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.

Sunny Scheveningen

Over the summer, I returned to the Netherlands for a few days holiday with some of my family. On one of the days, we jumped on the train from Rotterdam to Den Haag and then took a tram hop to the resort of Scheveningen.

It's not the first time I've visited, but last time I cycled here, it really was a flying visit as part of longer cycle ride and you can see a quick run of the route from Den Haag to the coast in this video. This time, we were aiming to spend the whole day and although we took advantage of the cooler morning, the afternoon was roasting.

One of the things I adore about the seafront is the group of sculptures which depict fairy tales, and as such, there is always a hint of unease and sometimes menace with them. The 12 metre tall "Herring Eater" is my favourite and provides quite the land mark (above).

This trip wasn't based around the cycle, but while #TheDoodle was digging on the beach under the eye of Mrs RH, I grabbed a little time to jump on a bike for a spin. To my delight (above), dockless hire firm Donkey Republic operates in Scheveningen and so I was able to add another place to my list of hires which includes places in Sweden, Denmark and Germany.

As well as the tram, residents of Den Haag also have an easy to cycle to Scheveningen (which is a district within the wider city) with high quality cycle tracks reaching the beach, but that's not the whole experience. If you want to avoid the beach and head north to the open spaces and dunes, you have to use the painted door zone lanes of Gevers Deynootweg (above). 

This street really is car-park central and at the height of summer, the queues of people trying to find somewhere to park made it quite unpleasant. As well as the 686 space Boulevard car parking garage which costs €2.70 per 30 minutes (or €2.30 with a PCard+), there is the Noord Boulevard cycle parking garage (above) which is free, although I can't quite work out who runs it.

While I was at the northern end, I took a little spin around the neighbourhood to the west and of course, the streets were pretty quiet. The housing mix is quite diverse, but on Hoornse Hop (above), the houses are quite large.

Back on Gevers Deynootweg and heading south again, the painted cycle lanes give way to cycle tracks which are perhaps showing their age with their block paved surfacing, but are much better than being with traffic (above).

Further south still and the cycle track becomes smooth red asphalt; and in fact, this is only a few years old (above).

I then turned off and headed to the beach front on the wonderful Strandweg cycle track (above) where there was lots of cycle parking available.

This whole area was redeveloped a few years ago and it's an amazing place to cycle, although at the southern end, it's only serving the beach and marina; to get to Hoek van Holland, one needs to turn off and head inland a little.

So there you have it, a quick spin around the resort of Scheveningen, definitely a place I would recommend visiting, although seeing the traffic queues for the car parking, maybe stick to public transport or a cycle!

Brilliant Bradford

The first time I visited Bradford, it was for the train driver to change ends at the station as I travelled between Manchester and Leeds, so a proper visit was long overdue. I put this right a couple of weeks ago.

I was looking forward to visiting the city after having been a sustainable mobility design advisor for some projects in the city centre before I was made redundant last year. Transport nerd and Bradfordian, Dave Stevens, had been encouraging me to visit for ages and so it is thanks to him for organising a whirlwind tour. I was actually going to a conference in Manchester, but when I said what's the best thing to look at, he said "Bradford". Arriving at the station, I met Dave and Kit, another transport nerd and we quickly dashed off to catch a bus to our first point of interest. 

Those active on Twitter during the Pandemic might remember the run-up to Christmas 2020 where I did the #CyclingInfraWorldCup, which got very territorial. We were too cooped up; it was bound to happen. A project which made it as far as the quarter finals was Bradford's Big Red Bridge and I was excited to see it in the flesh.

So guess what? It’s a bridge, that’s big and red, in Bradford. It crosses the A641 Manchester Road dual carriageway to the south of the city, reconnecting the communities severed by the road. It was built in 2012 as part of the Sustrans Connect 2 programme, which was supported by the National Lottery.

Designed by the city council's in-house team, the bridge works with the local topography across its east-west aspect as well as the steep hill which drops to the north towards the city centre.

In the centre of the main span, angled steel reaches for the sky (above) adding interest from a distance, but for me, it is how it works with the site levels and land constraints which is most interesting.

From Roundhill Street looking east, the sinuous nature of the bridge becomes apparent and over to the right (south), a spur from the main span drops south to meet the western side of Manchester Road (above and below).

We visited just as the local primary school was kicking out and so very quickly things became busy with walking, wheeling and cycling (below).

The colour is a little faded these days, but it is certainly a landmark. Curiously the colour is consistent with that of the shelters and railings of the guided busway along Manchester Road (below).

The busway has stops integrated with surface-level signalised crossings and at first glance you might think this makes the bridge redundant, but in practice, the bridge is far busier because it serves a different desire line. Anyway, we jumped back on the bus back to the city centre.

The busway is a curious thing which runs is sections with gaps at the main junctions where the bus driver has to make sure they get it right as they re-join the separated sections. 

For floating bus stop enthusiasts, the busway leaves people waiting between the two carriageways which isn't the nicest place to be and it only runs towards the city centre. It also means that the bus operators have to have the right buses for the route. On the flipside, it is some pretty heavy-duty infrastructure which is costly to repurpose and perhaps a little more immune from the political whims that bus lanes can suffer from. I'll leave that to the bus experts.

We then wandered over to Hall Ings which is at the heart of huge changes in the city centre. There has been a redesign of some of the roads and streets which skirt the city centre, along with routing of bus services in order to create a new park. The photograph above was taken from what was a dual carriageway running between the two buildings. It carved off the southern tip of the city centre, creating a barrier between Bradford Interchange station and the city itself.

