The Predictable & Lazy End Of Year Roundup: 2019

It's that time of year between Christmas and New Year where I'm having a rest from life and reflecting on the year just gone.

Actually, it has been a tough year for me personally. At the end of June, I said goodbye to working in a authority highways department; I job that I had loved for most of the proceeding 15 years with a step into the unknown world of being a consultant. I do very much miss the people I worked with and I really miss my cycle commute which put me in touch with my local area as well as the changing seasons - although I still have a daily cycle to my local station and back.

The change came as a result of the London council elections in May 2018 where the administration took a distinct shift away from any interest in walking, cycling and safety. Formal decisions started to take months to get made by the political side and staff were often under pressure to change their advice with little apparent support from management.

Towards the end of 2018 I was introduced to my now employer and after a bit of toing and froing it led to me handing in my notice at the start of April this year. My immediate (temporary) boss completely understood my decision, but they also quit and left before my notice ran out! I was left drifting without any real support for those weeks and senior people didn't even make a half-hearted attempt to try to convince me to stay.

Six-months into my new role, I'm no longer stressed and I'm immersed in engineering again which is an absolute joy. I've also got managers who are genuinely interested in my welfare and I'm working with a bunch of people who have made me feel welcome. I realise that all of this stuff is relative and there are many, many people in this country who are far worse off than me. I am thankful for how 2019 turned out, although goodness knows where 2020 will take the UK.

Enough self-pity, on to the roundup.

January
My 2019 started with a statement: cycle tracks should be laid in red asphalt. Some have disagreed, but they know deep down that I am right.

Red asphalt in Utrecht. Correct colour and material!

I then took a look at crash-friendly infrastructure on the high speed road network. Next up, a look at some of the costs associated with building cycling schemes.

January ended with the first of two posts on what I called "partially protected turns" which are layouts we can use to protect left turning cycle traffic when we can continue cycle tracks round a corner.

February
The month started with the second post on partially protected turns and following that, I made the mistake of having sympathy for people "caught" in a Chelmsford bus gate - most of you had no sympathy!

A partially protected turn layout

Many people are against the new micro-mobility ideas, but I think we should embrace the little wheels!

My last post of February considered ways of managing freight and loading in our urban places - there is no single answer of course.

March
The start of March was all about a terrifying crossing of a dual carriageway which shows that there are some old habits which die hard in UK road design.

I was asked how people can become highway engineers and for me, the easiest way to explain it was with my story (it's been a year about my story one way or another!)

I then noticed a curious little bit of kerb detailing on a vehicle crossing which was worth highlighting because nothing is new in highways. Then a look at the different ways we can control parking on an area-wide basis.

Keeping the footway level at vehicle crossings

The annual ALARM survey saw a mixed picture on the condition of our road asset.

April
The month started with a visit to the Traffex trade show which I last covered in 2015.

Next I looked forward to a possible footway parking ban in Scotland followed by a short post on making a car park hump in a narrow park access road cycle friendly.

Francis Road in Waltham Forest was the subject of the final post of the month and certainly my favourite street of 2019.

Francis Road

May
The month started with a look around London's Olympic Park which is mainly awful for cycling, but it has some hidden gems.

Scarlett Close, a hidden gem

A welcome return to Stratford in East London to look at the completed works to remove the gyratory was up next, followed by a practical look at incorporating loading into cycling schemes was next - it's about what we want to prioritise of course!

Something must be done near schools to make the streets safer, but much of what we do treats the symptoms and not the causes was the theme for the end of the month.

June
I started June with a look at A-road engineering and wondered why we keep the approach as we head into our urban places.

Taming A-road engineering

My first visit to Judd Street and Midland Road in Central London was followed by a look at why we make people wanting to cross the road wait so long at traffic signals with another slice of Traffic Signal Pie.

