Glen O'Hara @gsoh31 · 1h Student visas are already down nearly 30%, and I would say between 10 and 20 universities are going to get into deep trouble. Another 10 to 20 will follow rapidly. Imagine sending a further signal that you want the numbers down... (1/2)
In any country that wants a future the first job of education is to do the absolute best for that country's young people in every possible respect. Everything else comes second and third.
The signals sent out to UK young people who find that there are places available at elite institutions for international students but not for them (this happens all the time) is truly dreadful. This is pure intellectual and cultural suicide and academic prostitution, and demeans our generally very good top universities.
And the signals sent out to millions of good young people by underfunding and underrating local FE vocational provision - which matters just as much as Oxford and Cambridge - is even worse.
Not how it works. Lucrative foreign students cross subsidise domestic students. Without them there would either be higher tuition fees or fewer places. Or both.
The Tories are arguing their issue is with lesser universities (ie the ones they didn’t go to), not the “elite institutions”.
They want these ‘lesser universities’ to fail so our uppity working classes lose their opportunity for further education, leaving their crumbling home towns and broadening their minds, and all become once again insular, parochial manual labourers.
Banging the immigrant drum, if successful, helpfully destroys the former polys that so many working class kids attend.
That’s of course until they realise there’s one of those uppity institutions in their own marginal constituency and they’re asked by local radio if they want it to close.
See, for example, this thread on Teesside University, since Simon Clarke is one of the MPs to have jumped on this.
Lots of local students going into local industries and public services, cross-subsidised by international fees.
Tough shit, people want migration brought under control.
If their business model isn't sustainable without huge numbers of foreign students coming in then they'll have to change their business model to one that can succeed in the domestic market.
Such as? In rough terms, I can see two options.
One is for home students to pay more in fees (tricky with our current funding model run by the government), the other is for employers to take on the training that currently happens on these courses. Which doesn't necessarily help the public finances when so many of those employers are tendrils of the state.
Not liking those options is why the government encouraged universities to go all-in on recruiting foreign students, ignoring the risk that a backlash like this would happen.
People may well want migration numbers down. The question is whether they will be any happier with the consequences of cutting them in this way.
But c'mon Casino. You can think more than one move ahead, you're smarter than the government.
Spoiler: parents are not ditching their cars. A BBC Bristol journalist from BBC Bristol has spoken to a couple of left-wing parents in urban areas of what is now one of the UK's most left-wing cities who now cycle their kids to school.
It's entirely unrepresentative, it is very much exaggerated and it is absolutely very BBC. Met and preachy to the core.
I am a big supporter of the BBC - I think the country is trashing a huge soft influence asset by running it down...
But I have to say this is a fair cop Casino - DM or Express levels of journalism. I fear the journalist's/editor's biases got the better of them.
It’s noteworthy that there’s a BBC article that’s remotely biased in that direction given the torrent of Tory talking points the organisation is cowed into spewing on a daily basis.
There have always been weak articles like this on the site. Inevitable when you consider the volume they pump out daily. Though I’d note that at least a third of the parents at our primary school, possibly closer to half, don’t own a car. It’s perhaps of anthropological interest to those living outside big cities to understand the cultural norms and mores of the millions who do.
Yes. I think there's a more interesting story to be written about the inconvenience of bringing up a family without the use of a car that would still fit the topic.
To your point I'm guessing most young families are in cities because that's where the jobs are.
There was a great slightly provocative quote on the school run in the video about Waterbeach I posted yesterday:
"With the local schools team, we said what what do you need in terms of access - how much parking do you need for parents in the morning? They basically said we don't want any because whatever you do outside the front of a primary school it will be chaos.
If you provide 50 parking spaces they'll be filled and more. If you provide none it will all be filled and more. So we'd rather you didn't provide any. So that was actually quite encouraging and not really the answer we'd expected."
(Separate facility provided for staff, disabled access etc. Plus a local mobility hub within walking distance on paths through amenity space.)
My cynical side says that that response was from the developer: who would quite like that car parking space to cram yet more houses in.
Our school has a too-small car park; shared by it and the adjacent secondary. The approach is via a long road that leads from almost outside the village; most people have a long drive just to reach the access road.
There is lots of active travel to the school; a short path leads from the end of a residential road in the village to the main gate. At school times, this is crammed with people and bikes. Noticeably less so in wet weather, though, when the car park gets busier.
But: lots of people park, or drop kids off on, the residential road; it is a much shorter trip for many than negotiating the access road. The road is not designed for that sort of traffic load. I ca guarantee that this will also happen in Waterbeach; lack of provision of a car park will just lead to people using nearby residential roads.
Active travel is fine for people like me, where we live less than a ten minute walk away from the school, especially as I don't work. It may be very different if you need to drive to work immediately afterwards - in other words, the life many people lead.
I'd recommend watching the presentation - it is only 15 minutes. There is car park provision at the mobility hub nearby, which is provision for the area rather than just the school.
"Nearby roads" are tending to be replaced with open landscaped amenity space or walking / wheeling / cycling paths.
I haven't watched the whole thing yet, but I like the way that tactile paving is now deemed unnecessary (coz cyclists hate them). I wonder what the RNIB think of that?
This is one of my bugbears: if a path is to be shared use between cyclists and pedestrians, then cyclist should be restricted in speed relative to the pedestrians. Maybe not to walking speed; but no more than two or three times pedestrian speed. Instead, you get people going very fast. What they've created there is a racetrack for cyclists - and it will be used as such.
I am *very* cynical when it comes to the cycling lobby arguing for cycling infrastructure at the expense of pedestrians. Good infrastructure would involve compromises for all users.
Thoughts. There's a lot about the need to unlearn assumptions, and change cultural expectations. You see that in the hierarchy of road users in the updated Highway Code from 2022 - the pedestrian priority at side road entrances will remain difficult in some measure until general road culture changes, which will take years or perhaps 2 decades, especially when we have no routine continuing education required to maintain a driving license.
Or contraflow cycling on 20mph one way streets. Been done in Cambridge since the 1990s, and now I think (you may know better) on pretty much all one way streets. But try and do a single street in Mansfield, and all the Local Councillors will have a heart attack because it is "so dangerous". Or two way mobility tracks on Binley Road in Coventry and "people will never look both ways" (is it so difficult - Highway Code says it is a basic?and "it is dangerous when I reverse out of my drive into the busy road" (why the f*ck are you reversing *out* of your drive?)
Unlearning habits: One amusing thing that happened at Waterbeach (in the presentation) is that when they created a flat environment where pedestrians get priority, one of the first developers created and built another whole new level of pavements on top with kerbs even higher - not getting the basic philosophy that they were designed out. I'm interested how often tactile paving standards (which have been in place since the 1980s) are often simply not followed when it is installed.
Shared space is in debate. We are trained to make streets with kerbs, tactiles etc to make them readable by visually impaired. "Shared space" was a movement from ~2000-2005 which said "remove all of that and people will be safe because motor vehicle drivers will have do be considerate". That gave us spaces like Exhibition Road, which has failed because it treats shared space as fully including motor vehicles rather than allowing them in as "guests". It missed that that never works in practice because all drivers are human, and VI people / vulnerable road users can't trust their lives to that. Waterbeach is far more thorough, very much circumscribing spaces accessible by motor and changing priorities, but I'm not 100% convinced it will be successful. That's another one around cultural expectations.
Pedestrians vs cyclists. A development over maybe the last 2-3 years has been convergence around common needs, especially amongst disabled charities and organisations like Sustrans. The Cycle Design Vehicle required to be accommodated (and often not) by new cycling infra (1.2m wide by 2.8m long - that is, size plus a dynamic envelope aka wobble room) has almost identical needs to mobility aids.
Personally when lobbying or arguing I always take the PoV of a disabled pedestrian, because I am (or will be) one, I got radicalised on this stuff by not being able to wheel my mum to the GP as all the walkways had wheelchair blocking barriers, and it avoids a lot of spurious distractions, plus has more legal teeth.
There are certain small fringe organisations around - such as those feeding inflammatory videos about 'floating bus stops' to the Mail and the Telegraph - who *want* a cyclists-vs-disabled conflict, and say things like 'cycling organisation Sustrans using disabled people as a human shield'. On bus stop bypasses they ignore that banning them will force mobility aid users out into general traffic at every bus stop - so it's a balance to be struck with factors both sides, and they point blank refuse to acknowledge the other side of the equation. Mark Harper may try a wedge issue on this one before he is finished.
Speeds - my new e-cycle is interesting on that. The 3 levels of assist also reflect speed as well as power, so give me max assist speeds of ~10kph, ~17-18kph, and ~25kph on the flat. I find that 1 is for areas busy with pedestrians, 2 is for shared paths / rough surfaces, and 3 elsewhere.
Enough for now.
Near me, they put “floating bus stops” in. With a black asphalt surface and black curbstones.
After the inevitable happened, they painted white stripes on the curb stones.
Yep - it's in getting decent standards, following the standards and sweating the detail.
In London there has been a real issue for a number of years of Boroughs not following TFL standards, which have in general been good.
On that piccie, it's revealing all the yellow paintwork they had to put in the cycle track to stop ASB drivers abusing it. Something Edinburgh is still working on . There's a wonderful photo of a workteam replacing slabs on the footway smashed by delivery lorries, whilst behind them there is a 7.5 tonne lorry parked on the pavement, delivering.
Err… the double yellow line was there before the cycle lane/floating bus stop. As were the yellow markings on the curb.
The big problem is *lack* of adequate markings. Drivers who don’t know the area are visibly confused at junctions and sometimes only just avoid ending up in the cycle lane.
This is not helped by the idiots who put the cycle lane in changing their… minds?.. three times. Leaving three sets of somewhat faded and painted over markings to choose from.
I had no idea that curb stones could come in black - why would you want them to be?
That's interesting - so they pretty much modified the carriageway rather than reconstruct the whole corridor. It's interesting that they did not feel they could trust them enough to remove the yellow lines .
That will be budgets? Really expensive bits are when you start modifying foundations and underground features, as you start running into services. But grinding and repainting markings is not a big expense in the context of such a scheme, nor is getting it vaguely right first time - though often they need adjusting.
Where is it? What did it look like before?
The square ended island (which may be against a junction at the feet of the photographer?) looks like some of the things done on main roads through places like Peckham, where one complaint (from both user angles) is that some drivers turn their vehicles left into the end of the cycle track by mistake.
The kerb stones one is strange. They are usually a similar colour to the pavement and/or carriageway, and we have not had a history of needing to paint them back and white everywhere across the country.
One help would be for all cycle tracks to have their own surface colour wherever needed, but that would struggle to get adopted in the UK - we are too cheapskate.
On the question of floating bus stops, I'd note that the Hammersmith & Fulham one backs onto a road not a cycle path, and that might be why one is controversial and the other not. It can be easier for pedestrians to cross in the presence of cars than bikes. For a start, cars are easier to see. More subtly, that can work the other way. Car drivers are probably looking ahead. Cyclists, especially if going fast, might be looking mostly at the ground. Even if they've seen you, it is hard to make eye contact to confirm they've seen you.
The ones created on the Mile End Rd / Bow Rd section of the Cycle Superhighway 2 route in East London seem to work pretty well - one of the things they've done is to get buses to line up with the bus shelter before opening their doors.
That means that passengers can't simply exit the bus and take a couple of steps without looking before ending up in the cycle lane - instead, they first have to walk round the bus shelter which gives them a bit more time to gain situational awareness.
Of course, they were lucky in that they had loads of room to work with there - the inner part of the same route, along Aldgate / Whitechapel Rd is both narrower and busier, and as a result is far scarier.
I mean, that's sorta the issue, isn't it? The *pedestrians* have to walk around the bus shelter, coz cyclists have priority. How easy is that with a pram, or with limited visibility, or a dog, or with lots of people queuing, etc, etc?
It's not about pedestrians vs cyclists as the main question; don't fall for that one. That's a trope used by trolling lobbies and politicians wanting wedge issues. ASBO "cyclists" on pavements, of whom the majority of serious problems are likely ASBO motorcyclists with hacked ebikes or unregistered motorbikes such as Surrons, are a cultural and enforcement issue. The City of London are doing interesting stuff at present, including offering "responsible cycling" courses, as are sometimes transformative for lawbreaking motor vehicle drivers.
It's about equal access to the ability to travel. 40% of disabled adults do not have a driving license, compared to slightly more than half of that - 25% - for able-bodied adults. For many of that 40% it is not an option for medical reasons; I may in this category in 15-20 years if Diabetes damages my eyesight.
It's not acceptable that those peoples' autonomy is taken away; cycles (and e-cycles) as mobility aids are a part of that. The difference even on a manual cycle is that it is 6x more efficient than walking, which facilitates wider travel - it makes a huge difference to be able to get 10 miles from home rather than 1-2 miles.
I was advising someone with Fibromyalgia yesterday looking for a long (35 miles) off-road route around Derby to e-cycle today in the sun for half the day. It has to be entirely step free as she suffers serious pain from even pushing her cycle up one or two steps or a cycle groove, or any distance; "Cyclists Dismount" - NOPE. Many things we don't have around here; one thing we do have are former pit railways turned into rail trails. We have canal towpaths too, but many of them are barriered off.
One ask for the rumoured Transport Bill was for cycles - handcycles, tricycles, clip on e-cycles for wheelchairs and so on, to be recognised as mobility aids to bring them within the scope of eg motability. As remarked earlier, they are not cheap (a clip-on e-cycle is £2000 to £5000), and disabled people have a higher likelihood of being poorer.
Mobility lanes are also about mobility aids, and the possibility of using them easily and safely avoiding the dangers of being on the carriageway amongst the motor vehicles.
One of the most bizarre things you will see sometimes is clipboard-wielding Council Officers and others who think they are Jesus; they accost disabled people on cycles with legs that don't work properly, and essentially demand "Pick Up Your Mobility Aid and Walk". I have a friend who had that happen in St Pancras Station, when she was actually towing her wheelchair behind her Brompton which she was riding at walking pace. It talk 3 repetitions of "I can't walk; that's my wheelchair" before it sunk in.
"It's not about pedestrians vs cyclists as the main question; don't fall for that one."
It's my own view: all too often, then it the experience for pedestrians. And the cyclist 'lobby' are in denial about it. A pedestrian having to move out o the way because of some inconsiderate @sshat rider does not care if the rider was a 'serious' cyclist or an ASBO cyclist. And IME 'serious' cyclists - pepparami in lycra - are just as likely to be inconsiderate.
Spoiler: parents are not ditching their cars. A BBC Bristol journalist from BBC Bristol has spoken to a couple of left-wing parents in urban areas of what is now one of the UK's most left-wing cities who now cycle their kids to school.
It's entirely unrepresentative, it is very much exaggerated and it is absolutely very BBC. Met and preachy to the core.
I am a big supporter of the BBC - I think the country is trashing a huge soft influence asset by running it down...
But I have to say this is a fair cop Casino - DM or Express levels of journalism. I fear the journalist's/editor's biases got the better of them.
It’s noteworthy that there’s a BBC article that’s remotely biased in that direction given the torrent of Tory talking points the organisation is cowed into spewing on a daily basis.
There have always been weak articles like this on the site. Inevitable when you consider the volume they pump out daily. Though I’d note that at least a third of the parents at our primary school, possibly closer to half, don’t own a car. It’s perhaps of anthropological interest to those living outside big cities to understand the cultural norms and mores of the millions who do.
Yes. I think there's a more interesting story to be written about the inconvenience of bringing up a family without the use of a car that would still fit the topic.
To your point I'm guessing most young families are in cities because that's where the jobs are.
Their jobs are there of course, but they’ve also made the decision to stay in the inner city rather than commute from the suburbs.
Those without cars generally say they don’t miss them but it must cause issues when it comes to taking rubbish to the tip or picking up furniture from IKEA.
The carless parent cohort are a cross section from poor and on benefits to pretty wealthy and working in the city.
The walking and cycling parents in Bristol, at least the ones the BBC found, are the very lucky few who can both afford to live around the corner from the good school, and have a parent without a tight morning schedule.
Once upon a time, kids would've walked or cycled to school on their lonesome. Then parents started to get risk averse and thus the school run started, making the roads more dangerous for those who continued to walk - a vicious cycle until there is a huge increase in congestion during school term and people won't let their kids out on the road.
I find that very sad, and count myself lucky that I had the freedom of my neighbourhood from about age 8.
Oh indeed, kids should be allowed to be kids, but today’s parents are much more worried about the massively rare safety issues, than they are about letting them be kids and explore the world.
It tells you a lot about the BBC though, that they choose to venerate the yummy mummies and WFHers in the million-pound houses with six grand bikes, and softly demonise the hardworking secretary whose boss notices if she arrives at 9:05 because there was a traffic jam outside the school on the other side of town.
“demonise” Really? Can you show me an article that “demonise[s]” a “hardworking secretary whose boss notices if she arrives at 9:05 because there was a traffic jam”. I can’t say I’ve noticed that happening.
It’s the same thing as the Sunday Times “lifestyle” pages, showing the 1%er lifestyle to the 10%ers, and suggesting that we should all be doing the same. The ‘demonisation’ is implicit rather than explicit, and while it’s acceptable for the likes of the Sunday Times, it should be criticised when the organisation that gives criminal records to tens of thousands of the poorest in society does it.
I’m not familiar with BBC News articles that look like Sunday Times “lifestyle” pages. Can you show me a specific article demonstrating this demonisation?
I’m not saying that’s a great article, but I don’t think it “demonise[s]” hardworking secretaries who are 5 minutes late because of a traffic jam.
