I've seen things you people wouldn't believe: Spring 2025 Part 1

At the beginning of April, I was fortunate to be able to make another trip to the Netherlands, my ninth since 2015, and this will be the first of a few posts talking about what I saw.

I am of course travelling on holiday, and one cannot get under the skin of any place as a tourist. However, I also travel with an engineer's eye and so I hope that I can do some justice to what I see and there are certainly things which get stored in my brain for later. 

For this trip I wasn't sure if I'd see much new for a UK audience, but 300 photos and some video said otherwise! For this trip, I was with my son who likes the cycling days, but puts up with my geekery with promises of finding sports bars in the evenings!

For this post, I am going to talk about the F325 Fast Cycle Route between Arnhem and Nijmegen in the east of the Netherlands. For the full details of this route, please read Mark Wagenbuur's detailed post on his Bicycle Dutch website which helped me plan this part of our trip. 

It is worth mentioning here that the project was built to reduce traffic congestion which is quite amazing from the UK perspective, and especially from an English perspective given the millions of pounds being thrown at National Highways to build lane miles.

The other thing I want to mention now is that I am pretty sure we got lost along the route a couple of times because to be honest, the signage could be better which is not a criticism I'd normally make about the Dutch cycling network.

The trip took just over hour, perhaps a little slower than many people, but we had also cycled from Ede-Wageningen to Arnhem after travelling by train for a few hours and so we were a little tired! But, even with standard cycles, this route really does open up the opportunity for cycle commuting, and e-cycles would make it really quite easy. The photograph above shows the route just after leaving the centre of Arnhem with a wide two-way cycle track, a road carrying part of the city's trolleybus network and the N225 road beyond that.

A little further on, the route crosses a nature area on a viaduct called the Doorlaatbrug Eldensedijk which used to be a flood barrier until the 1990s.

A little further south and there is a pair of bus stops for the trolleybus with a pedestrian link off to the left down to provide access to the neighbourhoods to the east.

For completeness, above is a photo of the type of trolleybuses which are found in Arnhem and unique to the Netherlands, having been in operation since 1949.

The N225 turns east through Arnhem South and the A12 motorway which crosses the Netherlands east to west from Den Haag to Arnhem and then across the border to become Germany's Autobahn 3, a route that continues into Austria. The F325 continues south with a bridge over the N225 (above).

The route is now away from roads, maintaining its width, and because it is a transport route it is lit. The photograph above shows a local junction with the F325 heading to the left with markings and signs reinforcing the fact.

The route joins Huissensedijk (above) which was quiet enough, although perhaps it might provide better wayfinding if it were a cycle street.

We then ended up taking a wrong turn, ending up on Brinksestraat, rather than continuing ahead on the F325. In hindsight, it should have been obvious, but a lack of priority at the decision point must have thrown me a bit. So, we carried on using the advisory cycle lanes

After turning onto Huissensedijk (above), we continued vaguely along the A325 motorway.

We then found a sign indicating the F325 route towards Elst as well as Nijmegen and so we carried on and noticed the lighting was that of the F325 (above and below) which is modelled on cycle chain links.

The photograph above shows the route to the east of Elst and where it shares a corridor with a rural service road (Sillestraat) and the A325 to the right. Sillestraat was essentially widened to create the F325 with the two-way cycle track being nicely protected and giving a good level of confidence from a wayfinding perspective.

Above is the route as it passes under Bemmelseweg and continues on Zwarteweg (below), which had probably the worst cycle track surface I have ever experienced in the Netherlands where there was definitely a problem with the surfacing material failing.

As we entered the edges of Nijmegen, we passed the city's Pathé Nijmegen cinema complex which was quite incongruous given its out of town position, although it is full of cycle parking and only a few minutes from residential areas. The A325 turns in the N325 around here and the cinema has it's own junction nearby. The F325 route passes a roundabout which looks like it is all set up for development in the area.

The route then becomes a shared access road to a series of floating buildings on a lake complex which I thought were residential, but on looking more closely, there are some which seem to be office buildings which is interesting. The shared road accesses some local car parking for the floating buildings.

