Roundabout safety for cyclists and why Cambridge's new 'Dutch' roundabout is not what it should have been

This is not the Cambridge roundabout. It's an example of a different
design, the safe roundabout. This design is much more tolerant of
driver mistakes and results in a far lower rate of cyclist injuries.
Please read my blog post about this design and watch the
accompanying video as both of those describe how this
design keeps cyclists safe.

Cambridge in the UK recently opened a "Dutch style" roundabout on Fendon Road to replace another roundabout which had a poor safety record for cyclists in the city. People keep pointing this out to me. I think it's perhaps time for a response.

The design chosen is that which I have consistently recommended against. Why do I recommend against it ? Because it has a poor safety record here in the Netherlands. It has a safety record which is not very different to an uncontrolled crossing or having no cycling facilities at all on a roundabout, which was the situation in Cambridge before this new design was built. I am not convinced that British drivers are better trained or will behave in a safer way on roundabouts than Dutch drivers and therefore I am also not convinced that it will be safer to use this design in the UK than it is here. Dutch drivers have been trained for decades to expect to give way to cyclists under some circumstances and they have also had decades to get used to this type of roundabout, yet it remains unsafe in the Netherlands. Why should we expect this to be different elsewhere ?

Now you might wonder why all my emphasis so far has been on drivers. There's a simple reason. The danger comes from motor vehicles which are faster and heavier than any cyclist. That's why injury rates for cyclists are higher at roundabouts with more cars. Remember always that there is no design of roundabout which is built for cyclists. If it were not for cars then we would have no roundabouts at all and cycling would be all the safer for it.

Dutch research into roundabout safety

Dijkstra's research into roundabout safety in the Netherlands in 2005 is one of the most referenced articles about this subject. Here's a link. It's written in Dutch and having seen the mess that bad machine translations make of this and similar documents I suggest that if you can't read the Dutch then you're best off going no further than the abstract and my explanation below.

The research drew its conclusions from looking at three different earlier studies each of which looked at large numbers of roundabouts. They're well run studies and the people making them attempted to compare like with like. There was no attempt to study only a subset in order to favour a conclusion already drawn by any of the authors. Dijkstra's article is often used by proponents of priority on roundabouts, though I wonder if they actually read it all the way through. It's very clear about the danger caused by giving cyclists priority on roundabouts.

This graph compares the number of serious cyclist and moped injuries per year (Y) at roundabouts of differing types with differing motor traffic intensity (X). The green line shows the effect of a cycle-lane around the roundabout, which has been known to be dangerous for decades and is recommended by no-one  The black line shows a roundabout with no facilities, cycling taking place on the road amongst cars. The blue line shows the effect of cycle-paths around roundabouts, but this is an average as it is not specified which roundabout design or priority rule it refers to, which is a problem as I'll discuss later.

This graph looks a lot like that above, but it includes all serious injuries in all vehicles, not just those which occur to cyclists. However it is clear from comparing this graph and the one before that roundabouts are, generally speaking, far more dangerous for cyclists than they are for drivers. The relatively small number of motor vehicle occupants who are injured at roundabouts pushes each of the lines upward a little. The effect is especially obvious on the lower, blue line as in this case motor vehicle occupant injuries become dominant as traffic intensity increases. But comparing the two graphs does not make a clear-cut case for all roundabouts with cycle-paths because there is no distinction made between two very different roundabout designs discussed later by Dijkstra.

Three different studies are referenced by Dijkstra, that of Van Minnen/CROW (1998), Weijermars (2001) and Gerts (2002). All three of those studies showed that "with priority" roundabouts are substantially more dangerous for cyclists.

Three studies are summarized by Dijkstra. All studies show worsened safety with cyclist priority ('in voorrang') at roundabouts. Crashes (ongevallen) are between 1.75x and 2.9x more common and injuries resulting in death or hospital treatment (slachtoffers) are found to be between 3x and 6x more common. Gerts' study only reported crashes and not injuries.

Some of the data in the document, such as this example, show all injuries and not just cyclist injuries. Overall, a junction with cyclist priority ('in de voorrang') causes about three times as many injuries.  About as many motor vehicle occupants are injured on the two different types of roundabouts, the difference is made by the radically different results for cyclist safety. See the next table.

The same data from Weijemars is used here, but just the figures for cyclists and mopeds are included.

This table shows the number of roundabouts in total, within urban areas, with cycle-paths, with cyclist priority (470), without cyclist priority (314). These numbers come up repeatedly.

Estimated annual hospitalizations of cyclists and moped riders (on the cycle-path - now largely replaced by e-bikes) in the Netherlands due to crashes with motor vehicles on urban roundabouts. There are about 50% more roundabouts with cyclist priority ('in de voorrang') but they cause ten times as many serious injuries as the safe design of roundabout ('uit de voorrang').

Note that Dijkstra used data from Gerts who referred only to roundabouts which strictly followed the CROW design standards. By doing so both Gerts and Dijkstra tried to exclude potentially worse results which could have come from priority roundabouts which didn't follow the standards. This turned out to be less important than was expected because Gerts found that there was no statistically different result for roundabouts which followed the CROW norms vs. those which did not (bottom of page 13). Also read pages 34 and 35 where this is confirmed. i.e. The difference in safety between differing roundabouts with cycle-paths is almost entirely due to the priority rule. That is confirmed on page 36 where the conclusion is made that there is a significant link between priority and safety.
A note about 'mopeds'. Most of the data lumps cyclists and mopeds together because mopeds are not actually very common. They make up around 1% of the total traffic volume. As a result, I don't expect that their presence here makes much difference to any of the results. Low power mopeds which theoretically are limited to around 25 km/h on the cycle-path are losing ground these days to electrically assisted bikes which travel at a similar speed. Many Dutch people really don't like mopeds, but they do seem to like e-bikes which are now far more numerous. The two modes are quite similar from a safety perspective. There does seem to be an indication that 'with priority' roundabouts are more dangerous for faster cyclists (moped, racing bike, e-bike) who are more likely to surprise drivers because their speed makes them more difficult for drivers to spot, hence the idea that they suddenly appeared "from nowhere" over the driver's shoulder. Faster mopeds (limited to 45 km/h) are banned from urban cycle-paths so are not of interest here.

Comparison with a non-signalled crossing
In order to find a point of comparison for the effectiveness of substituting one type of roundabout or another, comparisons were made of 177 locations where non-signalled crossings ('voor, kruispunt') were converted into roundabouts ('na rotonde').

Note that this is not a comparison with traffic light junctions. That's a completely different story which I have addressed elsewhere: well designed traffic light junctions which separate cyclists in time and space from cars create an almost completely safe space for cyclists and as a result have an excellent safety record in the Netherlands. But they are not discussed by Dijkstra. These comparisons are between roundabouts and the straightforward non-signalled crossings without roundabouts or traffic lights which existed in the same location before they were built.

The comparison over time with non-signalled crossings in the same location across 177 junctions gives us a very good idea of the relative danger creating by giving cyclists priority at a roundabout.

Roundabouts are highly effective at preventing motor vehicle occupant injuries, reduced by 80% on average over the previously existing crossing, however for cyclists they are far less effective. Compared with non-signalled (no traffic lights) road crossings, Dutch roundabouts on average only lead to around a halving of cyclist serious injuries. But this statistic is deceptive because both the 'with priority' and safe roundabout designs have been mixed here to create an average.

In this table they've been separated and we if we consider only the safe roundabouts where cyclists do not have priority ('uit de voorrang') then we see a significant 87% reduction in the number of injuries vs. a non-signalled junction.

