Build it and they will come?

[Bollo]

Or not.

Another of the Graun's excellent recent cycling articles - this one about Stevenage's unused cycle network.

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/sep/19/britains-1960s-cycling-revolution-flopped-stevenage

It's worth a read for no other reason than the bon mots from Eric Claxton, Stevenage's post war designer, who doesn't have kind words for the general driving population. Essentially, the article says that facilities will be ignored unless you hobble motorised road traffic.

To a lesser extent I've seen the same issue described above in Basingstoke, which has a kinda-half assed segregated network that interleaves with a fast, roundabout heavy central road network. Pretty much nobody cycles in Basingstoke. In contrast, Winchester has next to no cycling infrastructure, but it does have crap and slow traffic and no parking, which is what happens when you insist on allowing cars into an essentially medieval road layout (and the hills, the hills...). From my observations at least, I'd say the modal share of journeys in Winchester is far higher.

 

[mjr]

It's a popular idea on this forum but it's not quite true. Most of the places with good cycling networks have about average cycling levels, but when you spread that over a large cycleway network, it looks like no one.

What usually suffers more in those places is walking because the distances between things are cyclable but further than most people walk, so walking is done to the local shops and school if that, not to the town centre. Buses are obstructed by a lack of bus lanes through the main junctions, car congestion at them and detours off of the faster roads to wiggle through populated areas.

I remain unconvinced that you actually need to hobble motoring. It'll do that itself as a disorganised system of inefficient uses of space. We just need to avoid bending over backwards to facilitate it with the appearance of fast wide roads to bottlenecks of town centres, unless we're willing to bludgeon multi lane roads through historic areas, like the dual carriageway through Bristol's Queen Square.

 

[Bollo]

It's a popular idea on this forum but it's not quite true. Most of the places with good cycling networks have about average cycling levels, but when you spread that over a large cycleway network, it looks like no one.

Ooooh, you're in danger of playing games with statistics and population samples to argue your point. Averages are notoriously tricksey things as they hide an awful lot of context, even before you've tried to address all the biases and intangibles (for example, what's a 'good' network?).

And even with that statistical slight-of-hand you're still saying that infrastructure makes no difference to levels of cycling -> "Most of the places with good cycling networks have about average cycling levels"? Wow!

What usually suffers more in those places is walking because the distances between things are cyclable but further than most people walk, so walking is done to the local shops and school if that, not to the town centre. Buses are obstructed by a lack of bus lanes through the main junctions, car congestion at them and detours off of the faster roads to wiggle through populated areas.

Not sure I follow this.

I remain unconvinced that you actually need to hobble motoring. It'll do that itself as a disorganised system of inefficient uses of space. We just need to avoid bending over backwards to facilitate it with the appearance of fast wide roads to bottlenecks of town centres, unless we're willing to bludgeon multi lane roads through historic areas, like the dual carriageway through Bristol's Queen Square.

On this I agree. To a certain extent that's what's happened in Winchester - motor traffic has hobbled itself (and the buses) by exhausting the limited road space, parking capacity and expansion opportunities. Even here, I'd expect a decent cycling survey to show huge differences depending on the sample points. Journeys to and from the station would be high (lots of London commuters, limited and expensive parking, good storage facilities), while journeys across and directly around the city centre would be low (vile one-way system, tight roads).

 

[mjr]

Ooooh, you're in danger of playing games with statistics and population samples to argue your point. Averages are notoriously tricksey things as they hide an awful lot of context, even before you've tried to address all the biases and intangibles (for example, what's a 'good' network?).

Oh sure, loads of this is far too open to interpretation, for reasons of crap data that I explain below. The article linked in the OP is doing it too, IMO.

Actually, I don't commit the population geography sin in that cartoon, because where I refer to "cycling levels", I mean the % of population who cycle (usually Active People Survey), which of course largely takes population distribution into account (not completely, but do people prefer to cycle in dense cities or open roads anyway? I doubt everyone on this forum likes the same thing and we don't really know what the population prefers... once again, it's complicated )

And even with that statistical slight-of-hand you're still saying that infrastructure makes no difference to levels of cycling -> "Most of the places with good cycling networks have about average cycling levels"? Wow!

Not exactly no difference. Merely that it's helpful but not sufficient. I feel you can't create mass cycling with infrastructure alone, but you can certainly suppress cycling levels by not providing any (especially if routes go through complex junctions that are hostile places to cycle).

Also, I slipped up and should have written "those places" or "the cycling-friendly new towns" or something like that: Stevenage, Milton Keynes and so on. Their problem is mainly that motoring was prioritised and facilitated to a point where it became a default choice, a habit: the town looks like you're expected to motor, so people motored. In the case of Milton Keynes, front-line promotional materials explained how to navigate by car (it was going to be N/S/E/W/C on the roadsigns, then as you got closer, you'd see the first part of the postcode on the signs, then district names within that postcode) but not by any other method.

