12 June 2007

Floris Bruynooghe commented:

"My experience is that European (including UK) drivers can't cope with wide roads, resulting in even more dangerous behaviour. Wide roads with on-road cycling lanes are probably pretty good. But they need to be clearly separated by a double line sort of like in Belgium, combine that with UK quality road surface (on average) and you might have someting usable. The cycle lanes on UK A roads are a joke though, a very good example of how not to do it."

I assume this means the converted edge strips that you see on some fast roads (note: not all edge strips have been marked as cycle lanes and you especially shouldn't use unmarked ones). There's one of those in Milton Keynes, alongside the A5D dual carriageway. My main complaint against them is that they are too narrow and you get HGVs passing close enough to pull you around. Also, you have to cross every slip road/ramp which is a fairly unpleasant experience at busy times. Redway Route Types The unique Redway network was built in several phases. To be fair, I can't recommend the original network for anything other than low-speed connecting use, but the later, straighter additions (the "cross-city Redways" mentioned in the 1998 paper and my introduction a couple of posts ago) to the original plan early in the 1990s improved matters immensely. Although the different types are mentioned in the introductions, this difference seems entirely ignored by the accident data, which is my main complaint against the papers. There's no way of comparing like with like, as far as I can tell. You can split the accident data for 60/70mph grid roads from the 30/40mph link roads and 30mph estate roads, but you can't split the long-distance maybe-40kph cross-city Redways from the maybe-20kph estate Redways. Based on my years cycling around the city, I expect that the difference between grid Redways and grid roads is pretty small and that local Redways are far worse than local roads, but I can't prove or disprove that from his data. What's more, none of the studies I've seen differentiate between construction phases or route types, which is like only having combined accident figures for the Fosse Way and the M1. It suggests interesting topics for further studies, but how can anyone draw useful conclusions about cycle track design in general from it?