By comparison, if we consider only the roundabouts where cyclists do have priority ('in de voorrang'), the improvement in injury rate over a non-signalled crossing is just 11%. i.e. priority for cyclists on roundabouts results in nearly eight times as many cyclist hospitalizations as occur at safe roundabouts when replacing non-signalled junctions. But carry on reading...

The simple conclusion to reach here is that 'with priority' roundabouts achieve about an 11% improvement in safety while safe roundabouts achieve an 87% improvement in safety, making them eight times safer. However it's not actually that simple. Over the same period of time, non-signalled crossings across the country became on average about 10% safer (Dijkstra last paragraph of page 10) so we should perhaps reduce both outcomes by this amount. That would imply that there is actually almost no significant difference in safety between an non-signalled crossing and a 'with priority' roundabout while a safe roundabout achieves about a 77% improvement in safety for cyclists.

How safe are 'with priority' roundabouts in reality ?

This blog post began with one of the first graphs from Dijkstra which showed the relative safety of cyclists using cycle-paths and cycle-lanes around roundabouts with cycling on the roadway on the roundabout itself. Unfortunately, that graph did not distinguish between the different types of Dutch roundabout which include cycle-paths. However later in the same document with the discussion about replacement of non-signalled junctions, Dijkstra calculates the relative safety of roundabouts with and without priority, and we see that the 'with priority' cause nearly eight times as many excess cyclist injuries as the safe roundabout design. I find it unhelpful that both roundabout designs are presented as one item in that graph as they really are not the same.

Below you'll find a modified version of the same graph showing the likely real-world safety of 'with priority' roundabouts vs. the average for all cycle-paths on roundabouts, cycle-lanes and cycling on the road:

The red line shows what the probably injury rate is for roundabouts with priority cycle-paths in the Netherlands. The blue line is an average for all roundabouts with cycle-paths. A line which represented only safe roundabouts would be lower than the blue line, especially in the first half of the graph.

You'll note that up to around 10000 vehicles a day there is no great difference between the black line, showing the rate of injury for cyclists riding on the road, the green line showing a cycle-lane painted around the perimeter and the red line showing the injury rate for cyclists on 'with priority' cycle-paths. Therefore swapping between a roundabout design where cyclists ride on the road to a design where they use a priority cycle-path should not be expected to bring an improvement in safety. The only option which always looks good is the blue line showing as an average for all roundabouts with cycle-paths, which is skewed downward by the greatly improved safety of the safe roundabout design over the 'with priority' design.

Explanation of the red line: Over half of all urban roundabouts in the Netherlands gave cyclists priority when Dijkstra's graph was created. He found that on these roundabouts about eight times as many injuries per year could be expected. i.e. the corrected data for with priority roundabouts should be at about four times the level of that for the safe roundabouts. The red line which I have added to the graph is at approximately three times the height on the Y axis of that for both types of roundabout combined. This places it at approximately at the level we would expect to see if the two different types of roundabouts had been  treated as two different cases.

Explanation of blue line shape and stippled red: The blue line, for all roundabouts with cycle-paths, has a rather unusual shape, with a peak at around 10000 vehicles a day before dipping downward and rising again with motor vehicle intensity. I believe that this is caused by priority roundabouts causing the vast majority of crashes and injuries but being built mostly in places with lower motor vehicle intensity. As a result, the blue line is pushed upward in the first half of the graph by crashes on 'with priority' roundabouts, but I think the second half of the blue line is made up to a higher extent of data for safe roundabouts. I used a stippled red line from ~10000 onward because it's likely that it is no longer reliable past this point for the same reason. Unfortunately the separate data is not available so that I can test this hypothesis.

Politics

Back in 1998, SWOV's own research already demonstrated a worse safety record for 'with priority' roundabouts. Their research indicated that 52-73 extra cyclists would find themselves in hospital with serious injuries each year if that design was used. Despite this concern, a political decision was made to go along with a standard recommendation that cyclists should always have priority on urban roundabouts. This happend after they were given two re-assurances: first that the new standards advised by CROW would be applied everywhere and second that introduction of these standards would result in improved safety for 'with priority' roundabouts.

Unfortunately, the expected safety improvement was not realised. This was not merely because the guidelines still were not followed in all cases, but because it was discovered that the guidelines didn't actually have a measurable effect on safety even where they were followed. In an appendix on pages 29 to 35 of Dijkstra ("Voorrang voor fietsers: effect van vormgeving?") it is shown statistically using data gathered from many real world roundabouts spread across the country over five years that there is no detectable difference in safety between 'with priority' roundabouts which adhere strictly to the CROW guidelines and those which do not. Therefore it would seem that roundabouts with significant differences from the norms (e.g. different radii, crossings too close to the roundabout, inadequate road markings, allowing bidirectional cycling around the roundabout etc.) were not worse from a safety perspective at all. The research suggests very strongly that exactly following CROW's guidelines is not important for safety at all. Just one thing makes roundabouts with cycle-paths dangerous and that is giving cyclists priority.

Since the decision was made to go along with the "with priority" guideline in urban areas, the number of roundabouts in the Netherlands has tripled. For that reason we can now reasonably expect that instead of 52-73 extra cyclists receiving injuries resulting in hospitalization or death each year that there are now between 150 and 210 more than would have been the case if the safe roundabout design (used all over Assen with extremely low injuries as a result) had been standardized upon across the entire country.

The CROW argument that roundabouts with priority are "slight less safe" than the safe design was based upon the 52-73 extra casualties being only between 1.8 and 2.5% of the total. Unfortunately, with their number having tripled, we can now expect that these dangerous roundabouts account for between 5.4% and 7.5% of cyclist casualties per year, which is certainly not insignificant. Given that after a period of decline, Dutch cyclist deaths are now rising once again, this is something we should be looking at more closely. We already know how to reduce injuries on roundabouts by 87%. We just have to switch to building the proven safe roundabout design.

Cambridge

So now back to Cambridge. Why did that city outside the Netherlands adopt a design has been proven to cause excess injuries and deaths in the country where it came from ? Why are they following a decision which was made in the Netherlands for political reasons and not based on safety ? Personally, I think they were extremely badly advised.

Valkenswaard roundabout visited in 2006. Not a safe design.
See statistics. This roundabout does not conform 100% to
CROW standards, but as you can read above, we now
know that it probably wouldn't make a difference if it did.

Now I take a little responsibility for this because I used to live in Cambridge, I was a member of the Cambridge Cycling Campaign who campaigned for Dutch style cycling infrastructure to be built in that city, and I organised study tours in the Netherlands for members of the campaigning group and people working for the council. Indeed, on the first of these study tours, way back in 2006, I was myself enthusiastic about the cyclist priority design of roundabout and I showed it to people from Cambridge.

However my enthusiasm for priority roundabouts didn't last long after I moved to the Netherlands, experienced near misses on these designs, learnt Dutch and read Dijkstra's and other studies of roundabout safety. I change my mind when presented with contrary facts and it's simply not possible to continue to believe that these designs are safe when they clearly are not. That is the reason why I promote the safe design of roundabout, especially in countries outside the Netherlands.

The advantage that the safe roundabout design has is of complete predictability for the cyclist. As a cyclist you can take control of your own safety. While mistakes made by drivers on priority roundabouts where the driver does not cede priority often result in crashes and cyclist injuries, drivers on safe roundabouts who make errors typically just slow or stop when they need not have done. This can actually be slightly annoying for a cyclist who has adjusted their speed to slip across the road before or after any given car, but it's a safe failure mode which doesn't result in injury.

