Traffic Calming the Railway Path

The greenbank development has surfaced again, with the developers asking for more input on their plans to build houses straight on to the path. The previous proposal was rejected by the community as having 20 paths opening on to the path was felt to be dangerous.

This time the community has the option of the same number of paths, or half as many, with the option of traffic calming. Oddly enough, there is no option to reject the proposal, which is clearly a bug in the web page design. It's tricky, getting those <select> buttons right.

Council Planning committee

Hot off the presses comes pics of the council planning committee visiting the railway path, to see whether it will need traffic calming once they run steps down to the tarmac. It is hard to tell if it is better that they chose a quiet period rather than the morning rush hour, or not. Peak period would have shown how daft steps would be, but that may have just encouraged traffic calming.

While this picture was being taken, the council staff were saying that they don't want me interfereing as this is not a formal site visit and it would not be fair for me to make representations without the architects being present too.

This is a good point, and one we in Bristol Traffic agree with. Henceforth, when David Bishop has a meeting with George Ferguson without any minutes being taken, we expect to be invited and given equal talking time.

Runout-align-commit

There are some people -Chris Hutt among them- who believe that the fact that the Squarepeg "cycle houses" will have steps up or down to 16 of the 20 houses they will build 3 m from the railway path means that they aren't cycle houses at all. That in fact anyone trying to get a bike in or out will ignore the steps and their wheel groove, and instead loop round to the garage. And that they are pretending to be cycle houses to justify their acquisition of a bit of parkland and the defacto enclosure of some more.


But like Rowland Dye, here showing the distance between the path and embankment is just over a bike length, that belief that stairs have no role to play in urban cycling is either one of ignorance or a consequence of using drop bar bikes, bikes whose Centre of Gravity on a flight of steps is pretty hairy.



Here's a photo of my son, learning to do stairs at the age of four. I may not be able to teach him how to do wheelies or hard-core BMX work, but doing steps is easy: runout-align-commit

1. Runout: check there is a clear, flat stretch with no approaching cars or other traffic.
2. Align: get on the bike, get it stable and don't be mid-turn when you hit the steps.
3. Commit. Go for it. Don't touch the brakes, keep your weight back. Only slow down on the runout.

That's all it takes. So cycle houses with steps on them could work. The key is getting the design right. Firstly, you need to be aligned and stable before the steps. The houses will need a little porch, and a front door that automatically closes and locks as you ride straight out. Secondly, you need a clear bit of path to come out on.

And that worries me: the path is busy, busy, busy in the morning, and having steps that runout at right angles to the main traffic flow is suicidal. The steps need to be angled so that they feed into the bike lane gently, giving you a clear runout that won't create a collision with someone doing race training from Bath or a group of trials bike riders heading to Castle Park.

If they don't do that, if they don't make the steps fun and safe for even a four year old to ride out on, well, then it wouldn't really be a cycle house and giving up some of the parkland to build them would make no sense whatsoever.

Bristol Chic Cycling

Over in Copenhagen, the chic cycling movement advocates cycling in normal clothes. As we do in Bristol too. The difference is that the average Scandinavian cyclist is generally tall, blond, fit, beautiful and worth looking at, especially in minimal clothing. Whereas we Bristol residents are somewhat less appealing. We also have an odd sense of fashion. Rather than put on bright reflective yellow clothes just to cycle round down, we are now going the other way, making wearing reflective gear at work as much a fashion statement as shorts and sandals. Here we have Rowland Dye of the Bristol Cycling campaign modelling a yellow top with his day to day clothes, while Councillor Faruk Choudhury shows that it goes well with his suit.

What's impressive about Cllr Choudhury's clothes are that not only is he wearing a yellow top while he walks to work -he isn't here with a bicycle- it is official council-issue cycle-chic clothing

Which even has his name on the back.

We are looking forward to attending the next full council meeting, in the hope that we will see all the councillors wearing their officially issued, Bristol Cycle-City-Chic clothing.

The Bristol-Bath path is our path to a Cycling City

There is lots of concern up in the green bristol blog, where Chris Hutt has discovered that a bit of the greenery Bristol-Bath railway path is being sold off. It does set a bit of a precedent, but then that happened at the "dangerous Z-bend", the worst part of the path to walk or cycle, when about 15 years back the safe route was turned into housing, and us walkers and cyclists given a more entertaining route.


The council decided to sell of bits of underused parkland a while back, and here is the first case of its use. All the greenery beside the railway path clearly meets this requirement, because it hasn't been used for a kite festival, balloon festival or other profit-earning use recently. Instead it is just unprofitable greenery with unprofitable things like badgers living in it. No more! Now as part of the Bristol Cycling City, a lucky few homeowners will be able to push straight out from their houses on the railway path!

This is a wonderful development, as it enables the city to provide safe cycle routes for homeowners without having to inconvenience any of today's motorists, or upset FirstBus enough for them to call the council and demand an apology.

Here's the best bit. If every house in the terrace takes up 5 metres of path. then the whole 21km of path has room for 4200 houses! On each side! We could deal with the government's demands for 10,000 new houses by building every single one along the path. The Bristol would truly become a cycling city!