It’s a very soft and indirect demonisation, by saying how lovely it is that the yummy mummies take their kids to school by bike. The actual problem is that these sort of articles feed into public policy, and over time it becomes more and more difficult to be that mum who needs to get her kids to school and then to work on time.
It’s as soft and indirect as a kitten. And if more yummy mummies bike to school, the hardworking secretary is less likely to get stuck in a traffic jam.
Where the fuck has this notional "hard working secretary" come from? The 1970s? There is no mention of it in the article.
The 1980s, when the Tories came up with the idea of cheap and cheerful commuter trains for the secretaries, which [edit] would be slow, and fast rapid posh ones for the bosses. On the same tracks. ISTR at least one embarrassing interview when the Tory for the Day had it explained to him in words of four letters or less that there might just be a problem.
Looks like the red crescent guys aren't missing at all so that's some good news. However Iran has 'imminent announcement' written all over it at the moment and the rev guards appear to be fortifying Tehran against unrest. Into the teeth of the gale again
Looks like the red crescent guys aren't missing at all so that's some good news. However Iran has 'imminent announcement' written all over it at the moment and the rev guards appear to be fortifying Tehran against unrest. Into the teeth of the gale again
Glen O'Hara @gsoh31 · 1h Student visas are already down nearly 30%, and I would say between 10 and 20 universities are going to get into deep trouble. Another 10 to 20 will follow rapidly. Imagine sending a further signal that you want the numbers down... (1/2)
In any country that wants a future the first job of education is to do the absolute best for that country's young people in every possible respect. Everything else comes second and third.
The signals sent out to UK young people who find that there are places available at elite institutions for international students but not for them (this happens all the time) is truly dreadful. This is pure intellectual and cultural suicide and academic prostitution, and demeans our generally very good top universities.
And the signals sent out to millions of good young people by underfunding and underrating local FE vocational provision - which matters just as much as Oxford and Cambridge - is even worse.
Not how it works. Lucrative foreign students cross subsidise domestic students. Without them there would either be higher tuition fees or fewer places. Or both.
The Tories are arguing their issue is with lesser universities (ie the ones they didn’t go to), not the “elite institutions”.
They want these ‘lesser universities’ to fail so our uppity working classes lose their opportunity for further education, leaving their crumbling home towns and broadening their minds, and all become once again insular, parochial manual labourers.
Banging the immigrant drum, if successful, helpfully destroys the former polys that so many working class kids attend.
That’s of course until they realise there’s one of those uppity institutions in their own marginal constituency and they’re asked by local radio if they want it to close.
See, for example, this thread on Teesside University, since Simon Clarke is one of the MPs to have jumped on this.
Lots of local students going into local industries and public services, cross-subsidised by international fees.
Tough shit, people want migration brought under control.
If their business model isn't sustainable without huge numbers of foreign students coming in then they'll have to change their business model to one that can succeed in the domestic market.
However 2 years ago they were told by this Government to increase overseas student numbers - this Government can't have it both ways.
But if you want to ensure your party never gets into power again - letting a lot of local universities close will be a sure way of making the Tory party as popular as the Sun in Liverpool.
It's also worth saying that last week I saw a survey that highlighted the 10 attempts across the past 25 years to regenerate Middlesborough. Literally the only one that has worked is attached to the University (and to a lesser extent the Northern College of Art).
Glen O'Hara @gsoh31 · 1h Student visas are already down nearly 30%, and I would say between 10 and 20 universities are going to get into deep trouble. Another 10 to 20 will follow rapidly. Imagine sending a further signal that you want the numbers down... (1/2)
In any country that wants a future the first job of education is to do the absolute best for that country's young people in every possible respect. Everything else comes second and third.
The signals sent out to UK young people who find that there are places available at elite institutions for international students but not for them (this happens all the time) is truly dreadful. This is pure intellectual and cultural suicide and academic prostitution, and demeans our generally very good top universities.
And the signals sent out to millions of good young people by underfunding and underrating local FE vocational provision - which matters just as much as Oxford and Cambridge - is even worse.
Not how it works. Lucrative foreign students cross subsidise domestic students. Without them there would either be higher tuition fees or fewer places. Or both.
The Tories are arguing their issue is with lesser universities (ie the ones they didn’t go to), not the “elite institutions”.
They want these ‘lesser universities’ to fail so our uppity working classes lose their opportunity for further education, leaving their crumbling home towns and broadening their minds, and all become once again insular, parochial manual labourers.
Banging the immigrant drum, if successful, helpfully destroys the former polys that so many working class kids attend.
That’s of course until they realise there’s one of those uppity institutions in their own marginal constituency and they’re asked by local radio if they want it to close.
See, for example, this thread on Teesside University, since Simon Clarke is one of the MPs to have jumped on this.
Lots of local students going into local industries and public services, cross-subsidised by international fees.
Tough shit, people want migration brought under control.
If their business model isn't sustainable without huge numbers of foreign students coming in then they'll have to change their business model to one that can succeed in the domestic market.
Out of interest, would you apply the same principle to public schools?
There is a slight difference in that my friends at school weren’t allowed to bring their wives and kids with them which, I’m sure you would agree, is hard to take for a thirteen year old boy.
I don’t have a problem with Unis taking in foreign students and bringing money into the UK but bringing dependents is a thorny issue clearly.
Looks like the red crescent guys aren't missing at all so that's some good news. However Iran has 'imminent announcement' written all over it at the moment and the rev guards appear to be fortifying Tehran against unrest. Into the teeth of the gale again
Are we expecting them to blame Israel?
Probably, although israel is unlikely to be responsible for the dense fog in the area.
As a general comment I would say that road safety issues are potentially politically explosive. There are around 30,000 deaths or serious injuries on the road network per year. Historically this has just been accepted as a cost associated with economic growth and individual freedom. But I think this perspective will not hold and a far more cautious and risk averse approach will become normal over time.
Yes, let's impose huge restrictions on everyone because of something affecting a few of us - I'm sure there'll be no adverse consequences of such a decision.
It's one of the few ways that people can suffer traumatic injuries or death, only pipped by suicide. As such, it's a relatively more important issue for younger people who haven't come across dementia, heart disease and cancer yet.
It's a huge deal in the north of Scotland when kids get driving licenses for the first time. We all get shipped off to Aberdeen to watch horrific videos of the aftermath of car crashes in a desperate attempt to slow us down.
Spoiler: parents are not ditching their cars. A BBC Bristol journalist from BBC Bristol has spoken to a couple of left-wing parents in urban areas of what is now one of the UK's most left-wing cities who now cycle their kids to school.
It's entirely unrepresentative, it is very much exaggerated and it is absolutely very BBC. Met and preachy to the core.
I am a big supporter of the BBC - I think the country is trashing a huge soft influence asset by running it down...
But I have to say this is a fair cop Casino - DM or Express levels of journalism. I fear the journalist's/editor's biases got the better of them.
It’s noteworthy that there’s a BBC article that’s remotely biased in that direction given the torrent of Tory talking points the organisation is cowed into spewing on a daily basis.
There have always been weak articles like this on the site. Inevitable when you consider the volume they pump out daily. Though I’d note that at least a third of the parents at our primary school, possibly closer to half, don’t own a car. It’s perhaps of anthropological interest to those living outside big cities to understand the cultural norms and mores of the millions who do.
Yes. I think there's a more interesting story to be written about the inconvenience of bringing up a family without the use of a car that would still fit the topic.
To your point I'm guessing most young families are in cities because that's where the jobs are.
There was a great slightly provocative quote on the school run in the video about Waterbeach I posted yesterday:
"With the local schools team, we said what what do you need in terms of access - how much parking do you need for parents in the morning? They basically said we don't want any because whatever you do outside the front of a primary school it will be chaos.
If you provide 50 parking spaces they'll be filled and more. If you provide none it will all be filled and more. So we'd rather you didn't provide any. So that was actually quite encouraging and not really the answer we'd expected."
(Separate facility provided for staff, disabled access etc. Plus a local mobility hub within walking distance on paths through amenity space.)
My cynical side says that that response was from the developer: who would quite like that car parking space to cram yet more houses in.
Our school has a too-small car park; shared by it and the adjacent secondary. The approach is via a long road that leads from almost outside the village; most people have a long drive just to reach the access road.
There is lots of active travel to the school; a short path leads from the end of a residential road in the village to the main gate. At school times, this is crammed with people and bikes. Noticeably less so in wet weather, though, when the car park gets busier.
But: lots of people park, or drop kids off on, the residential road; it is a much shorter trip for many than negotiating the access road. The road is not designed for that sort of traffic load. I ca guarantee that this will also happen in Waterbeach; lack of provision of a car park will just lead to people using nearby residential roads.
Active travel is fine for people like me, where we live less than a ten minute walk away from the school, especially as I don't work. It may be very different if you need to drive to work immediately afterwards - in other words, the life many people lead.
I'd recommend watching the presentation - it is only 15 minutes. There is car park provision at the mobility hub nearby, which is provision for the area rather than just the school.
"Nearby roads" are tending to be replaced with open landscaped amenity space or walking / wheeling / cycling paths.
I haven't watched the whole thing yet, but I like the way that tactile paving is now deemed unnecessary (coz cyclists hate them). I wonder what the RNIB think of that?
This is one of my bugbears: if a path is to be shared use between cyclists and pedestrians, then cyclist should be restricted in speed relative to the pedestrians. Maybe not to walking speed; but no more than two or three times pedestrian speed. Instead, you get people going very fast. What they've created there is a racetrack for cyclists - and it will be used as such.
I am *very* cynical when it comes to the cycling lobby arguing for cycling infrastructure at the expense of pedestrians. Good infrastructure would involve compromises for all users.
Thoughts. There's a lot about the need to unlearn assumptions, and change cultural expectations. You see that in the hierarchy of road users in the updated Highway Code from 2022 - the pedestrian priority at side road entrances will remain difficult in some measure until general road culture changes, which will take years or perhaps 2 decades, especially when we have no routine continuing education required to maintain a driving license.
Or contraflow cycling on 20mph one way streets. Been done in Cambridge since the 1990s, and now I think (you may know better) on pretty much all one way streets. But try and do a single street in Mansfield, and all the Local Councillors will have a heart attack because it is "so dangerous". Or two way mobility tracks on Binley Road in Coventry and "people will never look both ways" (is it so difficult - Highway Code says it is a basic?and "it is dangerous when I reverse out of my drive into the busy road" (why the f*ck are you reversing *out* of your drive?)
Unlearning habits: One amusing thing that happened at Waterbeach (in the presentation) is that when they created a flat environment where pedestrians get priority, one of the first developers created and built another whole new level of pavements on top with kerbs even higher - not getting the basic philosophy that they were designed out. I'm interested how often tactile paving standards (which have been in place since the 1980s) are often simply not followed when it is installed.
Shared space is in debate. We are trained to make streets with kerbs, tactiles etc to make them readable by visually impaired. "Shared space" was a movement from ~2000-2005 which said "remove all of that and people will be safe because motor vehicle drivers will have do be considerate". That gave us spaces like Exhibition Road, which has failed because it treats shared space as fully including motor vehicles rather than allowing them in as "guests". It missed that that never works in practice because all drivers are human, and VI people / vulnerable road users can't trust their lives to that. Waterbeach is far more thorough, very much circumscribing spaces accessible by motor and changing priorities, but I'm not 100% convinced it will be successful. That's another one around cultural expectations.
Pedestrians vs cyclists. A development over maybe the last 2-3 years has been convergence around common needs, especially amongst disabled charities and organisations like Sustrans. The Cycle Design Vehicle required to be accommodated (and often not) by new cycling infra (1.2m wide by 2.8m long - that is, size plus a dynamic envelope aka wobble room) has almost identical needs to mobility aids.
Personally when lobbying or arguing I always take the PoV of a disabled pedestrian, because I am (or will be) one, I got radicalised on this stuff by not being able to wheel my mum to the GP as all the walkways had wheelchair blocking barriers, and it avoids a lot of spurious distractions, plus has more legal teeth.
There are certain small fringe organisations around - such as those feeding inflammatory videos about 'floating bus stops' to the Mail and the Telegraph - who *want* a cyclists-vs-disabled conflict, and say things like 'cycling organisation Sustrans using disabled people as a human shield'. On bus stop bypasses they ignore that banning them will force mobility aid users out into general traffic at every bus stop - so it's a balance to be struck with factors both sides, and they point blank refuse to acknowledge the other side of the equation. Mark Harper may try a wedge issue on this one before he is finished.
Speeds - my new e-cycle is interesting on that. The 3 levels of assist also reflect speed as well as power, so give me max assist speeds of ~10kph, ~17-18kph, and ~25kph on the flat. I find that 1 is for areas busy with pedestrians, 2 is for shared paths / rough surfaces, and 3 elsewhere.
Enough for now.
Near me, they put “floating bus stops” in. With a black asphalt surface and black curbstones.
After the inevitable happened, they painted white stripes on the curb stones.
Yep - it's in getting decent standards, following the standards and sweating the detail.
In London there has been a real issue for a number of years of Boroughs not following TFL standards, which have in general been good.
On that piccie, it's revealing all the yellow paintwork they had to put in the cycle track to stop ASB drivers abusing it. Something Edinburgh is still working on . There's a wonderful photo of a workteam replacing slabs on the footway smashed by delivery lorries, whilst behind them there is a 7.5 tonne lorry parked on the pavement, delivering.
Err… the double yellow line was there before the cycle lane/floating bus stop. As were the yellow markings on the curb.
The big problem is *lack* of adequate markings. Drivers who don’t know the area are visibly confused at junctions and sometimes only just avoid ending up in the cycle lane.
This is not helped by the idiots who put the cycle lane in changing their… minds?.. three times. Leaving three sets of somewhat faded and painted over markings to choose from.
I had no idea that curb stones could come in black - why would you want them to be?
That's interesting - so they pretty much modified the carriageway rather than reconstruct the whole corridor. It's interesting that they did not feel they could trust them enough to remove the yellow lines .
That will be budgets? Really expensive bits are when you start modifying foundations and underground features, as you start running into services. But grinding and repainting markings is not a big expense in the context of such a scheme, nor is getting it vaguely right first time - though often they need adjusting.
Where is it? What did it look like before?
The square ended island (which may be against a junction at the feet of the photographer?) looks like some of the things done on main roads through places like Peckham, where one complaint (from both user angles) is that some drivers turn their vehicles left into the end of the cycle track by mistake.
The kerb stones one is strange. They are usually a similar colour to the pavement and/or carriageway, and we have not had a history of needing to paint them back and white everywhere across the country.
One help would be for all cycle tracks to have their own surface colour wherever needed, but that would struggle to get adopted in the UK - we are too cheapskate.
On the question of floating bus stops, I'd note that the Hammersmith & Fulham one backs onto a road not a cycle path, and that might be why one is controversial and the other not. It can be easier for pedestrians to cross in the presence of cars than bikes. For a start, cars are easier to see. More subtly, that can work the other way. Car drivers are probably looking ahead. Cyclists, especially if going fast, might be looking mostly at the ground. Even if they've seen you, it is hard to make eye contact to confirm they've seen you.
The ones created on the Mile End Rd / Bow Rd section of the Cycle Superhighway 2 route in East London seem to work pretty well - one of the things they've done is to get buses to line up with the bus shelter before opening their doors.
That means that passengers can't simply exit the bus and take a couple of steps without looking before ending up in the cycle lane - instead, they first have to walk round the bus shelter which gives them a bit more time to gain situational awareness.
Of course, they were lucky in that they had loads of room to work with there - the inner part of the same route, along Aldgate / Whitechapel Rd is both narrower and busier, and as a result is far scarier.
I mean, that's sorta the issue, isn't it? The *pedestrians* have to walk around the bus shelter, coz cyclists have priority. How easy is that with a pram, or with limited visibility, or a dog, or with lots of people queuing, etc, etc?
It's not about pedestrians vs cyclists as the main question; don't fall for that one. That's a trope used by trolling lobbies and politicians wanting wedge issues. ASBO "cyclists" on pavements, of whom the majority of serious problems are likely ASBO motorcyclists with hacked ebikes or unregistered motorbikes such as Surrons, are a cultural and enforcement issue. The City of London are doing interesting stuff at present, including offering "responsible cycling" courses, as are sometimes transformative for lawbreaking motor vehicle drivers.
It's about equal access to the ability to travel. 40% of disabled adults do not have a driving license, compared to slightly more than half of that - 25% - for able-bodied adults. For many of that 40% it is not an option for medical reasons; I may in this category in 15-20 years if Diabetes damages my eyesight.
It's not acceptable that those peoples' autonomy is taken away; cycles (and e-cycles) as mobility aids are a part of that. The difference even on a manual cycle is that it is 6x more efficient than walking, which facilitates wider travel - it makes a huge difference to be able to get 10 miles from home rather than 1-2 miles.
I was advising someone with Fibromyalgia yesterday looking for a long (35 miles) off-road route around Derby to e-cycle today in the sun for half the day. It has to be entirely step free as she suffers serious pain from even pushing her cycle up one or two steps or a cycle groove, or any distance; "Cyclists Dismount" - NOPE. Many things we don't have around here; one thing we do have are former pit railways turned into rail trails. We have canal towpaths too, but many of them are barriered off.
One ask for the rumoured Transport Bill was for cycles - handcycles, tricycles, clip on e-cycles for wheelchairs and so on, to be recognised as mobility aids to bring them within the scope of eg motability. As remarked earlier, they are not cheap (a clip-on e-cycle is £2000 to £5000), and disabled people have a higher likelihood of being poorer.