There is also the potential difference between British and Dutch drivers. I've not only cycled but also driven in both countries and I think the ability to drive safely is quite similar between the two countries. However there is a difference in behaviour in that Dutch drivers typically drive more slowly, at least on minor roads and in towns, and that there is less aggression. This is probably also a function of the unravelling of routes which keeps drivers who are minutes late for their destination from making through journeys near cyclists. They are also used to the idea of ceding priority to cyclists on roundabouts and elsewhere, and most people here do cycle. What effect this difference in driver behaviour will have on a roundabout design which requires drivers to cede priority in order to ensure cyclist safety is currently unknown.

Unfortunately the mistake in Cambridge goes far beyond just choosing a poor and dangerous design of roundabout. Their ambition unfortunately went no further than substituting one roundabout design for another and it is now being heralded as a victory for cycling before we even know whether it turns out to be safe in this location. In reality there is no roundabout design which has ever been built for the benefit of cyclists. They're all just ways of trying to address the problems caused by motor vehicles.

Most road junctions in Dutch residential
areas look something like this. Much
more common than any traffic light
or roundabout design, a non-signalled
junction in a residential area, with 30 km/h
speed limit, raised table, small corner
radii, and most importantly it's not a
through route for motor vehicles.

Addressing the problems of motor vehicles could have been done in many other and more effective ways. The roads leading to the location of Cambridge's new roundabout are places where people live. Residential streets which have for years endured high traffic volumes. If they had their usage changed so that they no longer had to support that through motor traffic (already done on a tiny scale in Cambridge) then the roundabout probably wouldn't be required at all. A simple non-signalled junction but with very cars, or if a stream of traffic was required to flow between two arms of the junction perhaps a signalled crossing, would have resulted in a better outcome for cyclists.

You could have asked...

There are few people who have lived, worked and cycled on an everyday basis in Cambridge for more than a decade and who have then done the same in a Dutch city for more than a decade. Fewer still who have written about cycling for decades, about cyclist roundabout safety and made suggestions for how countries outside the Netherlands can best learn from the Dutch experience regarding roundabouts and other infrastructure. Still fewer who have gone to the effort of learning Dutch, reading the research and trying to advise on the basis of that research, and I would guess that also bringing people from the council and the local cycle campaigning group in Cambridge to the Netherlands in order to demonstrate to them the pros and cons of different roundabout designs amongst many other things on top of those other things would make me pretty much unique. I'm also not hard to find.

So do you think anyone from Cambridge ever thought to contact me about their new roundabout ? Of course not. Actually that's a bit unfair. A couple of people on the periphery who were concerned about the direction in which that was going did make contact and I have heard from them how what I'd written was dismissed rather rudely. But why ? Did they have some other local expert who could read the Dutch documents in depth and translate them ? Did they not believe the stats therein ? Did they expect that a design which is relatively dangerous in the Netherlands with Dutch drivers would somehow be less dangerous in the UK ?

I of course don't expect any answers. But it's a shame. I could have helped. I fear that Cambridge will regret what has been done. Not now. Not soon. It'll take a while before you have stats - the Dutch research on which I based my advice was itself based on the stats from many roundabouts over many years. The stats above are based on up to 940 rotonde-jaren, or roundabout years. These results have not been cooked up after just looking at a single location for a few weeks.

Conclusion

I am left with a fear that what Cambridge has done is merely to replace one dangerous roundabout design with another. It's a pity that they have done this because it's been done with such a lot of publicity and this may tarnish the concept and make it more difficult to adopt a better design elsewhere. Britain's cyclists need safe infrastructure. It's high time that they got it instead of ineffective projects like this example. However this is just one junction in one city of a country of many millions of people. It won't in itself make a huge difference one way or the other. No single junction ever could do that.

What is required, in Cambridge and elsewhere, is to start looking at the bigger picture. It is a mistake to think that any real change can result from a piecemeal one junction at a time approach. The UK, and everywhere else, needs a complete grid of effective safe and attractive cycle-paths in order to enable efficient go-everywhere cycling. The Netherlands is fabulous for cycling not merely because some of the roundabouts are safe (as you can see above, some certainly are not). An holistic approach makes the difference. There is nothing new and novel about any of this, it's been known for forty years.

Planning occurs in the Netherlands on a much greater scale than in the UK. There are traffic circulation plans which limit the effect of motor vehicles on residential areas and direct cycle routes. Almost all roundabouts form part of a plan which removes motor traffic, especially through motor traffic, from locations where cyclists need to be to make everyday journeys. This makes even less safe designs safer. But removal of motor traffic can even result in a much bigger prize: the removal of roundabouts and traffic lights altogether from cycling routes. Cyclists don't themselves need either of those types of junctions. They are not actually for us, but exist only to moderate motor traffic. There exist very good traffic light designs which benefit cyclists and roundabouts which do likewise but in both cases these things should only be built where there is no choice. i.e. where it's impossible to get rid of the motor vehicles. Cyclists are always better off without big road junctions. This has happened on a large scale at least around the centre of most Dutch cities, spreading outward from the centre in many cities and into the renovation of old suburbs and the design of new suburbs. The process did not begin by changing the design of a single busy junction which will remain busy, but then making a lot of noise about it as if a great change has been achieved.

The piecemeal approach, resulting in years of little or no real action and the effect of such small forward steps as occur usually being swamped by backward steps elsewhere, is precisely why people in the UK have gone from saying that their country is 20 years behind the Netherlands to 40 or 50 years behind. It's only possible to catch up by doing the hard work required to make things better, consistently over years. This is something which no country can afford not to do: when all things are considered, it's cheaper to build cycling infrastructure than it is not to build it.

Update May 2023
Three years later we now have reported collision data for the Cambridge roundabout. In the three years since the roundabout was rebuilt as "Dutch" style there have been 10 collisions, including three which caused serious injury. In the three years before the change there were just six of which none were serious.

I'd been advising people in Cambridge about roundabout designs for well over a decade before they ignored my advice and chose to build this dangerous design instead. They now have injured cyclists as a result of their choice. I take no pleasure in saying that "I told you so", but I did tell them, repeatedly, and the result that they now have is just what I predicted.

Exaggeration considered harmful. Hiding the real story about cycling.

Click for the original copy

I just received a rather triumphant press release from Cambridge Cycling Campaign. It's a "good news story" about "5000 more bicycles" which I expect will be reported verbatim elsewhere. However as an ex resident of the city it instantly rang bells for me and I think it deserves a little analysis before blindly reproducing the claims.

The central claim is that there has been an increase of 37% of "employed people cycling to work everyday by residents of the City of Cambridge" between 2001 and 2011. There is also a claim that there are "now more people walking and cycling to work than people using buses, cars, taxis, or motorbikes combined", that the worst performing ward of Cambridge is Cherry Hinton with a "Percentage of residents cycling to work" of  23.3% while the best performing is Newnham with 40.6%. They also pointed out that "the rates of bicycle use may be under-representative of the actual bicycle use", suggesting that both the high rate of student cycling and multi-modal commutes both meant that these figures were underestimates. The reader is to assume that the actual cycling rate in the city is somewhat higher than these already high figures, based on nothing but a suggestion.

Cambridge and surroundings by bicycle. Darkest blue are
areas with between 20 and 30% of commutes by bike. Light
green in 5% - 10 %. The light brown colour found beyond the
boundary of the city indicates that just 0% - 5% of commutes
in those places are by bicycle. Cambridge is very obviously
an island in this view.