With the news that the Mayor of London was to push ahead with the Silvertown Tunnel while canning the Rotherhithe walking & cycling bridge, I suggested that we should repurpose the venerable Rotherhithe tunnel.

I rounded off the month marking the end of my long stint in the local authority highways office.


July
I started the month pondering the difference between cycling in the rural areas around Harwich (UK) and Hulst (NL) followed by a review of the Dutch CROW Design Manual for Cycle Traffic (which was an eye-wateringly expensive acquisition).

Rural cycling near Hulst

I reported from the Cycling Embassy of Great Britain's 2019 AGM in Cardiff with some cycleways under construction following by a look at the Greener Grangetown project in the city.

August
The month started with my third and final report from the CEOGB's 2019 AGM where I responded to some questions posed by Cardiff's cabinet member.

Then a look at options for crossing big roads, rivers and rail - something that the UK really doesn't get, despite some tantalising attempts in the past.

Different options for going under

The #LondonCycleSafari rode again with a trip along part of Quietway 14, followed by another look at Midland Road by Kings Crossing Station in Central London. I ended the month with a search for a bit of peace.

September
I got the month off to a start with tales from Luxembourg City, one of the places I visited for my summer holiday this year and this was followed up with possibly my favourite post of the year was a look around the Vauban neighbourhood in Freiburg, Southern Journey. I had read about the experiment in low car living and it was wonderful to experience on a cycle.

A scene from Vauban

Some thoughts next on the Global Climate Strike and the difficulty of rationalising it with my own work as an engineer. Then my final post from my summer trip, I continued my look around the wonderful Southern German city of Freiburg.


October
The month started with a little post on Lamlash Gardens, a tiny corner of London that I had cycled past many times but never noticed.

Lamlash Gardens

Little did I know that Chapter 6 of the Traffic Signs Manual would be out before the year end, but it didn't stop me decrying the paltry amount being invested by a government obsessed with training.

I took a moment to revel in the joy of seeing more and more cargo cycles in Central London following by a quick look at how the Design Manual for Roads & Bridges was being updated to end the month.

A Christiania cargo trike

November
The month kicked off with a look at the unusual "dog bone" interchange and how it might be a useful layout to use for incorporating walking and cycling into free-flow trunk road style schemes. This was followed by
a long-overdue slice of my Traffic Signal Pie series looked in depth at pedestrian crossing push buttons and how we might do away with them.

A dog bone interchange

Next was an in-depth look at CD195 - Designing for Cycle Traffic which took an earlier Interim advice Note and made it a full part of the Design Manual for Roads and Bridges, although technically it only really applies to England.

I scorned the nonsense that is the Dutch Reach, a technique for opening car doors to help people to avoid hurting people cycling. I prefer to change the streets. I rounded the month of with a look at how low bridges are signed and how we might mitigate bridge strikes.

December
At long last, the government published Chapter 6 of the Traffic Signs Manual which was the missing bit of guidance following the overhaul of the traffic signs rules in 2016, but then we elected a Johnson which led to a bit of navel gazing at the UK general election.

The year ended on a high note with my post about the UK finally getting a home-grown inritbanden or "entrance kerb" which will make the detailing of continuous footways and cycle tracks so much easier.

Entrance kerbs in action

The British Entrance Kerb - An Exclusive Introduction

I first went to the Netherlands in the early 2000s which was a decade before I became interested in how streets fit together, including the civil engineering elements that go into them.

In 2015, I made my return for a flying visit to attend a job interview where I got to look at how some of the Dutch street features worked. Of course, the country has a whole system approach to streets which has taken me a few more years to start to understand.

In 2017, I returned for a long family holiday where we spent three weeks touring the country and following which, I wrote eight blog posts examining what I had seen. That trip allowed me to start to understand how things worked from a user level - I am a strong advocate of experiencing engineering as a user of the end product.

