15 metres

This week, I have been lucky enough to have had time to think about how I would redesign a secondary type of street and it's adjacent residential areas.

It's a real project which I have no idea where it will lead to (if anything), but it is great to have some thinking and designing time.

In terms of street classification, we can use the follow;

• Major roads - dual carriageway trunk roads or motorways
• Primary streets - single (sometimes dual) carriageway A-roads
• Secondary streets - single carriageway B-roads or unclassified roads
• Local streets - residential streets

The definitions are a bit more complicated than I have set out, but in essence I am interested in the secondary street. It is a pretty bog-standard suburban street which mainly residential frontage (houses and flats). It has a parade of shops, a few individual businesses and a primary school The street carries two bus routes and it conveys traffic from one local area to another. At each end of the street, it connects to busy A-roads.

In terms of its geometry, it is generally straight and it is an almost a consistent 15 metres between the highway boundaries - 15m being the minimum width. The carriageway is 8m in width and nominally marked with 1.2m wide advisory cycle lanes and 2.8m general lanes along part of the street and general lanes with a hatched median elsewhere. 

The street carries some 14,500 vehicles per day which is very high and so it is not surprising that traffic congestion is bad twice a day. 

The footways are wide with old trees towards the kerbside - I have looked at a couple of historic photos and the street has never had a verge. The street has plenty of dropped kerbs for vehicle access and a number of side streets leading off it, all with nice tight radiuses and into filtered neighbourhoods. On street parking is restricted during the day and there are some footway parking bays (all four wheels up). 

Existing layout

Luckily the streets either side are filtered, but this does mean residents have to use this street to access their homes by car and there are cases of people using parallel routes through these areas to jump the traffic queues a little bit (leaving the secondary street at one point and rejoining a bit further up) - dealing with that is important, but I'll stick to our secondary street here.

So what is the project brief? In essence, it's about trying to make the place more liveable. This means getting some people out of their cars (especially those making short trips), making it easier to cross the road, providing protection to get people cycling, reduce casualties and collision risk and perhaps to discourage a bit of through-traffic. Simple aims, but quite difficult to achieve in terms of the usual issues of cost, resident acceptability and politics (but that's all another story).

From a technical point of view, it is in theory complete possible to strip everything out and rebuild the street layout from the ground up. This approach would allow some pretty good layouts;

One-way stepped cycle tracks with buffers from traffic

Two-way cycle track with buffer to traffic

Making the street one-way would free up loads of space, but being a bus route, it does mean looping buses onto other primary or secondary streets created a much long walk for local residents who we want to be able to get the bus for some trips;

The big issue from a technical point is that a layout such as V2 means changing an existing area of footway into carriageway which is costly in construction terms and the potential need to move utilities. It is easier to convert carriageway to cycle track.

We also have the existing trees to contend with. They are mainly mature and so any proposal to remove them will undoubtedly meet with objection (although removing them and planting new ones would be so much easier). The outcome of this means we are probably looking to work with them and having the cycle track pass on the outside of them - this does mean we lose the buffer we could have had;

It does mean that we are probably left with narrower cycle tracks as we pass each tree or groups of trees, but perhaps it's good enough for what we want to achieve. As we reach the side road junctions or driveways, we can tweak the layout to give a buffer which allows the footway and cycle track to stay at the same level and be continuous with drivers having to drive over them via ramped kerb units or little asphalt ramps within the buffer;

Junction width continuous footway/ cycle track

Section

You will have noticed that I have selected 3m wide traffic lanes. In my experience, the bus operator will always push for wider lanes. Buses tend to be around 2.5 - 2.55m in width from what I can gather (London's New Bus for London is 2.52m for example) and so this says to me that we actually need a 20mph speed limit. As well as buses becoming rolling road blocks, the speed limit is reinforced by the lane width, no centre line, plus if we hump crossings on the street, it helps with keeping driver speed down as well as creating level crossings for pedestrians.

Humped zebra crossing and a bit of a squeeze

in the cycle track to pass the tree

As usual, there are compromises, especially in trying to squeeze a cycle track around the existing trees, but for 15 metres of highway width, I think you can get a lot of improvements with something for all modes if we assume a secondary street will always carry a level of traffic where people cycling need protection, where people walking need crossings and where we facilitate bus routes.

You Get Who You Design For

It is a simple enough concept "you get who you design for", but it is utterly lost on many designers and the public alike.

The media and especially social media is adept at moaning about cyclists not using cycle lanes which immediately explains how the discussion is framed. The term "cyclists" in my view is all to often used when presenting "people cycling" in a bad light and it is often used as a shorthand for a stereotypical person in lycra (or whatever their clothes are made of) blasting along on a road bike.

The Cyclists. Monkey Dust, BBC.

"Cycle lanes" is another catch-all term and variously means anything which vaguely has some sort of sign or paint on the road which demands The Cyclists stick to it. Even if we are talking about some paint on the road which sets aside space in the gutter; a bumpy footway which can be cycled on because some signs have been added to it; or a world-class cycle track; the outraged demand that they be used.

Why aren't people using this cycle lane which

has been provided at huge tax-payer's cost?

