Discussing what is or should be a “cycle route” is one of the more tedious (but necessary)  parts of considering cycling as a mode of transport). All roads except motorways can be seen as ”cycle routes”: if you want to use a bicycle to get from where you live to where you need to go, you have to use the public highway.

 That said, there is a plausible case for engineering the highway to reduce danger and inconvenience for cyclists, so there is a need for engineering at particular dangerous or inconvenient locations for cyclists like large gyratory systems. Or a network of signed cycle routes. Or both. In fact, it is arguable that without doing anything special “for cyclists”, all roads should have danger to cyclists engineered out of them as much as possible as a matter of course.

 So what has happened in London? Read more »

By which I mean, of course, the term “vulnerable road user”…

“Men are always trying to protect me, I wonder what they are trying to protect me from…”. Mae West

A lot of colleagues think that it is helpful to refer to pedestrians (particularly children and elderly people) and cyclists as “vulnerable road users”. I disagree: seeing people who just happen to be outside metal boxes as being special easily morphs into seeing us AS A PROBLEM.  It is pften connected to what has been referred to as the “Fear of Cycling”. It misses out on the elephant in the room – or what the excellent Mkael Coville-Anderson of Copenahgenize.com refers to as “The Bull in the China Shop”. Read more »