It all sounds amazing. But can be we believe these figures ? I think not. Cambridge certainly has the highest cycling modal share in the UK. That is supported by many published figures and Cambridge stands out as an island on the Guardian's visualisation of the census data. Cambridge almost certainly also has the highest cycling modal share of any city across the English speaking world (I've discussed some of the reasons why). I like the city a lot. We lived there for nearly 20 years in large part because of the cycling, which is somewhat ahead of the rest of the UK. However, this exaggeration is painting a false picture of how much cycling there actually is in the city.

I believe the figures are based on British Government 2011 census stats published a few days ago. These were summarised quite nice with an interactive map overlay on the Guardian website. Cambridge achieved the highest figure for cycling with 18.1% of people saying that cycling is the main way that they commute to work.

It is important to note the source of these figures. They come not from traffic counts or observations of actual behaviour of commuters but from a survey question which asked about "the main way people commute to work". Any such survey is open to Response Bias - a tendency for people to give the answer that they think the questioner wants to hear. Such surveys are also quite open to people's own interpretations of how they think they travel. i.e. "Cyclists" are likely to say that they cycle even if they do so only two days a week on average. There are many causes of error in survey results, and while with care we can compare one survey with another taken at the same place on the same date of a different year, any comparison with different dates, different places or with the result of an analysis of behaviour measured in a different manner is at the very least to make some dangerous assumptions.

The press release combined "walking and cycling" as that made the figures sound more exciting than they actually were by adding the 9.6% of people who self-reported as walking to work to the 18.1% who said that they cycle. Note also that the 3% of people who said they used the train to get to work, 0.2% who said they used a coach and 0.1% who say they use light rail have been excluded from the comparison group of "buses, cars, taxis and motorbikes". That's how it was made possible to claim that cycling and walking combined were "more popular in Cambridge than the internal combustion engine."

Cambridge and surroundings by car. Darkest blue are areas
of between 60 and 75% of commutes by car. The lightest
green indicates 15% - 30% by car. A different scale had to be
be used compared with that for bikes because there is far more
driving than cycling in this area. Cambridge is an almost
invisible island in this view.

However, we must note that when we look at the raw stats on the Guardian site show that many places all the way across the UK, including just on the edge of Cambridge achieve a figure of between 45% and 60% of commutes by car without excluding anyone. The most extreme have between 60% and 75% by car, with one of these appearing just a few miles from Cambridge, and that's without anyone having to cook the books to make the numbers appear higher. Cycling remains a minority pursuit across the UK.


This press release was not the first example of exaggeration that I'd seen based on the same survey results. In fact, it took only a couple of days after their publication for the cycle of exaggeration to begin. A Cambridge politician excluded some of the groups used in the original report in order to report that "nearly 32% of those who travel to work in Cambridge get there by bicycle". This is presumably the reason for the peculiarly precise language used in the press release ("the number of employed people cycling to work everyday by residents of the City of Cambridge"). The more people we remove from the comparison, the more meaningless it becomes because each time we remove people we remove information. If we were to continue the process of removing groups of people who do not cycle, then we would end up reporting merely that 100% of cyclists ride bikes, which of course is a meaningless statement.

Now I have to note that it's rather self-serving for a politician to say this. Politicians have a long history of claiming to be working for cycling while in reality they spend far too little on cycling infrastructure. This is certainly true within Cambridge.

The press release goes on to say that "Much of this increase can be attributed to the hard work of councillors and officers at Cambridgeshire County Council and Cambridge City Council, for which we thank them." and that  "Cambridge has grown with virtually no additional motorcar traffic because of the money spent on cycling." when in fact, the investment in Cycling within Cambridge has for a very long time been a tiny fraction of that spent to benefit motorists. Indeed, it's not many years ago that the Cambridge Cycling Campaign itself pointed out that the expenditure on "cycleways, footpaths and safe routes to school combined" was just 0.6% of the local transport budget. When I wrote an introduction to an article printed in their newsletter I pointed out that local expenditure amounted to just "£1.45 per person per year".

The long running saga of, and
inadequate solution in Gilbert Road
is another example of Cambridge
Cycling Campaign acquiescence.

Unfortunately, Cambridge Cycling Campaign now seems to have joined with the council in their attempts to exaggerate the achievements of the city. It is a mystery to me why a campaign group which has watched remarkably little progress occur for nearly two decades should have decided to help the very politicians who have done so little for cyclists. To do this provides no basis for future campaigning. If everything's fine already, why even bother with campaigning ?

This is not the first time that false statements have been made about Cambridge. In the 1990s, one of the councils in Cambridge published a leaflet which described Cambridge as "the second best city in the world in which to cycle after Amsterdam" (or words along those lines). That wasn't true then, and this isn't true now.

Why exaggerate ?
Of course, Cambridge is far from the only place to exaggerate its achievements. Many other places do the same. I've pointed out some of Copenhagen's repeated exaggerations but also found Amsterdam exaggerating the truth. Portland made a similar claim to 1990s Cambridge when they said they were "only second to Amsterdam". Popular lists of "top cycling cities" regularly present figures which have no basis in fact, which are collected by sufficiently different means that they cannot be compared with one another, or the simply miss out many Dutch cities and this is often done in order to hype one place over another.

Of course it takes some effort to find good figures. I've found it difficult to get to the bottom even of many figures published here in the Netherlands. Emails which I've sent asking for the source of figures which apparently contradict each other have gone unanswered.

Is anyone actually interested in facts any more ? Is this exaggeration simply a reflection of people liking to be told that where-ever it is that they happen to live is good ? Does anyone want to actually learn from what works elsewhere, or are we all too busy claiming to be number one ?

Exaggeration considered harmful

A 20 km radius around Assen - the distance within which
it is normal for secondary school age students to cycle into
the city to school. Green spots show where school friends
of our children lived and from where they cycled to get to
school. The red line shows the route of a school triathlon
ridden by unaccompanied 12 year olds who had come to
school by bike and who afterwards rode back home.
Nothing out the ordinary in this country, but in the UK ?

The problem is that this exaggeration is harmful. It is harmful because it prevents progress from being made.

If all sets of figures have been "cooked" to some degree then we have absolutely no basis for comparison at all. If figures which are accurate from one place can only be compared with "cooked" figures from another then it makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to work out what works.

When figures are exaggerated, no new information is being created. All that happens is that the truth is swamped beneath piles of meaningless press releases. Hiding the facts does not help cyclists, and cycling campaigners do not help their own constituency by boosting their own cities purely for the sake of an impressive press release.

For cycling to grow we need to look at the best practice from all around the world, not encourage people to accept the low standards of what they already have. For progress, we have to continue to be critical. Even in the world's genuine top cycling city, campaigners are rightly not satisfied with what they are given if it doesn't result in an ever improving standard.

Far too much emphasis on "cycling cities"

The same 20 km radius around Cambridge showing how
even adult commuter cycling drops rapidly to below 5%.
 The red line shows the route that a 14 year old boy in a village
could not take to get to school. Seemingly no-one thought it
reasonable to suggest that he cycled. I've cycled there myself
in the past and I wouldn't have suggested it either. Whatever
the quoted statistics say, there is an enormous difference in the
ease of cycling between Cambridge and Assen.