Continuing south, we entered the suburbs of Nijmegen (above) on a cycle track which had priority over local connector roads such as Vrouwe Udasingel (below) where the connector road was locally dualled with narrow traffic lanes and which meant only crossing one half at a time.

The route gave way to becoming a cycle street (below) and we ended up getting lost again!

We picked up the route again at Nijmgen Lent station (below) where it rises to meet the railway bridge over the River Waal and of course, there was lots of cycle parking at the station.

The cycle route was added to the existing railway structure and opened in 2004 and provides an impressive gateway to Nijmegen.

In fact, the F325 route enters Nijmegen in two places, this railway bridge and also on the N325 road bridge which probably explains us getting a little lost before the river crossing!

Once crossed the railway bridge (above) continues for a while on a viaduct (below).

Eventually, the viaduct drops gently to street level at Stieltjesstraat where the fast route ends and you can continue your journey within the city.

Notwithstanding the occasional navigation issue, our progress along the route was quite rapid and its status as a fast route is well-earned. There were plenty of people using the route along its length, but clearly it also provides quick links into the two cities from their respective suburbs in addition to being a route connecting them.

I shall leave you with a video of most of the route at 4x speed (I had a couple of recording problems that afternoon).

Bouncing Around Bournemouth

At the end of March, I visited Bournemouth where I gave a talk at the BCP Council Transport Conference called "Movement, Place, Choice & Space" which I have written about on my business blog over at City Infinity.

I was in town for a couple of days and part of the plan was an afternoon seeing what was going on with infrastructure redevelopment to enable cycling around the Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole area. 

I am grateful to my fellow chartered civil engineer, Engineer Like a Girl, for giving up her afternoon to take me on an infrastructure safari in a loop which took in a large chunk of the Bournemouth and Poole parts of the council area. I should also give a shout out to public cycle hire operator, Beryl for sorting me out with one of its freshly serviced hire cycles which operates in BCP. Being an electric model, I barely noticed the 17 miles we cycled!

I'll prelude the rest of the post mentioning a slide I used at the conference which used Active Travel England's excellent map-based "Plan Your Active Travel Schemes" website which has lots of data to play with. I used it to show that the main road network in the area is fully joined up in contrast with the patchy cycling network. As I keep saying, until there is a decent primary cycle network in an area, it will never provide anywhere near the level of service provided by the existing and comprehensive motoring network. 

Fortunately, BCP council has been very successful at levering investment for infrastructure projects in recent years. Some of the legacy network has been improved and new connections are being made, both with cycle tracks on main roads and with filtered streets. It shows that yet again, local authorities need steady funding in order to build their capacity for delivery as do their supply chains.

So, at last, what did we see? Let's start at Glenfurness Avenue and specifically, a bridge over the railway (above). You can see a pretty narrow road bridge which would have been pretty awful to cycle on and previously, people walking would have been crammed on a narrow footbridge to the east.

The council has provided not one, but two new parallel bridges for walking and cycling over the railway which is part of longer term plans for a strategic route between Bournemouth town centre and Ferndown. The photograph above shows the arrangement of the bridges which provide a continuation of the footway on both sides of the street.

Crucially, as the two bridges are identical, they also provide with-flow cycling space on both sides of the street which connects to new cycle tracks and then existing lanes on both sides of the railway. On their own, the bridges and the short sections of cycle track won't change the world, but the council has invested at a location which is vital to provide future connectivity and even locally, the new bridges are enabling local trips. 

A pair of bridges on their own won't deliver a cycling network and there will be people saying that nobody uses them, but it's the kind of thing that has to be built before we have any hope of wider delivery. Drivers have taken over the original bridge and have the roads either side; we have to create that safe cycling space before we can even start to match the level of service driving has.

While the bridges at Glenfurness Avenue are important investments, they are probably not that sexy to the non-transport person, and for some cycle track action we had a look at Ringwood Road in Poole, a busy A-road dual carriageway (A3049). The work on the road was still in progress, but even then, we saw people using the new layout, including the two children travelling independently in the photograph above. 

The project required the narrowing of the traffic lanes across the dual carriageway and the movement of the central reserve to the north-west to free space for the cycle track. It would have been very easy to have retained the previous status of a shared-use path and so the investment has released clear space for walking and wheeling, as well as new crossings and a 30mph speed limit. 

