Inadequate infrastructure causes injuries. Better infrastructure prevents them. Learning from two minor crashes. Mini Roundabouts are unsafe for cyclists

My mother lives in Burnham-on-Sea in Somerset, England. Just before Christmas, my mum was involved in a crash while cycling. She had right of way when turning right on a mini roundabout. A driver coming from her left drove into her without seeing her.

My mother was following the line shown in red. The crash happened at the blue cross. See it on Google Maps.

The driver who hit my mother is not a bad person. She was apologetic from the start, took my mother to hospital and has checked up on her since then. The driver also paid for repairs to the bicycle and admitted liability to the police.

My mother was not seriously hurt, but her minor injuries have caused pain for some weeks now. A couple of days ago, my Mum collected her bike from the bike shop which made the repairs and rode it home. That's brave. Many people never cycle again once something like this has happened to them. While careful cyclists rarely have collisions anywhere in the world, including the UK, cycling becomes subjectively far less safe for people who have had this type of experience.

Crashes like this are quite common in the UK. They're usually referred to using the word "SMIDSY" ("Sorry Mate, I Didn't See You") as that's what drivers say so very often to the people who they have injured.

However, while crashes like this are common, they are rarely the result of deliberately dangerous behaviour. This is why neither legislation against drivers nor additional training are likely to make such events less frequent.

Another view of the same location. The red line shows the route that my mother takes to ride her bike home from the town centre.

The Blame Game
Who should we blame for this crash having occurred ?

My mother is a very careful cyclist and was riding according to the highway code when the crash occurred so she can't be blamed. The driver of the car has to take some responsibility because it was her action which caused the crash.

However it would be a mistake to think that these two parties are the only people involved. We need to look at why the driver made the mistake. This didn't happen for no reason at all, it was at least in part the result of the environment. Because crashes like this continue to occur I don't find it constructive to continue to blame either of the two principle actors.

It's not just Burnham. Britain has many
mini-roundabouts. This one near our old
home in Cambridge often caused us
problems by bike. Car crashes also
occurred. At least one person has died
at this junction since we left the UK.

This is a busy road junction yet it's designed as a mini-roundabout. Mini-roundabouts like this can be quite efficient for motorists but many cyclists find them to be dangerous. On a mini-roundabout, people have far less time in which to make a decision than they do on a full-sized roundabout. This leads mistakes being made and makes it far easier for motorists simply not to notice bikes and their riders amongst the more common and far larger motorized vehicles.

The speed limit at this junction is 30 mph (50 km/h). Burnham doesn't have any lower speed limits than this, not in residential areas which should not be used as through routes by car nor even by schools, even though schools exist for children yet children never drive cars to school.

The petrol station adjacent to the mini-roundabout adds more uncertainty. This station has a total of three entrances and exits, one in a side road and two of which divert traffic onto and off from the mini-roundabout. Passing drivers may also be distracted by reading the advertised fuel prices.

While both cyclists and pedestrians have no choice but to use this junction to get across the town, there is no provision here for cyclists to ride around the junction safely nor even to help pedestrians to cross the road.

The mini-roundabout is in the distance in this image, this is the road along which my mother was going to cycle in order to get home. Is this an equitable way to allocate space ? Both the mother with children and the person in a disability buggy have to use extremely narrow pavements while drivers enjoy wide lanes. The closest safe provision for crossing the road as a pedestrian is behind the camera.

Just like in other towns in the UK, planners here have only considered motor vehicles as a mode of transport. However, even that has not been done very well.

British Road Design
The roads in Burnham-on-Sea are very typical for a British town. I rode across this junction hundreds, if not thousands, of times when I lived in Burnham in the 1980s and 1990s. There has been no significant change to the roads in thirty years.

While British roads have not changed in design in the last thirty years, that is not true of the Netherlands. Sustainable safety principles applied progressively to Dutch roads in the ten year period between 1998 and 2007 are credited with having reduced the fatality rate by 5% per year. While the number of injuries for car occupants in the Netherlands is at around the same level as in Britain, pedestrians and cyclists are safer here than in the UK. Dutch children are far more likely to be independently mobile than British children and they are much safer than their British counterparts as they make their way around.