Mobility lanes are also about mobility aids, and the possibility of using them easily and safely avoiding the dangers of being on the carriageway amongst the motor vehicles.
One of the most bizarre things you will see sometimes is clipboard-wielding Council Officers and others who think they are Jesus; they accost disabled people on cycles with legs that don't work properly, and essentially demand "Pick Up Your Mobility Aid and Walk". I have a friend who had that happen in St Pancras Station, when she was actually towing her wheelchair behind her Brompton which she was riding at walking pace. It talk 3 repetitions of "I can't walk; that's my wheelchair" before it sunk in.
"It's not about pedestrians vs cyclists as the main question; don't fall for that one."
It's my own view: all too often, then it the experience for pedestrians. And the cyclist 'lobby' are in denial about it. A pedestrian having to move out o the way because of some inconsiderate @sshat rider does not care if the rider was a 'serious' cyclist or an ASBO cyclist. And IME 'serious' cyclists - pepparami in lycra - are just as likely to be inconsiderate.
Not a good week for world leaders, let's hope the in threes rule doesn't come in. Reports that red crescent searchers have now also gone missing looking for him. Bus driver bringing me back from Dads had an interesting new technique. Driving level with passengers at bus stops at 15mph or so then standing on everything like Bambi and a kitten had run into the road with 4 toddlers in tow. My tutting didn't help.
As a general comment I would say that road safety issues are potentially politically explosive. There are around 30,000 deaths or serious injuries on the road network per year. Historically this has just been accepted as a cost associated with economic growth and individual freedom. But I think this perspective will not hold and a far more cautious and risk averse approach will become normal over time.
Yes, let's impose huge restrictions on everyone because of something affecting a few of us - I'm sure there'll be no adverse consequences of such a decision.
It's one of the few ways that people can suffer traumatic injuries or death, only pipped by suicide. As such, it's a relatively more important issue for younger people who haven't come across dementia, heart disease and cancer yet.
It's a huge deal in the north of Scotland when kids get driving licenses for the first time. We all get shipped off to Aberdeen to watch horrific videos of the aftermath of car crashes in a desperate attempt to slow us down.
I'm astounded by Luckyguy's attitude. The timing is indeed the issue. People are killed or crippled decades before their time. I'm reminded, for instance, of a University professor in the prime of his career who was almost killed in a crash, and then made almost useless for years, with cascading results for his family *and* for his students and postdocs. He never properly recovered.
Spoiler: parents are not ditching their cars. A BBC Bristol journalist from BBC Bristol has spoken to a couple of left-wing parents in urban areas of what is now one of the UK's most left-wing cities who now cycle their kids to school.
It's entirely unrepresentative, it is very much exaggerated and it is absolutely very BBC. Met and preachy to the core.
I am a big supporter of the BBC - I think the country is trashing a huge soft influence asset by running it down...
But I have to say this is a fair cop Casino - DM or Express levels of journalism. I fear the journalist's/editor's biases got the better of them.
It’s noteworthy that there’s a BBC article that’s remotely biased in that direction given the torrent of Tory talking points the organisation is cowed into spewing on a daily basis.
There have always been weak articles like this on the site. Inevitable when you consider the volume they pump out daily. Though I’d note that at least a third of the parents at our primary school, possibly closer to half, don’t own a car. It’s perhaps of anthropological interest to those living outside big cities to understand the cultural norms and mores of the millions who do.
Yes. I think there's a more interesting story to be written about the inconvenience of bringing up a family without the use of a car that would still fit the topic.
To your point I'm guessing most young families are in cities because that's where the jobs are.
There was a great slightly provocative quote on the school run in the video about Waterbeach I posted yesterday:
"With the local schools team, we said what what do you need in terms of access - how much parking do you need for parents in the morning? They basically said we don't want any because whatever you do outside the front of a primary school it will be chaos.
If you provide 50 parking spaces they'll be filled and more. If you provide none it will all be filled and more. So we'd rather you didn't provide any. So that was actually quite encouraging and not really the answer we'd expected."
(Separate facility provided for staff, disabled access etc. Plus a local mobility hub within walking distance on paths through amenity space.)
My cynical side says that that response was from the developer: who would quite like that car parking space to cram yet more houses in.
Our school has a too-small car park; shared by it and the adjacent secondary. The approach is via a long road that leads from almost outside the village; most people have a long drive just to reach the access road.
There is lots of active travel to the school; a short path leads from the end of a residential road in the village to the main gate. At school times, this is crammed with people and bikes. Noticeably less so in wet weather, though, when the car park gets busier.
But: lots of people park, or drop kids off on, the residential road; it is a much shorter trip for many than negotiating the access road. The road is not designed for that sort of traffic load. I ca guarantee that this will also happen in Waterbeach; lack of provision of a car park will just lead to people using nearby residential roads.
Active travel is fine for people like me, where we live less than a ten minute walk away from the school, especially as I don't work. It may be very different if you need to drive to work immediately afterwards - in other words, the life many people lead.
I'd recommend watching the presentation - it is only 15 minutes. There is car park provision at the mobility hub nearby, which is provision for the area rather than just the school.
"Nearby roads" are tending to be replaced with open landscaped amenity space or walking / wheeling / cycling paths.
I haven't watched the whole thing yet, but I like the way that tactile paving is now deemed unnecessary (coz cyclists hate them). I wonder what the RNIB think of that?
This is one of my bugbears: if a path is to be shared use between cyclists and pedestrians, then cyclist should be restricted in speed relative to the pedestrians. Maybe not to walking speed; but no more than two or three times pedestrian speed. Instead, you get people going very fast. What they've created there is a racetrack for cyclists - and it will be used as such.
I am *very* cynical when it comes to the cycling lobby arguing for cycling infrastructure at the expense of pedestrians. Good infrastructure would involve compromises for all users.
Thoughts. There's a lot about the need to unlearn assumptions, and change cultural expectations. You see that in the hierarchy of road users in the updated Highway Code from 2022 - the pedestrian priority at side road entrances will remain difficult in some measure until general road culture changes, which will take years or perhaps 2 decades, especially when we have no routine continuing education required to maintain a driving license.
Or contraflow cycling on 20mph one way streets. Been done in Cambridge since the 1990s, and now I think (you may know better) on pretty much all one way streets. But try and do a single street in Mansfield, and all the Local Councillors will have a heart attack because it is "so dangerous". Or two way mobility tracks on Binley Road in Coventry and "people will never look both ways" (is it so difficult - Highway Code says it is a basic?and "it is dangerous when I reverse out of my drive into the busy road" (why the f*ck are you reversing *out* of your drive?)
Unlearning habits: One amusing thing that happened at Waterbeach (in the presentation) is that when they created a flat environment where pedestrians get priority, one of the first developers created and built another whole new level of pavements on top with kerbs even higher - not getting the basic philosophy that they were designed out. I'm interested how often tactile paving standards (which have been in place since the 1980s) are often simply not followed when it is installed.
Shared space is in debate. We are trained to make streets with kerbs, tactiles etc to make them readable by visually impaired. "Shared space" was a movement from ~2000-2005 which said "remove all of that and people will be safe because motor vehicle drivers will have do be considerate". That gave us spaces like Exhibition Road, which has failed because it treats shared space as fully including motor vehicles rather than allowing them in as "guests". It missed that that never works in practice because all drivers are human, and VI people / vulnerable road users can't trust their lives to that. Waterbeach is far more thorough, very much circumscribing spaces accessible by motor and changing priorities, but I'm not 100% convinced it will be successful. That's another one around cultural expectations.
Pedestrians vs cyclists. A development over maybe the last 2-3 years has been convergence around common needs, especially amongst disabled charities and organisations like Sustrans. The Cycle Design Vehicle required to be accommodated (and often not) by new cycling infra (1.2m wide by 2.8m long - that is, size plus a dynamic envelope aka wobble room) has almost identical needs to mobility aids.
Personally when lobbying or arguing I always take the PoV of a disabled pedestrian, because I am (or will be) one, I got radicalised on this stuff by not being able to wheel my mum to the GP as all the walkways had wheelchair blocking barriers, and it avoids a lot of spurious distractions, plus has more legal teeth.
There are certain small fringe organisations around - such as those feeding inflammatory videos about 'floating bus stops' to the Mail and the Telegraph - who *want* a cyclists-vs-disabled conflict, and say things like 'cycling organisation Sustrans using disabled people as a human shield'. On bus stop bypasses they ignore that banning them will force mobility aid users out into general traffic at every bus stop - so it's a balance to be struck with factors both sides, and they point blank refuse to acknowledge the other side of the equation. Mark Harper may try a wedge issue on this one before he is finished.
Speeds - my new e-cycle is interesting on that. The 3 levels of assist also reflect speed as well as power, so give me max assist speeds of ~10kph, ~17-18kph, and ~25kph on the flat. I find that 1 is for areas busy with pedestrians, 2 is for shared paths / rough surfaces, and 3 elsewhere.
Enough for now.
Near me, they put “floating bus stops” in. With a black asphalt surface and black curbstones.
After the inevitable happened, they painted white stripes on the curb stones.
Yep - it's in getting decent standards, following the standards and sweating the detail.
In London there has been a real issue for a number of years of Boroughs not following TFL standards, which have in general been good.
On that piccie, it's revealing all the yellow paintwork they had to put in the cycle track to stop ASB drivers abusing it. Something Edinburgh is still working on . There's a wonderful photo of a workteam replacing slabs on the footway smashed by delivery lorries, whilst behind them there is a 7.5 tonne lorry parked on the pavement, delivering.
Err… the double yellow line was there before the cycle lane/floating bus stop. As were the yellow markings on the curb.
The big problem is *lack* of adequate markings. Drivers who don’t know the area are visibly confused at junctions and sometimes only just avoid ending up in the cycle lane.
This is not helped by the idiots who put the cycle lane in changing their… minds?.. three times. Leaving three sets of somewhat faded and painted over markings to choose from.
I had no idea that curb stones could come in black - why would you want them to be?
That's interesting - so they pretty much modified the carriageway rather than reconstruct the whole corridor. It's interesting that they did not feel they could trust them enough to remove the yellow lines .
That will be budgets? Really expensive bits are when you start modifying foundations and underground features, as you start running into services. But grinding and repainting markings is not a big expense in the context of such a scheme, nor is getting it vaguely right first time - though often they need adjusting.
Where is it? What did it look like before?
The square ended island (which may be against a junction at the feet of the photographer?) looks like some of the things done on main roads through places like Peckham, where one complaint (from both user angles) is that some drivers turn their vehicles left into the end of the cycle track by mistake.
The kerb stones one is strange. They are usually a similar colour to the pavement and/or carriageway, and we have not had a history of needing to paint them back and white everywhere across the country.
One help would be for all cycle tracks to have their own surface colour wherever needed, but that would struggle to get adopted in the UK - we are too cheapskate.
On the question of floating bus stops, I'd note that the Hammersmith & Fulham one backs onto a road not a cycle path, and that might be why one is controversial and the other not. It can be easier for pedestrians to cross in the presence of cars than bikes. For a start, cars are easier to see. More subtly, that can work the other way. Car drivers are probably looking ahead. Cyclists, especially if going fast, might be looking mostly at the ground. Even if they've seen you, it is hard to make eye contact to confirm they've seen you.
The ones created on the Mile End Rd / Bow Rd section of the Cycle Superhighway 2 route in East London seem to work pretty well - one of the things they've done is to get buses to line up with the bus shelter before opening their doors.
That means that passengers can't simply exit the bus and take a couple of steps without looking before ending up in the cycle lane - instead, they first have to walk round the bus shelter which gives them a bit more time to gain situational awareness.
Of course, they were lucky in that they had loads of room to work with there - the inner part of the same route, along Aldgate / Whitechapel Rd is both narrower and busier, and as a result is far scarier.
I mean, that's sorta the issue, isn't it? The *pedestrians* have to walk around the bus shelter, coz cyclists have priority. How easy is that with a pram, or with limited visibility, or a dog, or with lots of people queuing, etc, etc?
It's not about pedestrians vs cyclists as the main question; don't fall for that one. That's a trope used by trolling lobbies and politicians wanting wedge issues. ASBO "cyclists" on pavements, of whom the majority of serious problems are likely ASBO motorcyclists with hacked ebikes or unregistered motorbikes such as Surrons, are a cultural and enforcement issue. The City of London are doing interesting stuff at present, including offering "responsible cycling" courses, as are sometimes transformative for lawbreaking motor vehicle drivers.
It's about equal access to the ability to travel. 40% of disabled adults do not have a driving license, compared to slightly more than half of that - 25% - for able-bodied adults. For many of that 40% it is not an option for medical reasons; I may in this category in 15-20 years if Diabetes damages my eyesight.
It's not acceptable that those peoples' autonomy is taken away; cycles (and e-cycles) as mobility aids are a part of that. The difference even on a manual cycle is that it is 6x more efficient than walking, which facilitates wider travel - it makes a huge difference to be able to get 10 miles from home rather than 1-2 miles.
I was advising someone with Fibromyalgia yesterday looking for a long (35 miles) off-road route around Derby to e-cycle today in the sun for half the day. It has to be entirely step free as she suffers serious pain from even pushing her cycle up one or two steps or a cycle groove, or any distance; "Cyclists Dismount" - NOPE. Many things we don't have around here; one thing we do have are former pit railways turned into rail trails. We have canal towpaths too, but many of them are barriered off.
One ask for the rumoured Transport Bill was for cycles - handcycles, tricycles, clip on e-cycles for wheelchairs and so on, to be recognised as mobility aids to bring them within the scope of eg motability. As remarked earlier, they are not cheap (a clip-on e-cycle is £2000 to £5000), and disabled people have a higher likelihood of being poorer.
Mobility lanes are also about mobility aids, and the possibility of using them easily and safely avoiding the dangers of being on the carriageway amongst the motor vehicles.
One of the most bizarre things you will see sometimes is clipboard-wielding Council Officers and others who think they are Jesus; they accost disabled people on cycles with legs that don't work properly, and essentially demand "Pick Up Your Mobility Aid and Walk". I have a friend who had that happen in St Pancras Station, when she was actually towing her wheelchair behind her Brompton which she was riding at walking pace. It talk 3 repetitions of "I can't walk; that's my wheelchair" before it sunk in.
"It's not about pedestrians vs cyclists as the main question; don't fall for that one."
It's my own view: all too often, then it the experience for pedestrians. And the cyclist 'lobby' are in denial about it. A pedestrian having to move out o the way because of some inconsiderate @sshat rider does not care if the rider was a 'serious' cyclist or an ASBO cyclist. And IME 'serious' cyclists - pepparami in lycra - are just as likely to be inconsiderate.
No problem with personal views. I'm keen on having public conversations.
Your "serious" cyclists are unlikely generally to be on pavements; they will usually be on roads and sometimes at inappropriate speeds on rural multiuser paths; the general cycling communities I am in discourage such behaviour and speak out about it. One real issue is that everything always gets built to the absolute minimum legal quality standard for eg width and visibility.
It can work in places where there are good sightlines and a very low density of pedestrians. I have newish decentish shared cycling / walking surfaces alongside the A617. When I get say 1.5 miles out of town on the way to somewhere 5 or 6 miles away, I have never seen a pedestrian on it.
Here's a piece from road.cc some time ago about excessive speeds on a shared path in Swansea, and a range of views. Interestingly there's the same Strava overestimating issue as in the Telegraph last week, though not dishonestly, but that does not detract from the need to be sensible.
Equally the behaviour of a small minority (yes, we need stats) does not mean that blanket bans should be applied. Fortunately on this we have equality law.
We know about here that from kneejerking Councillors in Mansfield. There was an issue with teens doing wheelies once or twice on Saturday afternoons, and a total ban by PSPO - which was softened slighty after a High Court legal action. Which means that kids going to the Rebecca Addlington swimming centre on one side of town have to walk their bikes through town for 15 minutes on dark winter evenings, or cycle around dangerous roads.
We do not seek to ban all driving because of the hoon minority in areas where motor vehicle ASB happens, nor all pedestrians because of muggings by young men in hoodies. The argument is the same.
Spoiler: parents are not ditching their cars. A BBC Bristol journalist from BBC Bristol has spoken to a couple of left-wing parents in urban areas of what is now one of the UK's most left-wing cities who now cycle their kids to school.
It's entirely unrepresentative, it is very much exaggerated and it is absolutely very BBC. Met and preachy to the core.
I am a big supporter of the BBC - I think the country is trashing a huge soft influence asset by running it down...
But I have to say this is a fair cop Casino - DM or Express levels of journalism. I fear the journalist's/editor's biases got the better of them.
It’s noteworthy that there’s a BBC article that’s remotely biased in that direction given the torrent of Tory talking points the organisation is cowed into spewing on a daily basis.
There have always been weak articles like this on the site. Inevitable when you consider the volume they pump out daily. Though I’d note that at least a third of the parents at our primary school, possibly closer to half, don’t own a car. It’s perhaps of anthropological interest to those living outside big cities to understand the cultural norms and mores of the millions who do.
Yes. I think there's a more interesting story to be written about the inconvenience of bringing up a family without the use of a car that would still fit the topic.
To your point I'm guessing most young families are in cities because that's where the jobs are.
There was a great slightly provocative quote on the school run in the video about Waterbeach I posted yesterday:
"With the local schools team, we said what what do you need in terms of access - how much parking do you need for parents in the morning? They basically said we don't want any because whatever you do outside the front of a primary school it will be chaos.
