A Street Corner In Rotterdam

Back in the summer, I visited Rotterdam, one of my favourite Dutch cities and this time, stayed in a neighbourhood on the southern edge of the city centre.

Rotterdam is a great city to explore and it's also a great base for trips out to other places by cycle or public transport. However, this post is about a junction outside our hotel.

The photograph above is the view west along Witte de Withstraat at its junction with William Boothlaan (left) and Hartmansstraat (right). We stayed in the H3 Hotel Rotterdam which is on the corner to the left and we were in a room facing Witte de Withstraat.

Of course, staying somewhere a few nights can't possibly give you a local's perspective, but watching the ebb and flow of life was interesting, especially as our stay was either side of a weekend so we got to see life during the week as well as a weekend. From the early start of the street cleaning crew, through the morning deliveries and into the afternoon and evening of the restaurants and shops, it's a busy and every changing place.

Above is a view from within the junction, looking to the south-east towards the Bazar restaurant. The words above read "in alles is een oogopslag" - "In everything, there is a glance" and is there to promote the work of the poet JH Leopold from the city, with the full poem HERE. Nothing to do with the general design of the street, but Rotterdam is full of these little pieces of local culture.

Of course, it was the street design that interested me. Witte de Withstraat is the main road which has one-way for general traffic westbound (2-way for cycling of course) and with the side streets two-way for all traffic. There are zebra crossings on each arm. The main road is subject to a 30km/h speed limit, whereas quite bizarely, the side roads are the usual urban 50km/h!

The carriageway is surfaced in 100mm x 200mm block pavers (above) with road markings in white units and with the standard 300mm concrete tiles for the footway. The kerbs are concrete with a stone-effect finish and drainage gullies sit in the kerb line so as not to be damaged by heavy vehicles. All very standard for a Dutch street, but so much nicer than the sea of asphalt we often see in the UK. It is also practical because the paving elements can be lifted for works and they are easily replaced.

The photograph above is view of the junction showing that it sits on a speed table, the ramp being denoted by the long and short lines. The detail of that and the zebra crossing is easily seen where they are formed by the block pavers - much more flexibility than the UK and given the local context, the crossing are marked with standard upright signs. 

It is also worth noting the bollards just behind the kerb edge (above) because Dutch drivers are just as bad at parking on the footway and just as scared about damaging their paintwork as UK drivers. The bollards do help to force slower turns at the junction and in a more effective way than the raised table does. In the Netherlands drivers are required to give way to people crossing or obviously waiting to cross (Article 49 of the Dutch Traffic Regulations). Drivers are also not permitted to wait within 5 metres of a crossing.

The other little detail to note is the tactile paving. There is a trade-off between accommodating the pedestrian desire line and ending up having to cut tactile paving into a curve. In this example, there is a very practical approach which has blocks of blister tactile paving two tiles deep (so people are less likely to step over and miss them), but laid out set back from the kerb to avoid cutting them in. They are laid to the width of the stripes. The bollards are at risk of a visually impaired person colliding with them, but I suspect there would be drivers on the footway otherwise.

One final detail is the way the parking bays are inset from the carriageway as a result of the footway being built out at the junction. The photograph above is at the kerb edge looking east along Witte de Withstraat. Yes, the van is parked facing the wrong way in the one-way street. The hatched bay is for Disabled drivers.

The narrowing of the carriageway is helpful in terms of slowing turning drivers, reducing the crossing distance at the zebra crossings, discouraging parking at the junction and it puts the "obviously waiting to cross" pedestrians right in the field of view for drivers and cyclists; all features which help with "pedestrian-friendliness". It also provides somewhere visible for traffic signs and potentially other things such as cycle parking or greening which is not on the general pedestrian design line.

The crossroads doesn't have marked priority for traffic and so drivers arriving at the junction are expected to give way to traffic arriving from their right (including cycles) as is the standard Dutch rule which helps to control driver speed at unmarked junctions, although my observations here did tend to see lots of "might is right" from drivers on the main drag. 

Despite the tightness of the geometry at the junction, there was some pretty poor right turning behaviour from some drivers who did so at excessive speed and with some intimidation of pedestrians trying to cross. This was more evident in the evenings where it was pretty clear the drivers were showing off.

At the network level, Witte de Withstraat runs in parallel to large roads to the north and south of the immediate neighbourhood. While the local one-way streets tend to deal with some of the potential rat-runs. Witte de Withstraat could be attractive for those wanting to cut between Westblaak to the north-east and Westzeedijk to the south-west if the main roads got a little busy (but only in that direction). 

This could be why the street felt too busy with motor traffic at certain times of the day and evening, and probably explains why zebra crossings are used at the junction - if traffic was light, the zebra crossings wouldn't be needed.

