Sustrans Handbook for cycle friendly design - a poor design manual which sets very low standards

Not only does this Sustrans route consist of nothing but loose
pebbles, there's a gate on it which I could not pass without
removing my bike trailer.

Sustrans (the name means sustainable transport) is a high profile campaigning organisation in the UK. They have a long history, having been around for 37 years. It might seem surprising that an organisation which claims to have been working on behalf of cyclists for so long should be criticised by many cyclists, but it's very common to hear their work criticised and there are good reasons why. The Sustrans name is not associated with high quality infrastructure.

A common problem with Sustrans signs is that they tell
you the same thing in more than one direction. That's
no help if you're lost. Which way should I go now?

Several years have now passed since Sustrans proudly announced that they had built up a 10000 mile network. Unfortunately, those of us who have tried to ride along it know that this in many cases this achievement came about as a result of prioritizing quantity over quality. It makes for a good headline, and this perhaps works well for fund-raising, but the result doesn't make for good cycling. When I lived in the UK, I tried to use Sustrans' network of infrastructure myself and was disappointed more often than not. When I rode from Land's End to John o'Groats, I tried on several occasions to use the National Cycling Network infrastructure, and each time it caused a problem. In the worst case it nearly caused me to crash so at that point I switched to a dual carriageway A-road for my own safety. This is not how it should be.

A photo from nearly ten years ago. From this point, turn left and take the Sustrans NCN route along 60 mph country lanes to Newmarket, 15 miles without many cars. Turn right to take the direct route to the same place, which is just 6 miles away if you ride on a busy 70 mph road with lots of cars. This has still not been improved.

Sustrans' attempts at building infrastructure often include such features as paths shared with pedestrians, on-road cycle-lanes shared with buses, narrow widths, rough surfaces, places where it's necessary to dismount, and many obstructions. These make progress by bicycle slow (so much for a practical means of transport). Where Sustrans routes consist of nothing but sign posts on country lanes, these almost invariably result in a long detour. These are not characteristics of proper cycling infrastructure.

Fast forward to today
I could spend a lot of time writing about past errors of Sustrans but this blog post is not about those. What I want to write about today is the new Sustrans "Handbook for cycle friendly design", which sadly is not nearly the document that it should be.

Cycle training cannot
result in mass cycling

Sustrans' document starts with a foreword which includes sort of text that we've come to expect from any document about cycling. There are many nice words about "cleaner healthier travel", "public health" and "liveability" and the introduction ends by talking about doing "all that we can to enable travel to be both healthier and better for the environment".

A few pages later the document starts to talk about "understanding user needs" with the illustration to the right being prominent. This shows "primary and secondary riding positions", primary meaning of course taking up a position in front of motor vehicles in order to control the following traffic.

Sustrans say they are designing for "the less confident cyclist" but this apparently means "a sensible 12 year old [...] trained to Bikeability level 2". While Dutch children have cycled to school as well as for other purposes for many years before they reach the age of 12, the needs of younger British children to be able to do the same are not being addressed.

It should be noted that Bikeability training in the UK is not associated with a higher rate of cycling. Training cannot result in true mass cycling because it does not address the fundamental issues which face cyclists. In particular it does not address subjective safety issues so parents won't allow their children to cycle even if they have been trained.

The importance of a fine grid of infrastructure appears to have made it into the Sustrans manual (they call it a mesh) and it's illustrated by a map which similar to those you'd see in the Netherlands, showing a primary grid which is linked by a secondary and third level grid. The language of what is required is in the Sustrans document, but what follows falls well short of the extremely high quality and convenience required in order to attract people to cycle.

Sustrans emphasize Shared Space
features early in the document

The first section on street design emphasises Shared Space designs, though in the Netherlands these have been found to be dangerous and to discourage less confident cyclists.

Bizarrely, their diagram to illustrate "good street design" shows that roads on which there was space for a cycle lanes should lose those lanes as they approach a roundabout which itself has no clear markings. This will generate conflict and danger just as it does at similar designs which have been tried in the Netherlands.

Two out of three are dangerous

The Sustrans design for "road humps" and "speed cushions" has proven to be dangerous in that drivers often pull sharply to the left before reaching such a traffic calming feature in order to avoid all four wheels going over the traffic calming feature. By doing this, they often pull into the path of cyclists.

Similarly, the central island design is lethal. Sustrans suggest painting bicycle symbols on the road, but this paint will not prevent drivers from pulling into the path of cyclists in order to pass the pinch point. We have pinch-points like this in the Netherlands, but not with cyclists are on the road. They are used at entrances to villages and to assist people to cross the road.

Advanced stop lines ? In 2014 ?

