Come on kids, you've got to learn to share

There is much talk in the cycling press of how segregated cycle paths are the way forward and up to a point I largely agree with the idea. I would however like to point out, as an example, a couple of things we might need to get right in the first place before we are to be trusted to “segregate” traffic.

No private vehicle is more important than another. If bicycles get their own lane, does that mean the road becomes cars only? Buses have a lane to prioritise them over car users. Bicycles get a lane to protect them from cars. Emergency vehicles have sirens to inform cars of their presence. Cars are the common centre of all these policies, but that is just habit and current policy. Cars rule at the moment.

Is it too much to ask that we all learn to share?

This isn’t car bashing.

Part of my morning commute involves shared bike/car roads both with and without bike/bus lanes. Other parts involve shared pedestrian/cycle paths. In both instances there is a problem sharing.

1. ·         Cars park in the bus and cycle lanes,
2. ·         Priority cycle boxes are ignored,
3. ·         Cyclists overtake on the inside
4. ·         Pedestrians and cyclists walk, or ride, on the wrong bit of the dual use tarmac.

Before we start to segregate to protect, shouldn’t we learn to share?

A few years ago I shared a flat with a Swedish man called Johan. We had watched a programme together about Dutch recycling and I had indicated my approval of the idea of multi compartmented bins for organising recycling. Johan laughed.

“The English need to learn to use one bin before they can use lots of bins” He said indicating the litter outside our front door.

He was right. If we couldn’t use a simple bin for all rubbish, how could we be expected to learn which can/bottle/wrapper went in which bin? How can we build a second infrastructure when we can’t use the one we’ve got.

When car usage took, off the government built more roads (I know they were for cyclists originally), then motorways, then widened the roads and motorways. Yet the motorway is full of drivers in the middlelane.

Maybe we need to learn to use what we've got and only adapt it where necessary.

Plans for 2013

It looks very much like we're going to be doing bike to bestival again this year. The twist this year is that we are now going to also be doing a ride to camp bestival. Busy, busy, busy! It's really good fun, but needs a lot more work than you'd imagine. Partly because, by their very nature, festivals have to be in the middle of nowhere. This isolation makes it difficult to get people to and from their final destination. In fact it makes it much easier to get there by car. This is partly because from the 1960's onwards, successive British Governments have favoured the car. Even to the extent of taking out railways and building major road networks as the popularity of the car spread out through the social classes.

This wouldn't matter if we were organising a "Drive to Bestival" but we're not.

The destinations we are aiming for cannot be reached without using A-roads. It is impossible to cover vast swathes of the U.K. Without sharing a dual carriageway with lorries blasting their way across Europe delivering (as it turns out) vast quantities of horse meat by road. In Scotland there are motorways built right next to dual carriageways as roads were upgraded. You get to cycle along a badly repaired dual carriageway, whilst traffic hurtles by merely feet away on a shiny new motorway.

The most terrified I have ever been (scared for my life) was during the descent into Glen Coe. Rain so dense that visibility was down to a few feet. Inches of water on the road. No brakes. Mountain roads. Heavy traffic. Really heavy traffic. All whilst trying to find a right hand turn across the oncoming traffic, and onto a flooded road for several miles to dry off in a youth hostel.

I also wished the rain back almost immediately upon it stopping as clouds of midges swarmed towards us as soon as the rain started to let up.