Tuesday 11 May 2010

Abbeywood Week: Advertising on the A4174 in a cycling city

This is on the A4174 looking towards the Abbey Wood roundabout, behind that UWE and the M32. The right is a post-post-industrial landscape, such as a closed down Woolworth superstore.

The piece of tarmac with some fading red stripes in front of the camera is the bike lane. Yet predictably, the cyclist is in the pedestrian area.

One might think it is a bit odd to have a bus lane in the middle of a bike path, but this is part of the S. Gloucs integrated transport plan: bicycle and bus. More importantly, if the North Fringe commuters are to embrace cycling, the existing business plan of advertising agencies "adverts at junctions where cars get stuck" goes away; we drivers stuck in our cars are their target market. To deal with cyclists, it is not enough to have adverts where they can see them, the cyclist needs to spend time in front of the advert. Putting the advert precisely where they will run into it achieves this.

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