blog

Shopping

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 13:04:16 +0100

What to do about it? Newcastle Council apparently think that retail businesses will leave if the don't get free car parking, more on that latter. Kim Harding has suggested that the solution to getting more people on bikes is taxing car parking, I'm not so sure.

I'm convinced that the way to get large numbers of people shopping by bike is really quite straight forward. You take places where the majority of shoppers are already walking, you make them a bit more bike friendly, you put in a few cycle routes covering the last mile or two in each direction and then you do a bit of advertising. These places are called High Streets, in all likelihood there is one near you and you may be one of a tiny minority who already rides a bike there.

OK, its a bit more complicated than that. Cultural shift takes time, any activity will get early adopters, and then become normalised as folk see their friends and neighbours doing it. Infrastructure will evolve, what works on a basic level for 5% of people will need continual improvement to work eventually for 50%. Some locations will work better than others, where I live leisure cycling is pretty strong and it is normal to see bikes on the high street even though mode share is only around 2%. Tonight at my local Sainsbury's local there were 6 cars in the car park and 2 bikes, unusual but not amazing.

To get people to shop by bike in these places you need to implant the idea that this is an attractive thing to do, and it can be combined with other pleasurable things to do like meeting friends for coffee etc. The decision point at which High Streets generally win or lose customers is when people either decide to pick up a set of car keys, or pick up a coat and umbrella or in the case of a small minority get their bike out. Comparatively few people drive to the High Street, typically about 20%. In my neighbourhood once people get in their car they tend to go to places like Silverlink Retail Park.
Silverlink sits on one of the best sections of cycle route in the country, part of NCN10, as does Royal Quays, its baby brother "Outlet Mall" which is a couple of miles South.

Although I am what most people would call a keen cyclist, I've never used a bike to shop at Royal Quays and at Silverlink I've only done so once. I live around 3 miles from either, so at the edge of cycling distance for most people but not a big deal for me, I go within a mile of either of them on the way to work each day depending on which route I take. I've used a bike to shop at the B&Q near Silverlink a couple of times, but again something about these destinations suggests that the car is the most appropriate way to visit (see photos). It is quicker to get to these locations by car than it is by bike.

Now you could as Kim suggests tax the car parking at these locations, but what would happen in practice is that the landlords who run the car parks and their retailer tenants would come up with a way to absorb the cost and make it invisible to customers. High Streets wouldn't be able to do this so any tax that fell there would become a visible up front cost. There is already a powerful deterrent which makes it possible to attract people away from places like this, they are ugly, traffic congested hellholes (OK, thats just my opinion, find me a beautiful car park and I will eat my cap).

Politically and locally it is not difficult to sell the idea of making it easier to get to the shops by bike. The same routes that serve the High Streets also tend to serve schools. Businesses like the idea of free advertising and local government making it easier for people to get to their shop. Yes there will come a point where a few parking bays need to be moved, but it is not strictly necessary to go to war with local retailers and try and take their parking away or tax them on it. I've unashamedly tried to convince shopkeepers to support pedestrianisation and traffic reduction because it would free up space for more car parking. Hopefully they will be back in a few years wanting cycle stands put in the parking bays, but lets not get ahead of ourselves.

Now for Newcastle. The CTC were in town today and Carlton Reid has reported that the subject of car parking came up and Newcastle's cycling officer made the point that "employers say they want free parking or they will leave". I may be misquoting, but to hear this from Newcastle Council is not surprising. Why the subject came up I don't know, perhaps the CTC had difficulty parking and were protesting the charges? More likely they were suggesting that imposing high city centre parking charges was a way to boost cycling.

Local context is always important. When Newcastle say this they are talking about retail employers. Newcastle are deeply involved with city centre retail, care a lot about it and see it as one of their big success stories. Newcastle City Council own 50% of the Eldon Square city centre Mall, its an asset to the city worth hundreds of millions of £. Retail rents on Newcastle's Northumberland Street are some of the highest in the country.

Newcastle have successfully kept a thriving retail sector in the face of competition from Gateshead's Metro Centre Mall, in stark contrast to Gateshead City Centre which is dead as a doornail. Ironically Gateshead are launching the regeneration of their town centre at the same time as trying to promote a relief road to ease traffic congestion at the Metrocentre. Similarly North Tyneside are clamouring for road junction upgrades at Silverlink and the same time as trying to regenerate their tradditional town centres, noone seems top make the link that making it easier to drive to these places does not help the High Street.