We move on to Advanced Stop Lines (Bike Boxes). This infrastructure claims to give cyclists a head start at traffic lights, but they're associated with cyclists stuck in the feeder lane when the light goes green being injured by moving vehicles, especially when they turn across their path. These are very much out of fashion in the Netherlands and those which still exist are relics of the 1980s. We have none remaining here in Assen. ASLs are no longer built in the Netherlands because they are an inferior way of designing a traffic light junction. We have no ASLs left in Assen and I have long recommended that these are one of those examples of infrastructure which should not be copied.

It's already proven to be dangerous
in Southampton and lethal in
Denmark. Why duplicate this
elsewhere in the UK. There are
better, safer designs for traffic
light junctions.

Under the banner of "innovative cycle facilities" we see "hybrid cycle tracks" which sadly found their way to the UK as a result of a misunderstanding when visitors from Cambridge saw a single very old cycle-path in Groningen and though it looked achievable. This is not something to copy. We also see "armadillos", much criticised in London and barely resembling the very oldest infrastructure here in Assen.

But the worst of their "innovative" facilities by some margin is the much criticised Southampton two-stage turn. This attracted criticism well before it was built because it was no more than a poor copy of a type of junction which is not only inefficient for cyclists to use but which has also proven to be lethal. Denmark has many junctions of a similar type and has worked for years to try to make them safer. Nevertheless, a relatively developed form of this type of junction killed seven Copenhageners last year. Is that the type of innovation that the UK needs ?

Sustrans asks for British cyclists to have
cycle-lanes narrower than the Dutch build

Sustrans then moves on to on-road cycle-lanes. The Netherlands has few on-road lanes because of the many problems which they cause. I've documented those problems together with the required widths in the Netherlands. I don't suppose it will surprise many readers to find out that Sustrans has much lower standards than do the Dutch.

Sustrans propose mere 2 m wide cycle-lanes as being adequate even with traffic flowing at 40 mph. At these speeds, proper high-quality segregated paths are required.

Gilbert Road Cambridge is used as a
"good" example by Sustrans. Actually
it was a missed opportunity to do
something better.

I was also amused to find that Sustrans had includes a photo of Gilbert Road in Cambridge as an example of good design. I know this road well. It was part of my commuting route for many years when we lived in Cambridge and the rework which has been there is to a far lower standard than was possible. Gilbert Road in Cambridge is a prime example of where a very much better solution was possible but cyclists ended up with nothing more than narrow on-road lanes largely as a result of not understanding what was possible and having low ambitions for improvement.

What's more, there is the suggestion that building a cycle-lane between lanes for motor vehicles is a good idea. This is one of several points in the Sustrans manual which I've criticised on several occasions before, including in my recent summary of cycle-lane problems. This dangerous idea keeps being proposed in inferior design guides from around the world. A cycle-lane like this almost invites motorists to turn across the path of cyclists and it is not a safe place to be. Not for an experienced cyclist and also not for the 12 year old with Bikeability training which Sustrans claim to be designing for. There are far better, far more convenient designs of traffic light junctions than those which Sustrans seems to be aware of.

Buses and bikes should never be mixed

Sustrans appears to think that buses and bikes can share lanes satisfactorily. This is a combination which never works well for reasons which any cyclist and any bus driver will understand. While the average speed of buses and bikes across town may be similar, cycles travel at their average speed while buses make that average by travelling relatively quickly between stops. The result is that bikes hold up buses and buses hold up bikes. Quite apart from the potential for lethal results from genuine error where you have a very heavy and large vehicle sharing a lane with a vulnerable cyclist, the tensions that result from this "sharing" often bubble over into deliberate violence. Just two years ago an incident due to an angry bus driver in Bristol, the home of Sustrans, made the national news in the UK. This conflict must be designed out of city streets, not encouraged by bad design.

The only way to achieve harmony between buses and bikes is to keep them apart.

Cyclists need all the help they can get when approaching and
negotiating a roundabout. Stopping the cycle-lane early so that
cyclists can "mix with traffic" is not a solution. Click to find
out how the Dutch build safe roundabouts.

The roundabout designs proposed by Sustrans are also compromised. There is great emphasis on "continental design" and emphasis on changing the geometry of the roundabout. In fact, what keeps Dutch cyclists safe on roundabouts is not the geometry, which varies considerably, but that bicycles are not ridden in the main traffic lanes.

i.e. The very safest designs of roundabouts for cyclists are safe precisely because cyclists don't use the roundabout.

Sustrans are not the first to make this mistake. It's a misunderstanding which has come up repeatedly with British road designers. I had a prolonged online conversation with a planner in Bedford in 2011 about this exact misconception. Regardless of this, Bedford has more recently gone one 'better' and proposed a turbo-roundabout with on-road cycling, and Sustrans amongst other campaigning organisations actually approved of this as good practice.

Turbo roundabouts are absolutely not for cyclists to ride around. They are a special design of motor vehicle specific roundabout intended to speed up traffic around such places as motorway exits. Ideally, cyclists won't even see these types of road junctions.

