They give money only to take it away

 

Confusion reigns over the government’s Active Travel Policy – or inactive, it seems to me - following the £200m cut to the £3.8bn budget a few months ago.

Because the government has since curiously decided to invest another £100m funding.

And so the saga rolls on – giving out and then taking away. Been going on for decades, and as a result there ain’t much to show for it.

 

This lack of proper funding, says Cycling UK, means, “there is no way the English Government can meet its own target that 50% of journeys in towns and cities should be walked or cycled by 2030.”

 

Which convinces me more than ever that England – the UK in fact - will never have anything approaching a nationwide cycle network.

 

And yet as the years roll by cycle lanes have been put down here and there by local authorities and this  begs the question, just how many miles are there, albeit not in the desired network form but rather bits and pieces here and there, some of it quite decent but a lot of it dangerous rubbish.

 

They are mostly rubbish because transport planners have little idea how to build a road infrastructure for cycling. The excellent design guides produced by people in the know some 30 years ago and accepted by the government are largely ignored by chief planning boffins who think they know better.

And those who would like to follow the guidelines find they haven’t the budget to do so.

 

 

 

One engineer I recently shared correspondence with – a UK Cycling member in fact - told me that his profession remains largely ignorant of how to design roads for cycling. And they don’t care to find out. Half a century of telling them what is wanted and they still mostly do not know.

This largely came about during the 60s era, probably, when car ownership began to shoot up and government of the day saw fit to do everything it could to allow drivers to go where they want when they want.

And providing for walking and cycling became an afterthought,

 

The difficulty then became how to provide for peds and cycs without

taking space from the car, space which should not have so readily been given up in the first place.

Very often this means ripping entire junctions out and rebuilding them. Expensive and not the preferred option. Although Manchester has bucked the trend with their Royce Road junction. Although I’m not sure how much ripping out was necessary here. But whatever, this is one smart junction.

 

Active Travel England has set out to do is teach local authorities how to go about building routes for cycling.

 

But as a matter of interest, and perhaps as a measure of how shit this country is at enabling cycling to play is part in staving off climate change, how many

cycle lanes – the good, the bad and the ugly – are there?

We don’t know, that’s the answer.

I asked Cycling UK policy Director Roger Geffen if he knew. He told me.

 

 

“The people best able to make an informed guess at how much cycle provision we have in England would be https://www.cyclestreets.net/. They have been getting volunteers to upload data on cycle provision onto Open Street Map, as this helps improve their cycle journey planner.”

 

He said that he hoped that a few years tie Active Travel England might have a better answer.

 

He hopes they will have data not just on how much cycle provision there is (and where), but how much of that is good provision…. “how much of it is white paint (i.e. OK for reasonably confident cyclists but no good for children etc) and how much of it is actually worse than useless.”

 

Geffen says Active Travel England are currently setting up a process for all local authorities to upload data on what exists for cycling and walking, both on the road network and off-road routes, classified by the type of provision that has been made. The idea is to enable councils and others to make better-informed decisions about where improvements are most needed.

 

“Then we may know how much more provision is needed before we can say we’ve got the ‘World class cycling network for England’ promised in the Government’s ‘Transport Decarbonisation Plan’?”

 

“Well, the Dutch network of protected cycle lanes is almost exactly a quarter of the length of the Dutch road network,” says Geffen.  “If we want to have something equivalent for England, we have a long way to go!”

 

I contacted CycleStreets to ask them if their data extended to showing

how miles of cycle lanes have been created over the past few decades

 

I said that Manchester’s grand scheme had given me hope but I have no idea how much of their proposed 1,500 mile network has been built. Not much, I imagine, given it is costed a £1.5bn.

 

CycleStreets replied to say that information remains had to come by and quite complex to determine.
For instance, cycle infrastructure often does not involve cycle lanes.
For instance, they explained, low-traffic neighbourhood schemes create large areas of
much-improved cycling conditions but have no actual 'cycle lanes' at all.

 

Nevertheless, CycleStreets has amassed a lot of interesting statistics.

CycleStreets is a UK-wide cycle journey planner system, which lets you plan routes from A to B by bike. It is designed by cyclists, for cyclists, and caters for the needs of both confident and less confident cyclists.