cycling Embassy of Great Britain Infrastructure Safari led by Jim Davis. NCN 2 here is largely traffic-free, and it is, of course, only traffic-free space that gets people on bikes as a mass movement, as Sustrans, the charity behind the NCN, have always realised. It is sad that so many compromises and manifest inadequacies exist on all the NCN routes that I have seen, however, and this is particularly true of NCN 2 on the Sussex coast, fitted in cheaply inbetween existing infrastructure with inadequate capacity and too many conflicts and "cyclist dismount" locations (one would be too many).

This failure to accommodate the demand for leisure and commuting cycling space adequately in the UK limits the take-up of cycling, when we should be doing everything we can to encourage people to be more active. It is a crazy situation that comes down to the existence of inadequate political structures for delivering and funding desirable changes to our environment. To be attempting to develop a national stratgic infrastructure through a charity rather than government agency is crazy: and to say that is in no way to do down the great and noble efforts that Sustrans employees and volunteers make to at least deliver something.

This isn't working: trying to squeeze both pedestrians and NCN 2 on to the prom at Worthing

Jim Davis seemingly going apoplectic over inadequate infrastructure. The pink pavement and the grey beyond it is all supposed to be shared by pedestrians and two directions of cycle traffic

Money cannot really be spent and space cannot really be found for cycling on the Sussex coast, so this is the self-defeating result in too many places

Silly width restriction and crummy quality generally of NCN 2 at Lancing

It is particularly sad to see penny-pinching and compromises that will reverberate down future decades being built into new, expensive infrastructure. At the quaint town of Shoreham-by-Sea, the route needs to cross the harbour. A bridge built in the early 20th century about 1.5 metres wide currently carries two directions of pedestrians, cyclists (dismounted of course), buggy passengers, wheelchair and mobility scooter users, and pets. On a busy day the result is of course great frustration. The good news is that this bridge is going to be replaced with a new one costing £7 million, and work has already started. The bad news is that the new bridge will be only 4 metres wide. To many people I expect a 4-metre wide bridge for non-motorised transport sounds generous. But it is obvious to anyone looking at the situation now on a day like Saturday that is is not. It is a short-sighted penny-pinching compromise. Two directions of cycle travel over a long bridge on their own would need 3.5 metres, and the remaining 0.5 metres is not enough for the rest. We never seem to make bridges for non-motoried modes wide enough in the UK. We used to be a nation of great engineers: why can't we learn about this?

The existing bridge across Shoreham Harbour on the left, and the beginnings of the new bridge on the right

Some bikes look like this: another reason you need enough width on cycle paths and bridges

There is more frustration where the route is taken through Shoreham docks, on more 1.5m-wide gangways that are now required, on a busy day, to take a large volume of cyclists and pedestrians, and which are closed (opened up) to allow boats through the locks. This infrastructure was never designed for having a national cycle route on it, and though it is fun to watch the docks in action, if you are not in a hurry, it is poor that this is all we can achieve. It is symptomatic of the way the NCN has been cobbled together from mostly existing bits and pieces, rather than actually having been planned and built as the real national prestige project it should have been.

More dismounting and waiting, and waiting, at Shoreham docks.

What's needed at Shoreham docks is something like this wheeling-channel bridge provided for when a lifting bridge is up in Groningen, Netherlands.

My main criticism of Sustrans (and I make this criticism of their concepts in London as well as on the south coast) is that in the many places where there is no alternative to putting the routes on main roads, they seem to shy away from pushing for real changes to these roads (real changes meaning not just dabbing paint on the pavements), and they seem to have no adequate concept of how cyclists (including young children) should be accommodated there.This leads to a lot of what Paul Gannon used to call "toytown engineering", which may not be directly Sustrans' fault but that of local authority officers implementing their route proposals, but still seems a fundamental inadequacy of the NCN project. "Toytown engineering" refers to the familiar meaningless, isolated, little constellations of white lines and squiggles on roads and pavements that indicate impossible, impractical or foolish cycling manoeuvres and which baffle all road-users. This kind of nonsense is also very influential in spreading the myth amongst "serious" cyclists that "cycle routes (or cycle paths) are slow". They are only slow if they are no good, and Dutch cycle paths are very far from being slow.