Mini-roundabouts give little reaction
time and can be more dangerous than
full sized roundabouts for cyclists

Mini-roundabouts are also featured in the Sustrans guide. I know I'm not alone in finding these to be less than safe. Earlier this year, my mother was injured cycling across a mini roundabout in the UK, just a few miles away from Sustrans HQ in Bristol. I've also had incidents in the past, and there were fatalities at mini roundabouts near where we lived in Cambridge. These are not good cycling infrastructure.

No. Don't do this.

When we come to the discussion of segregated infrastructure, Sustrans' old problems come to the fore. As I've tried to explain in the past, bollards should be used sparingly. The last photo at that link shows how the defunct Cycling England had much the same ideas about good practice as does Sustrans, but this not only costs more than would a single bollard which was adequate to stop people from driving cars along here, it also is dangerous for cyclists and restricts access by people with tricycles, cargo bicycles, trailers, or by people with disabilities. It is that latter group who I think need to be thought of most, and I'll come to this again in the conclusion below.

What Sustrans thinks of as an off-road facility is interesting. Note that we don't have any shared use paths in the Netherlands because they cause conflict and are not efficient to use but Sustrans expresses a strong preference for shared use on the grounds that it "maximises the usable width". As we're on the subject of widths, what do they suggest ? It turns out that a 3 m wide path is considered to be adequate for a main cycling route. That is thought to be enough for two way cycling combined with 2 way walking. 2.5 m and even 2 m widths are also considered to be adequate in some situations.

Sustrans recommend just a 2.5 m
wide bidirectional cycle-path
through underpasses. This is
very narrow. They also suggest
long subways are permissible.
All the dimensions are below
Dutch standards for tunnels.
There's also little consideration
of social safety.

A two metre wide path is simply not wide enough to allow for safe use in both directions at once, even without pedestrians also using the path.

Contrast this with the situation where we live in the Netherlands. We have mostly 4 m wide cycle-paths for bidirectional use, narrowing sometimes to 3 m wide for secondary routes. These are usually parallel with a 1.5 to 2 m wide path for pedestrians. For single direction cycle-paths, 2.5 m wide is normal, again parallel with a 1.5 m to 2 m wide path for pedestrians. The usable width is not being "maximised" by Sustrans' guidelines, but actually it is being set very narrow indeed.

Sustrans dimensions for segregated
paths would be OK if this was for
single direction use. A 2 m width for
bidirectional use is just not enough.

But wait, they're also talking about equestrians using the same paths. "Greater width" is then required. But horses should not be on the same paths as cyclists and pedestrians for reasons other than width. Horses are scared easily and that can lead to conflict and danger, and they leave behind something that no pedestrian wants to stand in and no cyclist wants to ride over. Horses need separate paths from cyclists and cyclists need separate paths from pedestrians. That's what we have here in the Netherlands.

Sustrans have been building inadequately wide infrastructure for an overly broad user-group for many years and of course they have seen the conflicts that result from cramming people onto narrow badly designed infrastructure. This document even suggests a way of trying to deal with it: 'On unsegregated paths consideration should be given to the erection of courtesy signs such as “cyclists give way to pedestrians” or “share with care”.' Needless to say, well designed paths do not need such signs.

Then there are the signs. Some of those shown as good examples  also are simply not good enough. The one on the left is hard to spot (from experience) and doesn't actually tell you where you're going or why you should follow that arrow. Perhaps your destination is in the opposite direction.

The one on the right illustrates another problem. This road junction has been designed in a way that it is so confusing to use that people require a sign just to tell people how to negotiate the junction. It doesn't tell the user anything about their destination unless that happens to be "Canal" or "Ashton Road".

And I've even pictures two of the others, which say "Please give way to pedestrians in path", raising the question of whether this would be necessary if the infrastructure had been designed to remove conflict between user groups instead of creating it, "Use diversion when route ahead flooded", which raises the questions of why there is a cycle path which floods and whether this is really an issue which should be "solved" by putting up a sign.

Who are Sustrans designing for ?
I mentioned briefly above that people with physical disabilities particularly have an enormous amount to gain from a real grid of high quality infrastructure. But that, sadly, is not what Sustrans are planning to enable. They've adopted the language of providing a real grid but their standards aim far too low to provide infrastructure which can be used by the entire population.

Sustrans labelled this photo
"inadequate drainage". I'm
more interested in how you
get through that gap with
this type of bicycle.

By concentrating on their mythical able-bodied 12 year old with Bikeability training, who they think can negotiate all types of roundabouts from mini to turbo, who can avoid being crushed at two stage turns, swerves easily around bollards, is un-phased by cycling in a narrow cycle-lane alongside 40 mph traffic, or indeed a lane with traffic on both sides of his lane, who has no concerns about social safety, likes sharing space with buses, pedestrians and cars as well as with horses, who doesn't mind routes being indirect and inefficient and has no problem at all with having to stop and read a sign just to find out how to cross one junction, they've seemingly forgotten about everyone else.