Personally I think that trying to get Newcastle to encourage cycling by raising city centre parking costs is unlikely to go down well. In the middle of the biggest recession since WW2 retailers are screaming for support from government in places like Newcastle and will react very badly to anything like this. Retailers care about footfall, if cheap parking generates footfall they'll have some of that, if buses and bikes generate footfall they'll have some of that too. City centre retailers do not expect parking to be free, but they do like it to be low enough not to put people off.

In Newcastle what we should be doing is getting a couple of well engineered cycle routes into the retail area, separating the cycle traffic from the motor cars who are trying to get to the car parks and the bus traffic trying to get to the bus station. Do this and it suddenly becomes practical to promote city centre shopping by bike to families in the wealthy catchment areas adjoining the city centre. The marketing budgets and expertise available to an operation like Eldon Square are far better suited to promoting cycling than anything the public sector can do.

Right now Tyne & Wear is preparing its bid to the governments Local Sustainable Transport Fund. They've nominated employment areas to be the focus of active travel promotion which with the exception of Newcastle City Centre are all out of town. These centres include the area around Silverlink, any hope that the local retail centres will get help seems to be disappearing. The government is telling councils to focus their efforts on areas of traffic congestion and employment growth, so Tyne & Wear is picking exactly the same locations where it also wants big road schemes.

I'm not knocking those who try to promote cycling on out of town business parks, its a good thing. The built environment matters. As someone who spends a lot of his day job looking at aerial photos I can't help but think money would be better spent trying to get people to ride bikes in places like this
View Larger Map, as opposed to places like this.

View Larger Map

Newcastle Map Quiz

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 15:48:16 +0100

Can you guess what this map shows? Its from 2006 so a bit out of date, but the "hot spot" locations seem to strangely tie in with a little mental map I carry around with me entitled "there be wolves"

Big Roads - Small Minds

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 11:50:26 +0100

This blog is inspired by a news article out in the regional press today entitled "Second Tyne Tunnel will transform the region, predicts project MD". For those not familiar with this project a second road tunnel has been built under the river Tyne which until now has served as a bottleneck on the A19. The A19 is a motorway in all but name that runs from North of Newcastle down to North Yorkshire.

Right now the new tunnel is open but the old one is closed for refurbishment, so it is still the scene of very large traffic jams in both directions at peak hours. With twin tunnels about to open the capacity of the junctions either side is attracting a lot of attention. These were supposed to have been completely rebuilt, but the money was not there and only minor works have been done.

Trevor Jackson, the project director says “Development and traffic growth go hand in hand, and as we finally see the constraints lifted traffic will come rushing, and business with it......We are doubling the tunnel so that has the potential to have the traffic arriving at double the rate at the Silverlink Roundabout in peak hours – how do the Highways Agencies intend to allow for this?"

Personally I think that Mr Jackson is underestimating both the scope and scale of the traffic changes that are going to result from the twin tunnels going operational in the next few months. I'm reminded of a study of the London Westway when it was built 40 years ago, highway engineers expressed amazement that an extra 18,000 cars had "come from nowhere" onto the route at peak hours.

Until now the Tyne Tunnel bottleneck has provided a powerful incentive for motorists to stagger their journey times and if possible to avoid commuting this route at all. The effect is powerful enough that businesses won't usually consider relocation from one side of the river to the other as the impact on their staff is seen as too big (this started to change about six months ago).

The public transport options on this route are less than ideal, with the choice being a bus through the road tunnel, a ferry crossing at South Shields, or taking the Tyne & Wear Metro (light rail) all the way into Newcastle and then back along the other side of the river. The river here is crying out for a rail or tram link but it doesn't exist.

It seems likely that we are going to see significant increases in car traffic on all the A roads anywhere near the tunnel, with a knock on effect on all of the popular rat runs nearby. All of those junctions within a few miles radius including those close to Newcastle City Centre, which are already at capacity are going to see more traffic.

There are twin foot and cycle tunnels under the tyne, but these see a lot less use these days as both housing and employment are less concentrated along the river than they used to be. The new Tunnel did finance some minor improvements to the NCN 72 cycle route which follows the river, but this is primarily a leisure route as it does not run in a straight line.