Comparison of the same road as above in Burnham (left) and a similar road and junction in Assen (right). The overall width of pavement, cycle-path and road at this point in Burnham is somewhat narrower than the example from Assen. Nevertheless, despite having less space overall, the British example allocates more space for cars even at this narrow point: the driving lanes in Burnham are about as wide as the driving lanes in Assen and the car parking lane, even though no parking is allowed. Extra width could be allocated to pedestrians and cyclists even here, but that isn't done even further along the road where it's much wider. Note also the smaller corner radii into side roads in Assen to reduce speeds and make crossing easier and lower speed limits in all residential streets. The width of the driving lanes of this street in Assen were reduced in 2008.

Burnham-on-Sea is a small town (the population is less than a third that of Assen at under 19000 people) but the roads in the town are always busy with cars. As in most of the UK, there is little alternative but to drive. Very few people will ever feel comfortable to cycle when the infrastructure design makes it so obvious that drivers are preferred over cyclists. In these conditions, people often believe driving to be a necessity.

When we visited in October, we saw that cycling provision is still virtually non-existent in Burnham. Enthusiastic cyclists ride their bikes, but there is little to attract those who are not enthusiastic cyclists. Many of the people who we came across who cycled used the pavement and apologised for doing so, or avoided the direct routes by using back streets and narrow pedestrian only cut-throughs.

The red line at the left shows part of the route taken by my mother to get from home to the town centre. The green line on the right shows the only cycling infrastructure in this area, a cycle-path built on the edge of a new housing development on the Eastern side of the town. This single path is of relatively good quality by British standards but it's not very useful because it skirts around the town and doesn't provide a direct route to common destinations. A very finely spaced grid of high quality cycle-paths is required to enable safe mass cycling. The blue line on the far left shows where Sustrans tell cyclists to ride along the beach.

Where the best cycle-path in Burnham
crosses a minor side-road, the corner
radius is large to enable high speed
when entering the residential streets
and drivers have priority. Also note
how much space is allocated for
driving vs. other modes.

A recently built housing development on the Eastern edge of the city provided a single cycle-path. However, this path is compromised in quality (narrow, gives way at all side-roads, low social safety) and doesn't actually go anywhere very useful. It skirts around the edge of the new homes where it was easy to build rather than going where it would provide a useful route.

There's a stark contrast between the housing development in Burnham-on-Sea which is typical for Britain, and what we've seen with a new development built on the edge of Assen which is typical for the Netherlands. In the Dutch example, cycling is not an afterthought. Not only was this development designed to enable most children to cycle to school but the new suburb also came with all facilities including a pedestrian and cycle friendly shopping centre. What's more, not only does the new development in Assen have an extensive network of internal cycle-paths, but it its construction also involved extensive works to provide a direct, unobstructed and nearly car free route to the city centre by bicycle.

Is everything perfect in the Netherlands ?

The collision in Assen took place at
this junction in an industrial estate

We go to some lengths to point out, both on this blog and on the study tours, that the Netherlands is not perfect. While the overall standard of the Netherlands is very good, there are plenty of places in this country where the infrastructure is not yet up to scratch. Plenty of work remains to be done. We have observed that those places which have inadequate, old-fashioned, infrastructure are often the scenes of collisions.

This is a long, straight road with lanes
just as wide as those used in the UK.
Drivers often exceed the speed limit
of 50 km/h in this location. No cycle-
paths here to keep cyclists safe.

This was illustrated in the last week because a friend of ours was involved in a very similar crash here in Assen to that which befell my mother in Burnham-on-Sea. Like my mother, our friend was bruised but not seriously injured. Her bicycle had some damage. The car driver in this case initially wanted to leave the scene of the accident but did co-operate.

It's often the case that people from outside the Netherlands overestimate the effect of "Strict liability" law. This was not a deliberate act and law does nothing to prevent accidental crashes. The driver simply "didn't see" the cyclist when he used a junction to turn around. No change to the law can prevent crashes because they address the wrong issue. The law does provide the useful service of ensuring that the crash victim will have her bicycle repair paid by the insurance of the driver.

Proper cycling infrastructure in this location almost certainly would have prevented the crash from happening because this removes the chance for a collision to occur. There is easily enough space for a cycle-path along this route and it is highly likely that one will be built in the future. The Western end of this area is to be rebuilt in the next few years and I expect to see changes for cyclists when that happens.