The weekend evenings had another layer of interest where Witte de Withstraat was closed Friday, Saturday and Sunday evenings to the west of the junction. As best as I can find out this was done for the summer to support the street's evening economy and got extended, but it also happens for other events. There are definitely some tensions with the traffic here and this might explain the 30km/h speed limit on the street.

I do like to share stories of the big and impressing pieces of infrastructure, but I also think it is interesting to stop and observe things which initially appear mundane, but where it actually turns out there are many layers to unpeel.

Back To The Future In East Oxford

I have been doing some work in Oxford, and on a recent visit, I had the chance to look at some historic traffic calming in East Oxford which has sent me down some research rabbit holes.

If "East Oxford" rings a bell, it could be the East Oxford Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs) project which has been the subject of some controversy. I say controversy as a shorthand really, because I think much of the framing is dishonest, but I have written about that before.

LTNs are a key tool in our box for delivering a Safe System (call it Sustainable Safety, Vision Zero or whatever) and they are decades old and nothing new. What was interesting about East Oxford is that it had all been tried before, but to learn more we need to jump into our DeLorean and head back to 1985.

In East Oxford in the early 1980's, there was a movement to deal with rat-running on the side streets in the area, which got as far as an experimental project being developed and deployed at the start of 1985 in the Divinity Road area.

I have tried to search online for the traffic order without success and so I am going on the account from a website dedicated against LTNs in East Oxford, which is as you'd expect. There are also Oxford Mail stories from 2020 and 2021 which mentions it, but I guess history is recorded by the "victors".

The arguments of the 1980s are identical to those we hear in the 2020s. They are rooted in the evolution and intertwining of highway law and public perception that driving (and parking) should be unrestricted, unless that basic premise is modified nationally (e.g. national speed limits) or locally with a traffic regulation order. This means we are having to expend significant resources to change the status quo which itself is often supported by powerful and/ or noisy voices.

Indeed, the anti-LTN account I link to above ticks off the boxes of someone who thinks they should have a bigger say because they have lived somewhere a long time, (driving) locals predicting chaos with no patience, and various attributions presented as facts rather than the opinions that they are. Fine. Whatever.

In the event, the experiment simply wasn't allowed to to run properly and objectively and it all collapsed. As a compromise, traffic calming interventions were proposed and this echoes the contemporary anti-LTN position with vague platitudes that things should work for all road users, as cover for side streets taking pressure off main roads. 

The problem is of course, that physics and bio mechanics do not operate on an equal level and the most vulnerable need the most protection. On residential streets, this has to be speed and volume reduction to a point where those walking, wheeling and cycling are not put at significant risk by high driver speeds and traffic volumes. 

For East Oxford, the failure to get the LTN to stick didn't tackle the rat-running in the area, but it did lead to the fall back position of traffic calming which is a good addition to the case study because we know that it didn't solve the problems in the long term, gives the more recent introduction of the LTNs in the area more gravity; it's a live case study of the decades.

For the Divinity Road area in particular, Danny Yee talks about how the traffic calming added after the abandoned experiment failed to deal with traffic flow, which isn't a surprise. He was also my guide around the city and we did pass through lots of East Oxford and some of the traffic calming I saw caught my eye.

The photograph above is Howard Street which is one-way for the most part and has a series of chicanes with alternating car parking and raised junctions.

The one-way working was not part of this scheme. This happened in 1972 when the street was made one-way between Cricket Road and Iffley Road. I can't find out why this was the case, but I wonder if this was an early reaction to traffic flow in the area being impacted by car ownership and this narrow section of street not working for two-way flows. 

The parallel (and also narrow) Magdalen Road is even more interesting. In 1964, it was made one-way but in the other direction between Iffley Road and St Mary's Road. This was extended in 1972 to continue the one-way working as far as Ridgefield Road. Taken with the 1972 order for Howard Street, this reinforces my view that this was about (motor) traffic flow through the residential streets acting as part of the main road network.

The traffic calming came in late 1989 as part of an experimental scheme which covered both Howard Street and Magdalen Road, both of which connect Iffley Road to Cowley Road, a pair of arterial routes into the city centre. The traffic notice actually gives us the "why" which is great to find:

"At present both roads suffer from large volumes of traffic which use them as short cuts. A lot of the traffic travels at speed. The Council proposes to alter the appearance of the roads by providing tree and shrub planting in planting boxes at either end of areas of parking. The areas of parking will also be protected by kerbing, bollards or similar installations. The present parking arrangements will themselves be altered so that parking is staggered along the roads. The roads will become less obviously straight and should reduce vehicle speeds."

The measures stuck and were made permanent in mid-1991 which came with various adjustments, although the traffic order doesn't tell us more more than that.