From what I can see the east-west bicycle commuter routes in the vicinity, both on and off road are going to suffer as a result of this new traffic. Those using the A193 which is my main route into town will run into faster and heavier traffic at its junction with the A19 (one of the few locations where it will speed up) . Those on the off road Coast Road Cycle Route will see heavier traffic as they try and cross slip roads, which are already a big problem.

To take a pessimistic view on things I'd say that my own bike commute will become increasingly unviable as the levels of delay and risk increase. Increased risk will eventually translate into deaths and injuries in the vicinity of some of these road junctions.

Public pressure is likely to increase to spend even larger sums of public money on road junction improvements in North and South Tyneside. Whilst I'm going to try and do my best to ensure that these also include improvements for those on foot or on bikes, it seems inevitable that the main focus will be on increasing car capacity at the expense of everything else.

Public satisfaction with their driving experience in the locality is gong to actually get worse as a result of the twin tunnels. In the past the misery was confined to those actually going through the tunnel at peak times who faced a 30 minute delay. In future this delay will be dissapated over a wider area with 5 to 10 minute delays at a lot of other locations. Using a bicycle to get around will become a lot less attractive on some key routes, and marginally less attractive over a wide area. Using buses may also become less attractive as they will also suffer delays.

If you are going to deliberately engineer a major increase in traffic volumes it would take careful planning and infrastructure improvements for all modes over a very wide geographical area in order to avoid problems. That is not generally how we do things in the UK, progress marches on.

CycleNation

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 11:55:23 +0100

I'd never heard of this lot until a couple of years ago, they are the body that unites the various local bike campaigner groups around Britain. They went a bit haywire on twitter last night and posted a (drunken?) rant against various people around Europe:

Is this what happens to you when you spend too much time cycling in Traffic? Quite Odd really.

The Changing Of The Guard

Mon, 05 Sep 2011 12:55:56 +0100

This blog post stems in part from a chat I had with Cllr Ed Hodson the Cabinet member for transport in my neck of the woods, which has already on been described in Karl McCracken's blog. Although Cllr Hodson was probably not a natural political proponent of cycling, he did at least know what a set of panniers was.

I'd put Cllr Hodson's age as mid to late 60's, which means that he would have been born in the late1940's and grown up in a Britain where bicycle modal share although in decline was still very significant. On Tyneside cycling at this time was so important that in 1951 they built a cycle tunnel under the Tyne, still operational today. At its peak 20,000 people per day rode or walked under the river.

Looking back on Lord Tebbit's famous 1981 exhortation to the unemployed to "get on your bike" it was clearly a comment from someone who knew that in Britain before and immediately after WW2 the normal way for working men to experience employment mobility was via bicycle.

I can't help contrasting Tebbit or Hodson with the key decision makers in UK Transport today. Phillip Hammond MP Minister for Transport born in1955 & Mike Penning MP Minister for Roads born in1957. Both Hammond & Penning spent their formative years in 1970's Essex where the car was king.

To a great extent the guard has already changed in national and local politics. Hodson is an exception in being active at cabinet level, most of his colleagues seem to be more of Hammond & Penning's generation. Lord Tebbit is an occasional voice in the house of lords but otherwise long gone from British politics.

My point? Well locally we are quite lucky in finding ourselves dealing with someone who at has at least experienced life in a Britain where bikes were an important form of Transport. Nationally those days are gone, and it shows.

There will always be exceptions, some MPs hold strong environmental convictions, some are from areas where cycling is strong, and some have done a stint cycle commuting in central London. But even with a few enthusiastic voices here and there its going to be more difficult now to revive large scale utility cycling than it would have been in an era when most people remembered seeing it in operation. For the average politician in his/her mid 50's the roads are for cars and the bicycle is a childrens toy and its always been that way (well as long as they can remember).

Rolling Around The Cote D'Azur

Tue, 09 Aug 2011 09:58:19 +0100

blog This week's installment comes to you live from the South of France. To set the scene I'm currently sat on a campsite on the Argens River which looks kinda like an American trailer park with trees, except its around 1/3 each Dutch / French / English with a few Belgians and Germans thrown in. The Dutch sit at the top of the pecking order with the biggest caravans and most sophisticated bicycles, with the English and French underneath holding each other in polite mutual contempt. I've been reliably informed by one of the Germans that the Dutch all deliberately take their caravans on a trip though Germany on their way south and clog up the Autobahn as revenge for the great bicycle theft of 1944 (sounds plausible to me). In a place like this you get to see the various european cycling cultures parked side by side.