If you provide 50 parking spaces they'll be filled and more. If you provide none it will all be filled and more. So we'd rather you didn't provide any. So that was actually quite encouraging and not really the answer we'd expected."
(Separate facility provided for staff, disabled access etc. Plus a local mobility hub within walking distance on paths through amenity space.)
My cynical side says that that response was from the developer: who would quite like that car parking space to cram yet more houses in.
Our school has a too-small car park; shared by it and the adjacent secondary. The approach is via a long road that leads from almost outside the village; most people have a long drive just to reach the access road.
There is lots of active travel to the school; a short path leads from the end of a residential road in the village to the main gate. At school times, this is crammed with people and bikes. Noticeably less so in wet weather, though, when the car park gets busier.
But: lots of people park, or drop kids off on, the residential road; it is a much shorter trip for many than negotiating the access road. The road is not designed for that sort of traffic load. I ca guarantee that this will also happen in Waterbeach; lack of provision of a car park will just lead to people using nearby residential roads.
Active travel is fine for people like me, where we live less than a ten minute walk away from the school, especially as I don't work. It may be very different if you need to drive to work immediately afterwards - in other words, the life many people lead.
I'd recommend watching the presentation - it is only 15 minutes. There is car park provision at the mobility hub nearby, which is provision for the area rather than just the school.
"Nearby roads" are tending to be replaced with open landscaped amenity space or walking / wheeling / cycling paths.
I haven't watched the whole thing yet, but I like the way that tactile paving is now deemed unnecessary (coz cyclists hate them). I wonder what the RNIB think of that?
This is one of my bugbears: if a path is to be shared use between cyclists and pedestrians, then cyclist should be restricted in speed relative to the pedestrians. Maybe not to walking speed; but no more than two or three times pedestrian speed. Instead, you get people going very fast. What they've created there is a racetrack for cyclists - and it will be used as such.
I am *very* cynical when it comes to the cycling lobby arguing for cycling infrastructure at the expense of pedestrians. Good infrastructure would involve compromises for all users.
Thoughts. There's a lot about the need to unlearn assumptions, and change cultural expectations. You see that in the hierarchy of road users in the updated Highway Code from 2022 - the pedestrian priority at side road entrances will remain difficult in some measure until general road culture changes, which will take years or perhaps 2 decades, especially when we have no routine continuing education required to maintain a driving license.
Or contraflow cycling on 20mph one way streets. Been done in Cambridge since the 1990s, and now I think (you may know better) on pretty much all one way streets. But try and do a single street in Mansfield, and all the Local Councillors will have a heart attack because it is "so dangerous". Or two way mobility tracks on Binley Road in Coventry and "people will never look both ways" (is it so difficult - Highway Code says it is a basic?and "it is dangerous when I reverse out of my drive into the busy road" (why the f*ck are you reversing *out* of your drive?)
Unlearning habits: One amusing thing that happened at Waterbeach (in the presentation) is that when they created a flat environment where pedestrians get priority, one of the first developers created and built another whole new level of pavements on top with kerbs even higher - not getting the basic philosophy that they were designed out. I'm interested how often tactile paving standards (which have been in place since the 1980s) are often simply not followed when it is installed.
Shared space is in debate. We are trained to make streets with kerbs, tactiles etc to make them readable by visually impaired. "Shared space" was a movement from ~2000-2005 which said "remove all of that and people will be safe because motor vehicle drivers will have do be considerate". That gave us spaces like Exhibition Road, which has failed because it treats shared space as fully including motor vehicles rather than allowing them in as "guests". It missed that that never works in practice because all drivers are human, and VI people / vulnerable road users can't trust their lives to that. Waterbeach is far more thorough, very much circumscribing spaces accessible by motor and changing priorities, but I'm not 100% convinced it will be successful. That's another one around cultural expectations.
Pedestrians vs cyclists. A development over maybe the last 2-3 years has been convergence around common needs, especially amongst disabled charities and organisations like Sustrans. The Cycle Design Vehicle required to be accommodated (and often not) by new cycling infra (1.2m wide by 2.8m long - that is, size plus a dynamic envelope aka wobble room) has almost identical needs to mobility aids.
Personally when lobbying or arguing I always take the PoV of a disabled pedestrian, because I am (or will be) one, I got radicalised on this stuff by not being able to wheel my mum to the GP as all the walkways had wheelchair blocking barriers, and it avoids a lot of spurious distractions, plus has more legal teeth.
There are certain small fringe organisations around - such as those feeding inflammatory videos about 'floating bus stops' to the Mail and the Telegraph - who *want* a cyclists-vs-disabled conflict, and say things like 'cycling organisation Sustrans using disabled people as a human shield'. On bus stop bypasses they ignore that banning them will force mobility aid users out into general traffic at every bus stop - so it's a balance to be struck with factors both sides, and they point blank refuse to acknowledge the other side of the equation. Mark Harper may try a wedge issue on this one before he is finished.
Speeds - my new e-cycle is interesting on that. The 3 levels of assist also reflect speed as well as power, so give me max assist speeds of ~10kph, ~17-18kph, and ~25kph on the flat. I find that 1 is for areas busy with pedestrians, 2 is for shared paths / rough surfaces, and 3 elsewhere.
Enough for now.
Near me, they put “floating bus stops” in. With a black asphalt surface and black curbstones.
After the inevitable happened, they painted white stripes on the curb stones.
Yep - it's in getting decent standards, following the standards and sweating the detail.
In London there has been a real issue for a number of years of Boroughs not following TFL standards, which have in general been good.
On that piccie, it's revealing all the yellow paintwork they had to put in the cycle track to stop ASB drivers abusing it. Something Edinburgh is still working on . There's a wonderful photo of a workteam replacing slabs on the footway smashed by delivery lorries, whilst behind them there is a 7.5 tonne lorry parked on the pavement, delivering.
Err… the double yellow line was there before the cycle lane/floating bus stop. As were the yellow markings on the curb.
The big problem is *lack* of adequate markings. Drivers who don’t know the area are visibly confused at junctions and sometimes only just avoid ending up in the cycle lane.
This is not helped by the idiots who put the cycle lane in changing their… minds?.. three times. Leaving three sets of somewhat faded and painted over markings to choose from.
I had no idea that curb stones could come in black - why would you want them to be?
That's interesting - so they pretty much modified the carriageway rather than reconstruct the whole corridor. It's interesting that they did not feel they could trust them enough to remove the yellow lines .
That will be budgets? Really expensive bits are when you start modifying foundations and underground features, as you start running into services. But grinding and repainting markings is not a big expense in the context of such a scheme, nor is getting it vaguely right first time - though often they need adjusting.
Where is it? What did it look like before?
The square ended island (which may be against a junction at the feet of the photographer?) looks like some of the things done on main roads through places like Peckham, where one complaint (from both user angles) is that some drivers turn their vehicles left into the end of the cycle track by mistake.
The kerb stones one is strange. They are usually a similar colour to the pavement and/or carriageway, and we have not had a history of needing to paint them back and white everywhere across the country.
One help would be for all cycle tracks to have their own surface colour wherever needed, but that would struggle to get adopted in the UK - we are too cheapskate.
On the question of floating bus stops, I'd note that the Hammersmith & Fulham one backs onto a road not a cycle path, and that might be why one is controversial and the other not. It can be easier for pedestrians to cross in the presence of cars than bikes. For a start, cars are easier to see. More subtly, that can work the other way. Car drivers are probably looking ahead. Cyclists, especially if going fast, might be looking mostly at the ground. Even if they've seen you, it is hard to make eye contact to confirm they've seen you.
The ones created on the Mile End Rd / Bow Rd section of the Cycle Superhighway 2 route in East London seem to work pretty well - one of the things they've done is to get buses to line up with the bus shelter before opening their doors.
That means that passengers can't simply exit the bus and take a couple of steps without looking before ending up in the cycle lane - instead, they first have to walk round the bus shelter which gives them a bit more time to gain situational awareness.
Of course, they were lucky in that they had loads of room to work with there - the inner part of the same route, along Aldgate / Whitechapel Rd is both narrower and busier, and as a result is far scarier.
I mean, that's sorta the issue, isn't it? The *pedestrians* have to walk around the bus shelter, coz cyclists have priority. How easy is that with a pram, or with limited visibility, or a dog, or with lots of people queuing, etc, etc?
It's not about pedestrians vs cyclists as the main question; don't fall for that one. That's a trope used by trolling lobbies and politicians wanting wedge issues. ASBO "cyclists" on pavements, of whom the majority of serious problems are likely ASBO motorcyclists with hacked ebikes or unregistered motorbikes such as Surrons, are a cultural and enforcement issue. The City of London are doing interesting stuff at present, including offering "responsible cycling" courses, as are sometimes transformative for lawbreaking motor vehicle drivers.
It's about equal access to the ability to travel. 40% of disabled adults do not have a driving license, compared to slightly more than half of that - 25% - for able-bodied adults. For many of that 40% it is not an option for medical reasons; I may in this category in 15-20 years if Diabetes damages my eyesight.
It's not acceptable that those peoples' autonomy is taken away; cycles (and e-cycles) as mobility aids are a part of that. The difference even on a manual cycle is that it is 6x more efficient than walking, which facilitates wider travel - it makes a huge difference to be able to get 10 miles from home rather than 1-2 miles.
I was advising someone with Fibromyalgia yesterday looking for a long (35 miles) off-road route around Derby to e-cycle today in the sun for half the day. It has to be entirely step free as she suffers serious pain from even pushing her cycle up one or two steps or a cycle groove, or any distance; "Cyclists Dismount" - NOPE. Many things we don't have around here; one thing we do have are former pit railways turned into rail trails. We have canal towpaths too, but many of them are barriered off.
One ask for the rumoured Transport Bill was for cycles - handcycles, tricycles, clip on e-cycles for wheelchairs and so on, to be recognised as mobility aids to bring them within the scope of eg motability. As remarked earlier, they are not cheap (a clip-on e-cycle is £2000 to £5000), and disabled people have a higher likelihood of being poorer.
Mobility lanes are also about mobility aids, and the possibility of using them easily and safely avoiding the dangers of being on the carriageway amongst the motor vehicles.
One of the most bizarre things you will see sometimes is clipboard-wielding Council Officers and others who think they are Jesus; they accost disabled people on cycles with legs that don't work properly, and essentially demand "Pick Up Your Mobility Aid and Walk". I have a friend who had that happen in St Pancras Station, when she was actually towing her wheelchair behind her Brompton which she was riding at walking pace. It talk 3 repetitions of "I can't walk; that's my wheelchair" before it sunk in.
"It's not about pedestrians vs cyclists as the main question; don't fall for that one."
It's my own view: all too often, then it the experience for pedestrians. And the cyclist 'lobby' are in denial about it. A pedestrian having to move out o the way because of some inconsiderate @sshat rider does not care if the rider was a 'serious' cyclist or an ASBO cyclist. And IME 'serious' cyclists - pepparami in lycra - are just as likely to be inconsiderate.
This is precisely the sort of attitude that pi**es me off with the cycle lobby. They can never be at fault; they're always the victim; no other road user matters. We saw this with the Huntingdon and the Regent's Park incidents, in different directions.
I recall some posters trying to tell me that the pavement in Huntingdon was a cyclepath...
Looks like the red crescent guys aren't missing at all so that's some good news. However Iran has 'imminent announcement' written all over it at the moment and the rev guards appear to be fortifying Tehran against unrest. Into the teeth of the gale again
Are we expecting them to blame Israel?
That will happen, whether officially or not, but certainly its a high risk thing
Glen O'Hara @gsoh31 · 1h Student visas are already down nearly 30%, and I would say between 10 and 20 universities are going to get into deep trouble. Another 10 to 20 will follow rapidly. Imagine sending a further signal that you want the numbers down... (1/2)
In any country that wants a future the first job of education is to do the absolute best for that country's young people in every possible respect. Everything else comes second and third.
The signals sent out to UK young people who find that there are places available at elite institutions for international students but not for them (this happens all the time) is truly dreadful. This is pure intellectual and cultural suicide and academic prostitution, and demeans our generally very good top universities.
And the signals sent out to millions of good young people by underfunding and underrating local FE vocational provision - which matters just as much as Oxford and Cambridge - is even worse.
Not how it works. Lucrative foreign students cross subsidise domestic students. Without them there would either be higher tuition fees or fewer places. Or both.
The Tories are arguing their issue is with lesser universities (ie the ones they didn’t go to), not the “elite institutions”.
Get this through your head: people want migration brought under control. Good and hard.
No-one gives a fuck if slightly fewer Brits end up doing shit degrees at Lancaster polytechnic as a result.
It's Russell group, not the former polys, that would be clobbered by this. At any rate outside London.
(Although actually Lancaster is a Russell Group uni. Do you mean Lancashire, which is different?)
Looks like the red crescent guys aren't missing at all so that's some good news. However Iran has 'imminent announcement' written all over it at the moment and the rev guards appear to be fortifying Tehran against unrest. Into the teeth of the gale again
Are we expecting them to blame Israel?
That will happen, whether officially or not, but certainly its a high risk thing
If Khameini goes for 'blame Israel' then we are about to find out how far Irans nuke program has come
Spoiler: parents are not ditching their cars. A BBC Bristol journalist from BBC Bristol has spoken to a couple of left-wing parents in urban areas of what is now one of the UK's most left-wing cities who now cycle their kids to school.
It's entirely unrepresentative, it is very much exaggerated and it is absolutely very BBC. Met and preachy to the core.
I am a big supporter of the BBC - I think the country is trashing a huge soft influence asset by running it down...
But I have to say this is a fair cop Casino - DM or Express levels of journalism. I fear the journalist's/editor's biases got the better of them.
It’s noteworthy that there’s a BBC article that’s remotely biased in that direction given the torrent of Tory talking points the organisation is cowed into spewing on a daily basis.
There have always been weak articles like this on the site. Inevitable when you consider the volume they pump out daily. Though I’d note that at least a third of the parents at our primary school, possibly closer to half, don’t own a car. It’s perhaps of anthropological interest to those living outside big cities to understand the cultural norms and mores of the millions who do.
Yes. I think there's a more interesting story to be written about the inconvenience of bringing up a family without the use of a car that would still fit the topic.
To your point I'm guessing most young families are in cities because that's where the jobs are.
There was a great slightly provocative quote on the school run in the video about Waterbeach I posted yesterday:
"With the local schools team, we said what what do you need in terms of access - how much parking do you need for parents in the morning? They basically said we don't want any because whatever you do outside the front of a primary school it will be chaos.
If you provide 50 parking spaces they'll be filled and more. If you provide none it will all be filled and more. So we'd rather you didn't provide any. So that was actually quite encouraging and not really the answer we'd expected."
(Separate facility provided for staff, disabled access etc. Plus a local mobility hub within walking distance on paths through amenity space.)
My cynical side says that that response was from the developer: who would quite like that car parking space to cram yet more houses in.
Our school has a too-small car park; shared by it and the adjacent secondary. The approach is via a long road that leads from almost outside the village; most people have a long drive just to reach the access road.
There is lots of active travel to the school; a short path leads from the end of a residential road in the village to the main gate. At school times, this is crammed with people and bikes. Noticeably less so in wet weather, though, when the car park gets busier.
But: lots of people park, or drop kids off on, the residential road; it is a much shorter trip for many than negotiating the access road. The road is not designed for that sort of traffic load. I ca guarantee that this will also happen in Waterbeach; lack of provision of a car park will just lead to people using nearby residential roads.
Active travel is fine for people like me, where we live less than a ten minute walk away from the school, especially as I don't work. It may be very different if you need to drive to work immediately afterwards - in other words, the life many people lead.
I'd recommend watching the presentation - it is only 15 minutes. There is car park provision at the mobility hub nearby, which is provision for the area rather than just the school.
"Nearby roads" are tending to be replaced with open landscaped amenity space or walking / wheeling / cycling paths.
I haven't watched the whole thing yet, but I like the way that tactile paving is now deemed unnecessary (coz cyclists hate them). I wonder what the RNIB think of that?
This is one of my bugbears: if a path is to be shared use between cyclists and pedestrians, then cyclist should be restricted in speed relative to the pedestrians. Maybe not to walking speed; but no more than two or three times pedestrian speed. Instead, you get people going very fast. What they've created there is a racetrack for cyclists - and it will be used as such.
I am *very* cynical when it comes to the cycling lobby arguing for cycling infrastructure at the expense of pedestrians. Good infrastructure would involve compromises for all users.
Thoughts. There's a lot about the need to unlearn assumptions, and change cultural expectations. You see that in the hierarchy of road users in the updated Highway Code from 2022 - the pedestrian priority at side road entrances will remain difficult in some measure until general road culture changes, which will take years or perhaps 2 decades, especially when we have no routine continuing education required to maintain a driving license.
Or contraflow cycling on 20mph one way streets. Been done in Cambridge since the 1990s, and now I think (you may know better) on pretty much all one way streets. But try and do a single street in Mansfield, and all the Local Councillors will have a heart attack because it is "so dangerous". Or two way mobility tracks on Binley Road in Coventry and "people will never look both ways" (is it so difficult - Highway Code says it is a basic?and "it is dangerous when I reverse out of my drive into the busy road" (why the f*ck are you reversing *out* of your drive?)
Unlearning habits: One amusing thing that happened at Waterbeach (in the presentation) is that when they created a flat environment where pedestrians get priority, one of the first developers created and built another whole new level of pavements on top with kerbs even higher - not getting the basic philosophy that they were designed out. I'm interested how often tactile paving standards (which have been in place since the 1980s) are often simply not followed when it is installed.