The route taken by the Assen cyclist through the industrial estate is shown as the bottom line, in red. The location of the crash is shown by the blue cross. No-one used this as a through route until very recently when a new bicycle bridge joined the short green section of cycle-path on the right to the red road. There are many cycle-paths in Assen and they go to all destinations. The longer green line across the top shows one good quality route (mainly cycle-path) to the same destination. This shortest safe route is 0.8 km longer for this particular journey, hence the desire to save time by choosing the red line. As the red route now makes a useful bicycle through-route, it is imperative that a cycle-path is built alongside it to improve safety.

Bad road designs are unsafe

Further along the same road, still in the
industrial area, there's a painted mini-
roundabout (new since we moved here)
Dutch drivers cut corners just as British
drivers do. This type of infrastructure
is no more safe here than in the UK.

Bad infrastructure in the Netherlands is no more safe than is bad infrastructure in the UK. Where conflict is caused by road design, problems of safety also arise.

In the post second world war period, the Netherlands and the UK were transformed by the rise of the private car. Starting in the 1970s, the Netherlands took a different path. Some forty years have now elapsed of this second phase of transformation. People now take priority and road safety has improved by a huge margin.

In some places, old fashioned and unsafe infrastructure remains in the Netherlands. In the case of the street featured above, it affected relatively few people until the recent opening of a cycle-bridge made it into a short-cut for some journeys by bike. It is now important that this street too needs to be updated to make it safe - part of an on-going process.

Book a Study Tour in order to find out about
what works and what does not work for cycling
in the Netherlands.

Just because something exists in the Netherlands, that doesn't mean it works well for cycling. Many things can be found on the road network of the Netherlands or are promoted by Dutch companies but that doesn't mean it's a good idea to copy all of them. This is why we offer independent advice about infrastructure. We're in a unique position to understand and explain, having experience of the UK and the Netherlands, and we have no company's product to sell.

My mother and Kona are not the only cyclists in Burnham-on-Sea. This town is also home to the world's oldest triathlete.  On the theme of the last paragraph above, some may remember that I criticized a Dutch company last year who offered "Dutch" infrastructure which was not the same as they would build in the Netherlands. Public companies are amoral. Just because they have Dutch roots that does not mean they're interested in cycling. Profit is their motive. The same company has now become involved with achieving consent for a shiny new nuclear power station just 10 km from my mother's home. That's not very "Dutch" either - there are no nuclear power stations under construction in the Netherlands near the mothers of the people at the top of Royal Haskoning.

"Alpe d'Huez" in Groningen and what this means for London and the rest of the world

My mother and the rest of the family
riding through a nearby village

We've had a few very busy weeks. First my Mother came to stay and cycle with us, and then several different cycling visitors have come to see us and find out what's been achieved for cyclists in this area.

As a result, we've done several short tours and because we've been doing things for other people I've mostly not been able to take photos or make video for myself or this blog.

However, an opportunity did arise yesterday when I rode to Groningen with Clarence Eckerson Jr. On our study tours we make a point of showing people the worst as well as the best infrastructure and to explain why the less good parts are considered to be a problem. Cherry-picking of a few highlights might be possible in a few hours it takes a lot more time to give an accurate impression of what cycling in the Netherlands is about and we try to do this even with people who have less time than the three days of our usual tours.

Streetfilms in The Netherlands
 Clarence and I rode between
Assen and Groningen

Clarence and I talked about many things including how despite having the highest cycling modal share in the world, Groningen missed out on winning the Dutch "Cycling City of 2011" award. It's still a wonderful place to cycle, but the city had not invested enough in making it better. In particular, two pieces of infrastructure were picked out by campaigners as a stick with which to beat the city and I was keen to show Clarence what "bad" was in this context. Cor van de Klaauw from Groningen city visited both of them with us and discussed the problems. Some time ago I wrote and made a video about one of these points: the most dangerous junction in the Netherlands. Yesterday I had the opportunity to video the other: a new bridge which is steeper than cyclists would like it to be. It's considered to be "a challenge like Alpe d'Huez" for elderly people. By international standards it's not actually very steep and the cycling provision on both sides of the road over the bridge is actually very good. However cycling has a very wide demographic in The Netherlands and there are very many elderly people riding bikes here. This bridge genuinely does cause some difficulties for some of them as you can see in a previous post.