Toytown engineering on NCN 2 in Brighton

The safari did visit some better cycling infrastructure, however. Where it reaches Brighton seafront, NCN 2 works better on its paint-segregated path as it is further from the sea than it is in Worthing.

NCN 2 at Brighton

Furthermore, the route connects to two other good pieces of infrastructure in the town, which show different effective methods of segregating cyclists from cars on main roads. The first is on Grand Avenue and The Drive and consists of one-way cycle tracks on both sides of the road at carriageway level, separated from the carriageway by car parking outside kerbed segregating strips about 1 metre wide. The segregating strips reduce the chances of cyclists getting hit by opening car doors, which is in any case unlikely because the parking is in the direction of travel, so it is only a passenger door that could open into a cyclists' path. One their wider section in Grand Avenue these tracks are wide enough to allow one cyclist to overtake another.

The beginning of the northbound cycle track on Grand Avenue

Grand Avenue and The Drive connect the seafront route to the other new facility, the route on Old Shoreham Road, created this year by the Green-controlled Brighton City Council. This consists of single direction segregated tracks on a road that passes three schools, the space having been taken by greatly narrowing the previously-existing carriageway. These tracks are at an intermediate level between carriageway and pavement, and are good-quality, with a smooth surface, and there is no adjacent parking. The side roads are either closed-off, with mode filters that allow cyclists through, or they have give-way lines which give the track priority. The centre line of the road has been removed, and this, combined with the narrowing, and the provision of a very wide zebra crossing on one place, has, according to local accounts, greatly reduced traffic speeds. At one traffic lights, an advanced green phase for cyclists reduces the potential for conflict between cyclists going straight on on the track and traffic turning left from the carriageway.

There are still problems with these facilities and they are not up to Dutch standards consistently. There is no help for cyclists turning from the track on The Drive to the track on Old Shoreham Road at the traffic lights, the right-turn here being executed in the normal UK fashion, with a cyclist needing to pull out across the lanes of general traffic. However there is enough here that is pioneering (for the UK), and effective, for these facilities to be given high marks.

Old Shoreham Road

Wide zebra crossing on Old Shoreham Road

But most of the people I saw on bikes on Saturday were not on the cycle paths of Sussex. They were  on the roads of East London, on which I made a journey for a different purpose on Saturday night. It was one of the hottest nights of the year, and everybody who had not left the stifling city for the seaside or the countryside seem to have decided to party that night. London Fields in Hackney was virtually one huge, spontaneous, communal barbecue. I suppose because people had decided to party, and drink alcohol, and thus could not drive (the suppression of drunk driving being one of the great UK road policy successes of modern times), that this, combined with the weather, and the temporary exodus of cars from the streets due to the Olympics and other summer factors, combined to produce a situation where people seemed to be on their bikes, at night, in huge numbers throughout Islington and Hackney.

These night-time cyclists are the ghosts of the city. They are not generally your type of dedicated, highly-equipped commuter cyclist. They will largely disappear when the traffic returns on Monday morning. Most people won't cycle when there are large volumes of motor traffic present. But for a while on a hot, relatively car-free Saturday night in East London these cyclists seemed spontaneously to have taken over the streets.

The lack of motor traffic did not mean conditions were very safe. I experienced a conflict with an aggressively-driven car at a pinch-point on a road by London Fields, where the driver did not seem to be able to predict, as I could, that we would both arrive at the pinch-point at exactly the same time, and that therefore he would not be able to pass me. And I witnessed plenty of danger due to fast driving on main roads at junctions. Getting large numbers of cyclists on to the streets and reducing motor congestion does not improve the behaviour of drivers of itself; there is no "safety in numbers" for cyclists in this sense, as the rising casualty rate for cyclists at the same time as a rise in cycling rates illustrates. The apparently better behaviour of Dutch drivers is not due to the large numbers of cyclists in the Netherlands, it is forced on them by better infrastructure design (for example, narrower carriageways and tighter and better-controlled junctions).