Shared space is in debate. We are trained to make streets with kerbs, tactiles etc to make them readable by visually impaired. "Shared space" was a movement from ~2000-2005 which said "remove all of that and people will be safe because motor vehicle drivers will have do be considerate". That gave us spaces like Exhibition Road, which has failed because it treats shared space as fully including motor vehicles rather than allowing them in as "guests". It missed that that never works in practice because all drivers are human, and VI people / vulnerable road users can't trust their lives to that. Waterbeach is far more thorough, very much circumscribing spaces accessible by motor and changing priorities, but I'm not 100% convinced it will be successful. That's another one around cultural expectations.
Pedestrians vs cyclists. A development over maybe the last 2-3 years has been convergence around common needs, especially amongst disabled charities and organisations like Sustrans. The Cycle Design Vehicle required to be accommodated (and often not) by new cycling infra (1.2m wide by 2.8m long - that is, size plus a dynamic envelope aka wobble room) has almost identical needs to mobility aids.
Personally when lobbying or arguing I always take the PoV of a disabled pedestrian, because I am (or will be) one, I got radicalised on this stuff by not being able to wheel my mum to the GP as all the walkways had wheelchair blocking barriers, and it avoids a lot of spurious distractions, plus has more legal teeth.
There are certain small fringe organisations around - such as those feeding inflammatory videos about 'floating bus stops' to the Mail and the Telegraph - who *want* a cyclists-vs-disabled conflict, and say things like 'cycling organisation Sustrans using disabled people as a human shield'. On bus stop bypasses they ignore that banning them will force mobility aid users out into general traffic at every bus stop - so it's a balance to be struck with factors both sides, and they point blank refuse to acknowledge the other side of the equation. Mark Harper may try a wedge issue on this one before he is finished.
Speeds - my new e-cycle is interesting on that. The 3 levels of assist also reflect speed as well as power, so give me max assist speeds of ~10kph, ~17-18kph, and ~25kph on the flat. I find that 1 is for areas busy with pedestrians, 2 is for shared paths / rough surfaces, and 3 elsewhere.
Enough for now.
Near me, they put “floating bus stops” in. With a black asphalt surface and black curbstones.
After the inevitable happened, they painted white stripes on the curb stones.
Yep - it's in getting decent standards, following the standards and sweating the detail.
In London there has been a real issue for a number of years of Boroughs not following TFL standards, which have in general been good.
On that piccie, it's revealing all the yellow paintwork they had to put in the cycle track to stop ASB drivers abusing it. Something Edinburgh is still working on . There's a wonderful photo of a workteam replacing slabs on the footway smashed by delivery lorries, whilst behind them there is a 7.5 tonne lorry parked on the pavement, delivering.
Err… the double yellow line was there before the cycle lane/floating bus stop. As were the yellow markings on the curb.
The big problem is *lack* of adequate markings. Drivers who don’t know the area are visibly confused at junctions and sometimes only just avoid ending up in the cycle lane.
This is not helped by the idiots who put the cycle lane in changing their… minds?.. three times. Leaving three sets of somewhat faded and painted over markings to choose from.
I had no idea that curb stones could come in black - why would you want them to be?
That's interesting - so they pretty much modified the carriageway rather than reconstruct the whole corridor. It's interesting that they did not feel they could trust them enough to remove the yellow lines .
That will be budgets? Really expensive bits are when you start modifying foundations and underground features, as you start running into services. But grinding and repainting markings is not a big expense in the context of such a scheme, nor is getting it vaguely right first time - though often they need adjusting.
Where is it? What did it look like before?
The square ended island (which may be against a junction at the feet of the photographer?) looks like some of the things done on main roads through places like Peckham, where one complaint (from both user angles) is that some drivers turn their vehicles left into the end of the cycle track by mistake.
The kerb stones one is strange. They are usually a similar colour to the pavement and/or carriageway, and we have not had a history of needing to paint them back and white everywhere across the country.
One help would be for all cycle tracks to have their own surface colour wherever needed, but that would struggle to get adopted in the UK - we are too cheapskate.
On the question of floating bus stops, I'd note that the Hammersmith & Fulham one backs onto a road not a cycle path, and that might be why one is controversial and the other not. It can be easier for pedestrians to cross in the presence of cars than bikes. For a start, cars are easier to see. More subtly, that can work the other way. Car drivers are probably looking ahead. Cyclists, especially if going fast, might be looking mostly at the ground. Even if they've seen you, it is hard to make eye contact to confirm they've seen you.
The ones created on the Mile End Rd / Bow Rd section of the Cycle Superhighway 2 route in East London seem to work pretty well - one of the things they've done is to get buses to line up with the bus shelter before opening their doors.
That means that passengers can't simply exit the bus and take a couple of steps without looking before ending up in the cycle lane - instead, they first have to walk round the bus shelter which gives them a bit more time to gain situational awareness.
Of course, they were lucky in that they had loads of room to work with there - the inner part of the same route, along Aldgate / Whitechapel Rd is both narrower and busier, and as a result is far scarier.
I mean, that's sorta the issue, isn't it? The *pedestrians* have to walk around the bus shelter, coz cyclists have priority. How easy is that with a pram, or with limited visibility, or a dog, or with lots of people queuing, etc, etc?
It's not about pedestrians vs cyclists as the main question; don't fall for that one. That's a trope used by trolling lobbies and politicians wanting wedge issues. ASBO "cyclists" on pavements, of whom the majority of serious problems are likely ASBO motorcyclists with hacked ebikes or unregistered motorbikes such as Surrons, are a cultural and enforcement issue. The City of London are doing interesting stuff at present, including offering "responsible cycling" courses, as are sometimes transformative for lawbreaking motor vehicle drivers.
It's about equal access to the ability to travel. 40% of disabled adults do not have a driving license, compared to slightly more than half of that - 25% - for able-bodied adults. For many of that 40% it is not an option for medical reasons; I may in this category in 15-20 years if Diabetes damages my eyesight.
It's not acceptable that those peoples' autonomy is taken away; cycles (and e-cycles) as mobility aids are a part of that. The difference even on a manual cycle is that it is 6x more efficient than walking, which facilitates wider travel - it makes a huge difference to be able to get 10 miles from home rather than 1-2 miles.
I was advising someone with Fibromyalgia yesterday looking for a long (35 miles) off-road route around Derby to e-cycle today in the sun for half the day. It has to be entirely step free as she suffers serious pain from even pushing her cycle up one or two steps or a cycle groove, or any distance; "Cyclists Dismount" - NOPE. Many things we don't have around here; one thing we do have are former pit railways turned into rail trails. We have canal towpaths too, but many of them are barriered off.
One ask for the rumoured Transport Bill was for cycles - handcycles, tricycles, clip on e-cycles for wheelchairs and so on, to be recognised as mobility aids to bring them within the scope of eg motability. As remarked earlier, they are not cheap (a clip-on e-cycle is £2000 to £5000), and disabled people have a higher likelihood of being poorer.
Mobility lanes are also about mobility aids, and the possibility of using them easily and safely avoiding the dangers of being on the carriageway amongst the motor vehicles.
One of the most bizarre things you will see sometimes is clipboard-wielding Council Officers and others who think they are Jesus; they accost disabled people on cycles with legs that don't work properly, and essentially demand "Pick Up Your Mobility Aid and Walk". I have a friend who had that happen in St Pancras Station, when she was actually towing her wheelchair behind her Brompton which she was riding at walking pace. It talk 3 repetitions of "I can't walk; that's my wheelchair" before it sunk in.
"It's not about pedestrians vs cyclists as the main question; don't fall for that one."
It's my own view: all too often, then it the experience for pedestrians. And the cyclist 'lobby' are in denial about it. A pedestrian having to move out o the way because of some inconsiderate @sshat rider does not care if the rider was a 'serious' cyclist or an ASBO cyclist. And IME 'serious' cyclists - pepparami in lycra - are just as likely to be inconsiderate.
No problem with personal views. I'm keen on having public conversations.
Your "serious" cyclists are unlikely generally to be on pavements; they will usually be on roads and sometimes at inappropriate speeds on rural multiuser paths; the general cycling communities I am in discourage such behaviour and speak out about it.
(snip)
That's fair enough; but I have seen the pepparami-in-lycra crew use pavements where it was not appropriate - in Cambridge (Castle Hill area) last year being one. Doubly annoying at was early on a Sunday morning with f-all traffic.
We all have to get along. As it happens, IMV all too often, the attitude on road.cc absolutely stinks, with zero thought for other road users.
Spoiler: parents are not ditching their cars. A BBC Bristol journalist from BBC Bristol has spoken to a couple of left-wing parents in urban areas of what is now one of the UK's most left-wing cities who now cycle their kids to school.
It's entirely unrepresentative, it is very much exaggerated and it is absolutely very BBC. Met and preachy to the core.
I am a big supporter of the BBC - I think the country is trashing a huge soft influence asset by running it down...
But I have to say this is a fair cop Casino - DM or Express levels of journalism. I fear the journalist's/editor's biases got the better of them.
It’s noteworthy that there’s a BBC article that’s remotely biased in that direction given the torrent of Tory talking points the organisation is cowed into spewing on a daily basis.
There have always been weak articles like this on the site. Inevitable when you consider the volume they pump out daily. Though I’d note that at least a third of the parents at our primary school, possibly closer to half, don’t own a car. It’s perhaps of anthropological interest to those living outside big cities to understand the cultural norms and mores of the millions who do.
Yes. I think there's a more interesting story to be written about the inconvenience of bringing up a family without the use of a car that would still fit the topic.
To your point I'm guessing most young families are in cities because that's where the jobs are.
There was a great slightly provocative quote on the school run in the video about Waterbeach I posted yesterday:
"With the local schools team, we said what what do you need in terms of access - how much parking do you need for parents in the morning? They basically said we don't want any because whatever you do outside the front of a primary school it will be chaos.
If you provide 50 parking spaces they'll be filled and more. If you provide none it will all be filled and more. So we'd rather you didn't provide any. So that was actually quite encouraging and not really the answer we'd expected."
(Separate facility provided for staff, disabled access etc. Plus a local mobility hub within walking distance on paths through amenity space.)
My cynical side says that that response was from the developer: who would quite like that car parking space to cram yet more houses in.
Our school has a too-small car park; shared by it and the adjacent secondary. The approach is via a long road that leads from almost outside the village; most people have a long drive just to reach the access road.
There is lots of active travel to the school; a short path leads from the end of a residential road in the village to the main gate. At school times, this is crammed with people and bikes. Noticeably less so in wet weather, though, when the car park gets busier.
But: lots of people park, or drop kids off on, the residential road; it is a much shorter trip for many than negotiating the access road. The road is not designed for that sort of traffic load. I ca guarantee that this will also happen in Waterbeach; lack of provision of a car park will just lead to people using nearby residential roads.
Active travel is fine for people like me, where we live less than a ten minute walk away from the school, especially as I don't work. It may be very different if you need to drive to work immediately afterwards - in other words, the life many people lead.
I'd recommend watching the presentation - it is only 15 minutes. There is car park provision at the mobility hub nearby, which is provision for the area rather than just the school.
"Nearby roads" are tending to be replaced with open landscaped amenity space or walking / wheeling / cycling paths.
I haven't watched the whole thing yet, but I like the way that tactile paving is now deemed unnecessary (coz cyclists hate them). I wonder what the RNIB think of that?
This is one of my bugbears: if a path is to be shared use between cyclists and pedestrians, then cyclist should be restricted in speed relative to the pedestrians. Maybe not to walking speed; but no more than two or three times pedestrian speed. Instead, you get people going very fast. What they've created there is a racetrack for cyclists - and it will be used as such.
I am *very* cynical when it comes to the cycling lobby arguing for cycling infrastructure at the expense of pedestrians. Good infrastructure would involve compromises for all users.
Thoughts. There's a lot about the need to unlearn assumptions, and change cultural expectations. You see that in the hierarchy of road users in the updated Highway Code from 2022 - the pedestrian priority at side road entrances will remain difficult in some measure until general road culture changes, which will take years or perhaps 2 decades, especially when we have no routine continuing education required to maintain a driving license.
Or contraflow cycling on 20mph one way streets. Been done in Cambridge since the 1990s, and now I think (you may know better) on pretty much all one way streets. But try and do a single street in Mansfield, and all the Local Councillors will have a heart attack because it is "so dangerous". Or two way mobility tracks on Binley Road in Coventry and "people will never look both ways" (is it so difficult - Highway Code says it is a basic?and "it is dangerous when I reverse out of my drive into the busy road" (why the f*ck are you reversing *out* of your drive?)
Unlearning habits: One amusing thing that happened at Waterbeach (in the presentation) is that when they created a flat environment where pedestrians get priority, one of the first developers created and built another whole new level of pavements on top with kerbs even higher - not getting the basic philosophy that they were designed out. I'm interested how often tactile paving standards (which have been in place since the 1980s) are often simply not followed when it is installed.
Shared space is in debate. We are trained to make streets with kerbs, tactiles etc to make them readable by visually impaired. "Shared space" was a movement from ~2000-2005 which said "remove all of that and people will be safe because motor vehicle drivers will have do be considerate". That gave us spaces like Exhibition Road, which has failed because it treats shared space as fully including motor vehicles rather than allowing them in as "guests". It missed that that never works in practice because all drivers are human, and VI people / vulnerable road users can't trust their lives to that. Waterbeach is far more thorough, very much circumscribing spaces accessible by motor and changing priorities, but I'm not 100% convinced it will be successful. That's another one around cultural expectations.
Pedestrians vs cyclists. A development over maybe the last 2-3 years has been convergence around common needs, especially amongst disabled charities and organisations like Sustrans. The Cycle Design Vehicle required to be accommodated (and often not) by new cycling infra (1.2m wide by 2.8m long - that is, size plus a dynamic envelope aka wobble room) has almost identical needs to mobility aids.
Personally when lobbying or arguing I always take the PoV of a disabled pedestrian, because I am (or will be) one, I got radicalised on this stuff by not being able to wheel my mum to the GP as all the walkways had wheelchair blocking barriers, and it avoids a lot of spurious distractions, plus has more legal teeth.
There are certain small fringe organisations around - such as those feeding inflammatory videos about 'floating bus stops' to the Mail and the Telegraph - who *want* a cyclists-vs-disabled conflict, and say things like 'cycling organisation Sustrans using disabled people as a human shield'. On bus stop bypasses they ignore that banning them will force mobility aid users out into general traffic at every bus stop - so it's a balance to be struck with factors both sides, and they point blank refuse to acknowledge the other side of the equation. Mark Harper may try a wedge issue on this one before he is finished.
Speeds - my new e-cycle is interesting on that. The 3 levels of assist also reflect speed as well as power, so give me max assist speeds of ~10kph, ~17-18kph, and ~25kph on the flat. I find that 1 is for areas busy with pedestrians, 2 is for shared paths / rough surfaces, and 3 elsewhere.
Enough for now.
Near me, they put “floating bus stops” in. With a black asphalt surface and black curbstones.
After the inevitable happened, they painted white stripes on the curb stones.
Yep - it's in getting decent standards, following the standards and sweating the detail.
In London there has been a real issue for a number of years of Boroughs not following TFL standards, which have in general been good.
On that piccie, it's revealing all the yellow paintwork they had to put in the cycle track to stop ASB drivers abusing it. Something Edinburgh is still working on . There's a wonderful photo of a workteam replacing slabs on the footway smashed by delivery lorries, whilst behind them there is a 7.5 tonne lorry parked on the pavement, delivering.
Err… the double yellow line was there before the cycle lane/floating bus stop. As were the yellow markings on the curb.
The big problem is *lack* of adequate markings. Drivers who don’t know the area are visibly confused at junctions and sometimes only just avoid ending up in the cycle lane.
This is not helped by the idiots who put the cycle lane in changing their… minds?.. three times. Leaving three sets of somewhat faded and painted over markings to choose from.
I had no idea that curb stones could come in black - why would you want them to be?
That's interesting - so they pretty much modified the carriageway rather than reconstruct the whole corridor. It's interesting that they did not feel they could trust them enough to remove the yellow lines .
That will be budgets? Really expensive bits are when you start modifying foundations and underground features, as you start running into services. But grinding and repainting markings is not a big expense in the context of such a scheme, nor is getting it vaguely right first time - though often they need adjusting.
Where is it? What did it look like before?
The square ended island (which may be against a junction at the feet of the photographer?) looks like some of the things done on main roads through places like Peckham, where one complaint (from both user angles) is that some drivers turn their vehicles left into the end of the cycle track by mistake.
The kerb stones one is strange. They are usually a similar colour to the pavement and/or carriageway, and we have not had a history of needing to paint them back and white everywhere across the country.
One help would be for all cycle tracks to have their own surface colour wherever needed, but that would struggle to get adopted in the UK - we are too cheapskate.
On the question of floating bus stops, I'd note that the Hammersmith & Fulham one backs onto a road not a cycle path, and that might be why one is controversial and the other not. It can be easier for pedestrians to cross in the presence of cars than bikes. For a start, cars are easier to see. More subtly, that can work the other way. Car drivers are probably looking ahead. Cyclists, especially if going fast, might be looking mostly at the ground. Even if they've seen you, it is hard to make eye contact to confirm they've seen you.
The ones created on the Mile End Rd / Bow Rd section of the Cycle Superhighway 2 route in East London seem to work pretty well - one of the things they've done is to get buses to line up with the bus shelter before opening their doors.
That means that passengers can't simply exit the bus and take a couple of steps without looking before ending up in the cycle lane - instead, they first have to walk round the bus shelter which gives them a bit more time to gain situational awareness.