The photograph above is at the junction with Loewy Crescent, which is a cul-de-sac serving less than 40 dwellings. Ideally, a junction like this would either be closed to motors or made exit only because drivers turning in from a higher speed environment (notwithstanding the 30mph limit) are less likely to want to stop on a dual carriageway to let people cycling pass. 

This is not an option with a cul-de-sac of course and so controlling the speed of drivers turning left into the side street relies on the kerbed buffer to the main carriageway and the "corner" of where the footway meets the side street carriageway. This creates the turning radius which controls speed. Perhaps the buffer could have been increased locally with a little bit of a bending out of the cycle track from the main road and the turning radius a little tighter, but the drivers we observed seemed to cope OK.

To the north-east, the A3049 corridor becomes Wallisdown Road which has seen significant investment in the last few years to create strategic and protected cycling space. The photograph above shows two-way cycle tracks on both sides of the street which had the speed limit reduced from 40mph to 30mph (I'll come back to the shared space area later).

The project provides access to an extensive employment area and connections to Bournemouth University. I won't link to it, but the investment of money and space for cycling upset the clickbaiting local newspaper and of course the Daily Mail which whinged that cyclists and pedestrians have 33 feet of space with motorists squeezing onto a 21 feet wide street. I assume the use of "feet" plays to their shrinking readership. 

It's 10 metres vs 6.4 metres in units I understand, but in the 5 metres each side of the carriageway, we're getting a footway and a 2-way cycle track which is an efficient use of space and anyway, who cares what the right wing press thinks.

The section of shared-use path I mentioned above comes from compromise. The designers couldn't reduce the carriageway any further and still needed to accommodate a bus stop which has given rise to a feature that I have never seen in the UK, but which is common in the Netherlands, and which is a kerbed passenger island (above).

The general UK practice would be to have a shelter plonked in the shared-use path somewhere with pedestrians, passengers and cyclists sharing. We don't really want to have shared space, but the use of a kerbed passenger island is actually useful conceptually. People getting on a bus are interested in doing that and their mind may not be on people cycling. Equally, people getting off the bus have their minds on making sure they have their bags, shopping, children etc and so haven't quite changed from a passenger to a pedestrian yet. 

It is an idea that Professor Nick Tyler of University College London terms "pedenger", and giving people space to transition from passenger to pedestrian leans into the concept and which is why having people cross cycling space from a bus stop or shelter creates worry for some people. The photograph above is a Dutch layout which provides "pedenger" space and whilst the cycle track is mainly for cycling, it is also walking space for those who need it. My criticism of the council's design is it really should have been paved in light grey block paving or similar to give it good contrast to the shared area.

While mentioning materials, I should mention another phase of the Wallisdown Road corridor project to the south-east which has me in a quandary. The photograph above is actually of a footway and not a cycle track (that is to be added to the right) and I say this because the surface has been machine-laid and is definitely the smoothest footway I have seen in the UK.

The flipside is that the council is (in common with most UK projects) using asphalt for footways which stems from a perception that they are easier to maintain than concrete element or flag paving, but in which we lose making footways a distinct colour. 

I mourn this loss of distinctiveness. I would also say that for this section, there is a parallel service road to the south-west which might have been best for the walking route which would have meant the main road only needed a cycle track rather than both a cycle track and a footway for this section (with there being a pair of with-flow cycle tracks under construction).

Back over to Poole and we had a look at Wimborne Road, a busy north-south B-road which is a strategic cycling route having some basic cycle lanes improved. The photograph above is the junction with Tatnum Road and Garland Road which is exactly where investment should be targeted as junctions are the riskier places for cycling. The carriageway width and junction side streets have been tightened up, cycle tracks added and new green estate provided.

Further north and the junction with the A35 Fernside Road has been redesigned for a better walking, wheeling and cycling experience, including the filtering of Darbys Lane (see above). This was a Covid-19 filter which has been incorporated into the new layout with motor access provided from an alternative location which is an example of the motoring and cycling networks being unravelled from each other, with Darbys Lane providing access to a quieter set of residential streets.