What the data from the Guardian website shows most vividly is just how much of an island Cambridge is. There is an amazingly sharp drop off in cycling as you reach the edge of the city. In most of the surrounding countryside the patterns of transport are the same as the rest of the country. i.e. Very low cycle usage, very high car usage.

The idea of "cycling cities" is itself harmful. There is no reason why we should only consider cities, nor why we should expect that people will only cycle in cities, nor why we should be so interested in counting only how much cycling there is in cities, nor how high the figures can be made to look for a subset of cyclists in a small area.

That is not how it works in the Netherlands. We don't have cycling cities, but cities, towns and villages in a cycling country. Cycling doesn't drop off at the boundaries of cities but is normal all the way out into the countryside and through all the villages until you reach the next city, where it's also normal. It's normal for secondary school children to commute relatively long distances through the countryside to reach the nearest city where their school is. It's normal for elderly people to go on rides together just because it's a pleasant thing to do. To make these things possible requires a lot more than boastful exaggeration. It requires reliably consistent quality of cycling infrastructure and investment of enough money to do a decent job of a comprehensive cycling network which goes everywhere - this ensuring a sufficient degree of subjective safety that cycling is accessible to everyone.

Now I could finish by quoting some spectacularly high figures for cycling in this area, but I won't. If I did, would you believe them ? I hope you would not without taking a close look first. Suffice to say that there is considerably more cycling here by a far wider demographic than exists anywhere in the UK, including in Cambridge. That's covered by the usual unspectacular figure quoted for the whole of the Netherlands: 27% of journeys in the whole country are made by bike, that's for all the people and all their journeys for all reasons.

Update: Two years later, more exaggeration
In November 2015, the Cambridge Evening News reported that "there has been a massive 88 per cent increase in cyclists" in an article which was picked up by other sources which point out that "Cambridge already has record cycling participation levels with 20% of trips made by bike". i.e. after the supposed near doubling of cycling in Cambridge, the actual modal share remains at the same figure as I've been quoting for many years.

Exaggeration doesn't help now, it didn't help four years ago and it didn't help twenty years ago. What is required in Cambridge is a go everywhere grid of genuinely improved infrastructure, not piecemeal developments combined with many words.

Notes:

The picture above of Cambridge as an island may seem to fly in the face of frequently made claims that Cambridgeshire as a whole has a higher percentage of trips by bike than other counties. However, note that a quarter of the population of Cambridgeshire lives in Cambridge. The bubble in the city therefore makes the whole county appear to have a higher modal share for cycling than is actually the case outside the city of Cambridge itself.

It should also be pointed out that the claim made in the press release that cycling has risen by 37% between 2001 and 2011 is itself dubious and difficult to support based on previous claims from the Cambridge Cycling Campaign. The current figure from the census is 18.1%. However, Cambridge Cycling Campaign has claimed higher rates many times in the past. For example in an article on the 2001 census published in 2003, "In Cambridge in 2001, 25.91% of workers between the ages of 16 and 74 travelled to work by bicycle" (a remarkably "precise" figure !). Another page says that "According to the 2001 census 28% of all commuting trips within Cambridge are by bike". The 28% figure was also attributed to the RAC in 2005, while a 2007 article claimed just 25% "according to 2001 census data". None of these previously claimed figures for the rate of cycling to work in Cambridge is low enough to support the claim that there has been a 37% increase. Cycling campaign groups have often made attempts to show to cycling is "booming" in the UK, but the consistently fly in the face of the evidence, 

Do British people get the politicians that
they deserve ? Excerpt from "Watching
the English" by Kate Fox.

I don't want to single out the un-named Cambridge politician involved in cooking the figures above as he's no better or worse than the rest of them and I found him quite agreeable in person. However, I will point out that for several years I made a point of inviting all of them, including him, to accompany me on Study Tours in the Netherlands so that they could see for themselves how it is that Cambridge falls short of the standards of the Netherlands. Unfortunately, while many of them replied to let me know that they were "interested", every one of them sadly turned out not to have a gap in their busy agendas on any of the dates that I'd planned. Unfortunately, it also turned out that not one of them could make it on a date of their own choosing or even at my expense. Politicial commitment to cycling clearly only goes so far.

I direct much the same sentiment towards the Cambridge Cycling Campaign. They're a good bunch of people who I again largely know personally. However their aspirations remain far too low for what is possible in their city and they are too easily led by the local politicians. The Campaign has now been in existence for seventeen years. That's the same period of time as it took for the whole of the Netherlands to get from Stop de Kindermoord to a very good standard of infrastructure. Cambridge has not made the same transformation over the same period of time.

"Second to Amsterdam" is a remarkably lazy claim which demonstrates the lack of knowledge of those who would claim it. Amsterdam may be ahead of places outside of this country but it's certainly not "the best" place in the Netherlands. For a start, rates of school cycling are lower in Amsterdam than in other Dutch cities.

There's a Dutch saying "Meten is weten". Translated into English this means "Measuring is knowing". The principle is sound: unless you have reliable measurements, you don't really know anything.

Read more blog posts about Cambridge.

Central reservations enable cyclists and pedestrians to cross safely

Where cyclists or pedestrians must cross a road which is used by an appreciable number of motor vehicles, central reservations make a huge difference to safety. They allow the cyclist to cross just one stream of traffic at once, which is moving in one direction, before making a second decision from the centre of the road before crossing again.

Of course, such a reservation needs to be adequate in size. The crossing shown above, in a residential area in Assen by the local shops, allows two cyclists travelling in each direction to pass each other, and is long enough for a bicycle with trailer to stop safely in the middle. it also has a completely separate crossing for pedestrians, and of course both the cycle and pedestrian paths on both sides of the street. The speed limit for cars is 50 km/h (30 mph).

Here is another view of the crossing:

Open in Google Maps - note that cyclists don't suffer from a "pinch" effect due to cars because there are separate cycle-paths either side of the crossing.

When we first moved to Assen, there
was no central reservation at this
crossing. Image from a leaflet
explaining the change

This is an example of a crossing which works extremely well for cyclists, but it is not in any way an unusual or unique design. It's actually strikingly normal - there are so many crossings like this in Assen that I couldn't possibly count them. You need look no more than a hundred metres to the South from this one to find three more which are similar (see them here on Google Maps).

However, that this is very common doesn't imply that such crossings have existed forever. Actually, this one was retrofitted quite recently.

Back of the same leaflet
explaining what was
being done to improve
safety. Particularly
aimed at school children

Note five features on and around this crossing which make motorists slow down. Firstly, the shape of the crossing requires that motorists must decelerate and change course to go around it. Secondly, the width of the lanes either side of the central reservation is narrow which makes maneuvering difficult at speed. Thirdly, the road is narrow and there is no central white line. This makes motorists less sure of their position on the road and further reduces speed. Fourthly, the speed limit is 50 km/h (30 mph) on this street, which provides access, and 30 km/h (18 mph) on surrounding streets. Fifthly, there is also a pedestrian zebra crossing here for which motorists must stop if a pedestrian is crossing. Cyclists don't have priority in this case, but often receive it anyway.

The requirement that motorists have to swerve could be dangerous to cyclists due to a pinching effect if cyclists were on the street but because there are parallel cycle-paths on both sides of the street there is no danger at all.

See also videos showing the same crossing in use by hundreds of school children.