It was the 2017 trip which really got me fired up about a couple of kerb designs; forgiving kerbs between footways and cycle tracks which have a gentle angle and low kerb height to stop wheels and pedals getting caught; and special ramped kerbs which allow us to keep footways and cycle tracks running at the same level through side streets (continuous footways and cycle tracks) and vehicle accesses by making drivers drive up and over them. It is the latter which I am interested in for this post.

Ramped kerbs (dark grey) to the left

The Dutch most commonly know this as inritbanden (roughly translated as entrance blocks) which I covered in detail in this post. It's not just about the ramped (and forgiving) kerbs, the Dutch approach relies on contrasting footway and cycle track surfacing and the side streets being filtered to promote low traffic neighbourhoods.

The UK has started to adopt Dutch techniques, but we have struggled to get our side street entrances right because of a lack of appropriate, off-the-shelf kerb elements. We have tried hard, but we invariably end up dipping the footway/ cycle track to accommodate side street traffic such as Magee Street in Kennington, London;

The alternative is to try and build a ramp which doesn't look like part of the road because we want to provide "visual priority" for people walking and cycling such as Angel Way in Romford, London;

Both examples kind of do the job, but they're compromised. We need to copy the Dutch! In April 2018, I released what is essentially an expansion of my most popular post - Kerb Your Enthusiasm, as a design guide to UK kerbs and how they can be used through my micro-consultancy, City Infinity as "The Joy of Kerbs" (or the Kerbasutra as a former colleague calls it).

In The Joy of Kerbs, I proposed ideas for a British version of the forgiving and inritbanden kerbs, with the latter captured as a concept sketch. Essentially we need two units; one is the ramped block and the other is a transition or corner unit which allows the system to match in with standard kerb products.

I can't recall exactly when (sometime last year I think), but I had a call from the specification team at Charcon (part of Aggregate Industries), which manufacture kerbs and paving units, with a request for a meeting because one of their directors was interested in the inritbanden idea. The interesting thing about Charcon is they have made kerb units for some of Transport for London's cycle superhighway schemes such as this unit to provide a divider between the cycle track and carriageway;

They also developed a sloping kerb with Cambridgeshire County Council which has been used on some stepped cycle tracks and which I covered here.

The specification team at Charcon are really interested in how this stuff fits together, but they have to be commercially-minded and so we essentially had an idea they were interested in, but it needed a scheme which would pay for the development costs. Concrete kerbs are cast in moulds which need to be designed and fabricated. Sadly, I was still in local government with an administration which had no interest in changing the borough's streets.

Things went quiet until earlier this year when I had request for another meeting with Charcon where I was told that the company was seriously looking to develop a product, but they were still looking for a project. I happened to mention that I had recently seen a proposal for the redesign of Chapel Street in Salford which looked like an ideal location for the product and I offered to put them in touch with Catriona Swanson, who was with Salford City Council at the time and she had talked about the project on a site visit with the Cycling Embassy of Great Britain's AGM in Manchester in 2018.

It turns out that Charcon had already spoken with Salford, but with Catriona's help, people were put in touch once more. As the weeks went by, I ended my local authority job and started my new one as a consultant and another call from the guys at Charcon saw me meet up with one of the team. The hot news was that the kerb units were almost certain to be taken forward with Salford, subject to a few caveats. I was sent some engineering drawings of the units, but I still couldn't say anything specific, although I did drop some hints on Twitter.

Some will have noticed a tweet about Charcon's website being updated with a new page showing a new product - Dutch Entrance Kerbs. Sharp eyed followers will have noticed some familiar photographs and a sketch of a Dutch side street - a little helping hand from me because the product literally hasn't been made yet! We debated the name of the product and agreed that "entrance kerbs" was probably the best translation to settle on. Of course, there needs to be a hook (of Holland if you will) and so the Dutch Entrance Kerb was born. I also helped out with the description, so blame me if it isn't right.