The photograph is a little closer to the main junction and shows how the redesigned filter operates as a two-way cycle track which splits at the traffic signals to become with-flow cycle tracks on Wimborne Road in the distance. There is also access to the long filtered Mellstock Road to the west of the junction as well as extensive greening.

I doubt many would wish to cycle on the A35 Fernside Road, but the junction design at least provides a protected transition to the carriageway, albeit from a bit of shared space (above) and access to the junction for cyclists (below), although I would have much preferred to see asphalt to asphalt tie-ins and some of the tactile paving is of the wrong type!

This post is only really a snapshot of what I saw on my afternoon's cycle around as there were lots of other large and small projects underway in the council's area. The important thing to take away is that BCP Council has been consistently planning and delivering using grant funding which has enabled it (and the supply chain) to grow skills, capacity and pipeline, and this is vital if we are going to deliver elsewhere. There is of course so much to do, but addressing 100 years of increasingly prioritising driving won't be addressed overnight.

Oh, and did I mention that lots of the new stuff has red cycle tracks which is, of course, the correct colour? #TeamRed

Floating Bus Stops: Redux

I write this with a deep sigh. Not because it's an unimportant subject, it's just that it comes up every so often and I need to remind people that floating bus stops are not the starting position, they are a design response to policy and network decisions. So, here I am again writing about floating bus stops.

Campaigns against floating bus stops sometimes break out into the media, but there's also the drip-drip output from some people and organisations (especially on social media) which far from galvanising people to seek improved designs, end up drawing out all sorts of oddballs to have a pop at people cycling, attitudes which all to sadly are replicated on the streets and ends up with views being entrenched and prejudices reinforced.

There are some people and organisations who advocate for a ban of floating bus stops and have got themselves into a position where they will absolutely not countenance discussion about that position, let alone compromise. At the moment I can't see how they can come back from such a purist position, but neither do I see them presenting any credible alternative designs (or any designs at all). It is very easy to say no.

I covered the issue of floating bus stops back in 2021 which was going to be my go-to response on the subject and there isn't much for me to add in terms of site design, but I there are a few things I've developed my thinking on since then, and I wanted to preserve a quick bit of research I did for a social media thread. I will come back so a couple of design issues at the end though.

On the thinking side, my 2021 post links to research and gives practical advice on how to improve designs which I think remain 100% sound, but I'll cover some more research later. What my post didn't cover is the network-level issues and the design of networks is something that has only really properly crystallised in my mind in the last year.

The fundamental question is why do we have floating bus stops? It's as fundamental as why do we have anything on the streets and the answer is because of motor traffic, but it's even more conceptual than that. Floating bus stops are a design response to a network-level decision to enable people to cycle as transport and that's the starting position. If we do not use floating bus stops at all, we cannot possibly enable people to cycle in a way that meets their wants and needs.

In the UK, we are very used a two-mode transport solution of either walking and wheeling on footways or driving on carriageways. Where those modes cross is where design comes into play and it has all to often been at the expense of pedestrians with layouts that encourage drivers to take priority and pedestrians to cede it, as well as complex junctions and crossings that take an age to get from one side to the other.

Prior to the last decade or so, cycling has been seen as a mode that should be accommodated in the carriageway and treated like little motor vehicles. That was reflected in national guidance as well as actually what was done on the ground. If you have a look at the numbers of people cycling where that approach has been taken, it comes as no surprise that numbers are low and the approach failed. 

When we weren't trying to paint people onto the carriageway, we tried to bolt cycling onto footways which often took space away from walking and wheeling, made cycling slow and perhaps made the users of both modes defensive of their space; and all the while, we were actually maintaining the motor-centric status quo.

From a network-level perspective, a three-mode solution will have three-mode needs and each mode will have its own network-level needs. The key is how we design where the modes coincide or cross. I write about this more in one of my business blog posts which of course mentions floating bus stops. 

There has been plenty of research to show that people won't cycle with fast and heavy flows of traffic and so when we design a cycle network, we need to remember that people have the same wants and needs to travel to get to places as with any mode, and so they will be travelling along roads that have a high density of services, but which are also in use as busy motor traffic corridors. It is impossible to design cycling networks which purely rely on side streets because most services are not found there.