Of course, they were lucky in that they had loads of room to work with there - the inner part of the same route, along Aldgate / Whitechapel Rd is both narrower and busier, and as a result is far scarier.
I mean, that's sorta the issue, isn't it? The *pedestrians* have to walk around the bus shelter, coz cyclists have priority. How easy is that with a pram, or with limited visibility, or a dog, or with lots of people queuing, etc, etc?
It's not about pedestrians vs cyclists as the main question; don't fall for that one. That's a trope used by trolling lobbies and politicians wanting wedge issues. ASBO "cyclists" on pavements, of whom the majority of serious problems are likely ASBO motorcyclists with hacked ebikes or unregistered motorbikes such as Surrons, are a cultural and enforcement issue. The City of London are doing interesting stuff at present, including offering "responsible cycling" courses, as are sometimes transformative for lawbreaking motor vehicle drivers.
It's about equal access to the ability to travel. 40% of disabled adults do not have a driving license, compared to slightly more than half of that - 25% - for able-bodied adults. For many of that 40% it is not an option for medical reasons; I may in this category in 15-20 years if Diabetes damages my eyesight.
It's not acceptable that those peoples' autonomy is taken away; cycles (and e-cycles) as mobility aids are a part of that. The difference even on a manual cycle is that it is 6x more efficient than walking, which facilitates wider travel - it makes a huge difference to be able to get 10 miles from home rather than 1-2 miles.
I was advising someone with Fibromyalgia yesterday looking for a long (35 miles) off-road route around Derby to e-cycle today in the sun for half the day. It has to be entirely step free as she suffers serious pain from even pushing her cycle up one or two steps or a cycle groove, or any distance; "Cyclists Dismount" - NOPE. Many things we don't have around here; one thing we do have are former pit railways turned into rail trails. We have canal towpaths too, but many of them are barriered off.
One ask for the rumoured Transport Bill was for cycles - handcycles, tricycles, clip on e-cycles for wheelchairs and so on, to be recognised as mobility aids to bring them within the scope of eg motability. As remarked earlier, they are not cheap (a clip-on e-cycle is £2000 to £5000), and disabled people have a higher likelihood of being poorer.
Mobility lanes are also about mobility aids, and the possibility of using them easily and safely avoiding the dangers of being on the carriageway amongst the motor vehicles.
One of the most bizarre things you will see sometimes is clipboard-wielding Council Officers and others who think they are Jesus; they accost disabled people on cycles with legs that don't work properly, and essentially demand "Pick Up Your Mobility Aid and Walk". I have a friend who had that happen in St Pancras Station, when she was actually towing her wheelchair behind her Brompton which she was riding at walking pace. It talk 3 repetitions of "I can't walk; that's my wheelchair" before it sunk in.
"It's not about pedestrians vs cyclists as the main question; don't fall for that one."
It's my own view: all too often, then it the experience for pedestrians. And the cyclist 'lobby' are in denial about it. A pedestrian having to move out o the way because of some inconsiderate @sshat rider does not care if the rider was a 'serious' cyclist or an ASBO cyclist. And IME 'serious' cyclists - pepparami in lycra - are just as likely to be inconsiderate.
This is precisely the sort of attitude that pi**es me off with the cycle lobby. They can never be at fault; they're always the victim; no other road user matters. We saw this with the Huntingdon and the Regent's Park incidents, in different directions.
I recall some posters trying to tell me that the pavement in Huntingdon was a cyclepath...
More people are killed by mobility scooters. Cows. And lightning.
No one likes a deliveroo cyclist whizzing down a pavement, or a MAMIL doing 22mph through a quiet village. But what we've seen over the last week is people completely lose their heads over the issue.
Spoiler: parents are not ditching their cars. A BBC Bristol journalist from BBC Bristol has spoken to a couple of left-wing parents in urban areas of what is now one of the UK's most left-wing cities who now cycle their kids to school.
It's entirely unrepresentative, it is very much exaggerated and it is absolutely very BBC. Met and preachy to the core.
I am a big supporter of the BBC - I think the country is trashing a huge soft influence asset by running it down...
But I have to say this is a fair cop Casino - DM or Express levels of journalism. I fear the journalist's/editor's biases got the better of them.
It’s noteworthy that there’s a BBC article that’s remotely biased in that direction given the torrent of Tory talking points the organisation is cowed into spewing on a daily basis.
There have always been weak articles like this on the site. Inevitable when you consider the volume they pump out daily. Though I’d note that at least a third of the parents at our primary school, possibly closer to half, don’t own a car. It’s perhaps of anthropological interest to those living outside big cities to understand the cultural norms and mores of the millions who do.
Yes. I think there's a more interesting story to be written about the inconvenience of bringing up a family without the use of a car that would still fit the topic.
To your point I'm guessing most young families are in cities because that's where the jobs are.
There was a great slightly provocative quote on the school run in the video about Waterbeach I posted yesterday:
"With the local schools team, we said what what do you need in terms of access - how much parking do you need for parents in the morning? They basically said we don't want any because whatever you do outside the front of a primary school it will be chaos.
If you provide 50 parking spaces they'll be filled and more. If you provide none it will all be filled and more. So we'd rather you didn't provide any. So that was actually quite encouraging and not really the answer we'd expected."
(Separate facility provided for staff, disabled access etc. Plus a local mobility hub within walking distance on paths through amenity space.)
My cynical side says that that response was from the developer: who would quite like that car parking space to cram yet more houses in.
Our school has a too-small car park; shared by it and the adjacent secondary. The approach is via a long road that leads from almost outside the village; most people have a long drive just to reach the access road.
There is lots of active travel to the school; a short path leads from the end of a residential road in the village to the main gate. At school times, this is crammed with people and bikes. Noticeably less so in wet weather, though, when the car park gets busier.
But: lots of people park, or drop kids off on, the residential road; it is a much shorter trip for many than negotiating the access road. The road is not designed for that sort of traffic load. I ca guarantee that this will also happen in Waterbeach; lack of provision of a car park will just lead to people using nearby residential roads.
Active travel is fine for people like me, where we live less than a ten minute walk away from the school, especially as I don't work. It may be very different if you need to drive to work immediately afterwards - in other words, the life many people lead.
I'd recommend watching the presentation - it is only 15 minutes. There is car park provision at the mobility hub nearby, which is provision for the area rather than just the school.
"Nearby roads" are tending to be replaced with open landscaped amenity space or walking / wheeling / cycling paths.
I haven't watched the whole thing yet, but I like the way that tactile paving is now deemed unnecessary (coz cyclists hate them). I wonder what the RNIB think of that?
This is one of my bugbears: if a path is to be shared use between cyclists and pedestrians, then cyclist should be restricted in speed relative to the pedestrians. Maybe not to walking speed; but no more than two or three times pedestrian speed. Instead, you get people going very fast. What they've created there is a racetrack for cyclists - and it will be used as such.
I am *very* cynical when it comes to the cycling lobby arguing for cycling infrastructure at the expense of pedestrians. Good infrastructure would involve compromises for all users.
Thoughts. There's a lot about the need to unlearn assumptions, and change cultural expectations. You see that in the hierarchy of road users in the updated Highway Code from 2022 - the pedestrian priority at side road entrances will remain difficult in some measure until general road culture changes, which will take years or perhaps 2 decades, especially when we have no routine continuing education required to maintain a driving license.
Or contraflow cycling on 20mph one way streets. Been done in Cambridge since the 1990s, and now I think (you may know better) on pretty much all one way streets. But try and do a single street in Mansfield, and all the Local Councillors will have a heart attack because it is "so dangerous". Or two way mobility tracks on Binley Road in Coventry and "people will never look both ways" (is it so difficult - Highway Code says it is a basic?and "it is dangerous when I reverse out of my drive into the busy road" (why the f*ck are you reversing *out* of your drive?)
Unlearning habits: One amusing thing that happened at Waterbeach (in the presentation) is that when they created a flat environment where pedestrians get priority, one of the first developers created and built another whole new level of pavements on top with kerbs even higher - not getting the basic philosophy that they were designed out. I'm interested how often tactile paving standards (which have been in place since the 1980s) are often simply not followed when it is installed.
Shared space is in debate. We are trained to make streets with kerbs, tactiles etc to make them readable by visually impaired. "Shared space" was a movement from ~2000-2005 which said "remove all of that and people will be safe because motor vehicle drivers will have do be considerate". That gave us spaces like Exhibition Road, which has failed because it treats shared space as fully including motor vehicles rather than allowing them in as "guests". It missed that that never works in practice because all drivers are human, and VI people / vulnerable road users can't trust their lives to that. Waterbeach is far more thorough, very much circumscribing spaces accessible by motor and changing priorities, but I'm not 100% convinced it will be successful. That's another one around cultural expectations.
Pedestrians vs cyclists. A development over maybe the last 2-3 years has been convergence around common needs, especially amongst disabled charities and organisations like Sustrans. The Cycle Design Vehicle required to be accommodated (and often not) by new cycling infra (1.2m wide by 2.8m long - that is, size plus a dynamic envelope aka wobble room) has almost identical needs to mobility aids.
Personally when lobbying or arguing I always take the PoV of a disabled pedestrian, because I am (or will be) one, I got radicalised on this stuff by not being able to wheel my mum to the GP as all the walkways had wheelchair blocking barriers, and it avoids a lot of spurious distractions, plus has more legal teeth.
There are certain small fringe organisations around - such as those feeding inflammatory videos about 'floating bus stops' to the Mail and the Telegraph - who *want* a cyclists-vs-disabled conflict, and say things like 'cycling organisation Sustrans using disabled people as a human shield'. On bus stop bypasses they ignore that banning them will force mobility aid users out into general traffic at every bus stop - so it's a balance to be struck with factors both sides, and they point blank refuse to acknowledge the other side of the equation. Mark Harper may try a wedge issue on this one before he is finished.
Speeds - my new e-cycle is interesting on that. The 3 levels of assist also reflect speed as well as power, so give me max assist speeds of ~10kph, ~17-18kph, and ~25kph on the flat. I find that 1 is for areas busy with pedestrians, 2 is for shared paths / rough surfaces, and 3 elsewhere.
Enough for now.
Near me, they put “floating bus stops” in. With a black asphalt surface and black curbstones.
After the inevitable happened, they painted white stripes on the curb stones.
Yep - it's in getting decent standards, following the standards and sweating the detail.
In London there has been a real issue for a number of years of Boroughs not following TFL standards, which have in general been good.
On that piccie, it's revealing all the yellow paintwork they had to put in the cycle track to stop ASB drivers abusing it. Something Edinburgh is still working on . There's a wonderful photo of a workteam replacing slabs on the footway smashed by delivery lorries, whilst behind them there is a 7.5 tonne lorry parked on the pavement, delivering.
Err… the double yellow line was there before the cycle lane/floating bus stop. As were the yellow markings on the curb.
The big problem is *lack* of adequate markings. Drivers who don’t know the area are visibly confused at junctions and sometimes only just avoid ending up in the cycle lane.
This is not helped by the idiots who put the cycle lane in changing their… minds?.. three times. Leaving three sets of somewhat faded and painted over markings to choose from.
I had no idea that curb stones could come in black - why would you want them to be?
That's interesting - so they pretty much modified the carriageway rather than reconstruct the whole corridor. It's interesting that they did not feel they could trust them enough to remove the yellow lines .
That will be budgets? Really expensive bits are when you start modifying foundations and underground features, as you start running into services. But grinding and repainting markings is not a big expense in the context of such a scheme, nor is getting it vaguely right first time - though often they need adjusting.
Where is it? What did it look like before?
The square ended island (which may be against a junction at the feet of the photographer?) looks like some of the things done on main roads through places like Peckham, where one complaint (from both user angles) is that some drivers turn their vehicles left into the end of the cycle track by mistake.
The kerb stones one is strange. They are usually a similar colour to the pavement and/or carriageway, and we have not had a history of needing to paint them back and white everywhere across the country.
One help would be for all cycle tracks to have their own surface colour wherever needed, but that would struggle to get adopted in the UK - we are too cheapskate.
On the question of floating bus stops, I'd note that the Hammersmith & Fulham one backs onto a road not a cycle path, and that might be why one is controversial and the other not. It can be easier for pedestrians to cross in the presence of cars than bikes. For a start, cars are easier to see. More subtly, that can work the other way. Car drivers are probably looking ahead. Cyclists, especially if going fast, might be looking mostly at the ground. Even if they've seen you, it is hard to make eye contact to confirm they've seen you.
The ones created on the Mile End Rd / Bow Rd section of the Cycle Superhighway 2 route in East London seem to work pretty well - one of the things they've done is to get buses to line up with the bus shelter before opening their doors.
That means that passengers can't simply exit the bus and take a couple of steps without looking before ending up in the cycle lane - instead, they first have to walk round the bus shelter which gives them a bit more time to gain situational awareness.
Of course, they were lucky in that they had loads of room to work with there - the inner part of the same route, along Aldgate / Whitechapel Rd is both narrower and busier, and as a result is far scarier.
I mean, that's sorta the issue, isn't it? The *pedestrians* have to walk around the bus shelter, coz cyclists have priority. How easy is that with a pram, or with limited visibility, or a dog, or with lots of people queuing, etc, etc?
It's not about pedestrians vs cyclists as the main question; don't fall for that one. That's a trope used by trolling lobbies and politicians wanting wedge issues. ASBO "cyclists" on pavements, of whom the majority of serious problems are likely ASBO motorcyclists with hacked ebikes or unregistered motorbikes such as Surrons, are a cultural and enforcement issue. The City of London are doing interesting stuff at present, including offering "responsible cycling" courses, as are sometimes transformative for lawbreaking motor vehicle drivers.
It's about equal access to the ability to travel. 40% of disabled adults do not have a driving license, compared to slightly more than half of that - 25% - for able-bodied adults. For many of that 40% it is not an option for medical reasons; I may in this category in 15-20 years if Diabetes damages my eyesight.
It's not acceptable that those peoples' autonomy is taken away; cycles (and e-cycles) as mobility aids are a part of that. The difference even on a manual cycle is that it is 6x more efficient than walking, which facilitates wider travel - it makes a huge difference to be able to get 10 miles from home rather than 1-2 miles.
I was advising someone with Fibromyalgia yesterday looking for a long (35 miles) off-road route around Derby to e-cycle today in the sun for half the day. It has to be entirely step free as she suffers serious pain from even pushing her cycle up one or two steps or a cycle groove, or any distance; "Cyclists Dismount" - NOPE. Many things we don't have around here; one thing we do have are former pit railways turned into rail trails. We have canal towpaths too, but many of them are barriered off.
One ask for the rumoured Transport Bill was for cycles - handcycles, tricycles, clip on e-cycles for wheelchairs and so on, to be recognised as mobility aids to bring them within the scope of eg motability. As remarked earlier, they are not cheap (a clip-on e-cycle is £2000 to £5000), and disabled people have a higher likelihood of being poorer.
Mobility lanes are also about mobility aids, and the possibility of using them easily and safely avoiding the dangers of being on the carriageway amongst the motor vehicles.
One of the most bizarre things you will see sometimes is clipboard-wielding Council Officers and others who think they are Jesus; they accost disabled people on cycles with legs that don't work properly, and essentially demand "Pick Up Your Mobility Aid and Walk". I have a friend who had that happen in St Pancras Station, when she was actually towing her wheelchair behind her Brompton which she was riding at walking pace. It talk 3 repetitions of "I can't walk; that's my wheelchair" before it sunk in.
"It's not about pedestrians vs cyclists as the main question; don't fall for that one."
It's my own view: all too often, then it the experience for pedestrians. And the cyclist 'lobby' are in denial about it. A pedestrian having to move out o the way because of some inconsiderate @sshat rider does not care if the rider was a 'serious' cyclist or an ASBO cyclist. And IME 'serious' cyclists - pepparami in lycra - are just as likely to be inconsiderate.
This is precisely the sort of attitude that pi**es me off with the cycle lobby. They can never be at fault; they're always the victim; no other road user matters. We saw this with the Huntingdon and the Regent's Park incidents, in different directions.
I recall some posters trying to tell me that the pavement in Huntingdon was a cyclepath...
More people are killed by mobility scooters. Cows. And lightning.
Now I have a really weird image as to how *that* accident occured...
Spoiler: parents are not ditching their cars. A BBC Bristol journalist from BBC Bristol has spoken to a couple of left-wing parents in urban areas of what is now one of the UK's most left-wing cities who now cycle their kids to school.
It's entirely unrepresentative, it is very much exaggerated and it is absolutely very BBC. Met and preachy to the core.
I am a big supporter of the BBC - I think the country is trashing a huge soft influence asset by running it down...
But I have to say this is a fair cop Casino - DM or Express levels of journalism. I fear the journalist's/editor's biases got the better of them.
It’s noteworthy that there’s a BBC article that’s remotely biased in that direction given the torrent of Tory talking points the organisation is cowed into spewing on a daily basis.
There have always been weak articles like this on the site. Inevitable when you consider the volume they pump out daily. Though I’d note that at least a third of the parents at our primary school, possibly closer to half, don’t own a car. It’s perhaps of anthropological interest to those living outside big cities to understand the cultural norms and mores of the millions who do.
Yes. I think there's a more interesting story to be written about the inconvenience of bringing up a family without the use of a car that would still fit the topic.
To your point I'm guessing most young families are in cities because that's where the jobs are.
There was a great slightly provocative quote on the school run in the video about Waterbeach I posted yesterday:
"With the local schools team, we said what what do you need in terms of access - how much parking do you need for parents in the morning? They basically said we don't want any because whatever you do outside the front of a primary school it will be chaos.