The designs that Sustrans are promoting are not good enough to get the masses to ride bicycles. They're also not good enough for confident cyclists to make the efficient journeys which everyone who cycles wants to be able to make.

Cycling should be for everyone. Able-bodied, disabled, young, old, fast or slow. Infrastructure for cycling should be designed for all these people to use safely at once. There should never be a choice between a safe option and a fast option. This is not a dream, it's reality just over here on the other side of the North Sea.

I think it's notable that while the best practice in cycling is not to be found in the UK, the references section of Sustrans new handbook includes only UK sources. Sustrans' references section tells me where to find their own publication about dealing with Japanese Knotweed, but there's no reference to the world's best practice cycling design documentation from CROW.

It's not just CROW that they're ignoring. We've offered to help to educate Sustrans planners about best practice but ten years have gone by without any interest being shown by Sustrans. We're still here. We can still help. We can show you better than ever what best practice really looks like as well as explaining the pitfalls that you must avoid. But we can only do so if you talk to us.

Other new guidance

Several of my older photos are used
in the camcycle guidance, one from
2008 fills most of the front cover.
The document could have benefited
from newer ideas and newer photos
but these were not sought.

As well as the Sustrans handbook, two other documents have appeared in the UK which seek to offer guidance on cycle facility design. Making Space for Cycling produced mainly by Cambridge Cycling Campaign and Space for Cycling from CTC. Both of these are much shorter documents than that from Sustrans and neither of them are so prescriptive as Sustrans' handbook. Both of these other guides fall short mostly by omission so I see them as much less harmful than the Sustrans handbook.

Both CTC and Camcycle have used photos from and around Assen, some of the photos used even feature Judy and myself. This should not be taken to indicate our endorsement. While both of these are improvements over Sustrans' work, neither of them aims quite high enough. For instance, some of the photos of Assen used as good examples are of infrastructure replaced years ago, there are references to hybrid cycle lanes and requirements for widths are inadequate.

It's also worth pointing out that not one of the three new documents discusses the safest roundabouts or the safest traffic light designs from the Netherlands. In all three cases they are promoting inferior designs which are less convenient as well as less safe for cyclists. Read more about good junction design.

From "Fast Forward" onwards, the illustrations and photos above come from Sustrans' handbook except for those on the cover of Making Space for Cycling, the largest of which is my photo.

A reader confirmed that the "inadequate drainage" barrier still exists and pointed out where it is.

Has Britain progressed in the last six years ?

This is the first of a three part series. See also "Has London progressed in the last six years?" and "Has Assen progressed in the last six years?"

A view from the ferry - The white cliffs of Dover are infinitely more attractive than the view of Dunkirk at the opposite side of the channel.

I spent most of the last two weeks of October in the UK and it gave me much to think about. It's three years since I last wrote about my thoughts after visiting the UK. As I've now lived in the Netherlands for twice as long as I had when I wrote the previous impression, it's time for an update.

In the first week, we first visited my family in the South West (Somerset) and then Judy's family in the East of England (Lincolnshire) before returning home to Assen. With four people aboard, a motor car is by far the most straight-forward and economical way of making the journey. I'm a reluctant driver but convenience won out in this instance. That's why we drove our car nearly 2500 km in one week in October - a huge increase on last year when all our journeys by car added up to just 2044 km.

The driving experience

This is the road which awaits both drivers and cyclists arriving in Dover by ferry. It's not inviting by bicycle and few people cycle here. When hundreds of vehicles leave the ferry at the same time and each is trying to get out of Dover faster than the next one, it looks a lot busier than this.

Driving across several countries was interesting. Our route took us across a good part of the Netherlands, from one side of Belgium to the other and through a small part of France before crossing the channel and driving a considerable distance in England. There are many contrasts.

British drivers genuinely are treated
worse than their counterparts elsewhere
but not necessarily in the ways they
think. I don't understand why parking
spaces in the UK are so narrow and
awkward to use. In many car parks it's
almost impossible for drivers and
passengers to use their doors without
risk of contact with an adjacent car,
wall or concrete post. None of these
cars is ours, BTW, so don't blame me
for the slightly crooked parking.

I've come to expect dangerous stunts from Belgian drivers and was not disappointed on this occasion (apologies to Belgian readers). However, British drivers have easily the worst lane discipline, seemingly being allergic to the "slow lane". Driving in that way effectively reduces a three lane motorway to two lanes and leads to more congestion.

Britain has the lowest motorway speed limits. 70 mph is a mere 112 km/h while speed limits in France, Belgium and the Netherlands are generally 120 km/h or 130 km/h. Britain also seemingly has the worst traffic jams. We found ourselves in heavy traffic, often slowing down or stopping, for the entire 370 km distance between Dover and Somerset along the M20, M25, M4 and M5. This was on a Sunday afternoon and early evening, not at a peak time.