Here's the controversial bridge. In any other country new infrastructure of this quality this would likely have been the subject of boastful press-releases:


This bridge, which provides a new good quality link for cyclists and drivers alike, is considered to be not quite good enough to win a "cycling city" award. It's one of the things which was used to criticise Groningen in 2011.
And then we return to earth with a bump...
Sadly, the problems in London have continued with more deaths of cyclists on the roads. I have criticized London's absurdly named "superhighways" since they were first announced in 2009 because even then they were obviously not up to the job of creating an environment in which mass cycling could take place in safety. These "superhighways" have a far grander name than anything else, but they are not even remotely close to the quality of infrastructure which is the subject of criticism in the Netherlands. London's more recent plans are equally lacklustre.

For decades, British politicians have pacified cyclists by making vague promises about future change, producing impressive looking press-releases and plans, hyping up projects which divert attention to the wrong things, using lots of words to describe remarkably little, and making endless promises of jam tomorrow while not actually starting the process of change at all.

In the past, the votes of cyclists have been captured by making these vague promises and relying on the short collective memory of cyclists so that people will believe the same story yet again. Due to the frequency with which people give up cycling in the UK, there is a high churn rate amongst cyclists and this has assisted the very short collective memory of what has happened before. The internet offers the potential of allowing younger campaigners to benefit from the experience of those who have already seen these things happen. It has the potential to make the collective memory of campaigners longer.

More people are waking up now to the fact that plans made by London are simply inadequate. The death of 65 cyclists during Boris Johnson's term of office is a high price to pay for incompetence. If you don't click on any of the other links in this post, please do read that last link to a post by Markbikeslondon and this one from an obviously angry Voleofspeed.

There's yet another protest in London today. I urge any of you who are there or near by to try to get to it.

September 2013 update - nothing stands still in NL
The Berlagebrug is being changed. The last two study tour groups which I took to Groningen saw some of the works going on around this area, cycling conditions are improving.

A still from July taken from the video above compared with the situation in September when the cycle-paths were being reworked.

On-road cycle-lane being replaced by off-road cycle-path on
adjacent road.

At the end of the video above, after the bridge, I turned right onto one of few roads which still had just a cycle-lane. This is being upgraded into a proper segregated cycle-path and the cycle-paths leading right up onto the bridge are being improved. I don't know as yet whether this will decrease the slope. However campaigning in Groningen about the quality of the Berlagebrug will in any case have paid off. The bridge will work far better for cyclists after these works are complete than it did immediately after the bridge was built.

Nothing stands still in the Netherlands and this is why no-one can "catch up" by doing less.

Readers from places other than London: Please realise that there is nothing to be gained by any other place trying to copy London's policies which consist almost entirely of hype and hot air. If you want to achieve mass cycling in your country, emulate the best example. This means The Netherlands. Take a study tour.

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.

The first Fietsroute+ in Groningen

Not all major cycle-routes are given a particularly grand name in the Netherlands. While other countries use terms such as "superhighway" for mere cycle-lanes, in this country, more modest terms are used for very good and direct cycle-paths. One of these terms is "Fietsroute+", favoured by the Groningen-Assen region.

My mother helping me to demonstrate
the Assen-Rolde Fietsroute+

The first Fietsroute+ was constructed in 2007 to cover the 10 km distance between Assen and Vries. For a couple of years, this featured on my commute, and the wonderful smooth surface and continuity of the path helped with riding at high enough average speeds that a 60 km round trip was quite feasible. This particular routes has also featured in several blog posts including about the required standards for a Fietsroute+ (worth reading) and how it is used by many secondary school students. Another Fietsroute+ heads East out of Assen, covering the 6 km distance between Rolde and Assen.

However, both of these are in Drenthe, not in Groningen and this post is about the First Fietsroute+ in the province of Groningen.

Two years ago, Wilfred took some photos of the construction of a new Fietsroute+ to make the 13 km distance between his home in Zuidhorn and Groningen more attractive to cyclists. This cycle-path was finally completed and officially opened in May as the first Fietsroute+ in Groningen. The local government produced a publicity film for it in which the entertainer Arno Van Der Heyden introduces the new fietsroute+, demonstrates how to cycle along the route, and interviews the burgemeester of Zuidhorn, a passer by, and the cycling project leader about the new cycle-path:


Like the other Fietsroute+ routes, as well as other major routes without that designation, it's designed to be safe, wide to avoid conflict, and smooth and direct to cope with higher speeds than an average cycle-path. The combined population of Zuidhorn and surrounding smaller villages is only around 18000, yet 1500 people per day cycle along this route. Their numbers are boosted by people for whom this section is part of a longer route. It is hoped that the quality of the new cycle-path will attract yet more people out of cars.