Last week, I had another catch up with the guys from Charcon - it's a go, the UK is getting a desperately needed addition to its streets toolkit with work starting on site next year. What's even better is that I'm now able to write this post because I have been desperate to tell the story! Even better than that, I have permission to talk about the dimensions of the units which means I can give some examples of how they can be used. So, onto the technical stuff. Before I go on, I must pay tribute to Charcon and Salford City Council for making this happen - the hard work of development is all theirs!

Let's start with a sketch of the units. We have the main ramped unit and the transition/ corner unit. Both are 500mm long (along the line of travel) and 750mm deep (cross the line of travel). The back of the kerbs (furthest away from the road) are 215mm high and the front is 150mm.

This means that the height difference from front to back is 65mm and so when used with ordinary kerbs, we'd generally set the kerb face of the cycle track (or buffer - more later) at 65mm (so 150mm is buried below road surface level). If my maths is correct, this means the kerb slope is a touch under 1 in 12. This is a useful gradient because it's one that most wheelchair and mobility scooter users will be able to traverse over a short distance. This is not a product intended for pedestrian crossings, but some people use dropped kerbs as crossing opportunities. 

The first 150mm of the corner unit is full-height (65mm kerb face) ramping to zero and the full height section runs diagonally over the next 350mm to give the distinctive shape which is far more elegant than my initial sketch! So, how do we use the product? The units are designed to be used with the square-edged variant of Charcon's Eco-Countryside range which has an attractive black fleck;

The other nice thing about the finish is that it's a little bit rough which is good for grip for those passing over it (whichever mode). The square kerbs which work with the system are the standard UK 914mm long (3 feet) and 145mm wide or an attractive 290mm wide. There's also going to be a 500mm by 500mm (on plan) unit which makes the unit a buffer in its own right, although in practice, standard kerbs might do the job. Charcon tells me that they are working on ordinary versions of the unit to be compatible with standard UK kerbs, so watch this space.

Let's look at some possible applications. First, here's a Dutch-style layout with a continuous footway and a continuous (one-way) cycle track. There is a very narrow buffer strip between the cycle track and the road which is 750mm deep - the same as the entrance kerbs. I have used the standard 145mm kerbs either side. You'll also note tactile paving for the footway because visually impaired people need to know when they are entering an area that traffic might be crossing - remember though, this is for a low traffic side street - busier junctions need different arrangements.

We can of course make the buffer much wider. At around 5m, we provide space for turning drivers to pause before or after the cycle track to give way to cycle traffic/ pedestrians or general traffic respectively. The Dutch would tend to have grass verges either side of this layout which provides space for trees, lighting, sustainable drainage, floating bus stops, parking and so on;

If space is tight, then, the units could be used with the 290mm wide kerb to provide a simple (if narrow) buffer;

Of course, this is a compromise for cycle traffic, but it might be a helpful way to maximise usable width for the majority of a link - it is necessary to make sure that the slight narrowing is conspicuous day and night, although there is mitigation as people tend to keep left on a cycle track unless overtaking. Of course, we can run this the other way round with the ramp into the carriageway;

Again, care is needed to make sure this is conspicuous day and night because it does present a safety risk to general traffic.

The units are very heavy, approaching 200kg so they will definitely need mechanical assistance for installation, but they should withstand some abuse. In terms of installation, they will need to be bedded on kerb-mix concrete - it's usual to use 150mm of bedding which is probably fine with these because the real support comes from the bearing strength of the ground below. In any case, you will need to employ a competent designer for the layout and structural design.

So, what's next? I'm hoping to visit Charcon's Derby factory in the new year when the units go into production and I'll blog about that. I'll also keep a beady eye on Salford for when work gets underway at Chapel Street (assuming nothing changes in the meantime).

For me, this year has been a challenge and so it's been brilliant to be able to round it off with this post because I genuinely believe that this product is a game changer. I have also floated the forgiving kerb idea and if someone has a scheme needing about 500 metres, then let me know and I'll put you in touch with Charcon.