However, it's not all bad for the British motorist. British petrol was the cheapest that we found on our journey. It was slightly cheaper than in Belgium and about 10% cheaper than in the Netherlands at the moment. We made sure we filled up our petrol tank before boarding the ferry to return home. So let's have fewer complaints about the cost of motoring and perhaps more about the ridiculously pokey car parking spaces in Britain.

Finally, with regard to driving, only Britain has Cat's Eyes. These are a wonderful invention which improve the safety of Britain's roads after dark and in bad weather. Other countries should take note !

Counting bikes

In Burnham-on-Sea, Sustrans simply
gave up and told cyclists to make an
inconvenient detour onto the beach.
I tried cycling here as a child. Bicycle
tyres sink into the sand and salty sand
damages your bike.

We didn't cycle at all on this trip but Judy and I did try to count every cyclist we saw. Our total came to just 20 in six days.

As you might expect, sporty "cyclists" in the UK almost always ride on the road. It's too inefficient to do otherwise. We also saw very few children cycling to school, which makes a huge contrast with the freedom on offer to Dutch children. Those children that we saw riding to school were mostly on the pavement (sidewalk), which is illegal. Some adults also used the pavement; they passed us very carefully and two of them gave unprovoked apologies for their presence on the pavement but clearly they felt safer riding slowly in this way than by "taking the lane" on the road.

Amongst those who dare to cycle at all, fluorescent clothing and helmets are the norm, even for adults, even in small towns, even when riding on the pavement. In fact it seemed you don't even need a bicycle to require special safety equipment. Children riding scooters (relatively commonly seen, perhaps because they're considered to be a more socially acceptable way to travel on two wheels on the pavement than by using a bicycle) often wear helmets. It is clear that a lack of subjective safety has a roll to play in the submissive attitude of the average British cyclist versus their confident Dutch colleagues.

A short trip to the sea-side
Weston-super-Mare's population is about the same as that of Assen but like all British towns, it is far more motor car oriented than any Dutch town. There is some cycling infrastructure in Weston, but it is very compromised and doesn't reach the city centre. This infrastructure also doesn't reach so far as other nearby towns. Weston is not unique in this, it's quite close to normal for the UK.

Ice-cream bicycle. One of a number of
bikes displayed temporarily in the
Weston-super-Mare museum.

Just like three years ago, there were a handful of people cycling in Weston-super-Mare. However they were once again a marginalized minority. Cycling is not normalized in British towns as it is in Dutch towns.

We heard of an exhibition of bicycles in a local museum and this was quite amusing to look at. Sadly, though, even this small exhibit featured more bicycles than we saw being ridden around the town itself.

Part of the route to Weston. Does this look like an inviting place to cycle ? I've done it before on my own and also with Judy. However we didn't ride along it this time with my family. Unsurprisingly, we saw no-one else cycling here either. Cheap petrol on the left.

My mother enjoys riding quite long distances in the Netherlands, and the distance between my mother's home and Weston is not far at all, just 17 km. Unfortunately, making this journey by bicycle would have meant riding on an A-road, which apart from the danger simply doesn't lead to cycling being a lot of fun. The distance between my mother's house and my sister's is even less, but it may as well be a thousand miles due to the design of the roads. Cycling is not attractive on roads like this.

A-roads are designed only for cars
For most of the distance between Somerset and Lincolnshire we used motorways, but the final part of the journey was on A-roads. We saw no cyclists at all during the relatively long distances that we travelled on A-roads. Cycling campaigners in Britain have fought for decades to retain the right to ride on these roads but in practice only very few people are interested in exercising this "right". Traffic volumes and speeds (60 mph = 100 km/h) are simply much too high. Such challenging conditions are common in the UK and taken pretty much for granted by long distance cyclists in that country but I have never found their equal in the Netherlands. In the Netherlands we often ride long distances but never have the stress of "sharing" the road with high speed motor vehicles because there is always either a cycle-path or the road has very few cars.

A coffee stop at a place with cycling infrastructure

Wilford at least had some cycling infrastructure, but this also was tokenistic. Next to a  large and busy road was a narrow cycle-path which within the 100 m of path visible in this photo manages to give way to a pub entrance, include signposts for drivers mounted right on the narrow cycle-path and then gives up altogether at the traffic lights, ejecting cyclists into an advanced stop line. To make a right turn here cyclists were either supposed to cross to the third lane or make an unassisted crossing of four and a half lanes of traffic which would be changing lanes a few metres before the junction. Neither of these is close being a safe and convenient situation.

We stopped for coffee at a town called Wilford. This location actually had cycling infrastructure but it was very far from ideal. Nevertheless, even bad infrastructure like this often proves to be more attractive for cycling than riding on the road and while cyclists remained a small minority at this location we did see several cyclists here in the space of about an hour. All of them were riding on the badly designed cycle-path rather than the busy and unpleasant road.