The photograph above is in Magdalen Road at the junction with Hurst Street showing one of the junction speed tables, and the chicanes created with parking bays. Remember, that this was one-way (in the direction the person is cycling) when the traffic calming was built; in fact the area of stone cobbles on the left used to have a bell-bollard and a tree which physically created part of a chicane.

The photograph above shows a ramp to one of the raised tables. This is interesting as we have a set of precast concrete ramps which are very much like the Dutch "intritbanden" units (entrance kerbs). They are far steeper than we tend to see these days in terms of speed table gradient, but they are compatible with the current road hump regulations. The anti-LTN piece I linked to earlier describes these humps as "vicious (and now illegal)" which again shows it is impossible to find a solution that actually has an impact that these people will support. 

The latest East Oxford LTN project removed the one-way working on Magdalen Road and a short section of Howard Street, as well as adding two-way cycling to the remaining section of one-way working. The project encompasses a larger area than I have researched, but when trawling through the Gazette, I did see lots of other roads popping up with various bits of traffic management and parking control schemes over the decades.

I've only scratched the surface of East Oxford here, but it's an interesting arc of the best part of 60 years of motorisation with the ebb and flow of how we've tried to both accommodate increasing levels of traffic, the backlash this created and then the backlash that trying to deal with the problems also creates. It also shows us that schemes sticking is almost random, but that the arguments are always the same.

In design terms, I actually liked the speed tables and chicanes created with the planters, although things aren't perfect because there aren't flush kerbs to cross the roads at the junctions, let alone the tactile paving that would go with them. This really is something that should be sorted out as part of the LTN scheme.

They do, however, give some local identity and work to show people that different behaviour is expected. This is lost on those wanting to blast through and so it has taken the new LTNs to complete the puzzle. It's a shame that many modern LTN schemes don't come with street enhancements like this.

There are lots of these interesting stories, experiments and ideas out there, but we rarely hear about their planning and engineering away from the confrontation and controversy which is often fuelled by the media. For example, the filter on Howard Street shown in the photograph above has been described the (far) right wing press as the UK's most hated bollard and even the BBC can't cover the story without giving air-time to conspiracy cranks.

This makes sharing knowledge and learning more difficult. The UK has got itself into a position where we won't admit our streets not working properly as it immediately opens a crack for the status quo folks to exploit. It also means that the technical side of things has to attain perfection, whereas those against change are never held to the same standards. This all makes things risk adverse politically and professionally which keeps things the same.

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe: Spring 2025 Part 2 - Dafne Schippersbrug

My Spring 2025 trip to the Netherlands included some time in Utrecht, one of my favourite cities, and another chance to have a look at an interesting piece of design.

My first post from this trip where I rode the F325 Fast Cycle Route between Arnhem and Nijmegen can be read HERE.

In 2023, I rode over the Dafne Schippersbrug, named after Dutch athlete, Dafne Schippers, but there wasn't much time to have a proper look as I was on a ride around Utrecht with Mark Wagenbuur (Bicycle Dutch) and my youngest daughter. I was determined to have a closer look and that was a task for this trip.

The bridge itself (above) opened in 2017 and was built to provide a walking, wheeling and cycling link to an expanding neighbourhood to the west of the Amsterdam-Rijnkanaal (Amsterdam Rhine-canal), and where the A2 motorway is covered over and forms the Willem-Alexander Park. The bridge also took advantage of the need to replace the local primary school (Montessorischool Oog in Al) which allowed some really clever design work to take place.

The land to the west of the canal is being redeveloped and has changed even in the 18-month gap between my visits. I arrived on the western canal path, heading north and the route to access the bridge is via local residential streets. I had to go a little way north before looping back to cross, but that was because of works. The final layout will use a couple of very quiet streets closer to the bridge; and of course, the main access to the bridge comes from the west anyway and where the ground is higher than the canal path.

The main span is a suspension bridge with a pair of outward raking pylons at each end from which the main cables are suspended and with vertical hanger cables holding the deck. The photograph above is looking east towards the city centre with a wide two-way cycle track and pedestrian path. These are separated by a white line which would be lighter weight than adding a raised footway and being at one level, it is easier to drain and treat for winter ice forming- something which tends to happen in cold, damp and windy places, such as over a canal!

While the western access ramp from the canal uses local streets, the eastern side is a little different as it needed to tie into the existing street levels. This is where the replacement of the primary school comes into play because the roof of the school forms part of the access ramp. The photograph above is the school viewed from ground level to the east and you can see the edge rail and people cycling on the roof.

It is worth looking at this with the old street layout and school HERE. Quite a conventional street layout, complete with bollards to keep drivers off the footway. Yes, Dutch drivers can be as bad as those in the UK!