I should say at this point that I have no affiliation to Charcon, but they are genuinely interested in how things work, so I hope this product takes off. A big shout out to Charcon's national specification manager, Clinton Young and specification manager, Gavin Fancote for being interested in this idea and for being instrumental in making it become a reality. Thanks also to whoever in Salford City Council who saw the benefits and thanks again to Catriona Swanson for the scheme inspiration on the tour of Salford.

Next week's post will be my usual lazy and predictable roundup of 2019, so it just remains for me to wish you all a very merry Christmas and a wonderful new year. See you in the saddle.

Taking Stock

The British (perhaps specifically the English) have never had to account for their past and perhaps with the election result this week, our reckoning might finally be here.

Because of a quirk of geography, we have always looked beyond our shores (and I realise there has been a long process of definition and redefinition of who "we" are). We've looked beyond our shores for trade, for conquest and for resources (with them often being violently linked). To my shame, I don't know anywhere near as much as I should about what we have done over the years.

I'll have been an engineer for 25 years next year. Over that time I have at least learned a few things and perhaps the key is that we need to collectively solve. Our country has not been built in isolation, it has taken the ingenuity, sweat, blood and indeed the lives of people from beyond the horizon. Even the word "engineer" comes from elsewhere with roots in the French word ingénieur which itself has Latin origins. Although on the European mainland, engineers are held with more social esteem that they are in the UK (with added post-expert reasoning these days).

The early days of engineering were distinctly military, but in the 18th Century, civil engineering was born which provided a distinction from military work. The professionalisation of civil engineering then properly sparked 200 years ago in a coffee house in London, my home city - an internationally facing city. To this day, people come from all over the world to work in London as civil engineers because of the opportunities which are available and to be involved powerhouse of UK engineering and construction - we have simply never had enough people in the UK to run our industry and the next few years look to be even worse.

It has been a tough year for me professionally and I'm not ready to write about it in detail. I worked for a local authority where I thought I was making a difference because it is also the place where I live and many of the wins we had for local transport were despite the politics (which latterly to a lurch towards the populist, isolationist fantasy we've seen in recent years). In some ways, I can see how the easy, popular and noisy responses to local consultations have been replicated in this week's vote - everything is binary. There are no long term goals. There is no vision.

For example, we had a bus stop accessibility programme which sought to ensure that the footway environment was compatible with low floor buses and the bus stop area restricted from parking. This meant that everyone could get on the bus more easily. I oversaw the improvement of well over 500 bus stops in a programme which took well over a decade to get 95% of them in the borough dealt with. 

So many were fought on a site by site basis and I cannot begin to explain the energy and perseverance my team and I invested to get the job done - a job we knew was the right thing to do. One councillor in particular used his influence to obstruct and frustrate progress because inevitable we took away on-street car parking (or the ability to park on street). We completed the programme after this councillor died, so their legacy is one of obstruction and not making life better for people.

As best as I can work out in my brain, the same long game of trying to make our streets and places better and to deal with climate change must include how we deal with the likes of Johnson. People react to propositions in accordance of how they are affected at the time and they almost always fail to see a larger picture. The person who noisily rejects a bus stop being made accessible because of person parking today, is the frail car-free pensioner in the future who relies on the bus tomorrow. The politician which ideologically supported the resident has long gone and so it's up to us who want change to keep those fires burning.

I really don't get the machinations and the subtleties of politics. I have never been in a political party and I doubt I ever will, but I've largely voted in a way which I think might help get our problems solved. My only advice is that those with the power need to be held accountable, even if in the short term they ignore you and make the politically expedient choices. In engineering, there are sometimes easy jobs and quick wins, but mainly it takes thought, application and hard work and at least with this week's result, the county has elected someone which shies away at all three.

The ultimate irony for me I suppose is that I now work for the UK subsidiary of a Scandinavian company where teamwork and knowledge sharing are are the heart of the company's approach. Isn't life funny?