Small villages and country roads dominated by cars
One of the things which remains remarkable to me about the UK is how competitive minor roads are with motorways so far as motor vehicle travel times are concerned. In the Netherlands there is a huge difference in the journey time that would result from taking mostly 60 km/h country roads vs. 120/130 km/h motorways. Country roads in the Netherlands are designed so that they deter usage as a through route. The result is that country roads in the Netherlands are remarkably empty of cars and villages are quiet places to live.

A minor road in the countryside in Lincolnshire. It's so narrow
that vehicles clearly leave the road regularly to pass each
other but even here the speed limit is 60 mph (100 km/h)

Britain has not tried this approach. In Britain, the speed limit not only on rural A roads but also even minor countryside roads is usually 60 mph (100 km/h) while the speed limit on the motorway is only slightly higher at 70 mph (112 km/h). As a result, journey times on rural roads, even minor roads, provide very good competition to journey times on motorways and people use them a lot to make their journeys as making a detour to a more major road will only add time. Even when such roads pass through villages and right next to homes, the speed limits remain much higher in the UK.

On rural and village speed limits, touring cyclists and villagers could have a common cause. If lower speed limits on country roads and through villages (a good start might be to leave the same numbered boards in place but swap to using km/h instead of mph) were achieved, even at the cost of higher speeds on the motorways, this could encourage drivers away from the small roads and onto the motorways, and this could help to make the countryside a much more pleasant place to live and cycle.

View of Stamford in Lincolnshire. A very pretty town which is
sadly dominated by traffic which is directed through the centre.
Stamford's population is but a third that of Assen, but it has a
hundred times the traffic problems. We saw no-one attempting
to cycle through this town as we passed through it.

It's remarkable to my eyes, adjusted as they are now to the Dutch norm, that the huge adverse effect of high volumes of traffic are seemingly ignored in British villages and towns. Surely towns which rely largely on tourism would be more attractive to tourists if they did not have a constant stream of noisy motor vehicles going past them. However, this is often the situation in the UK. Our GPS directed us to drive through Stamford because the main route goes right through the town. This is really a very pretty town, we once went there on an excursion from Judy's parents' house. However it's unfortunately somewhat blighted by traffic.

In some ways I find it remarkable how this has been allowed to happen, but actually it's not so different from what happened in the 1960s in the Netherlands and what the Netherlands could still be like if action had not been taken. The difference now is due to the Dutch having decided to change their environment starting decades ago. Many scenes from modern British towns still look very much like photos from Assen before the town was improved starting in the 1980s. It's not just Assen that has done this, but every Dutch town.

Why is Britain still following the wrong path ?
Despite Britain having a bit of a problem with its current account balance and even though only one in seven of the cars sold in the UK are made there, car sales still seem to be thought to represent "growth" and "economic confidence" even though a "significant proportion" of them are bought on credit. Car sales are booming and the result can be seen everywhere in the form of traffic jams in which those imported cars burn imported fuel at an ever increasing rate. This is not good for Britain's fragile economy.

People who choose to cycle in Britain remain marginalized by both the conditions on the roads and planners who simply do not take their needs into account. Those cycling facilities which exist remain piecemeal and substandard, designed neither to maximise efficiency nor safety of cycling and giving up where they are most needed. It's quite obvious why enthusiastic cyclists often ignore such facilities, though it's also quite obvious that many people find even inadequate facilities more attractive than riding on the road.

When we got back to Assen it didn't take us long to count 20 bikes. Just one group of school children visiting a museum near the city centre had more than 20 bikes between them. Schools in the UK don't dare to make school trips by bike.

Unfortunately, despite the already very low level of cycling in the UK, the British government is actually expecting that cycling will decrease further while they expect car usage to continue to rise. This is being justified in part due to the aging of the population, which makes no sense at all when the UK doesn't remotely approach its full potential for cycling for any age group, not even the youngest. In any case, aging of the Dutch population has been accompanied by a rise in cycling from an already high level, made possible because of an ever improving standard of infrastructure and planning in the Netherlands.

Every mass cycling event demonstrates the huge suppressed demand for cycling in the UK yet there has been no growth in recent years. Riding a bicycle makes sense to most people only when they can be confident about their safety and expect it to be convenient.

Many promises have been made to cyclists in the UK in the last six years, but none of them have led to continued progress in cycling. In part this is because cycling is still seen as a minority activity rather than being something of vital importance to the next generation.

We run infrastructure study tours and can
demonstrate to any British planners and
politicians exactly how and why the Dutch
infrastructure is so effective.

Real change requires real commitment of funds. Given that it costs less to build cycling infrastructure than not to build it, this really should not be difficult to arrange. Change will also require political emphasis and for planners to learn how to improve conditions such that everyone can cycle.

