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?
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