One of the reasons for coming here was that a brochure promised a “cycle path” all the way to the coast 8km away. I pictured an off road track or “route verte” in the local parlance. What we've found has been very different, I suspect the brochure mistranslated “cycle route”. This route is far more complex as its real utility infrastructure on main roads used by the locals to get around rather than a tourist trail.

Coming from another coastal tourist area up in the north-east of England there's obviously lots we have in common with this part of the Cote d'Zur (really). Coastal towns and villages, sandy beaches, Dutch tourists, traffic congestion, you name it. Of course the 10 degree difference in temperature is noticeable, and the vineyards do contrast to our brewery on the local industrial estate, but trust me it feels just like home.

With the kids aged 7 & 10 having some sort of workable bike infrastructure nearby is pretty handy on this sort of holiday. You don't drive over 1000 miles and then wake up wanting to spend much more time in the car. The kids are fit enough to do pretty big distances by bike, and with all wine and food I get through some exercise during the day is handy.

The route down to the coast starts with a trip through the local town of Roquebrune. Although the traffic through the town centre is in theory 30kph (20 mph) in practice its heavy enough that you quickly resort to pavement cycling as most people would do in the UK. However as you exit the town 2m wide cycle lanes have been built which cover about 90% of the route down to the coast. What the French have done is to surface the verge of the road and take a small amount of space from the main carriageway. It looks like the work was done at the same time as resurfacing the road with the aim of cutting traffic speeds as well as helping people get around by bike.

This is not Dutch standard cycle track, but it is an example of what can be done quickly on a budget and the end result is that I could cycle 2 abreast with my kids comfortably within the lane. The only points at which things go wrong are at two roundabouts where the lanes disappear and you are either on a narrow pavement or thrown back into traffic. What really stood out was the width of the lanes and the quality of the surfacing. What became very obvious quite quickly was that these lanes were working for and being used by sports cyclists on road bikes (lycra clad freaks to you or me) as well as normal folk, and not just lone roadies as shown in a couple of these pictures but groups of 8-10 riding in a pack.

As the route goes through Villepey it becomes fully segregated from the traffic by concrete barriers. I'm pretty sure I've never seen this anywhere in the UK, fine it is not beautiful, but then again neither is asphalt. I'd defy you to find anyone who wouldn't behappy with their kids riding to school on a section like this. Rest areas with bike parking had been built but won't be much use for a few years until the planting grows big enough to provide some shade (cycling in this heat you do not stop in the sun).

As you hit St Aygulf the route leaves the main road and cuts through the back streets of town as a cycle contraflow on what are otherwise one way streets. Signage is not great and all you get are the familiar blue rectangular on road cycle route signs the same as at home. Hang a left as you hit the beach and you then get to the “piste cyclable”.

This is by most measures a pretty outstanding two way cycle track, and makes the section of Coastal NCN 1 back home look like some cobbled together bits of promenade and pavement. Even UK coastal towns such as Brighton which have had bigger sums of money spend on cycle routes don't have anything approaching this quality. Again what strikes you immediately is that the route is being used by everyone from roadies in lycra to dutch tourists to locals with shopping baskets tied to their racks.

The route has priority over most side roads and the French tend to use a green marked path overlaying pedestrian crossing hatching to show the right of way.

At one bridge the route ground to a halt with the dreaded cyclists dismount signs, but at the next bridge they had solved the problem and used one of the pavements and some of the carriageway to take the route across. The sense was that the route was a work in progress and was getting more sophisticated as each new section was engineered.

By this point the route had left the beaches and ran parallel to the main route to Frejus. About half way it switched from one side of the carriageway to the other via some pedestrian crossings some of which seemed to have right of way for bikes and some didn't. I wouldn't be keen to test that right of way at speed but in practice with a bit of negotiation with drivers it was easy enough. On the approach to Frejus it looked like half the road had been converted to bikeway with the other side widened and made two way for motor traffic.

Now for the piece d'resistance, the route cuts back towards the coast through what until the mid 90's was a French naval aviation airbase (Le Top Gun). The route ran along what were originally aircraft taxiways with one branch doing a loop down the the main runway with one lane for rollerblading and one for bikes. The French had clearly seen it as essential to put a coat of smooth tarmac on the cycle path, clearly a runway is just not slick enough to do the job (coming from the UK this almost makes you want to cry ). I must admit to having a quick blast down the runway humming “take me to the dangerzone” as I overtook one of the locals.