Driving is seen as the only way to travel in Britain because it is by far the easiest option. This is due to policies which have prioritized the car over all other modes of transport for decades. It was a choice, and this choice could be changed.

For now, Britain still sees more roads for more cars as a good thing. The country is still trying to build the dream of the 1950s.

Building roads encourages more use of cars, the profits from which are largely made in other countries, the running of which requires imported fuel and the health effects of which cause thousands of deaths each year due to crashes and air pollution.

Building of cycling infrastructure leads to health benefits for the entire population, in particular to healthier happier children, less noise and air pollution, and it even helps to reduce the outward flow of money from the country.

Having lived for six years in a country which benefits so obviously and so greatly from all these things, it's rather sad to see that other nations, including the one in which I was born, can't see how these things would also benefit them. Where is the political leadership to change countries for the better ?

A view from the ferry on the return journey. At Dunkirk, France welcomes visitors with a splendid view of the largest nuclear power station in Western Europe, Gravelines. It's right next to the dock. The news in the UK during our visit was largely about the British government's recent decision to guarantee profits to a French/Chinese consortium who will build a new nuclear power-station near my mother's home. I can't say I'm enthused about this on any level.

Part two covers my second week in the UK, in London, including experience of riding a Boris Bike.

This is the first of a three part series. See also "Has London progressed in the last six years?" and "Has Assen progressed in the last six years?"

In other news, India seems to be copying the British approach. Note that while Petrol is often a few pence per litre cheaper in the UK than in the Netherlands, diesel is generally cheaper in the Neherlands than in the UK. The cost of motoring is not why the Dutch cycle.

The dangers facing long distance cyclists in the UK (and it's the same in many other places too)

Many British cyclists ride from Land's End to John o'Groats at some time or another. The distance between these two points, from the extreme South West of Cornwall to the extreme North East of Scotland, makes for the longest ride possible within the mainland of Great Britain without turning around. Riding LEJOG has become a sort of rite of passage amongst cyclists.

Yesterday, I read the sad news that two people riding from Land's End to John o'Groats had been killed by a truck on the A30 in Cornwall. I knew instantly the conditions under which this tragedy had occured because I rode there with a friend exactly seven years ago. In our write up of our ride we described this road as "lethal". We didn't mean this as a prediction.


The A30 near where the deaths occurred. I cycled here in 2007. Click for a larger image

A road like this with a 70 mph ( 113 km/h ) speed limit and no-where to go to get out of the way because the road has no hard-shoulder is hardly ideal for cycling. There is no good way to get out of the way of motor vehicles which present a danger. Where it is possible to pull off the asphalt surface your wheels drop from the hard edge of the asphalt an uncertain distance onto an unknown soft surface which will almost certainly cause a crash. However, in many places even this isn't possible because the safety barrier prevents cyclists from being able to get out of the way.

Why did we ride on the A30 ?
In our case we didn't actually set out to ride on busy roads like this because we knew they could be both dangerous and unpleasant. That's why we planned a route of about 1000 miles which would avoid the worst of the roads rather than taking the shortest possible route of about 870 miles which is largely in conditions like this. However progress is very slow if you try to follow small lanes, and it's not necessarily any safer because these also are not designed to make cycling either pleasant or safe. There are many blind corners from around which cars can suddenly appear and rough surfaces which can cause problems for cyclists are also common. That's why, even though our intention had been to find a more pleasant route, we ended up on the A30, as do so many LEJOG cyclists even if they had no desire to ride in such conditions as this.

We cut short our time on the A30 after being repeatedly passed too close by too many vehicles. The final straw was an incident in which two large articulated lorries, side by side with one slowly overtaking the other, passed us with just a few cm to spare and their horns blasting. We were definitely not having fun at this point so at the next junction we returned to the lanes.

A few days later
I returned home from this tour on a high. Several dangerous things had happened, but I'd survived them all. The experience is wonderful, but afterwards you have time to reflect on what could have happened.

In my case this reflection was partly prompted by one of my daughters, aged 13, saying to me that she thought she'd like to ride LEJOG when she was a little older. While overall I'd enjoyed the experience a lot, I didn't want her to put herself in this position. We already planned to emigrate to the Netherlands and thinking about the future safety of our children only made that idea more appealing (note: the idea stuck with my daughter and in 2016 she rode a similar distance in safety in the Netherlands)

Riding from Land's End to John o'Groats is enough to be a challenge, but this challenge should be against yourself, not against the danger from motor vehicles and dreadful conditions provided for cyclists on the roads of Britain.

The A30 is far from unique
The A30 is really a motorway in all but name. However, because no other road has been provided which offers anything like a direct route through the countryside in this part of the UK it is used by many cyclists making their LEJOG journey. Cycling conditions like this are far from unique.

There are many roads all across the UK which offer frightening and dangerous cycling conditions comparable with the A30. Many of them are in places where there is no good alternative route and so they serve as very effective deterrents against cycling even amongst people who like to cycle. Another example covered in a recent blog post from Cambridge was about the abuse meted out to a disabled person who dared to use the only route provided for him to travel a short distance from his village into the city.