We met a walk led by Dr Saira Ali, the city council's Landscape Design and Conservation team leader where we learned about some of the history of the area and the influences that led to the landscape design.

Strictly speaking, there is still a bit of a "road for vehicles" running through through space, but it's a wonderfully smooth cycle track (above), which sinuously, but directly provides a key east-west route. This is the part of the project I was involved with and where working with the city council team, we looked ensure that a decent connection was made. Wider changes are still a work in progress, but a stake has been claimed for future development.

Hall Ings is genuinely a park. There is open space, shaped grassed areas for sitting on and areas for incidental play. The planting in what has been incorporated into Norfolk Gardens, reflects the city's history of textile production with colours of the dyes used amongst other things.

There are linear routes through the area for walking, wheeling and cycling, but also walking and wheeling routes which cross the space between the station and the city centre. These points of interaction have zebra crossings over the cycle track. I would have preferred to have seen them squared up a little more to avoid the awkward stripe and tactile paving layouts. I was glad to see the zebras and the centre lines however which remind people cycling that people are crossing and everyone where the cycle route is.

The linear routes are also crossed by a bollard-controlled access to the magistrates court which is not successful at all (above and below).

The access road is designed to prioritise court traffic (of which there is generally very little). I argued against this treatment on the basis that drivers of court traffic should be competent to negotiate the space.

While I am on security, I'll also point out the hostile vehicle mitigation (HVM) which has been deployed, such as approaching the crossing of Princes Way (above). 

As usual, the people who only give their first names have come out of their government buildings to tell the council they have to put lots of bollards and blocks in positions which obstruct walking, wheeling and cycling in the name of security.

The cycle track here is particularly poorly detailed - surely a group of three bollards should have been used here? This was after my involvement, so I had no chance to influence things. On the positive side, the pedestrian and cycling space remains separated at this crossing which was where a large roundabout once stood.

After looking around at a couple more things as part of the tour, three became four as we were joined by yet another transport nerd, Emma, and we wandered further east along Hall Ings. The photograph above is at the eastern end of the main park space looking west and again, this would have been the middle of a road just a while ago. The cycle route crosses a little bit of shared space which gives an opportunity to head north and south and which is fine in the context.

As we walked along, I was amused to see a telecommunications chamber which still had the old carriageway-loading cover, complete with double yellow lines. This is a little bit of street archaeology which serves to remind us of what came before. In fact, I think it would be fun to keep the lines painted and for there to be a little plaque to explain it!

As we headed further east, the cycle track curved to the south (above) as the road still exists here beyond the city core, but it has had a bit of a diet, with the two-way cycle track on the south side to avoid the complexities of the multiple accesses to the Broadway carpark. 

Hall Ings then meets Vicar Lane which is essentially a 5-arm junction that has been remodelled. The southern arm of Vicar Lane used to be closed to traffic, but has been reopened as part of bus access changes, while the northern arm of Vicar Lane has been closed to traffic. To the northwest, previously closed Well Street has been reopened to traffic as part of wider servicing and access which means Bradford has pretty much now introduced a circulation plan.

The old layout here was a staggered toucan crossing with the northern arm of Vicar Lane being left in only and one-way, away from Hall Ings. The new layout needed to be signalised and the two-way cycle track threaded through to cross to the northern side of Hall Ings to be ready for a future extension. Rather than just take the cycle route through the junction, I thought that a creating a protected intersection would be much more flexible for people cycling (above).

The original plan was for a CYCLOPS variant of junction which has cycle traffic on the outside of pedestrians. This means that when people cross the cycle track, they turn before encountering the signalised crossing of the carriageway which provides assistance to some visually impaired users who like to have that change in direction.

However, on the southwest side of the junction we had to compromise as the design developed because of the position of an existing building. For this quadrant, we have the Dutch approach of in-line crossings which are more awkward for some people to cope with.

I was disappointed to see that my design for Vicar Lane North which was essentially a stub of cycle track providing direct access to the CYCLOPS was missing and there wasn't even a dropped kerb for access for cycles. Despite being steep street, the cycle access was there to maximise permeability.

I think the push buttons for the pedestrian crossings would have been better in the areas at carriageway level for long cane users to detect and to make sure people using amplified mobility could get as close as possible. I was pleased to see the contrasting traffic islands had made it into the final work as I think that helps to make the layout more conspicuous. I'll never like the green surfacing, but that's the council's preferred treatment, despite the dark buff of Hall Ings.

Finally, the two-way route re-joins to the northeast of the junction and continuous for a while with a floating bus stop (the bus stop being a relocation from elsewhere). In this case, the shelter is way too close to the crossing of the cycle track and blocks the through-visibility and I think the passenger island is too small for the numbers using it. Hopefully some of these issues can be reviewed.

One of the things the Hall Ings project has done is reveal the rich architecture of the city centre because rather than having to scurry about along and across a space dominated by motor traffic, one can actually relax and enjoy the surroundings. I'll leave you with a slightly older piece of public realm, the Mirror Pool (above) in Centenary Square which is great fun and another example of the city getting rid of roads in favour of people and a more liveable city centre which has been a work in progress for over 20 years.

We never really hear much about Bradford and that's a shame. The city centre public space really feels European and on the warm sunny Tuesday I visited, the city centre was busy well into the evening with people just hanging out and enjoying the spaces. Bradford should be shouting about what they have been doing!