Further into town I found another section of the route which hadn't yet been joined up to the main section back to St Aygulf. This two way track would look great running over Marden Bridge into Whitley Bay (although I doubt we'll get a marina full of superyachts next door any time soon).

Its taken me days to put my finger on exactly what the key difference is between the approach I've seen here to that experienced in England. There is plenty of crap here as well, but with the more recent better quality routes it is clear that the French are designing their infrastructure to work for roadies as well as kids on mountain bikes. Quite possibly it just has not occurred to them that it would make sense to do anything but build something of sufficient quality that it works for all types of bike and all types of cyclist.

I'm not holding up France as the place to go if you want to see bikeways at their best. What is interesting from a UK context through is that we are starting from a similar starting point to the French. The UK and France both have very low levels of cycling by North European standards and have to try and retrofit bikeways onto road networks built over the last 70 years with no thought given to providing separated routes. Here the French are tackling the problems of running routes into town centres to bring tourist cash to town centre businesses and help the locals get around, at home this doesn't seem to be happening to the same extent.

Where we differ from the French is largely in the pedestrian realm where the French have far greater mode share for walking for the UK. The French think nothing of sticking pedestrian crossings on all four arms of every junction in urban areas and about every 30 yards on High Streets, happily doing so right next to parked cars if they see the need. Overall French road safety looks worse than that in the UK, but I'd suspect per km walked it is just as good, public health is far better, draw your own conclusions. The way the French use pedestrian crossings may make it easier to run two way bikeways than the UK because drivers are used to the idea of giving way. Drivers do not respect pedestrian crossings to the same degree as in the UK, you've got to actually step on to them to get the traffic to stop, but they do work.

French cycling culture is very different to the UK. Other than sports cyclists I didn't see one local wearing a helmet. Most people seem to either ride cheap Decathalon BSO mountain bikes or second hand deraileur geared utility bikes. As in the UK people do not spend the same sort of money on utility bikes as they do in Germany or the Netherlands. There were noticably a lot more locals on bikes than at home, and far more had bikes adapted to carry shopping, no wicker baskets but plenty of racks and other attachments. Two wheeled road culture is dominated by mopeds, rather than cycle parking there is parking for 2 wheeled vehcles and lots of it.

In Cannes I saw a few french CRS bike cops. The guy shown in this photo spent a good half hour chatting up the young ladies running the fairground ride, until a couple of his mates showed up, at which point they all stayed for a bit longer. No helmets, tanned, designer shades, powder blue polo shirts and tailored shorts, with an automatic pistol on the hip (always important to accesorise). I got the feeling that if your average UK cyclist in hi-vis and helmet had rolled past they would have pulled them over and ticketed them for crimes against the city dress code.

Building a Coastal Bike Grid

Thu, 21 Jul 2011 10:11:42 +0100

Next week myself and Karlonsea are off to see the Transport Officer Head Honchos for North Tyneside. We met the Councillor and Cabinet member for Transport a few weeks back, but these are the guys who really run things. In North Tyneside you are to some extent pushing at an open door with this sort of thing. Although the Transport Engineers are as car centric as anywhere else there are plenty of Council transport officers who know what a Dutch Roundabout is and are genuinely interested in cycling as transport.

We've been banging on for a while now about trying to get the Council to combine its regeneration cash with money its getting from the Local Sustainable Transport Fund and take a real crack at getting cycling to work for local retail. The current Tory regime in North Tyneside have been elected on a promise to regenerate the town centres of North Shields and Whitley Bay so we've been busy explaining to retailers there what cycling can do for them. I'm going to try and put a copy of our whizzy powerpoint online and will update a link latter.

I'm leaning very much towards an argument that the Council should focus everything on a tight geographical area between North Shields and Whitley Bay and see what's possible. Reasons for this are as follows:

1/ Leisure cycling is very strong on the coast. People are on the whole very happy outdoors in all weathers. Its not unusual to see people cycling home in November covered in mud from a days mountain biking, or for that matter walking down to the beach surfboard in hand through the snow.

2/ Utility cycling, whilst nearly dead like everywhere else, does still exist locally. In the wealthier areas it tends to be people in their 60's with very sensible bikes and elaborate purpose built rack boxes. In the poorer areas you'll see people of all ages in some cases with shopping baskets attached to full suspension mountain bikes. In summer bike racks at the local shops are often full.