This can be seen as something which is easily "lost in translation" when implemented elsewhere because while the same concept might appear elsewhere, the implementation is completely different. For example, here's the same concept as implemented in Cambridge, UK:

Crossing of Madingley Road in Cambridge, UK. This is one of several roads in Cambridge which are unpleasant to cycle along and which can be difficult to cross safely by bicycle. We used to do this with our children, but this made us very much the exception as most people would not see this as a safe thing to do with their children. It's important for campaigners to realise that they are part of a self-selected group. Conditions like this are a reason why keen cyclists stop when they have children.

The example shown at the top of this blog post from Assen is on a relatively minor street with a slow speed limit and a significant but not enormous flow of vehicles. Those are the conditions in which  a crossing, if built to a high enough standard, can work well. However this Cambridge example is on a major arterial road, one of the busiest in Cambridge. This central reservation is too small in both dimensions. It does not slow traffic because the lanes either side of the reservation are too wide and it doesn't cause motor vehicles to change course, but the central reservation is also too narrow. Only one person can use it at a time and it can't be used if towing a trailer. It also doesn't feel safe because there is not much separation from high speed traffic. There's also no separate provision for pedestrians and neither pedestrians nor cyclists are prioritised at this crossing.

What's more, the speed limit here is much higher than that of the Assen example, at 40 mph (64 km/h) and this is a major arterial road into Cambridge so there are usually far more cars driving here than you find at the equivalent looking crossing in Assen.

When we crossed at this point with our children it was difficult to accompany them and cross the road safely. What's more, when I pulled a child trailer across this junction it didn't fit, so I had to make the crossing in one step.

It's an example of something extremely inadequate being installed in completely the wrong situation. The closest equivalents we have in Assen would be this or this.

Another view of the crossing of Madingley Road. It's similar to Huntingdon Road a little further North and many other roads in and around Cambridge. These are part of the reason why Cambridge's cycling is limited to a demographic group. View Larger Map

If your only reference to good infrastructure design comes from books, websites and looking at Google Maps, then it is very easy to misinterpret what is seen on the ground in the Netherlands. This is why it is important that planners from English speaking countries should see for themselves what good infrastructure actually looks like, and see it in the country which has the best standards. Referring only to what is in, for example, the UK can only result in copying from bad examples. It is to try to help to prevent this problem that we organise study tours.

See other examples of ideas "lost in translation", enabling of crossing the road, and perhaps most important, examples of what works in the Netherlands.

Cambridge family considers giving up cycling

The Cambridge Evening News reports that a family is considering giving up cycling in the city due to the danger, saying that it is 'worse than taking part in "dangerous sports" (a comparison which I made before).

I know the feeling. It was realising the level of danger which our children faced when they cycled on the streets of Cambridge, and comparing with the utterly different reality for children in the Netherlands, which caused us to give up not cycling, but Cambridge itself, and that's why we moved from that city four years ago.

The part of the article which struck me most was this: "There have been 43 accidents involving cyclists on the road from January, 2006 to September this year, according to figures from Cambridgeshire County Council. A spokesman said: 'These are average figures for similar roads in Cambridge.'"

To me, an average of eight cyclist accidents per year on an average road in a small city is not a very good record. By comparison, the most dangerous junction in the whole of the Netherlands has been the site of 14 incidents involving injury in three years. In the Dutch instance we're looking at something exceptional. There is nowhere worse. This location has 14000 cyclists per day riding through it (vastly more than the junction under discussion in Cambridge) and the under five injuries per year which it causes are not just for cyclists but for all road users.

i.e. a fairly normal junction in Cambridge is at least 70% more dangerous for cyclists than the very worst location in the whole of this country, even without taking into account the far lower number of people who cross that Cambridge junction by bike.

The huge improvements in safety for all cyclists in the Netherlands started with protests about the safety of children. Nowadays, the Netherlands has not only a staggering amount of cycling, by all sections of society, but also the safest cyclists in the world. Britain could take note from this, and transform conditions for all.

Cherry Hinton Road roundabout, where the incident occurred. A terrible roundabout design completely unsympathetic to the needs of cyclists. I've cycled here. It's very unpleasant. (Bigger map).

Roundabouts simply shouldn't look like this. The safest Dutch roundabouts are designed in a very different way, and cyclists are much safer using them.

Read more about the problems facing British children. Click here for The Truth About Cambridge or all posts about Cambridge. While the "everything is good" people and those whose reaction to this story could be summed up as I cycle so you could cycle too might try to convince you otherwise, the city has much to learn from Dutch practice.

The truth about Cambridge

Cyclists disappearing into the mist in a park in
Cambridge

Cambridge in the UK is sometimes held up as an example for other cities to follow.

The city generally claims a cycling rate of about 25%. However, this is a rate for commuters only, including students, and not the proportion of all journeys which are made by bike. Estimates of the percentage of journeys by bike for all purposes are harder to find, and often hover around 18-20%. In a rather glowing article in the Guardian earlier this year it was claimed that "one in five" journeys are by bike.

This is not bad at all for Britain. In fact, Cambridge's modal share for cyclists is almost certainly the highest in the English speaking world. That's one of the reasons why we moved to the city in 1991.

We lived in Cambridge for 16 years and we wouldn't have stayed so long if it were not a pleasant place to live. However, the conditions for cycling are really only so-so. The reasons for Cambridge's relatively high cycling rate are unusual, specific to the city, and not easy to copy elsewhere.

What's happened since we left ?
We visited Cambridge briefly in October to visit some friends. After becoming used to the rapid progress and dramatic changes to cycling infrastructure in Assen in four years, it was interesting to see that essentially nothing much had changed for Cambridge cyclists in four years. Speed limits remain high, cycle-lanes remain narrow, cyclists are still expected to share lanes with buses and few residential roads are designed to limit rat-running.

Cambridge cyclists still find themselves riding on rough surfaces in narrow cycle lanes on busy through roads to the left of obstructions in the middle of the road in places where the speed limit drops from 40 mph to 30 mph (64 km/h to 48 km/h). It's not much fun if a bus or truck passes as you come to pinch points like this:

Huntingdon Road, Cambridge. Narrow cycle-lanes past unpleasant and dangerous central islands. View Larger Map

We also went along the much celebrated Gilbert Road. This looked less like somewhere which had recently received attention and more like somewhere which still desperately needed work. It still relies on narrow on-road cycle-lanes to separate cyclists from motor vehicles.

Since we returned to the Netherlands, there has been another story in the local paper about the utter chaos caused by people driving their children to school and parking in the very road where we used to live. It's a long way from what the school run looks like in Assen.

Cambridge still feels like a city where quite a lot of people cycle despite the conditions, and not one where the entire population is invited to cycle because of the conditions.

Just behind the "cyclists dismount"
sign at the entrance to this school in
Cambridge you find Sheffield stands
have been repurposed to stop
pedestrians from walking where cars
are being driven. This is surely not what
what the Dutch company which made
the stands intended them to be used for.

Students cycle a lot in Cambridge
Cambridge is an atypical city, with unusual demographics. Cycling is largely split along demographic lines.

While Cambridge's population is around 130000, the two universities cater for about 43000 students, making up a substantial proportion of the total population.

Students are a particularly easy demographic to attract to cycling. They're young adults, well educated, more confident than average and have to be fairly careful with money. Cambridge is not alone in having a higher proportion of trips by bike because it is a university city. In fact, the top cycling cities in most countries are university cities. This includes Groningen in the Netherlands, Copenhagen in Denmark, Davis and Portland in the USA as well as Cambridge in the UK.

It is not possible to copy the extra proportion of trips by bike due to the large student population to other similar cities which don't have a large student population.