The cycle networks of those towns may be good compared to the rest of England but still distinctly secondary, because even Claxton in Stevenage was probably working plans set out for motorists first. Claxton only became lead engineer there in 1962, 16 years after its designation as a new town, 3 years after its town centre opened, which doesn't quite fit with how most people would understand het Gruaniad's description of him as "lead designer of post-war Stevenage". Longest-serving lead engineer, possibly. But wouldn't "lead designer" make most people think he led the original design?

I suspect motorists-first was just ingrained in planners and designers of the era when the new towns were designed (1946-1970). It goes right down to little things like streets having name signs only where motorists can enter them and not where cycleways do. So in most new towns, you end up cycling up and down artificial inclines and being hidden in trenches or behind trees at the edge of the highway corridors, while the motorists generally get the flatter route, central portion of the highways and priority where the routes cross on the same level. Look at even the picture from the Ladybird book in the Guardian article: the NS motorways are straight lines, while the NS cycleway goes E along half a side of a square, then W along half the far side of it: "cycle priority route"? It doesn't look like it. It looks like cyclists are expected to travel the longer/harder route between two points, yet again.

Not sure I follow this.

Which bit? I'm happy to try to clarify.

Even here, I'd expect a decent cycling survey to show huge differences depending on the sample points.

Yes, most of the cycling data we have is pretty weak:

• Particularly bad for cycling is the way most towns/cities have traffic survey cordons set only on the A/B road entrances, while any cycle-only entrances (including cycleways alongside those A/B roads IIRC) are ignored.
• Automatic counters on cycleways are being left to fail and not repaired/replaced during council budgets cuts - and they only compare one point on one route with itself over time, not normally showing if cyclists have merely been diverted to or away from the counter by things like obstructions on the cycleway or the opening of a better alternative route.
• The Active People Survey gives a % of population who cycle regularly in a given area, which is a bigger number than the modal share or any counter, so I suspect it's probably more robust for year-to-year comparisons of the UK's generally low cycling levels, but it's still only a survey (so we can't get down below borough/district level safely IIRC) and there's no comparable Inactive People Survey with a motoring % prevalence.
• The National Travel Survey makes it easier to compare modes but again it's a survey and it's also biased against cycling by classifying trips by "main mode in terms of distance" so most bike-train/bus-bike and park-and-pedal trips aren't counted as cycling trips.
• The Census Travel to Work question covers everyone but only journeys to work and I think also misclassifies multimodal trips in the same way NTS.

Now I hope @srw or someone will point out any bits of that I've misremembered, or other good data sources

Oh yeah, about the article's statistical sleights of hand - it doesn't say where it gets its town-level "cycling modal shares" figures from. Most often, "modal shares" means they're using traffic survey cordon counts, which always look worse for a town with many cycleways compared to one with few, for the reasons I mentioned above. The article also compares the "modal shares" of "some neighbouring towns" with the "% of the town’s residents [who] cycle each day" for Stevenage at one point, which seems rather naughty. In short, the article's number work is almost an innumerate mess trying to make the stats look like they support its central claim - it's far worse than anything I do

 

[Ian H]

When you got to your destination, were there any decent facilities for leaving your bike?

 

[mjr]

I think that is a key factor which is often overlooked. It's not necessarily the route but the facilities (or lack thereof) at the destination.

I know we like to care for our bikes, but do many people care that much? Most people seem comfortable locking bikes up to stuff that I dislike, such as handrails, fences, lampposts and larger roadsigns, and in a local survey, nearly twice as many people wanted route improvements as parking improvements - but the top request was lighting the unlit routes, which may be partly because the survey was carried out in February/March (I think).

 

[mjr]

I can talk about the organisations I've worked for the and the surveys we've done. Most people were interested in somewhere safe to store their bike and somewhere to change.

Sure, but would you agree that workplaces will have different priorities to many other cycling destinations? I expect secure parking will be wanted even more by cyclists at NHS sites which have staff leaving early/late, as well as the public legitimately on the site most of the day, but at the other extreme, few shoppers seem to that care much about what they have to lock to for a few minutes, as long as there's something (although campaigners do often prioritise making commercial sites comply with the parking standards because they're pretty visible examples).

 

[Ming the Merciless]

The modal share is based on cycling to work. I wonder how many of the residents in Stevenage actually work there rather than commute elsewhere?. The idea that residents who live there are unaware of the cycleways is laughable, and blatantly untrue. They may be unaware of their total length but that is a different question. How many miles of motorways do we have? Don't know but doesnt mean a person is unaware of motorways.

The modal share is also from a 2010 survey. Does anyone have links to that survey and how it was carried out? I cycled daily to work on those cycleways back in 2010 and was not surveyed once. It was also a bad winter that year, the second in a row after many mild snow and ice free winters before.