The photograph above is from the school roof looking back towards a long curving ramp which takes people up to the bridge which sits 9 metres over the canal, showing that the flat Netherlands needs a few artificial hills to cross big pieces of infrastructure!

The photograph above gives a slightly different view of the ramp from a little street which was created as part of the development adding a few more homes to the neighbourhood.

The ramp eventually meets street level and cycle traffic is integrated with general traffic on 30km/h low traffic streets with red surfacing providing clear wayfinding for its status as a main cycle route. 

The cycle route connects to cycle tracks on Lessinglaan which is a busier road, but cycle traffic can also cross to access more low traffic streets and a cycle street which runs towards the city centre. The exit from the street leading from the bridge is cycles only and so drivers have to take a more convoluted way out of the area.

The bridge is a nice piece of engineering, but the real skill here is how access to it has been designed in with development on both sides of the canal and of course, the integration with the new school is inspired. As well as this, a more detailed poke around the street layouts on both sides shows that the crossing is all set up to create a direct link to the city with drivers taking other routes which really is classic unravelling of the cycling and motoring networks.

I shall leave you with a video of my cycle around this wonderful piece of urban, landscape and engineering design, but you can see my 2023 crossing and compare the progress of the development on the west.

Liveable Leicester: Redux

Back in the summer of 2015, I spent a great couple of days with the Cycling Embassy of Great Britain having a look at what the City of Leicester had been doing for cycling and more.

I reported on what I saw in two posts HERE and HERE which looked at all sorts of interesting work around new cycle tracks, greenway development and some city regeneration. A decade later, I was invited back for a ride in July with the Leicester Cycling Campaign Group to see some of what had happened since my last visit with a bike. I say bike, because I had paid a visit in February for a conference, but didn't have much time for a look around!

Our ride took in a whole range of things, but let's start with a look at the city centre. A large part of Leicester city centre has been pedestrianised for many years with various adjustments made over time. It has bollard-controlled access and any servicing has to take place in the morning before things get busy with pedestrians - more on that HERE. 

On first glance, things haven't changed too much in the pedestrianised core, but there have been changes to simplify the surface materials palette across the area. In my experience, the UK has suffered too much from development and regeneration projects in which designers like to stamp their presence which leaves a disjointed patchwork across a place. 

Certainly Leicester was no different, but they have gradually been changing this to something which is quite muted, but consistent; and where in the more historic areas, it allows the buildings to shine. The photograph above is from the High Street to the east of the centre. The central zone used to be paved in small element paving, but has since been replaced with smooth red asphalt. This is great to cycle on, and encourages people cycling to stick to the strip. From a maintenance perspective, it's much easier to repair because it the area that delivery vehicles will drive along for access, rather than the paving.

Unlike many parts of the UK, the city permits cycling pretty much everywhere in the pedestrianised area. When delivery traffic is permitted, it much follow one-way loops, whereas cycling is two-way. It's nothing new and was the case a decade ago on my last visit, but people are trusted to drop their pace when things are busier. 

The photograph above is on Haymarket which used to be full of motor traffic, but with the redevelopment of the nearby bus station, the space has been given back to people. Yes, there is now a requirement to walk a little further to access buses, but this has been balanced against wider benefits that traffic-free spaces give.

I took the the photo above in February and which is of The Clocktower as viewed from East Gates, and in the same position of one of my 2015 photos. The old dark paving has been replaced with something far warmer, but you'll note there is no asphalt here in this key public square. It is quite subtle, but from a cycling perspective it does help to "step things down" to an environment which is very much for dropping one's pace right down. 

Across the city centre, the streets tend to change character like this and as we cycled round I remarked how Dutch things felt which I think people in the group found a little odd, but I've cycled between quite a few Dutch towns and cities and I am telling you, Leicester has captured some of what happens! 

The photograph above is Horsefair Street where motors are allowed, but in one-way loops around the city centre fringe, so it isn't too busy. I think the cycling here could have been just two-way rather than in contraflow, but it's fine and generally works.

After looking at the city centre, we left via Belgrave Gate which is not a great section of street with buses, taxis and a car park access which was a couple of hundred metres before getting to the outbound cycle track (above).

At the bus stop, the cycle track rises to footway space with tactile paving to suit, but I much prefer continuing with a stepped approach with perhaps a localised crossing point on a gentle hump. The tactile paving becomes awkward to ride over and as with the layout shown above for Horsefair Street, there just isn't the use of curved kerb lines to smoothly guide people through.

As the cycle track meets the A594 Inner Ring Road, the crossing becomes a wide shared-use path. This is another feature of Leicester where separate space often becomes shared at junctions with toucan crossings. While this is a relatively simple way of dealing with cycling at junctions, it's a shame there hasn't been a wider push to change the approach over the last ten years.

