WHBM wrote:tipsynurse wrote:The issue is that most cycle infrastructure is designed by drivers, which is why it's crap.
Actually the infrastructure is designed not so much by drivers as by people ... who almost certainly can drive AND can ride a bicycle. This is quite reasonable. Would you want the chief pilot of an airline responsible for devising their procedures to be someone who can't fly.
The problem is someone who can ride a bike and someone who commutes or cycles regularly are two different things. A path wide and suitable for commuters can be used by three year olds, but a path suitable for three year olds isn't suitable for commuters.
As an analogy imagine if a council puts in a new parallel road. But the road is narrow and has loads of speed bumps and mini roundabouts. So you think no problem, I'll keep on using the old road. But it turns out everyone on the old road now thinks you should be using the new road because it LOOKS new and shiny and after all, it's been built for you using THEIR money. So to prove the point a minority of drivers deliberately overtake you close and cut you up.
So now you have the choice of using the slow, rubbish, new road. Or the old road, which is suddenly a lot more dangerous and stressful but also much quicker. But of course you're not surrounded by 2 tonnes of metal, if someone misjudges their close overtake wrong then you are very likely to get injured.
That's the frustration for cyclists, when poor infrastructure is built you actually end up from one good/indifferent option to two bad options.
If you want to see what suggestions get thrown up by people who can ride a bike and therefore design cycle infrastructure look at these.
http://www.oxfordmail.co.uk/news/157848 ... d_s_roads/
Non-reflective blobs of plastic that cars can drive over but will throw a cyclist off their bike.
I would go so far as to say that cycle infrastructure needs specialist design, because retrofitting anything to existing infrastructure is difficult and not as simple as just drawing a line on a plan. This is especially the case with junctions. It would benefit from someone like the DfT or TfL having a team which councils are obliged to contract when putting in new cycle lanes.
That may sound like overkill but effectively a lot of money is being wasted on rubbish new infrastructure, and as I said about it's better not to do anything then to put in something unsuitable.