dumbass LCC bike lane on Stratford High Street

[jonesy]

The irony is that the study carried out after the initial trial period concluded that it was the motorcyclists themselves that were at increased risk, yet their lobby groups pressed for it anyway...

 

[deptfordmarmoset]

Bus lanes.

We should have more of them.
They are good for cycling, far better than cycle lanes and other farcilities and they are useful for buses .... Which is a good thing.
They also require a lot of space which means less space for cars ... Which is a good thing.
Cars don't tend to park in them either .... Which is a good thing.

There's an irony about London cycling and bus lanes, it seems. If I remember correctly, the widespread introduction of bus lanes on major routes happened prior to the introduction of congestion charging. Road journey times increased heavily for private and commercial vehicles at this time and this gave many people cause to reconsider how they were going to get around. The bus lanes were fundamental to this (first) step change in changing modes of transport. But it appears that a large increase in the number of cyclists happened at this time because they were allowed to use a reserved space that was never designed for them. Build a bus lane and cyclists appear....

 

[mjr]

same here. In Milton Keynes. Which, despite what the LCC bod is telling us, is almost devoid of cyclists. In fact, on six visits to MK this year, most of those visits spread over two days, and involving visits to 23C in Stony Stratford, we saw less than a dozen people riding bikes, And two of those were on the A5.

What LCC bod?

The data says there's more cyclists than average, so I wonder if it looks "almost devoid" because there's far far more infrastructure than average and so you've got a high-but-unremarkable number of cyclists mostly spread thinly over a vast network. If you were on roads, that would make you even less likely to see them in the newer parts of the city.

While not the bike-free-zone that some seem determined to say, I don't think MK is a good example for most of the country. Cambridge, London and to some extent Oxford are also open to accusations of special conditions causing high cycling (some restrictions motor ownership in the university cities and different highways management in London). So from the "top ten" that makes Norwich, York, Hull and Gosport more interesting to examine. http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/censu...ab-Which-areas-have-the-most-cycling-to-work- suggests at least some of those are because of low rainfall and flat cities... which I think it a superficial answer. The east may be drier but it's also colder/icier and riding up the likes of Grapes Hill or Mousehold Heath still isn't easy. Worth a closer look?

 

[mjr]

Bus lanes.

We should have more of them.
They are good for cycling, far better than cycle lanes and other farcilities and they are useful for buses .... Which is a good thing.
They also require a lot of space which means less space for cars ... Which is a good thing.
Cars don't tend to park in them either .... Which is a good thing.

I'm happy with bus lanes and recently called for some in King's Lynn town centre when we were being consulted on the bus station redesign. Wwe didn't get them - the councils are pushing ahead with their original plan of a too-narrow two-way shared-use next to parked cars leading to a badly-positioned toucan across to a no-through-motors road. We'll try to block the worst bits but it's an awful missed opportunity - and yes, the "we're designing only for the less confident cyclist" excuse was trotted out again.

There are three problems with them, though: it requires about an extra metre width per direction, what should happen at junctions (where bus lanes often vanish like cycle lanes do) and what should happen at bus stops? After all, it was a design to get bikes past stopped buses more safely that started this thread.

Cars do also use bus lanes far too often, but that's an enforcement problem, which I seem to agree with almost everyone here that more is needed. Also, while us old riders may be OK with them, is there much data about what cyclists in general and maybe-cyclists think about riding in bus lanes?

 

[jonesy]

I have a bit of a suspicion that a significant proportion of motorcyclists actively embrace the danger as part of their self image.

I agree, but that didn't stop them claiming that the trials had found it made it safer for motorcyclists, when no such conclusion was drawn. But then tfl did the same... Using.a mobile, so can't easily find the links, but to.compare and contrast the trial monitoring reports with tfl's press release would make an interesting comprehension test...

 

[Dan B]

My observation is that there is more over-compliance with bus lanes. Ones that are in force 07:00 - 19:00 tend to have people respecting them outside those hours.

I suspect this is because the hours often vary along the route and the signage is difficult to read at speed and after you've "jumped the queue" for 1000 metres nobody will let you back into the traffic lane when you realise you're approaching the 24 hour bit. Or the parked car.

 

[Dan B]

Cars do also use bus lanes far too often, but that's an enforcement problem, which I seem to agree with almost everyone here that more is needed. Also, while us old riders may be OK with them, is there much data about what cyclists in general and maybe-cyclists think about riding in bus lanes?

Of the non-cyclists who wish to cycle that I observed over a period of 25 minutes this morning, none of them (0) were cycling in bus lanes. Is that data? ;-)

 

[mjr]

Of the non-cyclists who wish to cycle that I observed over a period of 25 minutes this morning, none of them (0) were cycling in bus lanes. Is that data? ;-)

Yeah it's data, but neither particularly useful nor what I asked for!

There's mention of "wide bus lanes (if properly enforced)" in the "Get Britain Cycling" report but frustratingly no way to follow that suggestion back to any evidence and it didn't make it into the recomendations.

There have been some surveys of opinions of new and would-be cyclists (like "Climate Change and Transport Choices", "Barriers to taking up cycling in Hackney" and so on) but I don't remember and didn't find any asking about bus lanes and they don't seem to be suggested by new/would-bes as something that would encourage them to ride. Is there any evidence about this? It seems a surprising omission.

 

[zimzum42]

 

[zimzum42]

http://versus.com/en/london-vs-amsterdam

 

[zimzum42]

 

[mjr]

I forget what point those Amsterdam pictures were trying to prove, but they seem to show that Amsterdam has faster-flowing motor traffic and no way to build anything like the M25. Does that mean we should copy the Amsterdam solutions for London?

As I wrote earlier, I'd prefer to look at what works in high-cycling English places as much as what works abroad. Amsterdam and Copenhagen look different (although I've ridden in neither) so it's possible that what works here will look different to both.

 

[mjr]

Aha, I think it's that in Amsterdam

journeys may be longer, a big chunk of them are going to be using nice open not really urban in the London sense roads. They will be coming in from suburbs that are properly detached from the city in a way that London journeys aren't and because of that the ability to give them long contiguous (word of the day obviously) compulsory cycle lanes is greater. Of course they then let 50cc 'cars' drive on them which are an utter menace and you can't really go quickly because of the width. But we can ignore those bits if you'd prefer.

so those maps aren't really illustrating that point but a few minutes on www.osm.org standard layer illustrates the different structures, with Amsterdam area looking more like a series of urban islands (as I'd expect for a fenland/holland city) and London looking like a splat (as I'd expect for a river valley city). Doesn't say much about the 50cc or width and are Amsterdam area bike lanes much narrower than London mixed lanes that apparently people here are happy to whiz along?

And I write "mixed lanes" because cycle lanes are part of the road too.

Browsing osm a bit more and looking at high-cycling places, Cambridge and Oxford look to have the urban islands thing going on. Hull looks more solid and faces up to the Humber, but has a bit of the urban islands thing around it. Norwich and York don't have the island-y structure at all, but have relatively green river valleys cutting through them and cycle routes in/near those. Gosport is a peninsular with routes roughly along both coasts and over the bridge. Are waterway routes the key to cycling? So the EW London cycleway near the river may work well even if the design is merely not-lethal rather than particularly good.

 

[zimzum42]

I think we should build a network of cycling tunnels

 

[mjr]

We'll find out in a few years whether tunnels have made a difference in Bath ;-)