Belgrave Gate continues outside the ring road (above) with a central running cycle track which continues to Belgrave Circus, which I visited a decade ago after the flyover was removed. A central running cycle track avoids mixing with kerbside activity, but it also makes it harder to visit the shops and services fronting the street. Access to the central area is again via toucan crossings.

At Belgrave Gate, we headed north-west onto Abbey Park Road which has been treated with sections of shared-use path and separate space (all at footway level - above) There has been a bit or road space reallocation to provide bus lanes as well as the sections of dedicated cycle space.

After a crossing with another toucan, we came across the new shared-use bridge over the River Soar which has been added in parallel to the existing road bridge (above), although there was a lack of priority crossing Abbey Meadows, the side street just before.

It's a serious bridge which has a very large span which is why it looks so chunky (above)!

We immediately turned off and followed the greenway along the River Soar for a while (above), towards the National Space Centre and then to Wallingford Road (below) which has been reallocated as walking and cycling space from an old access road.

At the end of Wallingford Road, the road is closed to motors and we had a little time admiring the entrance kerbs as it meets Corporation Road, which has seen an existing cycle route upgrade.

Corporation Road's with-flow painted cycle track is now a properly surfaced affair (albeit at footway level - above) with the city-bound provision being on-carriageway as before. The area is pretty quiet and so I am not sure why there wasn't a much wider redesign of the street, but the wayfinding is clear at least.

We crossed the A6 and carried on into Beaumont Leys Lane (above), which is a upgrade of a Pandemic pop-up cycle route. It's a bit of a shame that the space was taken from a grass verge. The other side of the street has a very wide footway which could have been a good choice, but of course, it has been subsumed by people parking their cars. The dropped kerbs to the off-street parking also make for an uneven ride which is something that could have been designed-out with entrance kerbs.

The route then turns south-west via a parallel crossing accessed via a shared-use area into Parker Drive. Crossings of the side streets are on "cycle priority crossings" as seen above at Galleywood Drive. The layout is OK, but the use of radius kerbs and yellow lines confuses the priority somewhat, although this is common in UK design. 

The last side road crossing on this route is at Somerset Avenue which used to be an enormous bellmouth has been redesigned with a two-stage parallel crossing. Somerset Avenue is a bus route and so the junction needs to accommodate buses and so the two-stages means people only have to cope with one traffic stream at a time in what would otherwise still be quite large (but not as was originally).

We had cycled about 4km in an anti-clockwise loop which took us to Blackbird Road, a large dual carriageway, and where we were left to fend for ourselves somewhat. We headed about 900m south to the junction with the A50 Groby Road which had been upgraded with decent cycle crossings.

We headed east back towards the city centre on the A50 two-way cycle track which quickly becomes Woodgate (above). Much of the space has come from the carriageway and so traffic lanes are relatively narrow. The floating bus stop above is at footway level and passes with a curved path.

The cycle track switches sides using another toucan crossing and then location connections are made by other toucan crossings such as the one above near North Mills off Frog Island. The A50 route carries on south and back to the city centre, crossing the ring via more toucan crossings (there is a theme here).

We turned off the A50 into Soar Lane which is being redeveloped for housing and soon arrived at Rally Park, which is a fairly narrow piece of open space next to the River Soar, and between two developed parts of the city. Within the open space, work had been ongoing to provide separate walking and cycling links (above) within the wider area.

The photograph above shows one of the new links which ends at Richard III Road which soon meets St Augustine Road to the south and which is crossed by a long existing cycle crossing, albeit a bit clunky. But, work is ongoing here with upgrades for cycling and bus priority, including changing the older cycle lanes for cycle tracks.

The photograph above is Duns Lane looking south just after crossing St Augustines Road. It was still a work in progress and connected to some pop-up wand-protected cycle lanes which essentially gets people into the city centre from the west. The cycle track here is at footway-level, but has passengers alight on the cycle track which in my view is poor practice for a brand new layout.

Away from the city centre, the day took in a ride south to Everards Meadows, which included a chat around a beer from The Beer Hall. The site is in a cluster of out of town developments with Fosse Park just to the north, Grove Park to the east and junction 21 of the M1 to the north-west. Very much development designed around the car, but easily cyclable from the city centre, some 5.5km north-east.

We used various off-road routes, including NCN6 (Great Central Way), which included a look at the ramp between NCN6 and paths next to the various cuts of the River Soar (above). 

The ramp is gentle in slope and easily cyclable and features a nice grippy, self-draining surface (above).

NCN crosses under Soar Valley Way which is a dual carriageway sporting a lightwell between the two carriageways to the path below which passes through an open aspect underpass, although the photograph above doesn't do it justice with the contrast!