Despite the under-resourcing of cycling infrastructure, the problems of the political structures, and the absurd policies of London's Mayor (his latest brainwave being not fixing the roads but providing cycle paths alongside railway lines – and do we have surface railway lines crossing central London? – no we don't), there are some limited grounds for optimism about the future of cycling in Britain. There are one or two examples about of satisfactory infrastructure which could  be copied and extended. There is a massive popular desire for safe cycling space, particularly from families, which could start to translate into noticeable political pressure. There is the general feeling arising from the Olympic summer that it is the duty of government to provide for people being physically active. There is a more coherent world-view and platform from the various cycling organisations, as was apparent in the debate on cycling held in the London Assembly last month, part of their enquiry into the subject. And when unusual circumstances occur, the emergence of bikes in the inner London boroughs (but not yet in the outer ones) can be quite striking – possibly the austerity of recession also has something to do with this. But which way it will all go is still hard to predict.

Bristol, Bath, Brighton, and the continuing work of the Cycling Embassy of Great Britain

Slightly revised version of a post previously published on my WordPress site. Comments could not be transferred, unfortunately.

I am afraid I have not kept this blog much up to date with recent developments, though I have been busy attending things relevant to cycling: the Cycling Embassy AGM held in Bristol in May, the Cycling Cultures report launch at the University of East London, and meetings discussing the preliminary results of TfL's junction reviews. I will give some thoughts arising out of the first of these today.

Despite having been born and brought up in the south-west quarter of England, I had never actually been to Bristol, and I had never seen the "flagship" National Cycle Network route, the Bristol to Bath bike path, so all this was very interesting. The Cycling Embassy group were shown not only the Bristol to Bath path, the full length of which we cycled, but also the work on the Two Tunnels cycle (and walking) route within Bath, which will, eventually, link the B2B path with new suburbs..

Cycling Embassy folk arrive at Bath on the one hot Saturday we have had his "summer"

The long blocked-off entrance to a railway tunnel in Bath that should soon be part of a magnificent cycle route

Brand new bridge forming part of the Two Tunnels Greenway, Bath

This awkward crossing of a road on the Two Tunnels Greenway will soon go in favour of a bridge

Good junction treatment where the Bristol to Bath route crosses a minor road (but the vegetation could do with cutting back)

Refreshment stop on the Bristol to Bath path

Later in the day, after the AGM itself, we were shown around Bristol town centre by Steve Melia, who explained how the area had been change to favour walking and cycling in recent years, and went into proposals for further reducing motor traffic in the centre and the politics of this change. The meeting extended over a whole weekend, and on the Sunday there were two further bike trips round Bristol and its environs, both led by Joe Dunckley. The first explored cycling conditions in the northern suburbs and some of the established and developing routes (other than the B2B path), and the second took us to some new places including scenic views of the Avon gorge.

Steve Melia (left) explains proposals to further limit motor traffic in the centre of Bristol by restricting the use of the bridge in the distance

The Clifton suspension Bridge by Brunel, from the riverside path

Having been clueless about Bristol's cycling credentials before, I was very impressed. Here was a town that does have some natural advantages in generating a cycling culture, such as a compact, historic centre and a large student population (though, as a proportion, nothing like as large as that of Cambridge, Oxford or York), but also some disadvantages: severe hills, severance by big roads, and suburban residential, commercial and industrial sprawl. Yet the level of cycling was impressive, and the progress made and being made to facilitate that cycling through real and sometimes controversial infrastructure change not insubstantial.

Not particularly smart or expensively-designed, but this is Shared Space in Bristol that is genuinely shared because most motor traffic has been excluded. Contrast with London's failed Exhibition Road scheme.