Traffic Signs Manual - Chapter 6: Traffic Control

Back in April 2016, the UK's rules of traffic signs changed with the enactment of the Traffic Signs Regulations & General Directions 2016. As with previous iterations of the legislation, it isn't always easy to follow and so we awaited the updates to the Traffic Signs Manual.

The Traffic Signs Manual (TSM) is a set of chapters which explain how to interpret the Regulations and guidance for such is provided. In short, it's something which is vital if you are designing highway schemes. For years, there was never a Chapter 6 (I assume the Department for Transport had a long game for its release) but at long last and over three-and-a-half years after the new legislation, we now have Chapter 6.

This is an important release because traffic control deals with the operation of traffic signals and zebra crossings. Notwithstanding the fact that traffic control is necessary because of motor traffic, we are still going to have to manage conflicts for the foreseeable future.

After the introduction, the chapter is in four sections;

• Signal controlled junctions,
• Crossings,
• Other signals (wig-wags, trams etc),
• Installation

At 200 pages long, I'm not going to go through the document in detail (and it's going to take while to digest it), so I'll pick out some of the stuff relevant to walking and cycling.

One important point made is that a whole raft of old Traffic Advisory Leaflets and Local Transport Notes have been superseded by Chapter 6 and it does rather lead me to think that the DfT would be far better to roll all of national guidance into a "Traffic Design Manual" which could incorporate everything by theme thus allowing simple updating - and I'm including Manual for Streets in this as well as having a single design guide for cycle traffic, one for traffic management and so on.

The introduction restates (slightly updates for my mind) the hierarchy of provision which is pretty much universally ignored by most highway authorities, but it is good to see it here and it should be used as another stick to take highway authorities to task on, plus it references Manual for Streets which despite needing an update puts place at the heart of design;

There's also some useful information on consultation and publicity which confirms that there are no legal requirements to consult on a signalised junction. There's also an interesting clarification on crossings in that zebra and puffin crossings are covered by S23 of the Road Traffic Regulation Act 1984, but parallel crossings (zebras for walking and cycling), equestrian and toucan crossings are not.

S23 crossings require consultation with the police, but the other don't; also the requirement to notify the Secretary of State was removed in 2015 (which I had missed). I suspect the non S23 crossings never caught up with the law and really, the need to consult the police is not really needed. For the non S23 crossings, technically they can be installed with no consultation whatsoever, but of course engagement is good practice.

There's also a reference to the Equality Act 2010 which is a shot across the bow of some of the awful junction and crossing installations we see. I might go so far as to argue that signalising a junction without green men crossings is an issue under EA2010, but of course it needs testing in court.

Section I is all about junctions and there is quite a lot of detailed information on how they should be designed. It's aimed at situations of 40mph or below and so for high speed roads, it's suggested that the Design Manual for Roads & Bridges might be more appropriate. 

There's discussion on keeping corner radii tight at junctions with the pros and cons depending on the situation, but that tight junctions help slow drivers down and help keep pedestrian crossings on the desire line. We're told that left turn slip lanes should be avoided because they are essentially dangerous for people cycling and make it more awkward to cross the road (my interpretation).

The part on basic principles (p35 onwards) will be of interest as it goes through all of the jargon and so you'll know that phases make stages when you read it (with thanks to Brian Deegan). Further in and there's details on assessment and modelling, information on how signal stages can be arranged and the different ways in which junctions can be controlled as well as how detection works.

Back to walking then. From p62 there is a whole lot of information on pedestrian facilities at signalised junctions and there are some clear points made here;

• [C]rossing places at junctions are a key part of the network, providing a safe and reliable place to cross
• When considering crossing types it is important to establish the level of pedestrian demand and any existing desire lines as this will influence the eventual choice
• Pedestrians are more likely to ignore the red signal if they consider the time they have to wait is unreasonable

I personally prefer far-side pedestrian signals, but there's help in understanding near vs far and we're reminded that visually impaired people expect to find push buttons on the right side of a signalised crossing. As for not providing a green man crossing, this is stated as something to be seen as the exception. There's also information on straight through and 2-stage (staggered or unstaggered) crossings.