A comparison with the Netherlands
While this unpleasant drama on the A30 was being written about in the UK, we were blissfully unaware of it here in the Netherlands:

This rather nice place for cycling is not a road. It's also not called a "super-wotsit" or a "mega-thingy". It's merely one of many very ordinary and mundanely "cycle-paths" in the Netherlands. My Mum's in the middle. Note that all types of cyclists benefit from cycle-paths like this and they use them for all types of journeys.

As it happens, my mother (aged 74) is visiting us at the moment and yesterday we went for a short tour together through the countryside. We took it easy and rode about 60 km through the countryside to sit at a beach and ride on a ferry. During our short tour we hardly saw any cars at all. Almost all the distance was covered on cycle-paths, many of them quite generously proportioned as shown in the photo above.

Cycle-path that we rode on between
a small town and village 20 km away

We would never have done this if we lived in the UK. It's simply not safe enough and not pleasant enough to do purely for the fun of it. In the UK we couldn't have ridden side by side for hour after hour in peace and enjoyed each others' company as we cycled.

While my mother is fit and enjoys cycling, she has never considered riding her bike the much shorter journey between her home and my sister's home in the UK. The distance is just 10 miles but conditions on the roads she would have to cycle on mean that it might as well be a thousand miles by bicycle.

In the UK and other similar countries, many short distances like this can be cycled only by those people who might set off to ride a thousand miles, such as myself or the unfortunate victims of yesterday's crash.

Cycling campaigners place too much emphasis on cities
While the most obvious place to start is with emphasizing infrastructure within cities, it is not only within cities that we need to provide better conditions for cyclists - cycling should be viable as a safe option for all journeys including shorter and longer distances to and between villages, for holiday trips and for people making long tours.

Judy riding home from holiday last
year. Judy never rode so far as 130
km a day in the UK but cycle-paths
like this make such longer touring
distances accessible to more people.
The challenge is against yourself,
not against the danger of traffic.

Good cycling infrastructure benefits everyone. It's not just for people like my mother when they are on holiday, but also people like myself who are keen on cycling every-day. I was always a keen cyclist but I ride far more kilometres each year now than I ever did when I lived in the UK. Why ? That's simple. It's more pleasant and it's more convenient here. We ride long distances without ever having to "share the road" with motorised vehicles travelling at 113 km/h and therefore everyone does it more often.

The same comprehensive network of high quality cycle-routes which best serves local cycling and children going to school is also the best infrastructure to serve fast cyclists and longer distance tourers. All cycling in the Netherlands is safe.


My thoughts are with the families of those killed yesterday, and indeed with the families and victims of all road crashes, whether cyclists, pedestrians, equestrians, motor cyclists or drivers. The greatest danger to all these groups comes from motor vehicles, primarily the vast number of private cars. Especially where they mix with more vulnerable road users, the result is all too often lethal. Back in 1896, the coroner who investigated the very first death due to a car said "This must never happen again". How did we become so passive about something which was is no longer an exceptional cause of death but which now kills 1.2 million people every year ?

Other reading
I also covered the danger of British dual carriageway A-roads back in 2010.

The cyclists killed yesterday have been named as Andrew McMenigall and Toby Wallace. They were riding to raise money for the very worthwhile Kirsten Scott Memorial Trust.

Problems like those which occur on Britain's roads are not limited to that country. On Monday night, cyclists all the way around on the opposite side of the world in New Zealand were killed and injured when riding on a similarly unsuitable road despite taking the precautions of riding single-file and having lights on during the daytime. Road design which causes this degree of conflict is lethal for cyclists everywhere that it exists.

Off road car parking. NL vs. UK

The photo on the right, from the Crap Waltham Forest blog, shows how High Road in Leytonstone in London has been transformed to move car parking off the road. This has resulted in narrowing of the carriageway and a worsening of conditions for cyclists.

Click on the link for more details of the harm that is being done as well as comments about the continuing confusion of some cycle-campaigners in the UK about what works to increase cycling modal share.

On the face of it, this is an application of the same idea as I blogged about a few weeks ago having seen it adopted more frequently throughout Assen. However, there is a fundamental difference.

In the Netherlands, this is a technique used to civilize residential streets which are not busy through roads, which do not have a high number of motor vehicles passing through and which have a 30 km/h speed limit. In the UK the same thing is being done on busy through roads with higher speed limits and lots of traffic.

Context is important. This concept, and others like it, can only work properly if they are implemented in the right places, and from the point of view of a cyclist, the implementation in London is definitely not happening in the right places.

On the face of it, this is yet another case of the fundamental principles of a good idea in effect being "lost in translation" as it travels across the North Sea.

Update Freewheeler provided more context and explanation of the first photo.