However, Cambridge goes further than most and almost forces students to cycle. Few people from outside the city, and not all within it, realise that "Undergraduate students are not normally allowed to keep a car", or as it is put elsewhere, "it is a Regulation of the University, agreed with the City Council, that students are not allowed to keep a car or motorcycle in Cambridge". There are exceptions, for instance for physically disabled students, but most students don't drive in the city.

Enough students are banned from keeping a car in Cambridge that if just half of them made all their journeys by bike, no-one else would need to cycle at all to achieve the headline cycling modal share of the city.

Who else cycles in Cambridge ?
Cycling in Cambridge also benefits from the fact that many students remain in the city after graduating in order to work for one of the high-tech companies in the area. Also, many people move to the city to work for these companies after graduating at other institutions.

The city is home to a higher than usual proportion of graduates and many people have noted that those who form the cycling habit at University tend to continue to cycle afterwards, especially at the start of their careers when they're still young and don't yet have responsibility for children. Cambridge is a very young city due to the recent graduates as well as the students.

Cambridge Cycling Campaign committee members are also predominantly from the "University and high-tech" end of local society¹. Many members of the campaign are the same². Cyclists in Cambridge are predominantly people who identify themselves as "cyclists", or at least are a member of the university and high-tech demographic that cycles. They've taken the unusual step of doing something which the majority of the British population now never does: riding a bike.

This is great, but with such a source of commuting cyclists, it's surprising that it is still only a quarter of journeys to work that are made by bike.

Just as it is not possible to copy the extra proportion of trips by bike due to the large student population to other similar cities without a large student population, so it is not possible to copy the extra proportion of trips by ex-students who kept the habit of cycling.

Note that I am not saying that everyone who cycles in Cambridge is either a student or works in a high-tech company as of course there are some cyclists who fit into neither of those groups. However very many of those who cycle in Cambridge are part of one of those two groups.

A social divide
There has long been a divide between "town" and "gown" in Cambridge. This is perhaps less severe than it once was, but it is still real. Even now it still occasionally breaks out into violence.

People from families which have long been in the city and who are connected with neither the university nor the high-tech businesses and who you might classify as "working class" don't cycle at a particularly higher rate than they would in any other British town. Amongst the "town" people, car usage is very much higher and riding a bike can be seen as a reflection of being poor.

That people linked with the university and high tech industries are more likely than average to cycle does not have much influence on the "town" people as they don't identify with that other group. Rather, cycling has become one of the ways that the two groups, of "local people" and "students" can be identified. As I cycled in the city, drivers shouting abuse (something which happened all to often) would often refer to me as a "student" or as "poor". They were not interested in that I never studied in Cambridge and only moved there in my mid 20s to take quite well paid jobs for computer companies. To them, I was definitely "gown". I made this clear to them in part by cycling.

It's not just cycling. The two sides of the town / gown divide have different priorities in other ways too. For instance, take the shops in Cambridge. The city has high retail rents. As a result, shops which sell low cost goods are relatively few and far between. Campaigns have been run by against new supermarkets opening in "gentrified" areas, even though many of the locally born people who live in the same area value the possibility of cheaper food and other bargains which the new shops may bring rather higher than having boutique stores which sell organic produce for higher prices.

The results of a social divide
The divide affects attitudes of both sides. It is part of the cause of a relatively high level of intolerance experienced by cyclists in the city even though cyclists are not such a small minority as they might be in other parts of the UK.

When cyclists experience trouble from drivers in Cambridge, the result tends to be quite similar to other parts of the country. They are unlikely to get much sympathy from the police or the public. I once had an experience of a Cambridge taxi driver driving into me deliberately as I rode along a counter-flow cycle-lane (very near where something similar happened to this cyclist). This driver also turned his vehicle around, chased me up the street, got out of his taxi and assaulted me. When I went to the police, the very first words spoken by the officer who interviewed me were "cyclists cause a lot of problems in Cambridge". The local newspaper in Cambridge quite often reports conflicts, with van drivers, runners, bus-drivers and youths all finding a reason to dislike cyclists.

It's a huge contrast with the Netherlands where cycling is something that the whole of society finds to be normal and there is no social divide between cyclist and non-cyclist. The response is very different should anything untoward happen to a cyclist.

The Cambridge Cycling Campaign was formed when shopping streets in the centre of the city, essential as part of many direct and relatively safe routes across the city, were closed to cyclists. This was a popular change amongst non-cyclists, and was possible to implement only because the public at large didn't cycle, didn't understand cycling and didn't support cycling as a means of transport. These streets have only partly been restored as cycling routes, and some of the one-way restrictions on them, which make sense only when driving, still apply to bikes. They are occasionally enforced with much publicity.

These restrictions in the centre make cycling routes in Cambridge less direct and force cyclists sometimes to have to use busy and dangerous roads.

The local newspaper in Cambridge often includes the same kind of articles and letters from outraged non-cyclists (red lights, one way streets, pavement cycling) which you see in other areas in Britain. These letters, and the attitudes which go with them, are unknown in the Netherlands. The conditions which cause cyclists to ignore red lights, ride the wrong way down one-way streets and ride on the pavement are to a large extent eliminated in the Netherlands by infrastructure designed to benefit cyclists, so they are not an enforcement issue. The occurrence of these problems are symptoms of a greater planning and design problem.

What about the infrastructure ?
I'm not the only person to have noted that cycling happens in Cambridge not because of the infrastructure but despite it.

There are a few high points. The paths through the parks, though narrow, shared with pedestrians and often crowded, are relatively pleasant to ride through. Recently a good new path opened which heads North from the Northern edge of the City to some villages. Also there is a nice cycle path about 600 m long which heads to the University buildings on the West (it was chosen for the cover of the Cambridge Cycling Campaign's 2016 document).

However, the better examples of infrastructure are not joined up. You can't make any journey only using these few good paths away from motorists. This is quite typical for the UK. Cyclists spend much of their time on roads which are "shared" with large numbers of cars. Also, the bans on cycling in shopping streets in the centre which originally were the catalyst for the formation of the local cycling campaign group in 1993 have only been partly repealed, leaving a useful link from the centre to the east unavailable to cyclists.

Cyclists go left, pedestrians go right.
Carlton Way in Cambridge

Much of the separate provision that exists, is woefully inadequate, such as the short length along Carlton Way where a narrow path is shared with pedestrians for bidirectional travel. It's only a couple of hundred metres long but in this short length presents an array of problems to cyclists including a rough surface, having to give way twice, bollards, and an exciting point where pedestrians and cyclists have to cross each other's paths on a sharp corner before after another 90 degree bend cyclists are ejected into a side-road.

Kings Hedges estate in Cambridge.
It's far from perfect, with bumpy
narrow paths and bad sight lines.
However, these paths do provide a
traffic-free route to a primary school,
swimming pool, and a few shops.

In the 1970s, a reasonable effort was made in the UK to create housing developments designed around people rather than around cars. The Kings Hedges estate in Cambridge is an example of this. However, these early starts have not been maintained nor developed. They also have not been linked up with other newer developments.

There was also an attempt to build good cycling provision in the East of the city. However, this also doesn't really link up with anything in a useful way.

Newer developments are far worse in design. No longer are there significant green spaces, no longer is there an attempt to provide a network of motor traffic free paths.

"The Quills" - a new housing estate which offers this view of
the world. The result of trying to limit car ownership by
limiting car parking is to make car parking more of a problem.

I blogged before about "The Quills", a small new estate dominated by cars, and designed with no good route to cycle to the centre of the city without riding with those cars.