From p80, we have information on facilities for pedal cycle traffic and even where there is nothing specifically provided, we are encouraged to remember to think about the time people need to cycle through a junction. For those frustrated about "not being seen" by the junction, there is a reminder that loops in the road don't always work. We're next given some information on low level cycle signals, early release, cycle bypasses and that cycle tracks can form part of a junction; as well as how toucan crossings can be incorporated into junctions.

There's some nice diagrams such as the one above which shows a cycle track coming through a junction from a route away from the road to a route running parallel, despite the mistake in the tactile paving which should be corduroy with ridges running across the footway rather than tramlines (spotted by Brian Deegan).

Thanks to Transport for London lobbying and experimenting with layouts, we now have "hold the left", 2-stage right turns and cycle gates in an official document which might encourage their use. I'm less of a fan of cycle gates as the other two, but sometimes we need to use tools to get schemes in for current conditions. 2-stage right turns seem useful on small junctions where general traffic is banned from turning right as part of a wider network arrangement. Yes, advanced stop lines are in Chapter 6 and while they are lawful markings they are bound to be in the book, I'm still not a fan because they entice people into a risky position next to HGVs.

Section II of the document is all about crossings and it's far less complicated than junctions. The old Local Transport Notes 1/95 and 2/95 (the assessment and design of pedestrian crossings) has been absorbed into this section and of course updated because the UK has realised that we also need to provide for cycle traffic!

This section is about crossings separate from junctions and there are three main objectives for a crossing - safety, convenience and accessibility. For my mind, get one wrong and the crossing fails. We are also reminded that people can cross the road where they like which is an important point for some people in the UK to appreciate - we're not the USA with their stupid jaywalking laws. There's also another reminder about the Equality Act 2010.

Then we have some general advice including an interesting layout of an advanced stop line at a standalone signalised crossing which I'm not sure I've seen in the wild yet.

There's some construction-related issues mentioned such as getting the drainage right at crossings, confirmation that guardrailing doesn't really help (p121/p122) and how to place crossings near junctions and roundabouts. There is information on lighting, but rather than talking about supplementary lighting (spotlights essentially), I'd have preferred there to be information on task lighting which is designed to illuminate the vertical like this;

There are specific sections on each crossing type. In the zebra crossing section (p125) there's a good reminder that unusual layouts may be best controlled with signals (e.g. bus lanes), but unfortunately the issue of multilane approaches isn't covered (where a slow lane of traffic masks people crossing from a faster lane).

We've at long last some advice on parallel crossings (where people walk and cycle across), although I disagree with the advice that the waiting area at a parallel crossing should be shared use (p130). While the constraint of having the pedestrian and cycle crossings fixed with a 400mm gap, it is possible to design them to be properly separated.

Within the signal-controlled crossings section, we have a welcome admission that staggered crossings generally offer more benefits for traffic than pedestrians (p133) and that if we do need two stages, a wide island or slight offset is better than a full stagger - much better for accessibility.

Puffin and toucan crossings are mentioned (but nothing interesting), but we do have a description of pedex crossings (p142) which essentially replace pelicans which are being phased out. Pedex crossings essentially use far side red/green man signals for pedestrians with drivers seeing the familiar red, red amber, green, amber, red sequence (no more flashing green man/ amber traffic) - we can also have the countdown units as popularised in London by Transport for London. Finally, we have signals for equestrians.

Part III contains "other signals" - tram systems, wig wags and lane control. Part IV is about installation is probably of less interest to most people. In Appendix A, we have a nice glossary of technical terms and symbols used on engineering drawings.