I am very lucky to live right next to the Rochdale Canal which is mainly good surfaced and very scenic.
I've used that to get between the Peak and the Dales a few times. I pick it up at Middleton, then come off at Todmorden for Mankinholes YHA, although I've also done the rest up to Sowerby Bridge. Middleton - Manchester I've only done on foot.
I never deliberately seek out cycle tracks when planning a route but if they are heading in my direction I am quite happy to make use of them.
I never plan to use them, not least because they aren't marked on the road atlas I use for touring. If I stumble upon one, the first thing I do is try to size up whether I it looks like one that'll lead me on a wild goose chase. I've had:
*The one at a roundabout on the edge of town with a signpost "Town Centre". Having waited several minutes to cross the road to it, it took me 200 yards to the other side of the roundabout where I then had to wait several minutes more just to cross back again.
*To lift the bike over the Armco in to the traffic lane in order to be able to make a right turn.
*Cycle paths signed to "City Centre" that spit you out in a residential street after100 yards, with nothing to navigate by.
cycle paths are the thin end of the wedge and once you take a cycle path you are acknowledging that you are a second class road user and the eventually will never be allowed back on the road network again
This. All they're doing is teaching motorists that cyclists have no place on the roads, and they get incandescent when they see money being spent on cycle paths and cyclists not using them. The public pressure to make cycle paths compulsory will just grow and grow until it becomes irresistible. It's coming, sure as God made little apples. There'll be no pressure to make them attractive to use then.
Safety and self preservation could always come before principle.
Have a read of John Adams'
Risk, you can get it for
free off his website these days.
Everybody has their own personal appetite for risk, some like lots, others don't like it much at all, but the one thing they all share in common is that they'll react negatively if you try to make them have either more or less than that which they're comfortable with, and behave in a way that seeks to reassert the level of risk that satisfies them. Hence motorists drive faster when they're wearing seatbelts, for example.
This leads to several problems:
1) People presume to tell someone with a different appetite how much risk they should want/have.
2) Allowing people to decide how much risk they have is fine whilst the person receiving the benefit is the same one incurring the costs, but with some risks the benefits accrue to the risk taker whilst the costs are inflicted on others, and people are 1000 times more sensitive to a risk inflicted on them compared with one that they choose for themselves.
3) Risk debates invariably start from the premise that risk is unwanted and undesirable, when all the evidence shows that this patently isn't the case. (For example, we needn't have made ourselves dependent on motor transport if we didn't think the risk of death was a price well worth paying in return for the independence that cars bring.) One person's freedom is another persons risk that they'll do something that's not in their interests, so a society without risk is one without any freedom too. Again, there's no evidence that that's what anyone wants.
There's all sorts of intereting stuff in Adams: accident migration, regression to mean, Willingness to Accept vs Willingness to Pay etc, etc.
nice ones on such as the Tissington Trail....
...are built on land vacated by trains and barges. The purpose built ones get relegated to waste land nobody wants between the gas works and the sewage farm, because there isn't the space or money to put them elsewhere.
I haven't got the stats to hand but I would think the number of people killed or seriously injured on cycle paths in comparison to on roads is probably miniscule.
It's John Franklin (author of Cyclecraft) who has collated all the studies on cycle path safety. You can find the
list on his website.
People believe that their primary risk is from overtaking traffic because that's what feels intimidating, and they like cycle paths insofar as they get them away from this, but they are mistaken, most accidents occur at junctions, because that's where vehicles cross each other's paths. The problem with cycle paths is that they make junctions less safe for the following reasons:
1) They increase the number of vehicles crossing one anothers paths:
2) They create confusion by increasing the junction complexity:
3) They dilute a driver's sense of responsibility by removing cyclists from "his" road
4) They reduce visibility:
5) They create needless conflict about who has right of way:
and
6) In the case of painted lanes, they reduce passing distance because they turn the issue from one of leaving cyclists enough room to wobble into one of territory and borders:
You probably heard that because a certain type of anti-cycleway cycling advocate likes to say such things. There's not really much evidence for it. Or against it, either, though. Having enough cycleways of any consistent standard to have enough incidents to make any useful generalisations has been pretty unusual until recently. I'll try to summarise what I remember:
There's a couple of half-cock analyses by John Franklin which claimed Milton Keynes's cycleways were more dangerous than the roads, but drilling deeper found (if I remember correctly) that he'd lumped all types of cycleways in together, from the bendy driveway-crossing residential ones to the much safer "grid ways", and he counted any crashes at a junction as for the cycleway not the road, plus he'd not adjusted for the types of cyclists: I lived there during the study time and it was mainly the fast roadies who still rode on roads — so experienced riders probably less likely to crash, but probably in bunches and at higher speeds when they do, mitigated by gloves, glasses and maybe other protective gear — with the rest of us using the adjacent redways, including the annoying underpasses swapping from one side of the road to the other.
There's also an oft-quoted study from about 1990 which was something to do with Lund University, looking at 1980s roadside cycleways somewhere, which claimed a 3x increase in danger for with-flow cycleways across side roads up to 11x for contra-flow at a major crossroads. That's the sort of study where the devil is probably in the detail, but there's no indication of assessing it for cycleway width, set back into the road signs, markings or kerbs or posts or whatever. It's contradicted by a recent study of the London CS routes, which found no significant difference, but that may also be down to a "safety in numbers" effect from attracting/concentrating cyclists onto the CS routes, or the small difference in speed (if any) between motorists and cyclists in London: it's difficult to left-hook someone if you're not going fast enough to pass them.
So, in short: it's complicated and both have studies to support them, but the older ones are very weak. Personally, I suspect it depends very much on the design of each cycleway. After all, a riverside cycleway with no roads crossing it is unlikely to have many cyclists left-hooked. A cycleway-carriageway junction with good intervisibility won't have many cyclists riding out in front of motorists who blatantly won't stop (no matter what the markings suggest) and will have more motorists see the cyclists approaching and hesitate to run them over while looking them in the eye! This is why we need good standards for common situations and a body like Active Travel England to actually enforce them!
So that's just three out of a total of 36 studies you've addressed, and then not with any evidence, you just make the assumptions that it suits you to make.
As Franklin says:
"
This list is intended to be without bias, but little evidence has been found to suggest that cyclists are safer on paths than on roads. If you know of other research, please contact John Franklin."
If you have the evidence, why not send it to him?
I think the Camden scheme is the only one that's been subjected to a Public Inquiry isn't it? Here are some of the Inspector's Conclusions from the Inquiry:
there is a fundamental paucity of evidence to support the efficacy of the trial
In terms of safety, whilst pedestrian casualties along the corridor have reduced there has been an increase in cycling casualties which is unexplained but cannot be attributed to an increase in cycle use; the Council acknowledge that at best the cycle use has not decreased.
In the absence of detailed monitoring......the Council acknowledge that the redistribution of traffic is likely to result in an increase in pollution.
Whilst there are health benefits for those who walk and cycle along the corridor there is no evidence of a modal shift such that there are wider health benefits.
In my view, although finely balanced, these disadvantages outweigh the advantages that will arise from making the Order permanent. As such the Order should not be made.
Aside from the blue cycleway signs at either end it would be the first footpath will standard highway warning signs along it.