Rather magnificent new bike path in the northern suburbs of Bristol

Part of the Concord Way route, North Bristol

The Concord Way route passes under a big road here. The space is insufficient, but at least a properly-connected and continuous largely traffic-free cycle route has been provided, a great rarity in the UK

Decent space for cyclists and pedestrians side by side through Castle Park in central Bristol

Sensible design of main road segregation continues the route over a bridge

If Bristol had the student proportion that Cambridge or even York has (which it could not have as it is a bigger, more diverse place, I am sure if would be far and away the leading cycling city in the UK. It may justifiably make that claim even now. For the basic fact about Cambridge is that relatively poor infrastructure there is trumped by the fact that the students literally have no other possible way of getting around. They are not allowed to own cars: a long-standing agreement between the university and city council ensures this. No other city could replicate this situation. The cycling level is high in Bristol, despite the hills, because the cycling infrastructure is the best in the UK. By "cycling infrastructure", I mean this to be taken in a broad way: not just specific bike paths and lanes, though these make a significant contribution, but also the measures that have been taken to control motor traffic both in the centre and in some suburban areas. We tend to regard the "centre of gravity" of cycling in the UK as being in the east: well-known cycling places are London, Cambridge, Peterborough, York and Edinburgh. But towns and cities wishing to become more cycle-friendly probably should look at Bristol more than any of these. Britain's cycling centre of gravity is here, in the west.

Bath is fairly cycle-unfriendly at the moment; the B2B path is not satisfactorily connected to the town centre, the riverside path that is supposed to have that function being far too narrow, and the on-road alternatives hostile. But the local authority is progressive and with Sustrans is working hard, and it looks like the Two Tunnels Greenway will be a huge breakthrough. Even without a good  connection to Bath town centre, the Bristol to Bath path is absolutely at capacity, and urgently needs to be widened (or have alternative routes built to take some of the pressure off). We were accompanied on the ride on the path by a Bath councillor, the city's "Cycling Champion", and he recognised this. The path is a victim of its own success, and is generating the need for more investment on cycling infrastructure elsewhere. He made the legitimate point that, due to shortage of available funds, it was hard to decide whether the existing path should be improved or developments made elsewhere. This is not a choice that really should have to be made.

Bristol to Bath path in Bristol suburbs: cyclists taken clear of busy roads; hugely popular with all ages

The Bristol-Bath path is making a huge contribution to tourism, transport and leisure of people of all ages and walks of life in the area, and that success should be built on. It is typically 3 metres wide, but, as Joe Dunckley pointed out, the whole line of the railway bed is far wider, and in most places it could be widened to 4 or 5 metres at least. There is the problem that the railway is, for a distance between Bristol and Bath, still in place on a single track, operated by steam enthusiasts. Neither the path, nor the railway, can ever be all that satisfactory on this stretch with the other present. This is a conflict that I have seen elsewhere on NCN paths in the UK (in Norfolk). It comes from the fact that we have been relying on these disused railway alignments as our only serious  source of land for inter-town cycle paths, and they are a resource in very short supply. We should be instead thinking about doing what the Dutch do: local authorities there can, and do constantly, acquire land for new cycle paths that are unrelated to the road network, and so suffer no environmental influence from traffic. There is an immense demand for these routes, and the supply, at the moment, is pathetic. This is why, when one path, the Bristol to Bath one, is done reasonably well (though to nothing like Dutch standards of quality), all the world and his wife and their family and dog and horse come to use it.

Where the B2B path enters the suburbs of Bristol, it does not conk out or divert onto minor roads or collide with cycle-unfriendly traffic systems, as do most off-road cycle paths in the UK when entering urban areas. It is carried over motorways and roundabouts on bridges that almost made me feel I was back in the Netherlands, where, of course, high-level engineering totally separating cycle flows from motor traffic is the norm. The original line of the railway did not go properly to Bristol city centre, but new links have now been created within the city to allow you to cycle, traffic, free, all the way there. And when you get to Bristol city centre, there are extensive almost traffic-tree spaces to cycle around in.