One might argue that buses (and trams) should be thought of as a fourth mode, but I would say that the difference here is that they are not door to door in the same way as cycling is and (conceptually) they follow fixed routes which should make the planning aspect a little easier. One solution which is sometimes advanced is that where space is constrained, then buses and cycles should be routed on different streets. 

The problem here is the density of services issue and people using cycling as a door to door mode. I think this is a position which could be explored if we are willing to remove other motor traffic and where space is still constrained, but this is a rare. If we end up with a bus only street, but it has relatively low levels of bus traffic, then in fact most people will be happy to mix if it is all low speed. If there are high levels of bus traffic, then people will want to be protected and clearing out general traffic might be enough to build high quality floating bus stops. 

Anywhere that cannot achieve this is going to be an edge-case needing bespoke network planning work in any case and will need a high density road network to be achievable. But, it has its place in the discussion and it needs the UK to move beyond designing routes as the starting point and really get under the network planning skin.

In England, we have the Local Walking Cycling & Walking Infrastructure Plans technical guidance which is meant to help us plan for walking and cycling networks over a geographic area and then prioritise delivery. I think the guidance is over-complex and some of the data sources it suggests we use are flaky. There is a basic premise that people want and need to travel between places and that is what we have mostly given motoring in the door to door sense. There is, however a key failure in the guidance as it completely forgets to mention the motoring network and by extension, bus networks. If those aren't being looked at, how do we ever rationalise things? It's more about the rural situation, but I have a look at network planning in my business blog post here.

It is worth highlighting at this point that the busiest cycle route on the planet is also on a bus only street, but because bus services are frequent, there are cycle tracks. At the network level, this is a main cycle route in the local city network and the streets either side are just low traffic city streets which are accessible for cycling, but nobody is using them unless they need to be there. I am talking about Vredenburg in Utrecht.

The photograph above is a view along one of the passenger islands of the floating bus stops on a street which are needed because if buses and cycles mixed, there would be chaos and people would get hurt. The live bus times at the stop in my photograph can be found here which make interesting watching. I am not suggesting that this design works for everyone, but it is very much the design response to network-level decisions and from a city perspective, Utrecht is really squeezing out private cars which gives more transport options for those who don't or can't drive.

It is also worth mentioning the London Cycling Campaign's new report "After Dark" which takes a critical look at London's designated Cycleways and suggests that a quarter of the network is socially unsafe at night. It also suggests there has been too much reliance on indirect routes which use or skirt parks, canals and other lonely places. This isn't directly linked to the design of floating bus stops, but it is a network-level outcome where we haven't tackled what is happening on the nearby and more direct routes along streets and in the event we keep cycle routes and bus routes separate, this type of thing will be one outcome.

I can think of examples of lonely routes which get you away from traffic (and the density of services) because there is no appetite to tackle the main roads. I can also think of examples where main roads have been tackled and where there are floating bus stops, but the alternative parallel routes that would have avoided floating bus stops are indirect, sometimes lonely and sometimes on local streets with too much rat-running traffic.

In terms of research undertaken since my original post, Living Streets has looked into floating bus stops (and continuous footways). The report and research backing it is dense, but at the very least it is worth reading the executive summary which essentially calls out the lack of design consistency and poor layouts seen out in the real world, but it also says:

However, whilst there is some concern about bus stop bypasses, our observational data suggested the level of discomfort or difficulty most people experience in using these bus stops, when well designed, is very low. Where a cycle track is extremely busy – a much wider group of pedestrians can be disadvantaged, unless reliable support is provided to allow easier crossing.

This pulls at network-level and local contextual design responses, and in my opinion, is completely sensible and more effort is needed on the really busy places.

Guide Dogs commissioned University College London to undertake research on floating bus stops (and other design elements). Again, it is well worth a read and there are a set of recommendations which on the whole are sensible in my view. There is one recommendation I take issue with however:

Investigate different ways of enabling cycle lanes and bus stops to interact which do not raise safety concerns amongst passengers and pedestrians using the stop. This investigation should include consideration of alternative positions, alignments and routes for the cycle lane to ensure that both cyclists and pedestrians are safe around bus stops. Until findings from this research are available, stop the further installation of Floating Island Bus Stops and Shared Bus Stop Boarders. 