So, a bit of a whistlestop tour of some of the things I saw in Leicester, but there is so much more going on. The city deployed lots of pop-up cycle routes during the Pandemic and lots of them have been made permanent with significant upgrades. It is actually quite tricky to keep track of what's been happening!

I was asked to sum up what I thought about what I had seen. Now look, it isn't perfect. There needs to be a move away from using so many toucan crossings and bits of shared-use path. However, the spirit of the pragmatism is alive and well in a city that has been going back and upgrading and adjusting once the network improvements have been made; it has also seen lots of work in the city centre which is not cycling-related, but has just made a nice place and that includes all of the work to rebalance the bus network. 

If I were going to sum things up, I would use the word "boring". This is not derogatory or intended to be an insult; it just sums up the way that the city has decided that cycling is a useful every day transport mode and have just gotten on with it. I am sure there have been projects with controversy, but Leicester's projects rarely make national news. The city is up for trying stuff out and adjusting it over time which is great to have seen ten years after my first cycling visit.

One of the key things the city has is a directly elected mayor. The position was created in 2010 and Sir Peter Souslby has been in post since the start - re-elected four times. He has not just championed cycling as transport, but a whole range of other transport improvements and the results show. Of course, it's not just him, there have been lots of people making the changes happen, but it really helps to have a politician in charge that gets it and with a directly elected mayor, you get the executive power too. 

With the potential for changes to English councils over the next couple years and the potential loss of the city mayor, I wonder if this level of progress will be maintained in the next ten years?

What makes side road junctions pedestrian-friendly?

Here is something a little unusual as I am cross-posting a blog post from my City Infinity website, because I think it needs as wide an audience as possible. I hope you enjoy it, regardless of where you read it!

Foreword

This post has a companion written by Robert Weetman. We have been working collaboratively on something which we think needs to be more widely known, but we also thought it might be fun and useful for us to each write about the subject from our own perspectives. Robert’s post is available to read HERE.

The work underpinning and contained within this blog post are © Mark Philpotts/ City Infinity and Robert Weetman.

Introduction

It’s hard for anyone to admit they are wrong about something, and in my experience, highway engineers really don’t like doing so because they think it exposes them to liability. It’s not wholly their fault for thinking this because they are part of a system which is hard to change, especially with a hundred years of motonormativity to contend with; but frankly, it is pretty difficult to be successfully sued for poor highway design.

When I started writing The Ranty Highwayman blog well over a decade ago, it was the end point of me realising that something was wrong with how our streets and designed and managed. Probably both consciously and unconsciously, this set me on a course which has changed my professional outlook and career path, sometimes because I wanted to and sometimes because I had to. 

Now my work as an independent consultant has led to an amazing collaboration with Robert Weetman. We successfully bid for a piece of work with Manchester City Council (MCC) to help them think about how side road junctions could be made better for pedestrians through design. This work developed the idea of “pedestrian-friendly design” or just “pedestrian-friendliness” and from this, a framework approach emerged.

This blog post is an introduction to a subject that we have been grappling with the past several months, and hopefully, you’ll come away inspired and challenged. What seems simple conceptually needed an awful lot of work to think through, and it remains very much new and evolving practice. But that’s exciting.

It is also worth stating that whenever I mention the word “pedestrian”, the idea of walking and wheeling is very much at the forefront. In undertaking our work, the input and insight from a group of Disabled people was vital in testing where we were headed. I hope you never look at a side road junction in the same way again, because I cannot.

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark

Well not Denmark exactly, because they often do quite well with their side road junctions, although care is always needed with trying to import ideas from other countries with different rules, culture and design approaches. 

The UK national practice on the other hand is so rotten that many people barely notice how bad it has got, and if I am honest, I was one of those people until recently because my usual practice with side roads tended to concentrate on tight junctions, maybe speed tables and of course decent dropped kerbs. It has only been since working on this project that I have seen the issues as being far deeper.

MCC recognised that the design of side road junctions in the UK is not supporting the interests of people walking, wheeling and cycling, so through the Manchester Active Travel Strategy and Investment Plan (MATSIP), a commitment was given to improve practice, although the “how” remains a work in progress.

As we got started at the beginning of 2025, Robert and I realised that there was this thing nagging us in the background which meant that the design of side road junctions often failed from the pedestrian-perspective. Given this, we really do think the MCC team have been brave in commissioning this work because it has meant confronting the status quo. This is a challenge to someone like me who thought they had a good grasp of the subject.

Regionally, Greater Manchester has developed the Streets for All approach (SfA). While there is excellent SfA design guidance, it doesn’t get under the skin of side road junction design to the level of detail that is needed, but that’s not a criticism as we don’t think anyone has gone this far in looking at the issues as we have.