If you provide 50 parking spaces they'll be filled and more. If you provide none it will all be filled and more. So we'd rather you didn't provide any. So that was actually quite encouraging and not really the answer we'd expected."
(Separate facility provided for staff, disabled access etc. Plus a local mobility hub within walking distance on paths through amenity space.)
My cynical side says that that response was from the developer: who would quite like that car parking space to cram yet more houses in.
Our school has a too-small car park; shared by it and the adjacent secondary. The approach is via a long road that leads from almost outside the village; most people have a long drive just to reach the access road.
There is lots of active travel to the school; a short path leads from the end of a residential road in the village to the main gate. At school times, this is crammed with people and bikes. Noticeably less so in wet weather, though, when the car park gets busier.
But: lots of people park, or drop kids off on, the residential road; it is a much shorter trip for many than negotiating the access road. The road is not designed for that sort of traffic load. I ca guarantee that this will also happen in Waterbeach; lack of provision of a car park will just lead to people using nearby residential roads.
Active travel is fine for people like me, where we live less than a ten minute walk away from the school, especially as I don't work. It may be very different if you need to drive to work immediately afterwards - in other words, the life many people lead.
I'd recommend watching the presentation - it is only 15 minutes. There is car park provision at the mobility hub nearby, which is provision for the area rather than just the school.
"Nearby roads" are tending to be replaced with open landscaped amenity space or walking / wheeling / cycling paths.
I haven't watched the whole thing yet, but I like the way that tactile paving is now deemed unnecessary (coz cyclists hate them). I wonder what the RNIB think of that?
This is one of my bugbears: if a path is to be shared use between cyclists and pedestrians, then cyclist should be restricted in speed relative to the pedestrians. Maybe not to walking speed; but no more than two or three times pedestrian speed. Instead, you get people going very fast. What they've created there is a racetrack for cyclists - and it will be used as such.
I am *very* cynical when it comes to the cycling lobby arguing for cycling infrastructure at the expense of pedestrians. Good infrastructure would involve compromises for all users.
Thoughts. There's a lot about the need to unlearn assumptions, and change cultural expectations. You see that in the hierarchy of road users in the updated Highway Code from 2022 - the pedestrian priority at side road entrances will remain difficult in some measure until general road culture changes, which will take years or perhaps 2 decades, especially when we have no routine continuing education required to maintain a driving license.
Or contraflow cycling on 20mph one way streets. Been done in Cambridge since the 1990s, and now I think (you may know better) on pretty much all one way streets. But try and do a single street in Mansfield, and all the Local Councillors will have a heart attack because it is "so dangerous". Or two way mobility tracks on Binley Road in Coventry and "people will never look both ways" (is it so difficult - Highway Code says it is a basic?and "it is dangerous when I reverse out of my drive into the busy road" (why the f*ck are you reversing *out* of your drive?)
Unlearning habits: One amusing thing that happened at Waterbeach (in the presentation) is that when they created a flat environment where pedestrians get priority, one of the first developers created and built another whole new level of pavements on top with kerbs even higher - not getting the basic philosophy that they were designed out. I'm interested how often tactile paving standards (which have been in place since the 1980s) are often simply not followed when it is installed.
Shared space is in debate. We are trained to make streets with kerbs, tactiles etc to make them readable by visually impaired. "Shared space" was a movement from ~2000-2005 which said "remove all of that and people will be safe because motor vehicle drivers will have do be considerate". That gave us spaces like Exhibition Road, which has failed because it treats shared space as fully including motor vehicles rather than allowing them in as "guests". It missed that that never works in practice because all drivers are human, and VI people / vulnerable road users can't trust their lives to that. Waterbeach is far more thorough, very much circumscribing spaces accessible by motor and changing priorities, but I'm not 100% convinced it will be successful. That's another one around cultural expectations.
Pedestrians vs cyclists. A development over maybe the last 2-3 years has been convergence around common needs, especially amongst disabled charities and organisations like Sustrans. The Cycle Design Vehicle required to be accommodated (and often not) by new cycling infra (1.2m wide by 2.8m long - that is, size plus a dynamic envelope aka wobble room) has almost identical needs to mobility aids.
Personally when lobbying or arguing I always take the PoV of a disabled pedestrian, because I am (or will be) one, I got radicalised on this stuff by not being able to wheel my mum to the GP as all the walkways had wheelchair blocking barriers, and it avoids a lot of spurious distractions, plus has more legal teeth.
There are certain small fringe organisations around - such as those feeding inflammatory videos about 'floating bus stops' to the Mail and the Telegraph - who *want* a cyclists-vs-disabled conflict, and say things like 'cycling organisation Sustrans using disabled people as a human shield'. On bus stop bypasses they ignore that banning them will force mobility aid users out into general traffic at every bus stop - so it's a balance to be struck with factors both sides, and they point blank refuse to acknowledge the other side of the equation. Mark Harper may try a wedge issue on this one before he is finished.
Speeds - my new e-cycle is interesting on that. The 3 levels of assist also reflect speed as well as power, so give me max assist speeds of ~10kph, ~17-18kph, and ~25kph on the flat. I find that 1 is for areas busy with pedestrians, 2 is for shared paths / rough surfaces, and 3 elsewhere.
Enough for now.
Near me, they put “floating bus stops” in. With a black asphalt surface and black curbstones.
After the inevitable happened, they painted white stripes on the curb stones.
Yep - it's in getting decent standards, following the standards and sweating the detail.
In London there has been a real issue for a number of years of Boroughs not following TFL standards, which have in general been good.
On that piccie, it's revealing all the yellow paintwork they had to put in the cycle track to stop ASB drivers abusing it. Something Edinburgh is still working on . There's a wonderful photo of a workteam replacing slabs on the footway smashed by delivery lorries, whilst behind them there is a 7.5 tonne lorry parked on the pavement, delivering.
Err… the double yellow line was there before the cycle lane/floating bus stop. As were the yellow markings on the curb.
The big problem is *lack* of adequate markings. Drivers who don’t know the area are visibly confused at junctions and sometimes only just avoid ending up in the cycle lane.
This is not helped by the idiots who put the cycle lane in changing their… minds?.. three times. Leaving three sets of somewhat faded and painted over markings to choose from.
I had no idea that curb stones could come in black - why would you want them to be?
That's interesting - so they pretty much modified the carriageway rather than reconstruct the whole corridor. It's interesting that they did not feel they could trust them enough to remove the yellow lines .
That will be budgets? Really expensive bits are when you start modifying foundations and underground features, as you start running into services. But grinding and repainting markings is not a big expense in the context of such a scheme, nor is getting it vaguely right first time - though often they need adjusting.
Where is it? What did it look like before?
The square ended island (which may be against a junction at the feet of the photographer?) looks like some of the things done on main roads through places like Peckham, where one complaint (from both user angles) is that some drivers turn their vehicles left into the end of the cycle track by mistake.
The kerb stones one is strange. They are usually a similar colour to the pavement and/or carriageway, and we have not had a history of needing to paint them back and white everywhere across the country.
One help would be for all cycle tracks to have their own surface colour wherever needed, but that would struggle to get adopted in the UK - we are too cheapskate.
On the question of floating bus stops, I'd note that the Hammersmith & Fulham one backs onto a road not a cycle path, and that might be why one is controversial and the other not. It can be easier for pedestrians to cross in the presence of cars than bikes. For a start, cars are easier to see. More subtly, that can work the other way. Car drivers are probably looking ahead. Cyclists, especially if going fast, might be looking mostly at the ground. Even if they've seen you, it is hard to make eye contact to confirm they've seen you.
The ones created on the Mile End Rd / Bow Rd section of the Cycle Superhighway 2 route in East London seem to work pretty well - one of the things they've done is to get buses to line up with the bus shelter before opening their doors.
That means that passengers can't simply exit the bus and take a couple of steps without looking before ending up in the cycle lane - instead, they first have to walk round the bus shelter which gives them a bit more time to gain situational awareness.
Of course, they were lucky in that they had loads of room to work with there - the inner part of the same route, along Aldgate / Whitechapel Rd is both narrower and busier, and as a result is far scarier.
I mean, that's sorta the issue, isn't it? The *pedestrians* have to walk around the bus shelter, coz cyclists have priority. How easy is that with a pram, or with limited visibility, or a dog, or with lots of people queuing, etc, etc?
It's not about pedestrians vs cyclists as the main question; don't fall for that one. That's a trope used by trolling lobbies and politicians wanting wedge issues. ASBO "cyclists" on pavements, of whom the majority of serious problems are likely ASBO motorcyclists with hacked ebikes or unregistered motorbikes such as Surrons, are a cultural and enforcement issue. The City of London are doing interesting stuff at present, including offering "responsible cycling" courses, as are sometimes transformative for lawbreaking motor vehicle drivers.
It's about equal access to the ability to travel. 40% of disabled adults do not have a driving license, compared to slightly more than half of that - 25% - for able-bodied adults. For many of that 40% it is not an option for medical reasons; I may in this category in 15-20 years if Diabetes damages my eyesight.
It's not acceptable that those peoples' autonomy is taken away; cycles (and e-cycles) as mobility aids are a part of that. The difference even on a manual cycle is that it is 6x more efficient than walking, which facilitates wider travel - it makes a huge difference to be able to get 10 miles from home rather than 1-2 miles.
I was advising someone with Fibromyalgia yesterday looking for a long (35 miles) off-road route around Derby to e-cycle today in the sun for half the day. It has to be entirely step free as she suffers serious pain from even pushing her cycle up one or two steps or a cycle groove, or any distance; "Cyclists Dismount" - NOPE. Many things we don't have around here; one thing we do have are former pit railways turned into rail trails. We have canal towpaths too, but many of them are barriered off.
One ask for the rumoured Transport Bill was for cycles - handcycles, tricycles, clip on e-cycles for wheelchairs and so on, to be recognised as mobility aids to bring them within the scope of eg motability. As remarked earlier, they are not cheap (a clip-on e-cycle is £2000 to £5000), and disabled people have a higher likelihood of being poorer.
Mobility lanes are also about mobility aids, and the possibility of using them easily and safely avoiding the dangers of being on the carriageway amongst the motor vehicles.
One of the most bizarre things you will see sometimes is clipboard-wielding Council Officers and others who think they are Jesus; they accost disabled people on cycles with legs that don't work properly, and essentially demand "Pick Up Your Mobility Aid and Walk". I have a friend who had that happen in St Pancras Station, when she was actually towing her wheelchair behind her Brompton which she was riding at walking pace. It talk 3 repetitions of "I can't walk; that's my wheelchair" before it sunk in.
"It's not about pedestrians vs cyclists as the main question; don't fall for that one."
It's my own view: all too often, then it the experience for pedestrians. And the cyclist 'lobby' are in denial about it. A pedestrian having to move out o the way because of some inconsiderate @sshat rider does not care if the rider was a 'serious' cyclist or an ASBO cyclist. And IME 'serious' cyclists - pepparami in lycra - are just as likely to be inconsiderate.
This is precisely the sort of attitude that pi**es me off with the cycle lobby. They can never be at fault; they're always the victim; no other road user matters. We saw this with the Huntingdon and the Regent's Park incidents, in different directions.
I recall some posters trying to tell me that the pavement in Huntingdon was a cyclepath...
Spoiler: parents are not ditching their cars. A BBC Bristol journalist from BBC Bristol has spoken to a couple of left-wing parents in urban areas of what is now one of the UK's most left-wing cities who now cycle their kids to school.
It's entirely unrepresentative, it is very much exaggerated and it is absolutely very BBC. Met and preachy to the core.
I am a big supporter of the BBC - I think the country is trashing a huge soft influence asset by running it down...
But I have to say this is a fair cop Casino - DM or Express levels of journalism. I fear the journalist's/editor's biases got the better of them.
It’s noteworthy that there’s a BBC article that’s remotely biased in that direction given the torrent of Tory talking points the organisation is cowed into spewing on a daily basis.
There have always been weak articles like this on the site. Inevitable when you consider the volume they pump out daily. Though I’d note that at least a third of the parents at our primary school, possibly closer to half, don’t own a car. It’s perhaps of anthropological interest to those living outside big cities to understand the cultural norms and mores of the millions who do.
Yes. I think there's a more interesting story to be written about the inconvenience of bringing up a family without the use of a car that would still fit the topic.
To your point I'm guessing most young families are in cities because that's where the jobs are.
There was a great slightly provocative quote on the school run in the video about Waterbeach I posted yesterday:
"With the local schools team, we said what what do you need in terms of access - how much parking do you need for parents in the morning? They basically said we don't want any because whatever you do outside the front of a primary school it will be chaos.
If you provide 50 parking spaces they'll be filled and more. If you provide none it will all be filled and more. So we'd rather you didn't provide any. So that was actually quite encouraging and not really the answer we'd expected."
(Separate facility provided for staff, disabled access etc. Plus a local mobility hub within walking distance on paths through amenity space.)
My cynical side says that that response was from the developer: who would quite like that car parking space to cram yet more houses in.
Our school has a too-small car park; shared by it and the adjacent secondary. The approach is via a long road that leads from almost outside the village; most people have a long drive just to reach the access road.
There is lots of active travel to the school; a short path leads from the end of a residential road in the village to the main gate. At school times, this is crammed with people and bikes. Noticeably less so in wet weather, though, when the car park gets busier.
But: lots of people park, or drop kids off on, the residential road; it is a much shorter trip for many than negotiating the access road. The road is not designed for that sort of traffic load. I ca guarantee that this will also happen in Waterbeach; lack of provision of a car park will just lead to people using nearby residential roads.
Active travel is fine for people like me, where we live less than a ten minute walk away from the school, especially as I don't work. It may be very different if you need to drive to work immediately afterwards - in other words, the life many people lead.
I'd recommend watching the presentation - it is only 15 minutes. There is car park provision at the mobility hub nearby, which is provision for the area rather than just the school.
"Nearby roads" are tending to be replaced with open landscaped amenity space or walking / wheeling / cycling paths.
I haven't watched the whole thing yet, but I like the way that tactile paving is now deemed unnecessary (coz cyclists hate them). I wonder what the RNIB think of that?
This is one of my bugbears: if a path is to be shared use between cyclists and pedestrians, then cyclist should be restricted in speed relative to the pedestrians. Maybe not to walking speed; but no more than two or three times pedestrian speed. Instead, you get people going very fast. What they've created there is a racetrack for cyclists - and it will be used as such.
I am *very* cynical when it comes to the cycling lobby arguing for cycling infrastructure at the expense of pedestrians. Good infrastructure would involve compromises for all users.
Thoughts. There's a lot about the need to unlearn assumptions, and change cultural expectations. You see that in the hierarchy of road users in the updated Highway Code from 2022 - the pedestrian priority at side road entrances will remain difficult in some measure until general road culture changes, which will take years or perhaps 2 decades, especially when we have no routine continuing education required to maintain a driving license.
Or contraflow cycling on 20mph one way streets. Been done in Cambridge since the 1990s, and now I think (you may know better) on pretty much all one way streets. But try and do a single street in Mansfield, and all the Local Councillors will have a heart attack because it is "so dangerous". Or two way mobility tracks on Binley Road in Coventry and "people will never look both ways" (is it so difficult - Highway Code says it is a basic?and "it is dangerous when I reverse out of my drive into the busy road" (why the f*ck are you reversing *out* of your drive?)
Unlearning habits: One amusing thing that happened at Waterbeach (in the presentation) is that when they created a flat environment where pedestrians get priority, one of the first developers created and built another whole new level of pavements on top with kerbs even higher - not getting the basic philosophy that they were designed out. I'm interested how often tactile paving standards (which have been in place since the 1980s) are often simply not followed when it is installed.
Shared space is in debate. We are trained to make streets with kerbs, tactiles etc to make them readable by visually impaired. "Shared space" was a movement from ~2000-2005 which said "remove all of that and people will be safe because motor vehicle drivers will have do be considerate". That gave us spaces like Exhibition Road, which has failed because it treats shared space as fully including motor vehicles rather than allowing them in as "guests". It missed that that never works in practice because all drivers are human, and VI people / vulnerable road users can't trust their lives to that. Waterbeach is far more thorough, very much circumscribing spaces accessible by motor and changing priorities, but I'm not 100% convinced it will be successful. That's another one around cultural expectations.
Pedestrians vs cyclists. A development over maybe the last 2-3 years has been convergence around common needs, especially amongst disabled charities and organisations like Sustrans. The Cycle Design Vehicle required to be accommodated (and often not) by new cycling infra (1.2m wide by 2.8m long - that is, size plus a dynamic envelope aka wobble room) has almost identical needs to mobility aids.
Personally when lobbying or arguing I always take the PoV of a disabled pedestrian, because I am (or will be) one, I got radicalised on this stuff by not being able to wheel my mum to the GP as all the walkways had wheelchair blocking barriers, and it avoids a lot of spurious distractions, plus has more legal teeth.
There are certain small fringe organisations around - such as those feeding inflammatory videos about 'floating bus stops' to the Mail and the Telegraph - who *want* a cyclists-vs-disabled conflict, and say things like 'cycling organisation Sustrans using disabled people as a human shield'. On bus stop bypasses they ignore that banning them will force mobility aid users out into general traffic at every bus stop - so it's a balance to be struck with factors both sides, and they point blank refuse to acknowledge the other side of the equation. Mark Harper may try a wedge issue on this one before he is finished.