I am not getting into shared boarders here as it's another discussion, but as I have said above, floating bus stops are a design response to the decision to enable cycling through network design and calling for their use to be halted until some so far undiscussed and uncommissioned research is simply not reasonable.

The suggestion that there is somehow "alternative positions, alignments and routes for the cycle lane" is at best naïve because if there were a magic layout that had 100% support from everyone with an interest, people would be able to go and point at real-life examples. It is certain that there is no alternative where two-way cycle tracks are used. They don't exist for a very good reason, and this is where I want to preserve a bit of a thread I did on social media. 

I did a very quick literature review on international design guidance for floating bus stops (ignoring all of the network-level discussions for a minute). I am not going to critique each one, but there is very obviously a certain level of familiarity about all of them.

Brazil (2007)

British Columbia

Chile

England

India

Massachusetts

NACTO (USA)

New Zealand

Scotland

London (TfL)

Wales

Of course, I can be critical here and just say that all of these essentially copy the Dutch approach and given the discourse in the UK, we have folks unhappy with the approach. That's fair to a point, but my counter is that nobody has proposed a reasonable alternative that doesn't throw people cycling back into traffic or just ignores their needs (eg, bus lanes). 

I did find this layout in Colombian guidance, but it doesn't take an engineer to explain how awful it is.

Colombia

For completeness, people cite designs from Copenhagen where passengers board and alight from the cycle track and people cycling stop for them as a matter of it being of traffic rules. It is a solution, but one which those who don't like floating bus stops will like even less. From the perspective of Copenhagen, there might, however, be an argument about consistency and everyone knowing how it works and that might take you so far, but they have plenty of floating bus stops and the reality of the compromise is actually space and in many cases, not taking it from general traffic.

Copenhagen

In rounding up other thinking, I need to link to Wheels for Wellbeing's thoughts and perspectives which remind us the need for inclusive consultation but that people choosing cycling need continuous protection.

Transport for London has also undertaken a safety review of floating bus stops in London. It found the risk of injury to be very low, but more than a third of stops not meeting their guidance and that some people remain concerned, especially with confusing layouts. Personally, I dislike some of TfL's guidance which has one layout which funnels people cycling into single file and requires them to negotiate what I would say quite tight geometry to the point where their attention might be on negotiating that and not people crossing, but again, I'm getting drawn into detail.

TfL does suggest there needs to be more education in how the infrastructure is intended to operate, that boroughs need to be more consistent with design and that guidance needs to be reviewed. They also want to look at innovation to help visually impaired people use [floating] bus stops and research the behavioural issues around cyclists not giving way (I assume at zebra crossings over cycle tracks).

On the technology side, I do think the idea of using detectors at busier cycle tracks which provides tactile information on large gaps in cycle traffic is helpful as it doesn't rely on administrative controls to stop cyclists to allow people to cross (because zebra crossings and signals are motor traffic responses). I can't find a link to a trial, but I will update this if I do.

Finally, on the zebra crossing issue my 2021 post did link to the research TRL did for Transport for London some time back, but which is is worth mentioning again here. The study was limited, but did suggest that zebra crossings on cycle tracks are a feature that most people understand in terms of who has priority, even if the compliance from people cycling was decidedly mixed. In legal terms, zebra crossings over cycle tracks are very much real zebra crossings and so people cycling should be giving way to people crossing.

On balance, I think the zebras are useful from a wayfinding and consistency perspective and I recommend them to be used wherever someone is being formally guided to cross a cycle track.

Floating bus stops seems to have got themselves stuck in a never ending debate about a design response which comes way down the line from policy and network planning decisions in a way I can't think happens with anything else we find on the street.

To some extent they are a worry to folks who rely on buses and have fought for accessible services and floating bus stops perceptibly erode that hard won accessibility. I can't argue against that, but equally, I can't support positions that when taken back up the policy chains mean we have to maintain the status quo, which is pretty much motor traffic domination of most of the country. You can't research your way out of it, you need to build you way out of it.