On Wed, 10 Sep 2008, wrote:

On Sep 10, 12:29*am, Tom Anderson wrote:

diagonally across). *I just get in the bus lane and behave like a bus...

This is also my strategy. I'm getting very good at brrrmming noises.

I can ride fast enough, and more to the point accelerate rapidly enough,
that I can outperform buses in urban settings. But then I don't need
the bike lanes in the first place --- fit, alert, knows what cars do by
virtue of having driven them for twenty-five years, plus the added je ne
said quoi have having a few years' motorbike experience too. My kids,
however, don't have many of those attributes, and things like National
Cycle Routes _should_ be aimed at them: if not for children / the
nervous / the inexperienced, what's the point of traffic engineering the
roads in city centres?

The actual point has got nothing to do with the needs of any group of
cyclists at all: it's essentially a religion, in which planners, without
any reference to evidence, fervently believe that some white and green
paint will make life better for cyclists, encourage more cycling, etc. In
this, they're supported by their congregation of the equally uninformed
general public, sadly including most cyclists.

Seriously - cycle lanes have been shown time and time again to *increase*
danger to cyclists. They protect them while running alongside the main
lane, but expose them to greater danger at junctions. The way the numbers
pan out for all but the most unbejunctioned roads means that they increase
risk overall. A cavalcade of studies are listed he

http://www.cyclecraft.co.uk/digest/research.html

You say that experienced cyclists like us don't need cycle lanes, but i'd
say that inexperienced cyclists need them *even less*, since they're the
ones who are at most risk to begin with, and so stand to suffer the most
from the increased risk presented by a cycle lane.

Now, where it's possible to build fully segregated routes that have no
interaction with roads at any point, or do so very infrequently, i would
agree that these can be of use to inexperienced cyclists, and even to
experienced cyclists. The trouble is that there are vanishingly few
opportunities for such things. You can build them in to new developments
if you try, but it's generally impossible to fit them into existing street
layouts without either making them useless to cars (which is a good idea,
but not popular) or spending an absurd amount on grade separation or
something. The exceptions are where there's an existing grade-separated
right of way that can be used, such as a canal towpath or a disused
railway, or an area that's already car-free, like a park, or an incredibly
lucky set of circumstances.

Perhaps the thing to do would be to stop building ('building' - can you
build anything with paint?) conventional cycle lanes altogether, and focus
the resources on building a small number of genuinely good routes where
they could do the most good, and be the most use to inexperienced cyclists
- for instance, if there's a large primary school surrounded by busy
roads, then elevating or sinking some of the roads and putting a
grade-separated ground level cycle route in to link to adjacent regions of
quieter roads.

Or to spend the money on extra police or traffic wardens (or cameras) to
enforce traffic laws at key conflict points. And, since a minor but
significant fraction of cyclist casualties stem from cyclist errors, i
mean enforcing them against cyclists as well as motorists!

tom

--
And dear lord, its like peaches in a lacy napkin. -- James Dearden