However, this wasn't the only publicity. There was another event, an opening "race":

The winner of this "race" was professional cycle racer Bauke Mollema. Bauke Mollema grew up in Zuidhorn and rode to Groningen each day to go to school. He tells an amusing anecdote about how when he made his school journeys along the old path, they would ride with two students next to each other and it too cramped for three, while with the new improved path five abreast will be possible. I've seen how school children and students cycle, and I've no doubt that this will happen.

Bauke is a local hero. This year he took part in the Tour de France, though sadly he had to stop after the 11th stage due to problems from injuries suffered on the sixth stage. Better luck next time !

Progress continues to be made so that cycling becomes steadily safer, faster and more attractive. Seven routes are currently shown as either completed or in progress on the Groningen-Assen website, and another fietsroute+ is also planned to be built along the line of the railway to Winsum, some 15 km North of Groningen:

It is only by continual improvement that cycling can be expected to grow. Standards are so high as they are in the Nnetherlands because they need to be higher here than elsewhere merely to preserve the modal share which already exists, let alone to make it grow. While it is relatively easy to convince the first few percent of the population to cycle because they are the least demanding, if the modal share is to become higher, it becomes steadily more difficult because the target is no longer "low lying fruit". Rather, to maintain and build on a high modal share for cycling, the target audience is necessarily those people who are not easy to convince to ride a bike. They may have longer journeys, be more easily scared off from cycling, come from from demographic groups who are less likely to cycle, or perhaps they simply more likely to prefer an alternative such as driving a car.

This is why development of ever better cycling facilities is not a luxury but a necessity not only in the Netherlands but also elsewhere. Campaigners can make no progress by asking only for what is good enough for themselves. Such campaigners are themselves the low-lying fruit and they are already riding. For progress, the standards have to improve and this isn't achieved by aiming low. The benefit of good quality cycling facilities is for everyone, even professional cycle-racers.



In related news, Bauke became a father last week. Gefeliciteerd Bauke en Jane !

Reflections on England

The Morris Minor is a classic British car. Over a million were produced between 1948 and 1971 and they are still sometimes seen in use, including this example.

I just spent a week in England, visiting my family. It was great to be back. I had crumpets for breakfast, curry for lunch, and can report that English beer remains much tastier than Dutch beer. I enjoyed it very much, and even visiting it as a "foreigner" I found much to enjoy. It does help that my family live in one of the nicest corners of the country.

However, not everything is wonderful. I read in a newspaper while over there that the number of cars on Britain's roads have increased from just over 26 million in 2005 to more than 31 million in 2009, a rise of nearly 20% in just four years - a period only slightly longer than we've lived in the Netherlands. Considerable growth since the last time I looked at car ownership rates in Britain.

This growth was obvious on the roads themselves, and not only at school time, as in this photo, or rush hour. It didn't seem to matter what time of day or night it was, the roads had lots of cars on them. Often enough to cause a bit of a traffic jam, even at the most unlikely of times. For instance, we even found ourselves in a jam on the way to small a market town in the west country at 7 o'clock on a Sunday evening.

The UK's current transport secretary recently reminded us "that over 80% of all journeys are undertaken by car." He's absolutely right, and it will likely remain the case. It's the only means of transport which he, and the rest of the government, actually encourage in the UK at present. While it's not necessarily convenient due to the number of other motor vehicles on the roads, in very many cases it's the least bad option open to people.


I flew to Bristol and my mother came to meet me at the airport. As a pensioner, she is entitled to a free bus pass, so she left home in Burnham-on-Sea just after 2 pm to arrive over three hours later on the last bus to go to the airport from that direction. She covered 30 km in a fair bit over 3 hours, or an average of under 10 km/h.

I, on the other hand, left home in Assen somewhat after 3 pm, taking one of the regular trains (every 30 minutes) from Assen to Schiphol airport 200 km away in order to arrive a long time before the flight. I waited, got bored, bought a book, ate some food and eventually boarded the aeroplane and flew to Bristol Airport for 19:30. Just over four hours in all, and 800 km covered at an average of 200 km/h.