It is also worth mentioning that in the last few years, there has been lots of attention on designing for cycling. In some cases, there have been concerted campaigns against street design features which protect people cycling, but where there might be trade-offs with the pedestrian experience. 

Let me tell you something right now, compared with side road junction design, these issues are way down the list of things that worry me. Having said that, we have taken the view that pedestrian-friendly design is, and should be compatible with cycling, but that’s for another day.

What is a side road?

This might be obvious, but it’s important to understand what we are talking about. Put simply, this is where two roads meet as a T-junction or crossroads. This is by far the vast majority of UK junction layouts compared with junctions controlled with roundabouts, traffic signals and with closely associated zebra crossings (including the current experiments on side road zebras without Belisha beacons). 

Signals, roundabouts and zebra crossings  have their place in the overall traffic system, but they are a trade-off with conditions designed to give more priority to motor traffic; what we have come to refer to as “flow focussed design” (as in motor traffic).

For side road junctions, most of the time, there will be give way markings that show which roads have priority. Unsurprisingly, these are known as “priority junctions”, a traffic engineering term that not even all traffic engineers understand. 

Sometimes there aren’t any markings and so there is no priority. We have called these “no-priority junctions”, because there was no pre-existing term available. Very occasionally we might have a junction with a stop line and sign which we still include, but they are rare. We’ve also have continuous footways and minor accesses to think about, and which fall into our overall approach. Although not part of our project, we also think that simplified zebra crossings will work within our approach, if and when they are approved for use across the UK. 

If you spend any time walking around your neighbourhood or even using online mapping, you will very quickly see all sorts of different design approaches. Sometimes there might be a level of local consistency (possibly within distinct housing developments), but there will be an awful lot of inconsistency as well as things being consistently awful for pedestrians.

As well as obvious issues such as crossing distance and the ease (and speed) at which drivers can turn in and out of a side road, there are more subtle issues around the layout of dropped kerbs (and their absence), the use of speed tables, coloured surfacing and every other odd thing that someone thought was useful at the time, but which has now been collectively forgotten. This means that in many cases, the design will exclude some people or at best, make life difficult them. There also just seems to be random experiments all over the place where it’s hard to unravel the logic.

The Highway Code

I very rarely read the Highway Code, unless it is to argue with someone about a particular rule and on that basis, I doubt many people read it either. However, we do have rules H2 and 170 which were part of an update in January 2022, and which added another layer to the complexity of how roads and streets are meant to be used. 

The update was essentially that pedestrians crossing a side road should be afforded priority by drivers and cyclists turning into and out of it; and where cyclists are passing a side road on the main road, they should be afforded the same priority by turning drivers.

Traffic engineers are familiar with talking about vehicular priority (motor and cycle traffic), but the Highway Code has rules also talks about priority being given to pedestrians and cyclists, so I appreciate it can be confusing, but it is worth explaining the distinction. 

The change to the Highway Code is welcome from a designer’s perspective as it gives licence to support the needs of pedestrians and cyclists within the hierarchy of users. However, it doesn’t automatically mean that people will adhere to rules that they probably haven’t read up on since they passed a driving test, and in fact, anyone who doesn’t drive are perhaps even less likely to have read those rules. 

UK road legislation has developed to almost mean that driving might is right and so we’re trying to steer people through this. In the strictest sense, we’ve taken priority in terms of vehicular priority which possibly feels a little motonormative. We’ve had to tackle it in this way because of the motorised baggage that design and legislation carries.

Defining pedestrian-friendly design

We’ve boiled all of this down to three scenarios that start to help explain our approach which actually creates a spectrum:

• What are the conditions under which drivers are LIKELY to obey the Highway Code rules H2/ 170?
• What are the conditions under which drivers are UNLIKELY to obey the Highway Code rules H2/ 170?
• What are the conditions under which drivers are UNABLE to obey the Highway Code rules H2/ 170?

I’ve said earlier that the Highway Code tells drivers (and cyclists) that they should be giving way to those crossing a side road when turning. We think compliance with this is influenced by a range of issues and conditions that can be influenced both locally through design and at the network level.

For example, a quiet T-junction in a residential street with very little traffic provides the conditions under which a driver might be likely to give way to a crossing pedestrian, although there are still design considerations around achieving this.

Compare this with a side road that meets a busy high-speed dual carriageway where a driver cannot safely stop on the main road to give priority to someone crossing because there is a very real chance of them being hit by another driver from behind. In other words, the traffic conditions in terms of speed and volume are very important in influencing pedestrian friendliness.