3/ The area is compact and densely populated. At certain times of the day it is genuinely quicker to get around by bike. From where I live near Tynemouth I can be at the shops at Whitley Bay or North Shields in under 5 minutes.

4/ There's around £2 million of regeneration cash up for grabs, which if you put it together with LSTF money means there's scope to actually build something quite good.

5/ There is a lot of existing infrastructure which is sort of OK. A lot of the area was built out in the 1930's at a time when they'd started to see the sense in providing separate roads or paths for bikes and cars. Join this together, connect it to the sea front promenade which is part of Sustrans Route 1, and you've got not a bad bike grid. The Victorian areas all have back lanes which tend to be used by cyclists to get around, there is also in Whitley Bay a very large number of Victorian pedestrian Streets. Although the pedestrian streets are often signed as "no cycling" in practice people ignore this. The sea front promenade is not much good for Utility Cycling as its too exposed, but it will help.

What we're going to suggest is that the Council focus on piecing together a really good backbone route connecting North Shields and Whitley Bay with a spur down to the coast at Cullercoats. It could look like this, with existing infrastructure shown in Pale Blue, a few junctions that need some work in Red, and the proposed new high quality Dutch style cycleways in Dark Blue.

Perhaps we should even suggest that they apply for a GB Cycling Embassy Seal of Approval (I'm sure Jim could make them a badge or something).

Combine building a route like this, with work in Schools using Sustrans Bike IT officers, get the retailers advertising how easy it is to shop by bike, add a bit of luck and hopefully keep the routes ploughed and gritted in Winter (sponsored by ASDA maybe?), and we may just achieve something quite special.

On the buses

Tue, 05 Jul 2011 12:12:55 +0100

Relations between cyclists and bus drivers have their comic moments, as well as downright scary moments. This morning I had to put up with what I'd call a pointless and scary overtake from two buses whilst in one of Newcastle's "no-car" lanes approaching a set of (red) traffic lights. Yes they didn't actually hit me, but they gained nothing from overtaking, I got a scare and then had to manoeuvre around them 100 yards up the road. Just part of the day to day "treat me like a cockroach" experience that you have to put up with cycling on UK roads (and then we wonder why so few people ride bikes).

The incident brought to mind an ongoing debate I've been having with members of Newcastle Cycling Campaign about bus lanes and specifically what should be done with Gosforth High Street. I'm fast coming to the conclusion that in most cases the interests of bus companies and those who want more bikes on the streets are diametrically opposed.

There is a school of thought that says that the biggest factor behind a recent rise of cycling in London has been the creation of lots of new Bus Lanes by Ken Livingstone. These lanes were soon adopted by London's commuter cyclists who preferred them to the back street routes of the London Cycle Network. This phenomenon is now being institutionalised via the London "Super" Cycle Highways which are in many cases a strip of blue paint running down Ken's bus lanes.

The difficulty with seeing the London bus lanes as a model to follow is that levels of cycling in London are still desperately low when compared to mainland Europe. it seems to me that we could perhaps assume that there is maybe a small number of people, maybe 3-4% who are prepared to mix it with buses on a bicycle, but once you've got them any progress grinds to a halt. There are UK cities like York and Cambridge which do have high cycling levels, but they also have large city centre cores which are inaccessible to buses and difficult for cars, coincidence?

Bus companies don't just like bus lanes, they are also huge fans of the multilane traffic smoothing junctions which are becoming a battleground for London's cyclists. Closer to home on Tynemouth Front Street I've had to put up with my local shopping street being traffic smoothed in a project which it turns out is largely driven by the bus companies. The problem is that often if you model a street or junction to allow smooth transit by bus, you also facilitate faster driving by private motor cars.

On Gosforth High Street one of our members has been arguing for Bus lanes, which would then also function as strategic cycle routes on the way to Newcastle. The thinking behind this is I'd expect partly driven by what's happened in London combined with a desire to see infrastructure that also benefits public transport users.

Newcastle have consulted on a Highways scheme for Gosforth although thankfully seem now to have failed to fund it. The objectives of this scheme are to "not only improve the flow of local traffic but also the traffic coming from wider areas". If you look at the plans for the main roundabouts covered, Blue House and Haddricks Mill, you'll see that not a single cycle lane is added anywhere, where there is provision for cyclists it means being lumped in with pedestrians. This is the sort of thinking we have to deal with in Newcastle right now, the high level text will talk of issues for pedestrians and cyclists, but the solutions are all about motorised traffic.