On the map: I started at A, my mother started at B and we met after comparable journey times at the white dot somewhat closer to B than to A.

In fact, transport remains a complete pain in England... unless you have a car. My original intention had been to make the entire journey between our home in Assen and my Mother's home in Burnham by public transport. However, while it's easy to cover the 200 km distance from Assen to Schiphol Airport (trains run every 30 minutes), it's not easy to cover the 30 km distance between Bristol Airport and Burnham on Sea. While my flight was to land at 19:30, the last bus running in the correct direction was the one my mother got off of at around 17:30, so I'd have had to find some other way of making the journey.

I checked out the other options and found nothing which wouldn't be expensive, take a long time and in at least one option would leave me waiting at a remote unmanned railway station at which I could easily miss the very last train of the evening. Not attractive at all as something to rely on, especially with the risk of delays. A taxi was an option, but it cost a good percentage of the price of a hire car for the week, so I arranged a hire car.

Having a hire car was interesting in itself. Naturally I picked the cheapest option available on the website, as they all do the same thing: roll along on four wheels at the speed of the same traffic jam, and the cheapest being the smallest it also is the most economical on offer.

However, the car was of interest to many people, who asked me the same question: "What hire car did you get ?" If it'd been "interesting" like the old Morris Minor at the top of this blog post perhaps I might have known what it was. There it is to the left, Small and blue. Not worth too large a photo. It worked well enough.

It seems to me that British people are on average rather more interested in cars than is good for them. In one sense this is understandable. On hearing that I normally drive rather infrequently, more than one person responded by saying that they "couldn't manage without a car". It's easy to see why people believe this, given the way the country's transport infrastructure is arranged. For many people it is genuinely difficult to imagine living without a car in the UK. Given the ubiquity of the car as the only way of getting about, it's perhaps also not surprising that the most popular TV programme in Britain is now the execrable Top Gear, the presenters of which, and presentation style of which, seem to have taken over many other BBC programmes.

I did a small amount of cycling myself, around Burnham on Sea where I lived with my family as a teenager. I used my father's old bike, and rode as I always did in the UK: "vehicularly" (as the American's put it). i.e. big and bold and taking the lane when I needed to. It's not particularly pleasant, and conditions which require such behaviour from cyclists lead to cycling only ever being a minority pursuit, as could be seen by the small amount of cycling in the area, and its domination by a young adult demographic. However, this is the only way to survive in such conditions. Few people see this as something they want their loved ones to do. It's part of the reason why 70% of the British population never ride a bicycle at all.

Burnham is still a nice little seaside town, but as it's in Britain it's also still a nice seaside town which is dedicated to cars. There's plenty of car parking, and while the area at the sea front is wide and could be quite pleasant to cycle along it is still out of bounds for cyclists. This photo shows the spot where on an out of season day in the 1980s, with almost no-one around, a teenager version of myself was assaulted by an angry local Conservative councillor who pushed me off my bike to uphold his personal idea of what "the law" ought to be.

The neighbouring towns of Bridgwater and Weston-super-Mare are just 9 and 11 miles away (14 and 17 km) from Burnham. These are easy distances by bicycle in the Netherlands. Distances which many school children cycle to school and back again every day. However, not so in the UK. By bike, these neighbouring towns remain unreachable to any but the brave, as getting to them requires riding on narrow A-roads with 60 mph (100 km/h) speed limits and heavy traffic. Almost no-one ever makes such a journey of such a distance by bicycle. My mother, my sister and her teenage children have never done this. It's not safe by any definition.

Conditions for cyclists have not improved. Cycle paths remain almost non-existent, or very compromised in the few places where they do exist. Where on road cycle lanes exist, they remain narrow strips at the edge of the road which lead cyclists to ride through potholes while positioning themselves too far to the left around awkward "traffic calming" obstacles. Unsurprisingly, cyclists remain a very rare sight. Some youths cycle, and apart from that I saw a handful of utility cyclists (mostly riding the ubiquitous "mountain bikes") on the move during my week in England and three or four quite "serious" types on racing cycles.

On returning home I found out that the government in the UK has (as I mentioned in passing was likely a few weeks back) now decided to definitely scrap funding of Cycling England, the organisation in charge of promotion of cycling in the country, saving enough to build just 5 metres of motorway. The UK government instead seems to want to promote electric cars, the buyers of which are having their purchases subsidized. As ever, Britain is ignoring lessons from the Netherlands, even ones which you might think would fit in with the demands of Britain's pro-motoring policies, such as that encouraging cycling improves conditions for drivers.