Bristol waterfront: a little bit "Dutch"

Yet another bridge for cyclists and pedestrians in central Bristol

Cyclists of all ages come out for business and leisure in Bristol because of the existence of convenient and spacious traffic-free paths and bridges

One of the biggest and most commendable roll-backs ever of inappropriate motor invasion of a historic city centre in the UK  took place in Bristol in 2000 when the Inner Circuit Road, driven diagonally across Queen Square in 1937, was removed, and the square restored to its peaceful, Georgian grandeur, a place for sunbathers, walkers and cyclists, with the occasional delivery by van allowed. This massive change is a signal one to give encouragement to those who believe it is possible to improve our cities and actually make big, popular changes that involve removing traffic. There was great opposition to the removal of the Inner Circuit Road at time, but now nobody in Bristol would have it back in Queen Square. And I suspect this change in modern times had a wider effect on the psychology of the city, and put in train a desire to change even more in the environment for the benefit of people not travelling in space-wasting metal boxes, a realisation that radical things can be done,  that has led to the subsequent improvements to the city centre, and development of some decent (by UK standards) mostly traffic-free routes to the suburbs.

Steve Melia indicates the route of a huge road through Bristol's Regency centre prior to the restoration of Queen Square in 2000. The statue is George III by Rysbrack (1733).

Bristol is certainly not a miniature Amsterdam or Copenhagen (though in places it does resemble them). The standard of the cycle panning and engineering is far off what the Dutch would consider acceptable, and there are still far too many main road barriers, poor crossings, nasty junctions, built-in pedestrian/cycle conflicts, and other issues arising from car-centric planning of the past. But compared to the Borough of Brent it is a bit of paradise. And it is moving visible in the right direction, whereas the London suburbs (with the exception of odd projects like the Olympic Park, which haven't helped cycling either) seem to be set in concrete at Epoch 1970.0, the changes required being so vast that no London borough can contemplate the expenditure that is necessary.

Measuring a cycling and pedestrian path in the northern suburbs of Bristol (local authority: South Gloucestershire) that foolishly tries to contain two directions of cycle flow in 1.3m

Cycle route on a nice new estate at the Bristol Council–South Gloucestershire border foolishly obstructed by a wooden post. It would never occur to me to suggest that this problem could easily be remedied by a couple of men with a hand saw in the dead of night.

Inconvenient low-priority multi-stage design of crossing of cycle route of main road that also is inconvenient for pedestrians and mixes cycle traffic with pedestrians inappropriately

This is not a cycle path, it is just a pavement. Shared use is generally not appropriate in towns.

Near Bristol Cathedral: not too bad a cycle path, but again, to my mind, too much confusion between cycle and pedestrian space in a small area, too much subtlety with the tiny red cycle symbol tile, and a silly (worn-out) "Give-way".


The main purpose if the Cycling Embassy AGM was to decide the direction and strategy of the organisation after its first year of existence, which was devoted mainly to explaining to the world why it should exist at all. Many people have asked me, "Why another cycling organisation in the UK?", but I have not the slightest doubt that the setting-up of the Cycling Embassy of Great Britain was necessary, and, indeed, a long overdue step. The reason was that the UK needed a pressure group to demand, on a national basis, the type of high-quality dedicated cycle infrastructure that is the necessary prerequisite of a mass cycling culture. The existing cycling organisations were not doing this. They were doing many other good things, representing their members, providing services to them, and organising training, and acting as suppliers of services to government, but not this. Or if they were, it was a too low-key and mixed-up message to work.

We needed a body that shouted a single, clear, unambiguous message about cycling "from the rooftops": Mass cycling as transport ain't going to happen in the UK without proper cycle paths and tracks everywhere, in the city, suburbs and countryside. There was some overlap between the objectives of the Embassy and Sustrans, the great charity responsible for the B2B path and other elements of the National Cycle Network, but they were and are primarily a provider of a practical service involving the organisation of volunteers, not primarily a political lobby group, and also, as recipients of large amounts of public (or lottery) money, they could not be regarded as a fully independent force. Also, I think it is fair to say that the founders of the Embassy regarded Sustrans' apparent collective concept of the nature of the cycle infrastructure that the UK required to be inadequate. We felt there needed to be a voice that was (in a friendly, constructive way) critical of Sustrans and of inadequate demands by other cycling organisations.