The deta iled plans for the High Street show the main carriageway being set at two lanes and then remaining space being divided between wider pavements, on street car parking and bus lanes. Looking at the scheme the glaring problem is that at no point are they creating the sort of environment suitable for a family cycling to their local shops. Some sections of the High Street are the nightmare scenario of cyclists left on the road mixing with very heavy traffic next to parked cars.

I can't help but think that what we need to be campaigning for is something that looks like this:

The key implication is not aligning ourselves with the bus companies but instead siding with local retailers who want people to have easy access to the shops. You look at the Dutch High Street and you see proper pavements and bike lanes, car parking and cycle parking - the message it screams out to any retailer is that you can have it all. What you don't see is bus lanes, but it looks pretty good to me.

Building UK Cycle Infrastructure - Where it all goes wrong

Wed, 29 Jun 2011 14:03:47 +0100

A few months ago I became embroiled in the design of a section of Newcastle Council's new "red" cycle route which runs through the city centre to the Tyne Bridge. The experience left me very disillusioned with the way that this sort of stuff is done, but at the same time convinced that the solution to getting things improved lies at a political level not in arguing with junior council officers on the ground. This gets technical but bare with me.

The "red" route is pretty low quality and mostly consists of a few ASL's at junctions. Eventually the Council plans to sign it as part of the Great (?) North Cycle Route but for now it exists purely as a line on a map. Part of the route goes past the office where until recently I've worked in Newcastle City Centre, so when I was sent a copy of the original route plan I took it upon myself to get involved.

The original plan circulated for the Red Route showed a section of pavement outside the door to my office converted to shared use. This seemed to me to be an example of the absolute worst sort of UK practice, putting bikes on a busy city centre pavement. It looked all the stranger because there was plenty of room for a proper segregated path.

At no point was the council going to talk to businesses that fronted onto this pavement about making it shared use. However because I got a copy of the plans from Newcastle Cycle Campaign I was able to object on behalf of my employer. The end result was that the Council agreed to change the scheme to a segregated cycle path that looked like this:

What immediately strikes you about this drawing is that there is bags of room for good quality segregated paths, but at the junction the designers lose the plot and throw cyclists and pedestrians back together through a narrow shared use crossing.

To cut a long story short I did my best, I sent drawings of Dutch designs, I met the cycle officer and engineer on site. I think I convinced them that the segregated cycle route needed to run through the crossing, but this is where it gets interesting.

Keeping a separated cycle route through the junction was blocked with the following explanation:

"Unfortunately we have to say that we cannot go ahead with your suggestions on safety grounds.

1) The attached drawing although a bit rough, shows what the tracks of pedestrians and cyclists would be. The area in red is the area where the two streams would meet: on the carriageway and within the pedestrian refuge. While pedestrians and cyclists might be expected to interact in a sensible way on the refuge, we cannot put in place something which would cause them to collide on the carriageway with the danger that if they have taken a chance on the lights, they could be tangling with each other in the face of moving cars.

2) the arrangement we spoke of would mean a 15m wide crossing point on the north side. This would be very difficult to control for safety.

3) The only way to split the facilities at a crossing is if you continue the split through the island. This kinds of arrangement is not the normal convention for crossings and would need special dispensation.

We have consulted three sets of professionals on this: traffic management engineers, road safety auditors and traffic signals officers. All of them advised against this arrangement.

I am disappointed at this outcome but safety considerations for pedestrians and cyclists must come first. We are still concerned like you about the possibility of bikes taking the straight north route instead of following the cycle path and will look to judicious use of street furniture - bins and signs - to try to direct them."

And they built the route so that it looks like this:

Nice wide smooth tarmac, but you'll note the steel fence erected directly across the path of the cycle route, I wasn't expecting that and completely lost my temper and started emailing councillors left right and centre. When it comes down to it the problem we have is that creating a safe direct fast cycle route is at the bottom of the list of priorities for the engineers involved. Any slight safety concern is allowed to trump creation of a useable route.

Can you imagine what our streets would look like if a similar approach were taken to building routes for motor traffic? Does a motor traffic lane ever get a steel fence erected across it on safety grounds? I guess we could summarise the situation with the following rules of local authority cycle infrastructure:

1/ Any innovation that requires Department of Transport permission won't be done because the bureaucracy cannot be bothered.