And then there is the CCTV. There is masses of it, everywhere, on the streets, in shopping centres, in shops, all "for your safety" of course. Some of it even claims to make the town "brighter safer." Mind you, apparently the French are providing pretty good competition on installing CCTV these days.

Yes, there is even CCTV in the pub. But let's finish on a more positive note:

Brown, warm, completely non fizzy. The best beer in the world.

Veggie curry pub lunch.

Onion Bhajis and Mango Chutney.

I know it is counter to the reputation that many people think it deserves, but Britain is actually quite a good place to eat and drink.

Update
A week or so later, it got worse. Read another post reflecting on the demise of "Cycling England."

Thanks to freewheeler for the tip about the Independent article. He also has more on the demolition of Cycling England. In case you're wondering, the ominous grey buildings in the middle of the blog post are Hinkley Point nuclear power station, which is visible from the sea front at Burnham. Electric cars are the future, apparently, so expect more of these.

Cycle Friendly Zone Ahead

Unless more is done than erect signage, it can sometimes be difficult to tell a "cycle friendly" zone in the UK from one which is less "cycle friendly".

The photo shows a sign in Highbridge, Somerset, England. It was taken a couple of weeks ago by a friend passing through who had seen this arrangement of "cycle friendly" sign and lots of traffic and thought it funny.

As it turned out, this sign is in a place which has some significance for us.

Some years ago, my wife and I had our first home together just a couple of hundred metres from this sign.

Years before that, this road was part of my cycle route to work. It wasn't always particularly pleasant to cycle along here, however I was part of that small minority who get around by bike even if the conditions are not good.

In 2006, with a friend, I passed this spot on my ride between Land's End and John o'Groats.

This point is between my parents' and my sister's home. They only live 10 miles (16 km) apart from each other, which is a short distance by bike, but it may as well be a thousand miles when there are obstacles like this in the way.

What could be nicer than grand-children cycling over to see their grand-parents, or the whole family going on bike rides together with a picnic. If this was the Netherlands, such things would be possible. However, in Britain it is not possible. The lack of proper cycling infrastructure means that my nieces have grown into adults without ever making that journey, and that my parents would never consider riding in the opposite direction either (even though they find riding here to be very pleasant). Riding in this location is something that few would encourage their loved ones to do.

I don't criticise anyone for not cycling in conditions like this. If I still lived there I also wouldn't be encouraging my children to cycle their journeys. In fact, I might have stopped cycling myself by now too. That's what people do. I've met any number of people in Britain who cycled when they were young, but gave up as they got older, including friends of a similar age to myself. If conditions are not pleasant, people don't tend to cycle. Riding along the busy A38 and through cramped areas like that shown are enough to stop virtually everyone from riding, and the result is that despite this area of Somerset being just as flat as much of the Netherlands, the cycling rate is very much lower. Close to zero.

Over here it's very different. It's always pleasant to make such journeys by bike, and that's what everyone does. My children regularly make longer journeys than this to visit their friends. Not only does this mean my children have far more freedom because we moved to the Netherlands, but it also means that Mum and Dad are free from having to act as taxis. The habit isn't lost as people age, either. Even the over 60s make 24% of their journeys by bike.

For cycling to increase in popularity in the UK, provision for British cyclists needs to move well beyond just putting up a few signs. So long as infrastructure puts cyclists in the way of drivers, cycling will remain a minority pursuit. A high degree of subjective safety is vital if the habit of cycling is to be encouraged and retained as people get older. We're not traffic calming, we're people.

While this location was particularly interesting to us because of our connection to the area, the situation is far from unique. There are thousands of locations across the UK which look a lot like this. Thousands of locations that put off all but the most keen cyclists. By comparison, take a look at the way a Dutch city has been changed over time, or look at a typical route between towns.

We're running Study Tours over here for councillors, campaigners, planners from the UK to come and experience the difference between cycling in the Netherlands and cycling in the UK, and to see for themselves what the results are in numbers of people cycling.

The photo was taken by Simon Nuttall on holiday in the west country and is used here with permission. The original photo is online, and shows even more cars along with the location...