 

[mjr]

The modal share is based on cycling to work. I wonder how many of the residents in Stevenage actually work there rather than commute elsewhere?. The idea that residents who live there are unaware of the cycleways is laughable, and blatantly untrue. They may be unaware of their total length but that is a different question. How many miles of motorways do we have? Don't know but doesnt mean a person is unaware of motorways.

But as long as you know motorways exist and where your nearest access is, you can be reasonably confident that the signs and so on will help you get to where you want to go: first you follow "The NORTH", then "York" and so on... but does that work on Stevenage's cycleways?

Once again resorting to the new town I know better, it took over 20 years for them to fix that basic fault in the Milton Keynes Redway system signs and start adding route numbers, but I think even now after 50 years they still haven't added N/S/E/W directions or non-MK eventual destinations to many route signs. You end up district-hopping, similar to how cyclists in most of England end up village-hopping if they want to use roadsigns to follow routes away from the busiest roads - but motorists aren't expected to know the names of all the districts they pass by. Actually, navigation in MK is slightly worse than village-hopping because the faster redways avoid the district centres so you need to spot when to switch to following cross-city route numbers, before you end up in the centre of the first district!

In King's Lynn, one of our travel-smart advisers encountered someone who had recently moved to the area, tried cycling to work and given up. Discussing it, it turned out that he had tried simply cycling the route he drove, which was:

(actually slightly worse as that road into the industrial estate from the east wasn't yet built, so you'd have to go around the roundabout at the bottom of that map section)
rather than using the cycleways:

Maybe that wouldn't happen so much any more with smartphones, cycling sat nav apps and so on, but 10 years ago? I could believe that residents could easily be unaware of how the cycleways connected and could be used to get around.

The modal share is also from a 2010 survey. Does anyone have links to that survey and how it was carried out? I cycled daily to work on those cycleways back in 2010 and was not surveyed once. It was also a bad winter that year, the second in a row after many mild snow and ice free winters before.

Yes, it would be interesting to know how it was carried out, sample size and error bounds. You may have had only a small chance of being surveyed, and if it was a simple counter, maybe infrared, you may not even have noticed being counted.

 

[Bollo]

Oh sure, loads of this is far too open to interpretation, for reasons of crap data that I explain below. The article linked in the OP is doing it too, IMO.

Actually, I don't commit the population geography sin in that cartoon, because where I refer to "cycling levels", I mean the % of population who cycle (usually Active People Survey), which of course largely takes population distribution into account (not completely, but do people prefer to cycle in dense cities or open roads anyway? I doubt everyone on this forum likes the same thing and we don't really know what the population prefers... once again, it's complicated )


Not exactly no difference. Merely that it's helpful but not sufficient. I feel you can't create mass cycling with infrastructure alone, but you can certainly suppress cycling levels by not providing any (especially if routes go through complex junctions that are hostile places to cycle).

Also, I slipped up and should have written "those places" or "the cycling-friendly new towns" or something like that: Stevenage, Milton Keynes and so on. Their problem is mainly that motoring was prioritised and facilitated to a point where it became a default choice, a habit: the town looks like you're expected to motor, so people motored. In the case of Milton Keynes, front-line promotional materials explained how to navigate by car (it was going to be N/S/E/W/C on the roadsigns, then as you got closer, you'd see the first part of the postcode on the signs, then district names within that postcode) but not by any other method.

The cycle networks of those towns may be good compared to the rest of England but still distinctly secondary, because even Claxton in Stevenage was probably working plans set out for motorists first. Claxton only became lead engineer there in 1962, 16 years after its designation as a new town, 3 years after its town centre opened, which doesn't quite fit with how most people would understand het Gruaniad's description of him as "lead designer of post-war Stevenage". Longest-serving lead engineer, possibly. But wouldn't "lead designer" make most people think he led the original design?

I suspect motorists-first was just ingrained in planners and designers of the era when the new towns were designed (1946-1970). It goes right down to little things like streets having name signs only where motorists can enter them and not where cycleways do. So in most new towns, you end up cycling up and down artificial inclines and being hidden in trenches or behind trees at the edge of the highway corridors, while the motorists generally get the flatter route, central portion of the highways and priority where the routes cross on the same level. Look at even the picture from the Ladybird book in the Guardian article: the NS motorways are straight lines, while the NS cycleway goes E along half a side of a square, then W along half the far side of it: "cycle priority route"? It doesn't look like it. It looks like cyclists are expected to travel the longer/harder route between two points, yet again.


Which bit? I'm happy to try to clarify.