The conditions where a driver is unlikely to obey the rules sit in the central area of our spectrum. For example, we might have a side road meeting busy high street where it’s actually quite easy for a driver leaving the side road to give way to a pedestrian, but where a right turning driver might have their attention mainly on finding a gap in oncoming traffic, rather on someone crossing. This also has implications for people cycling in a lane next to oncoming flows for obvious reasons.

Drivers do have a duty of care of course, but we argue that where the road layout and traffic conditions are complex, the level of quality for pedestrians is lower. This is summarised in our simple, but powerful diagram:

© Mark Philpotts/ City Infinity and Robert Weetman.

As you can see, we have split this into “pedestrian-friendly” design and “standard” design. The standard design section of the diagram considers the spectrum between “compromise design” and “flow focussed design”. In other words, once we start to move away from the conditions that mean turning drivers are likely to allow people to cross, we start to see layouts which are much more familiar on our streets and which contain compromises.

The issue with “standard design” is the degree to which pedestrians are excluded. For example, there could be a situation where there’s a significant volume of left turning motor traffic from a main road into a side road that there is no way a parent would let their child cross alone and thus the child is an excluded pedestrian, even if they are otherwise independent. We could also have a situation where the junction is actually very quiet, but an absence of dropped kerbs to cross it excludes wheelchair and mobility scooter users.

This is not to say that standard designs should never be used and we have spent a great deal of time thinking about that as well because we are talking about the long term here. It takes time, effort and investment to get meaningful change; and this does lead to trade-offs and an iterative approach.

For example, adding dropped kerbs and tactile paving to an entire residential estate might assist more people with accessing their local shops than spending the equivalent money on on tighter junctions with raised tables at a handful of side roads on a main road which already had dropped kerbs with tactile paving. We are not saying we need perfection from day one, but we are saying that it needs thinking through each time we want to tackle a side road junction.

Better by design

The idea that drivers will keep to date with the rules of the road is a fantasy; as is thinking that any sets of rules will lead to better safety and accessibility for pedestrians. Education has a place, but this is often aimed at the most vulnerable on our streets and not those with the greatest capacity to cause harm. 

Enforcement also has a place, but it really needs to be targeted at the worst behaviour and on the roads and streets which are harder to redesign. We argue that design is by a long way the most important element in the system and that’s where efforts must be made if we are in any way serious about delivering Vision Zero.

Our approach recognises that Rome cannot be (re)built in a day and so an incremental approach is absolutely fine if it is being contained within an overall framework. In some cases, the conditions for pedestrian-friendliness will be in place and we can go to town. In most cases we won’t be there yet and so the design of the highway network remains incredibly important in influencing how pedestrian-friendly a local junction could become..

The implication here of course is that in order to maximise pedestrian friendliness, we need to think about the factors which affect conditions for pedestrians and which include:

• Background vehicle speed 
• Through traffic volume 
• Turning speed 
• Turning vehicle size 
• Turning levels and complexity of traffic movement 
• Visibility character and crossing distance 
• Presence/absence of physical barriers to pedestrian movement 

Taking this a step further, we realised that the development of low-speed, low traffic neighbourhoods is crucial for delivery. We also realised that where these neighbourhoods meet main roads, we might need to accept that priority junctions are not always appropriate and a different type of management is required.

If the motor traffic conditions are conducive or are being redesigned to be conducive, then we can look at the details. We have developed a comprehensive set of features, but the most essential for a pedestrian-friendly marked-priority junction are:

• Detectable kerbs away from dropped kerbs.
• The provision of flush dropped kerbs (or a raised side road entry treatment) 
• The correct layout of blister tactile paving, laid at 90 degrees to the pedestrian route.
• Appropriate ramp gradients for dropped kerbs which slope in the direction of travel.
• Adequate space at the top of dropped kerbs to allow people to move around the corner without being exposed to the slope.
• A constrained maximum-turning radius.
• A minimum crossing distance.
• Physical prevention of parking close to the junction.
• Standard placement of give way or stop markings in accordance with the requirements traffic signs regulations.

© Mark Philpotts/ City Infinity and Robert Weetman.

This does all lead us to junction layouts which start to look like the one above, which is just one way of achieving our aim. There will be local considerations of course, and there are other things which can enhance provision. In fact, we think that several design features used together amplify effectiveness and so the more we can do the better. The areas shown in blue also suggest that we might be able to add other features, but that’s for exploration another time.

Conclusion

The first stage of instigating change is acknowledging there’s a problem, but perhaps more importantly, it’s also recognising one’s own practice and knowledge requires updating. This was the case for me with this project and as well as now knowing what is actually rotten about UK practice, I can now articulate this as a designer and this will enable me to advocate a better approach.

Theory is one thing. We think we are onto something important here and so this blog post will turn into a series as we want our ideas to spread more widely because things actually need to change on the streets; and that includes network planning which I’ll cover in another post.