So that was what the Embassy was about, but what sort of organisation should it be? A membership organisation, a pressure group, a think-tank, or a political lobby? This was debated at this AGM. It was decided that the Embassy should not a membership organisation. It was decided that there is no need for another organisation to compete with CTC and British Cycling to be a provider of benefits (such as insurance) to individual cyclists in return for a membership fee. These organisations do a good job. The Embassy also, it was decided, does not have the resources to be a consultee on whatever problems or schemes need addressing for cycling on a local basis across the country, though we do with to supply good information to local campaigning groups, who are the proper people to advise local authorities as to what needs doing in their areas.

The Embassy, it was decided, should free itself primarily to be the national lobby directed at central government (Westminster and the devolved administrations) for asatisfactory policy, legal backing, and funding for building cycling through provision of cycle-specific infrastructure across the UK, based on best-practice from what has been proven to work in other countries. The Embassy would be a network of supporters who all shared the vision of mass cycling on quality separated infrastructure, with all the huge economic, social and health benefits for the nation we believe that would bring. With a large support base, pledged to support a clear manifesto, it would be possible to go to central government and say "This is what X thousand people think on this subject. What are you going to do about it?"

This is the point. For too long (almost the whole period of the invention of the bicycle, in fact, the British government has failed to provide a lead on how the bike should be accommodated in our country. We have been watching and discussing the successful pro-bike policies of some of our continental neighbours, particularly, of course, the Netherlands, for 80 years, wondering whether or not they could work here, while continuing, in practice, to design-out the bike from our urban and rural environments so comprehensively that the vast majority of the population consider it totally out of the question to attemp to meet the daily transport needs by cycling. In each decade, in each generation, and in each parliament, ministers of transport have insisted that it is "the responsibility of local authorities" to provide for cycling, without giving them the direction, the legislative backing, the powers and the funding to do it. If this attitude had been taken in respect of the nation's railways, its ports, motorways and airports, we would have none – as we have (with precious few exceptions like the B2B path) no effective cycle infrastructure.

We need a change that has to come from the top. Getting this is the huge task that the Cycling Embassy of Great Britain has set itself. Every town, city and rural district in the UK needs to have what Bristol has, but far more, and better, and that won't happen until central government has said loud and clear that this is what they want and provided the cash, freedom and expertise to local authorities to make it happen. That will mean ending the long British tradition of treating cycling as some sort of toy or diversion, but reassessing it thoroughly as universal efficient mass transport for medium-length daily journeys and part of the core infrastructure requirements of a modern advanced nation, on a par with motor, rail, air and sea infrastructure.

It's a long way off. But in Bristol, Bath, and other places, many people are working towards this goal, and, little, by little, in places, it is becoming a reality, and then other places can see how it is done. Brighton (with its Green Party council) has taken the latest substantial step with a high-quality cycle track on Old Shoreham Road that looks as if it will be genuinely useful to many cyclists. As more good examples of working dedicated cycle infrastructure appear around the country, other towns will want the same, and, with the correct policies from central government, a momentum will develop that has the potential to transform the appearance of our towns and the nature of local transport across the UK.

The Cycling Embassy is organising an Infrastructure Safari on bikes for campaigners, planners, politicians, and anyone interested to see what has been achieved in Brighton and Worthing on Saturday 18 August. Sign up to the Embassy (if you have not already done so) to be kept informed, and put the date in your diary. And if you think the Embassy should come and look at cycling developments in your town, then tell us. Don't forget also that the Embassy is organising another study tour party with David Hembrow in Assen, Netherlands, in September. If you want to understand what it is really all about, what the Embassy is actually aiming at, this is the one "must-do" activity. You will see how riding a bike becomes really "as easy as riding a bike" in the correct environment, and why we urgently need this in the UK. We've been discussing this for 80 years. We shouldn't loose any more time.