Yes, most of the cycling data we have is pretty weak:

• Particularly bad for cycling is the way most towns/cities have traffic survey cordons set only on the A/B road entrances, while any cycle-only entrances (including cycleways alongside those A/B roads IIRC) are ignored.
• Automatic counters on cycleways are being left to fail and not repaired/replaced during council budgets cuts - and they only compare one point on one route with itself over time, not normally showing if cyclists have merely been diverted to or away from the counter by things like obstructions on the cycleway or the opening of a better alternative route.
• The Active People Survey gives a % of population who cycle regularly in a given area, which is a bigger number than the modal share or any counter, so I suspect it's probably more robust for year-to-year comparisons of the UK's generally low cycling levels, but it's still only a survey (so we can't get down below borough/district level safely IIRC) and there's no comparable Inactive People Survey with a motoring % prevalence.
• The National Travel Survey makes it easier to compare modes but again it's a survey and it's also biased against cycling by classifying trips by "main mode in terms of distance" so most bike-train/bus-bike and park-and-pedal trips aren't counted as cycling trips.
• The Census Travel to Work question covers everyone but only journeys to work and I think also misclassifies multimodal trips in the same way NTS.

Now I hope @srw or someone will point out any bits of that I've misremembered, or other good data sources

Oh yeah, about the article's statistical sleights of hand - it doesn't say where it gets its town-level "cycling modal shares" figures from. Most often, "modal shares" means they're using traffic survey cordon counts, which always look worse for a town with many cycleways compared to one with few, for the reasons I mentioned above. The article also compares the "modal shares" of "some neighbouring towns" with the "% of the town’s residents [who] cycle each day" for Stevenage at one point, which seems rather naughty. In short, the article's number work is almost an innumerate mess trying to make the stats look like they support its central claim - it's far worse than anything I do

Thanks for that detailed response. I think you identified the bit where I didn't quite follow and you've clarified it here.

I posted the article up because, for all it's failings, the Graun is the only mass-circulation media that's trying to report on cycling and wider transport issues with anything like a grown-up voice. It's a piece of journalism that attempts to tell a coherent story and, while you can take issue with some of the conclusions, at least its out there to be debated at a few levels above the Hate Mail's cyclingmenacemustbebannedandroadtax. I think it deserves support for that.

I've tried to read and understand what you've written and there are elements where I think we agree. You've gone into some detail about how the statistics are collected and I'll take your word for it, but you imply that nearly every counting mechanism is inherently biased against capturing the actual number of cycle journeys. Even if that were the case, it's very unlikely that there's an entire cohort of invisible cyclists on the paths of Stevenage, Milton Keynes and (risking anecdote as evidence) Basingstoke. Numbers are low ...... because they're actually low. Even with more representative statistics or more a more carefully stated hypothesis, I think you'd struggle to show significant causation (not just correlation) between the availability of segregated cycle facilities and increased cycling numbers based on any UK town or city.

You've offered up some reasons for why that might be - piecemeal coverage is the most convincing. Lack of signage, inclines under roads, parallel facilities with roads and the rest aren't as persuasive. Even in the Netherlands, there are plenty of feitspads that follow the edge of trunk roads and have lights every 100 meters or so to let the motorised traffic flow. I was in Utrecht two years ago and nearly missed the ferry back from Hook of Holland because it took me the best part of an hour to move a few kms due to the constant stop-start at intersections.

Blaming lack of signage suggest that people use bikes as they might cars to venture to places unknown. In reality most utility cycling would be done on routes and in areas that are familiar to the rider. It's conflating walking to the shops with hiking. They both involve the act of walking, but I don't need a compass and map to go to the local Aldis!

Where I do agree is that people drive rather than cycle or walk through habit that's supported, or at least not challenged, by the existing transport infrastructure and policy. If you ask people why they don't cycle, they'll usually (anecdote again!) tell you because it's too dangerous and they would if there were better facilities. You take them at their word, build the facilities and nowt happens. That's because they've lied, or rather they've reached out for a ready excuse. Like saying that they'll vote for Hillary and not the orange shite-gibbon, people don't want to be judged.

The real answer more often than not is that they can't be arsed. The real trick to getting more people out of cars and potentially on to bikes (or public transport or their legs) will be to make them arsed, and the only effective lever is something that (no pun) drives them away from the car, rather than anything that in theory makes cycling more attractive. Unfortunately there's nothing like the political will or social pressure to make this happen anytime soon, outside London at least.

 

[GrumpyGregry]

They built it in Stevenage, as they did in most new towns. People came, they used it, extensively, they prospered, they could afford cars, they fell for the only poor failures ride bicycles line, they bought cars, the left.

cph was a grid locked mess, strangled by the car. In the seventies the modal share was 10%, this in the captial city which, sans motors, is probably the most hospitable capital in which to cycle in the developed world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycling_in_Copenhagen - I've lived there. If you build it, and build it right, and sign post it, and have lots of cycle parking, they do come.