Also I wrote in the past about another new development, the multiply named Arbury Camp / Arbury Park / Orchard Park. The plans for this place were alarming enough, but the reality was worse. It caused many problems for cyclists before it had even been built, even if you were merely trying to pass nearby.

Outside the city
A few cycle-paths stretch outside the city of Cambridge, but they don't provide anything near to a comprehensive network of efficient routes. The local newspaper recently reported that another cyclist had been injured riding along the A14, a road with a 70 mph ( 113 km/h ) speed limit which might well have been classified as a motorway in other countries:

The A14. A motorway in all but name with a 70 mph speed limit and no hard shoulder. This runs across the Northern edge of the city and provides the most direct route to some nearby villages. Some people actually do cycle here, but we've known for a long time that it's not safe. View Larger Map

Britain does not provide convenient and safe routes paralleling "motorways" like this, and cycling on an A-road like this is legal in the UK. You might wonder why anyone would choose to use such roads. The answer is simple. Doing so avoids a long detour along busy narrow country lanes with 60 mph ( 96 km/h ) speed limits and blind corners.

Children from villages at a distance from school which would be routinely cycled in the Netherlands cannot routinely cycle to school in Cambridge.

Conclusion
The cause of the higher than average cycling rate in Cambridge is not something that can be replicated in other British cities. Where could you convince a third of the population to agree to be banned from owning a car ?

On the other hand, what makes cycling attractive in Dutch cities, including here in Assen, could be replicated in British cities if only the will existed to ask for it. What has been done is very simple. Long term planning is key - the same policies have been followed for many years. They've followed the principles of sustainable safety and have created conditions which:

• Keep cyclists away from cars absolutely as much as possible.
• Make all residential streets no-go areas for through traffic (preserving segregation of modes without cyclepaths).
• Provide bikes with more direct routes than cars.
• Remove cars from minor rural roads.
• Produce a high degree of subjective and social safety everywhere.

This is what is needed to make infrastructure a draw for cycling rather than a hindrance.

We had three different houses in and around Cambridge, and it's notable that in none of them were any of our neighbours particularly enthusiastic cyclists. In fact, most of our neighbours never rode a bike in the entire time we lived in those houses. This is in sharp contrast with where we live now in Assen. All of our current neighbours cycle for at least some of their journeys. Due to cycling having been made the preserve of the many instead of a hobby activity for a few, there are few "non-cyclists" and no anti-cycling sentiment.

Assen is in most respects is quite normal by Dutch standards. Car parking here is the cheapest in the country, and no attempt has been made to limit the ownership of cars. New build homes here have adequate car parking as well as compulsory cycle parking. There is also no university in this city to boost cycling numbers. These things could be seen as disadvantages where encouraging cycling are concerned, but the cycling rate here is more than double that of Cambridge. More importantly, the people who cycle here come from the whole spectrum of society and are not taken predominantly from a particular demographic.

Cambridge	Assen

A video from Cambridge which has become popular on youtube:


Many people who view this think little more than to note that there are quite a few cyclists. Let's look deeper into it. The most dense cycle usage in Cambridge is in a few streets in the centre like this one, on routes used by many students. The conditions for cycling in this location are neither especially pleasant nor especially safe. The bulk of the cyclists that you see in the video are students. They ride for the reasons that students everywhere ride, but there are more of them in Cambridge in large part because they are not allowed to keep a car.

What can be done ?
Several unfortunate things have happened recently. The local government scrapped the much needed post of cycling officer and also while Cambridge was briefly in receipt of extra funds as a Cycling City, this initiative has also been scrapped. Investment in cycling in Cambridge has never been adequate.

It's important not to lose focus and not to be complacent. Cambridge's leading position in the UK, and in the English speaking world, is the result of unusual and fortunate circumstance, not of cyclists being particularly well provided for. With investment in decent cycling infrastructure, the city has the potential to do much better. For this reason, I was recently surprised to see a proposal to rename the main campaign group in the city with a more passive tone. Your work is not finished yet.

People elsewhere who look to Cambridge are looking in the wrong direction. The things that make cycling popular in Cambridge are not easily duplicated elsewhere. Instead of looking to one town which is exceptional for reasons that cannot be duplicated you would be better off looking to the Netherlands where a far higher cycling rate has been achieved even in towns with none of these special circumstances. The difference is the infrastructure above all else.

August 2013 update

A recently published research project by Anna Goodman into socio-economic patterns and their relevance to commuting in the UK supports my argument above.

The chart on the right. Anna's research confirms that there is a correlation between cycling in Cambridge and affluence - precisely the point that I make above re "town vs. gown".

Note that Oxford and Hackney have similar demographic bubbles in which cycling is correlated with the lifestyle of a self selected and relatively prosperous section of the population.

A personal note about Hackney
I used to visit Hackney quite often just over twenty years ago. I met my (then) future wife, Judy, in Hackney as she lived there for a time. Hackney was then a very different place demographically to how it is now. We have to recognize the effect of social change on peoples' chosen modes of transport.

Hackney has been through a period of gentrification. The population is now more similar to Cambridge and Oxford than it used to be and that's the primary reason why cycling has grown in that area. The infrastructure is still dreadful and Hackney still achieves nothing like its potential for cycling.

Read other posts about Cambridge.

January 2015 update
Since I wrote this piece, people from Cambridge have often claimed that great changes have been made since we left the UK. Their claims have not as yet stood up to much scrutiny. I made a very short work trip to Cambridge for work this month, arriving by coach and leaving by train. As a result Most of my view of the city on this visit was through a coach or taxi window. I saw a good part of my old commuting route from a village south of Cambridge, and two different routes to the Science Park. Nothing much had changed. Cycling remains difficult in Cambridge. In response to the conditions, many of those people who do cycle dress like canaries. I took some photos while waiting for buses and trains:

This cyclist decided he'd had enough of the road at this point.

Pleasant conditions for cycling by the station ?

Road vs. pavement.

A very narrow cycle-lane leading into to a bus stop. Those who can turn left here, mounting the kerb and riding through a park.

Making short connections by riding on the pavement is an understandable reaction to the conditions.

I was only here for a few minutes. Quite a lot of people prefer the pavement here.

I took the photo at the top in 1998 as I cycled to work in Cambridge in the fog. Jesus Green is one of the nicer bits of Cambridge for cycling, but those shared use paths were always too narrow and too bumpy, and access to them is not what it could be.

The University of Cambridge continues to be charged with elitism. They have problems with admitting people from less advantaged backgrounds, even though they've supposedly been trying for years. This is noticed even by newspapers which show the same elitism.

¹ This is not in any way a criticism of the campaign committee. These are wonderful people giving freely of their time to try to encourage cycling. Cambridge Cycling Campaign is very well organised and the people in it try to do a good job. I was once a member of the committee myself. However, like everyone else their ideas are inevitably shaped by their position in society.
² Cycle campaigners around the world often point out that cyclists are on average better educated than non-cyclists or that they have on average higher incomes. This is all very well, but it also reinforces the difference between "town" and "gown".


A history of exaggeration
Readers from elsewhere may be amused to hear that back in the 1990s, the local council in Cambridge produced literature which said that Cambridge was second only to Amsterdam. This was of course a smokescreen. Portland now makes the same claim. It's still a smokescreen. Indeed, Portland is boasting even more. They only have about 5% of commutes by bike which isn't close even to Cambridge, let alone average Dutch cities. We have to always be wary of nonsense like this. There is a lot of exaggeration about and it's not helpful.