2/ Anything that delays cyclists, throws them into conflict with pedestrians or makes the infrastructure completely unworkable is permissible.

3/ Anything that requires a junction design to be modified in a way that takes even a square centimetre of space from motor traffic is "difficult to control".

4/ traffic management engineers, road safety auditors and traffic signals officers do not ride bicycles, have not been told to design for a high volume of bicycle traffic & do not consider the safety implications of building something of such low quality that people don't use it.

5/ If there is any political will to build decent cycle routes this hasn't filtered down through the bureaucracy, one suspects that there isn't.

Depressing stuff but all part of getting to "know your enemy" for your friendly neighbourhood cycle campaigner. This photo kind of sums it up for me:

The Newcastle 4 C's bike ride

Thu, 23 Jun 2011 12:59:18 +0100

I've always been slightly unclear about what the "4C"'s bit means something like Council Chiefs City Cycle ride or something like that. Anyway it happened last night, I went along and a BBC "Man on the Telly" (who's name I forget, sorry) was there so it should make tonight's TV news Up North.

The idea started out as a ride between the Town Halls of Newcastle and Gateshead organised by Newcastle Cycle Campaign. Over time the idea of going to Gateshead got dropped and it settled down into a circuit around Newcastle City Centre. The point was to get the Council Leaders and Senior Council officers out and about seeing what life is really like for those hardy souls who cycle daily in Newcastle City Centre.

Credit where credit is due, most of the Cabinet turned up including Nick Forbes the new Council Leader, Henry Murison the Quality of Life man (including transport) and Nigel Todd who specifically looks after transport. There was one guy there in a very fetching pair of running shorts who might have been David Faulker the Lib Dem leader.

What surprised me most (but perhaps it shouldn't) was how few owned bikes of their own or had cycled at all in the last few years. In theory half of all households own a bike but it seemed like less with this group. Some of the councillors who did bring their own bikes were on machines that clearly hadn't been ridden in years or were borrowed from their kids. The Cycle Campaign had arranged loan of bikes from Recyke Y'bike, Scratch Bikes and Saddle Skedaddle, most of the senior cabinet members ended up on these. I had a go on one of the Scratch Bike bicycles which reminded me of riding a big BMX, attempted a bunny hop and wheelie in front of the civic centre but failed miserably, riding skills have been going downhill since I was 12.

The council cycling officer had deposited a box of high-vis gear earlier and most council folk helped themselves liberally hence the day glow theme in my photos. We'd not bothered much with cycle helmets which did prompt a few questions but they mostly happily hit the road bare headed. It was good to see the cabinet members riding the streets in suits, if not quite Copenhagen Cycle Chic at least heading in the right direction.

As ever with this sort of thing you always think of things afterwards that you should have said. I managed to get in the story of having to move away from inner city Newcastle because car polution was destroying my daughters health. Too many kids these days are walking around with Asthma inhalers which they wouldn't need if air quality was better. I also mentioned the injuries I used to get commuting in from Gosforth because the Council never gritted the cycle paths, Henry noted down details of the Cambridge trial involving gritting with a quad bike, so maybe we'll see one on the town moor this winter.

The worrying comments were along the lines of "we don't want to promise too much". I mean come on, other cities can build hundreds of km of bike lanes within a couple of years, why not think big Newcastle? Hopefully we can drag a few of our politicians over to Copenhagen, Manhattan or the Netherlands and show them how its done. Too many of Newcastle's "bike routes" are winding indirect back streets which most people still wouldn't see as being safe for cycling. Its time we got the message across that whats needed are well engineered safe direct routes designed to work for everyone i.e. what they build in those countries where more than a couple of % of people cycle.

The really odd thing about the ride was that the streets were completely empty, we barely saw a single car, I guess rush hour had finished and the evening economy hadn't got going yet. In many ways this was good because we had novice riders with us on unfamiliar bikes. Unfortunately I don't think they'll have got a real feel for the reality of cycling around Newcastle. Perhaps we should have arranged for them to be buzzed by a few crazy taxi drivers?

On balance the event has got to have done some good. At least these ladies and gents will have ridden the streets at least once, and they'll remember it next time they pass through at busier times and perhaps empathise more with those of us who do it every day. To hear talk of aiming for 25% bike mode share for short trips is great, so lets hope there is real political will to make it happen.