Shared-use cycle tracks are interesting. If they have even a moderate use by people walking, then they will end up being slow for cycling (people people walking are in the way) and they will be intimidating to walk on (because of The Cyclists). We sometimes get a bit for cycling and a bit for walking, although a white line up the middle is the usual treatment. We'll get rage from people driving who expect The Cyclists to get off the road and onto the cycle tracks. Even if they end up making people give way at every side road.

Give way to drivers at every side road.

(Don't forget to keep looking behind you)

Once we start treating people cycling as *people* who we wish to move in comfort and safety, rather than The Cyclists, then things start to change. For a start, the demographic starts to change from the young, white male;

We see a shift from people wearing PPE to people travelling in ordinary clothes;

We see the types of cycle change. Road bikes are no longer the most popular as riders don't have to keep up with traffic to be safe;

We start to see deliveries being made by cycles;

And where people feel really safe, comfortable and welcome, we'll see people using all sorts of cycles to get around;

Families will start to cycle because they are not exposed to traffic;

Hell, we'll even see people who are not cycling!

This really isn't a difficult concept to grasp. If you treat people cycling properly, then they won't be in the way of people who want to drive which makes life easier for everyone concerned. Even the roadies will prefer the decent infrastructure;

Congestion

The UK needs to have a grown up conversation about traffic congestion and the issues which stem from it.

Coming home from work on Thursday, the dual carriageway was its usual evening crawl;

It is often like this, but it was especially bad because of an emergency (partial) closure for road repairs at a large junction. Given that the schools were on holiday as well, it was especially noticeable.

OK, this was an unplanned event and so it was bound to cause problems, but just think about the daily "drive time" traffic news, or the twitter feeds of transport authorities and this is actually routine. There is no resilience left on our urban highways and as such, they are extremely sensitive to disruption.

The problem is, however, that (the royal) we has no plan to deal with the problems. At the national level (and I include the devolved administrations) we are hopelessly locked into the predict and provide cycle of adding lane miles to interurban roads and motorways, then wondering why they have filled up and then perhaps more seriously, we get surprised when the crunch hits our towns and cities!

We've made it easy to drive between and around towns for so long we have now got to the point where they cannot absorb the daily influx with any efficiency. We know that the roads are quieter in the school holidays and I wonder why people can't make the link. Where secondary roads and residential streets remain easy to use for through traffic, then they have also been subsumed into the daily peak. This perfect storm makes it very hard for people to imagine change and it also makes it hard to make change because the implication is that we have to reduce motor-traffic in the widest sense.

Although we have some encouraging noises from some regional governments, there is an almost total absence of debate about congestion. Local press and radio witter on about roadworks disrupting drivers, they talk about drivers being caught out by bus lanes and speed cameras and they whine about the cost of the latest scrap of walking or cycling infrastructure. We never get the voices asking why we have got to this point and more importantly, how we deal with it.

We could increase urban road capacity by adding lanes, but only if we are prepared to knock down buildings and give further space to tarmac. We need to confront the congestion problem and until we do, every intervention which goes against it will require disproportionate amounts of energy to deal with.

Heading West

After the long slog of winter, it was a joy to be able to cycle further than my usual commute this week and in the sunshine. It was even more of a joy to be cycling with my older daughter on what was her longest trip since learning to ride a couple of years back.

Round our way, cycling in safety is in short supply. Perversely, it is easier to get to the retail park than the local shops because the former has a cycle track passing it, whereas the latter is mixing with poor driving along heavily-parked streets. So, for a cycling day out we have to travel further into London and that either means taking the bikes on the train or in the car.

We chose the latter which meant we could start at Barking and cycle right into Town via CS3. If you're interested in the section built before the wonderful Central London section, you can read about it here. Nothing has changed on this section and sadly, the development works ongoing around Canning Town and Canary Wharf hasn't changed the road layout at all. Still shared crossings or giving way to traffic.

Our intention was to cycle to the headquarters of the Institution of Civil Engineers at Great George Street in Westminster to go and see their Invisible Superheroes exhibition, although in the event, we had to park on CS3 by Westminster Bridge and walk because of the complete absence of cycle parking in the area around the ICE, despite there being plenty of space in the area - a really poor show from Westminster City Council.

The exhibition is part of the ICE's 200th anniversary and even if you haven't got children, it is worth a visit if you are in the area during the week. It a bit of fun seeing my own civil engineering hero, Sir Joseph Bazalgette, getting the superhero treatment and rather fitting that his Embankment scheme now allows people to cycle in safety along the Thames!

We also managed to fit in lunch at Borough Market which was heaving with people as usual (my favourite time is 8am on a Saturday); and as usual, there were the usual drivers pushing through the crowds. If there ever was a place which needs to be a pedestrian zone during the day, then this is it.

But away from the crowds, we had the freedom of CS3. Despite what some would have you believe, it performs a vital off-peak transport function for those who work outside of the 9 to 5 norm, as well as being a great way to see some of the city sights. With children, this sort of trip was impossible before it was built.

It is a theme that I am constantly repeating, especially those who go on about such infrastructure being only used in the peak times. It is true that transport generally is used most at peak times - that is why they are called peak times. For cycling, if the infrastructure is not available off-peak, then it is never going to be inclusive or enabling. So be honest, you just hate the idea of kids being able to have a day out under their own steam.