Speeds - my new e-cycle is interesting on that. The 3 levels of assist also reflect speed as well as power, so give me max assist speeds of ~10kph, ~17-18kph, and ~25kph on the flat. I find that 1 is for areas busy with pedestrians, 2 is for shared paths / rough surfaces, and 3 elsewhere.
Enough for now.
Near me, they put “floating bus stops” in. With a black asphalt surface and black curbstones.
After the inevitable happened, they painted white stripes on the curb stones.
Yep - it's in getting decent standards, following the standards and sweating the detail.
In London there has been a real issue for a number of years of Boroughs not following TFL standards, which have in general been good.
On that piccie, it's revealing all the yellow paintwork they had to put in the cycle track to stop ASB drivers abusing it. Something Edinburgh is still working on . There's a wonderful photo of a workteam replacing slabs on the footway smashed by delivery lorries, whilst behind them there is a 7.5 tonne lorry parked on the pavement, delivering.
Err… the double yellow line was there before the cycle lane/floating bus stop. As were the yellow markings on the curb.
The big problem is *lack* of adequate markings. Drivers who don’t know the area are visibly confused at junctions and sometimes only just avoid ending up in the cycle lane.
This is not helped by the idiots who put the cycle lane in changing their… minds?.. three times. Leaving three sets of somewhat faded and painted over markings to choose from.
I had no idea that curb stones could come in black - why would you want them to be?
That's interesting - so they pretty much modified the carriageway rather than reconstruct the whole corridor. It's interesting that they did not feel they could trust them enough to remove the yellow lines .
That will be budgets? Really expensive bits are when you start modifying foundations and underground features, as you start running into services. But grinding and repainting markings is not a big expense in the context of such a scheme, nor is getting it vaguely right first time - though often they need adjusting.
Where is it? What did it look like before?
The square ended island (which may be against a junction at the feet of the photographer?) looks like some of the things done on main roads through places like Peckham, where one complaint (from both user angles) is that some drivers turn their vehicles left into the end of the cycle track by mistake.
The kerb stones one is strange. They are usually a similar colour to the pavement and/or carriageway, and we have not had a history of needing to paint them back and white everywhere across the country.
One help would be for all cycle tracks to have their own surface colour wherever needed, but that would struggle to get adopted in the UK - we are too cheapskate.
On the question of floating bus stops, I'd note that the Hammersmith & Fulham one backs onto a road not a cycle path, and that might be why one is controversial and the other not. It can be easier for pedestrians to cross in the presence of cars than bikes. For a start, cars are easier to see. More subtly, that can work the other way. Car drivers are probably looking ahead. Cyclists, especially if going fast, might be looking mostly at the ground. Even if they've seen you, it is hard to make eye contact to confirm they've seen you.
The ones created on the Mile End Rd / Bow Rd section of the Cycle Superhighway 2 route in East London seem to work pretty well - one of the things they've done is to get buses to line up with the bus shelter before opening their doors.
That means that passengers can't simply exit the bus and take a couple of steps without looking before ending up in the cycle lane - instead, they first have to walk round the bus shelter which gives them a bit more time to gain situational awareness.
Of course, they were lucky in that they had loads of room to work with there - the inner part of the same route, along Aldgate / Whitechapel Rd is both narrower and busier, and as a result is far scarier.
I mean, that's sorta the issue, isn't it? The *pedestrians* have to walk around the bus shelter, coz cyclists have priority. How easy is that with a pram, or with limited visibility, or a dog, or with lots of people queuing, etc, etc?
It's not about pedestrians vs cyclists as the main question; don't fall for that one. That's a trope used by trolling lobbies and politicians wanting wedge issues. ASBO "cyclists" on pavements, of whom the majority of serious problems are likely ASBO motorcyclists with hacked ebikes or unregistered motorbikes such as Surrons, are a cultural and enforcement issue. The City of London are doing interesting stuff at present, including offering "responsible cycling" courses, as are sometimes transformative for lawbreaking motor vehicle drivers.
It's about equal access to the ability to travel. 40% of disabled adults do not have a driving license, compared to slightly more than half of that - 25% - for able-bodied adults. For many of that 40% it is not an option for medical reasons; I may in this category in 15-20 years if Diabetes damages my eyesight.
It's not acceptable that those peoples' autonomy is taken away; cycles (and e-cycles) as mobility aids are a part of that. The difference even on a manual cycle is that it is 6x more efficient than walking, which facilitates wider travel - it makes a huge difference to be able to get 10 miles from home rather than 1-2 miles.
I was advising someone with Fibromyalgia yesterday looking for a long (35 miles) off-road route around Derby to e-cycle today in the sun for half the day. It has to be entirely step free as she suffers serious pain from even pushing her cycle up one or two steps or a cycle groove, or any distance; "Cyclists Dismount" - NOPE. Many things we don't have around here; one thing we do have are former pit railways turned into rail trails. We have canal towpaths too, but many of them are barriered off.
One ask for the rumoured Transport Bill was for cycles - handcycles, tricycles, clip on e-cycles for wheelchairs and so on, to be recognised as mobility aids to bring them within the scope of eg motability. As remarked earlier, they are not cheap (a clip-on e-cycle is £2000 to £5000), and disabled people have a higher likelihood of being poorer.
Mobility lanes are also about mobility aids, and the possibility of using them easily and safely avoiding the dangers of being on the carriageway amongst the motor vehicles.
One of the most bizarre things you will see sometimes is clipboard-wielding Council Officers and others who think they are Jesus; they accost disabled people on cycles with legs that don't work properly, and essentially demand "Pick Up Your Mobility Aid and Walk". I have a friend who had that happen in St Pancras Station, when she was actually towing her wheelchair behind her Brompton which she was riding at walking pace. It talk 3 repetitions of "I can't walk; that's my wheelchair" before it sunk in.
"It's not about pedestrians vs cyclists as the main question; don't fall for that one."
It's my own view: all too often, then it the experience for pedestrians. And the cyclist 'lobby' are in denial about it. A pedestrian having to move out o the way because of some inconsiderate @sshat rider does not care if the rider was a 'serious' cyclist or an ASBO cyclist. And IME 'serious' cyclists - pepparami in lycra - are just as likely to be inconsiderate.
This is precisely the sort of attitude that pi**es me off with the cycle lobby. They can never be at fault; they're always the victim; no other road user matters. We saw this with the Huntingdon and the Regent's Park incidents, in different directions.
I recall some posters trying to tell me that the pavement in Huntingdon was a cyclepath...
More people are killed by mobility scooters. Cows. And lightning.
No one likes a deliveroo cyclist whizzing down a pavement, or a MAMIL doing 22mph through a quiet village. But what we've seen over the last week is people completely lose their heads over the issue.
It's not just 'deliveroo cyclists'. And I don't care if more people are killed by Leon's aliens; that doesn't excuse it. As we've seen; cyclist collisions with pedestrians are often unreported and are not investigated by police.
Cyclists are not above other road users. All road users need to muddle along; That is not the attitude that the cycle lobby give out.
I want cyclists to be safer. I want pedestrians to be safer. I want car drivers to be safer. That will only happen when everyone using roads takes responsibility for their actions, and respects the rights of others to use the road.
Sadly, in all three modes, there are people who think it is not 'the' road, but 'their' road.
Spoiler: parents are not ditching their cars. A BBC Bristol journalist from BBC Bristol has spoken to a couple of left-wing parents in urban areas of what is now one of the UK's most left-wing cities who now cycle their kids to school.
It's entirely unrepresentative, it is very much exaggerated and it is absolutely very BBC. Met and preachy to the core.
I am a big supporter of the BBC - I think the country is trashing a huge soft influence asset by running it down...
But I have to say this is a fair cop Casino - DM or Express levels of journalism. I fear the journalist's/editor's biases got the better of them.
It’s noteworthy that there’s a BBC article that’s remotely biased in that direction given the torrent of Tory talking points the organisation is cowed into spewing on a daily basis.
There have always been weak articles like this on the site. Inevitable when you consider the volume they pump out daily. Though I’d note that at least a third of the parents at our primary school, possibly closer to half, don’t own a car. It’s perhaps of anthropological interest to those living outside big cities to understand the cultural norms and mores of the millions who do.
Yes. I think there's a more interesting story to be written about the inconvenience of bringing up a family without the use of a car that would still fit the topic.
To your point I'm guessing most young families are in cities because that's where the jobs are.
There was a great slightly provocative quote on the school run in the video about Waterbeach I posted yesterday:
"With the local schools team, we said what what do you need in terms of access - how much parking do you need for parents in the morning? They basically said we don't want any because whatever you do outside the front of a primary school it will be chaos.
If you provide 50 parking spaces they'll be filled and more. If you provide none it will all be filled and more. So we'd rather you didn't provide any. So that was actually quite encouraging and not really the answer we'd expected."
(Separate facility provided for staff, disabled access etc. Plus a local mobility hub within walking distance on paths through amenity space.)
My cynical side says that that response was from the developer: who would quite like that car parking space to cram yet more houses in.
Our school has a too-small car park; shared by it and the adjacent secondary. The approach is via a long road that leads from almost outside the village; most people have a long drive just to reach the access road.
There is lots of active travel to the school; a short path leads from the end of a residential road in the village to the main gate. At school times, this is crammed with people and bikes. Noticeably less so in wet weather, though, when the car park gets busier.
But: lots of people park, or drop kids off on, the residential road; it is a much shorter trip for many than negotiating the access road. The road is not designed for that sort of traffic load. I ca guarantee that this will also happen in Waterbeach; lack of provision of a car park will just lead to people using nearby residential roads.
Active travel is fine for people like me, where we live less than a ten minute walk away from the school, especially as I don't work. It may be very different if you need to drive to work immediately afterwards - in other words, the life many people lead.
I'd recommend watching the presentation - it is only 15 minutes. There is car park provision at the mobility hub nearby, which is provision for the area rather than just the school.
"Nearby roads" are tending to be replaced with open landscaped amenity space or walking / wheeling / cycling paths.
I haven't watched the whole thing yet, but I like the way that tactile paving is now deemed unnecessary (coz cyclists hate them). I wonder what the RNIB think of that?
This is one of my bugbears: if a path is to be shared use between cyclists and pedestrians, then cyclist should be restricted in speed relative to the pedestrians. Maybe not to walking speed; but no more than two or three times pedestrian speed. Instead, you get people going very fast. What they've created there is a racetrack for cyclists - and it will be used as such.
I am *very* cynical when it comes to the cycling lobby arguing for cycling infrastructure at the expense of pedestrians. Good infrastructure would involve compromises for all users.
Thoughts. There's a lot about the need to unlearn assumptions, and change cultural expectations. You see that in the hierarchy of road users in the updated Highway Code from 2022 - the pedestrian priority at side road entrances will remain difficult in some measure until general road culture changes, which will take years or perhaps 2 decades, especially when we have no routine continuing education required to maintain a driving license.
Or contraflow cycling on 20mph one way streets. Been done in Cambridge since the 1990s, and now I think (you may know better) on pretty much all one way streets. But try and do a single street in Mansfield, and all the Local Councillors will have a heart attack because it is "so dangerous". Or two way mobility tracks on Binley Road in Coventry and "people will never look both ways" (is it so difficult - Highway Code says it is a basic?and "it is dangerous when I reverse out of my drive into the busy road" (why the f*ck are you reversing *out* of your drive?)
Unlearning habits: One amusing thing that happened at Waterbeach (in the presentation) is that when they created a flat environment where pedestrians get priority, one of the first developers created and built another whole new level of pavements on top with kerbs even higher - not getting the basic philosophy that they were designed out. I'm interested how often tactile paving standards (which have been in place since the 1980s) are often simply not followed when it is installed.
Shared space is in debate. We are trained to make streets with kerbs, tactiles etc to make them readable by visually impaired. "Shared space" was a movement from ~2000-2005 which said "remove all of that and people will be safe because motor vehicle drivers will have do be considerate". That gave us spaces like Exhibition Road, which has failed because it treats shared space as fully including motor vehicles rather than allowing them in as "guests". It missed that that never works in practice because all drivers are human, and VI people / vulnerable road users can't trust their lives to that. Waterbeach is far more thorough, very much circumscribing spaces accessible by motor and changing priorities, but I'm not 100% convinced it will be successful. That's another one around cultural expectations.
Pedestrians vs cyclists. A development over maybe the last 2-3 years has been convergence around common needs, especially amongst disabled charities and organisations like Sustrans. The Cycle Design Vehicle required to be accommodated (and often not) by new cycling infra (1.2m wide by 2.8m long - that is, size plus a dynamic envelope aka wobble room) has almost identical needs to mobility aids.
Personally when lobbying or arguing I always take the PoV of a disabled pedestrian, because I am (or will be) one, I got radicalised on this stuff by not being able to wheel my mum to the GP as all the walkways had wheelchair blocking barriers, and it avoids a lot of spurious distractions, plus has more legal teeth.
There are certain small fringe organisations around - such as those feeding inflammatory videos about 'floating bus stops' to the Mail and the Telegraph - who *want* a cyclists-vs-disabled conflict, and say things like 'cycling organisation Sustrans using disabled people as a human shield'. On bus stop bypasses they ignore that banning them will force mobility aid users out into general traffic at every bus stop - so it's a balance to be struck with factors both sides, and they point blank refuse to acknowledge the other side of the equation. Mark Harper may try a wedge issue on this one before he is finished.
Speeds - my new e-cycle is interesting on that. The 3 levels of assist also reflect speed as well as power, so give me max assist speeds of ~10kph, ~17-18kph, and ~25kph on the flat. I find that 1 is for areas busy with pedestrians, 2 is for shared paths / rough surfaces, and 3 elsewhere.
Enough for now.
Near me, they put “floating bus stops” in. With a black asphalt surface and black curbstones.
After the inevitable happened, they painted white stripes on the curb stones.
Yep - it's in getting decent standards, following the standards and sweating the detail.
In London there has been a real issue for a number of years of Boroughs not following TFL standards, which have in general been good.
On that piccie, it's revealing all the yellow paintwork they had to put in the cycle track to stop ASB drivers abusing it. Something Edinburgh is still working on . There's a wonderful photo of a workteam replacing slabs on the footway smashed by delivery lorries, whilst behind them there is a 7.5 tonne lorry parked on the pavement, delivering.
Err… the double yellow line was there before the cycle lane/floating bus stop. As were the yellow markings on the curb.
The big problem is *lack* of adequate markings. Drivers who don’t know the area are visibly confused at junctions and sometimes only just avoid ending up in the cycle lane.
This is not helped by the idiots who put the cycle lane in changing their… minds?.. three times. Leaving three sets of somewhat faded and painted over markings to choose from.
I had no idea that curb stones could come in black - why would you want them to be?
That's interesting - so they pretty much modified the carriageway rather than reconstruct the whole corridor. It's interesting that they did not feel they could trust them enough to remove the yellow lines .
That will be budgets? Really expensive bits are when you start modifying foundations and underground features, as you start running into services. But grinding and repainting markings is not a big expense in the context of such a scheme, nor is getting it vaguely right first time - though often they need adjusting.
Where is it? What did it look like before?
The square ended island (which may be against a junction at the feet of the photographer?) looks like some of the things done on main roads through places like Peckham, where one complaint (from both user angles) is that some drivers turn their vehicles left into the end of the cycle track by mistake.
The kerb stones one is strange. They are usually a similar colour to the pavement and/or carriageway, and we have not had a history of needing to paint them back and white everywhere across the country.
One help would be for all cycle tracks to have their own surface colour wherever needed, but that would struggle to get adopted in the UK - we are too cheapskate.
On the question of floating bus stops, I'd note that the Hammersmith & Fulham one backs onto a road not a cycle path, and that might be why one is controversial and the other not. It can be easier for pedestrians to cross in the presence of cars than bikes. For a start, cars are easier to see. More subtly, that can work the other way. Car drivers are probably looking ahead. Cyclists, especially if going fast, might be looking mostly at the ground. Even if they've seen you, it is hard to make eye contact to confirm they've seen you.
The ones created on the Mile End Rd / Bow Rd section of the Cycle Superhighway 2 route in East London seem to work pretty well - one of the things they've done is to get buses to line up with the bus shelter before opening their doors.
That means that passengers can't simply exit the bus and take a couple of steps without looking before ending up in the cycle lane - instead, they first have to walk round the bus shelter which gives them a bit more time to gain situational awareness.
Of course, they were lucky in that they had loads of room to work with there - the inner part of the same route, along Aldgate / Whitechapel Rd is both narrower and busier, and as a result is far scarier.
I mean, that's sorta the issue, isn't it? The *pedestrians* have to walk around the bus shelter, coz cyclists have priority. How easy is that with a pram, or with limited visibility, or a dog, or with lots of people queuing, etc, etc?
It's not about pedestrians vs cyclists as the main question; don't fall for that one. That's a trope used by trolling lobbies and politicians wanting wedge issues. ASBO "cyclists" on pavements, of whom the majority of serious problems are likely ASBO motorcyclists with hacked ebikes or unregistered motorbikes such as Surrons, are a cultural and enforcement issue. The City of London are doing interesting stuff at present, including offering "responsible cycling" courses, as are sometimes transformative for lawbreaking motor vehicle drivers.
It's about equal access to the ability to travel. 40% of disabled adults do not have a driving license, compared to slightly more than half of that - 25% - for able-bodied adults. For many of that 40% it is not an option for medical reasons; I may in this category in 15-20 years if Diabetes damages my eyesight.
It's not acceptable that those peoples' autonomy is taken away; cycles (and e-cycles) as mobility aids are a part of that. The difference even on a manual cycle is that it is 6x more efficient than walking, which facilitates wider travel - it makes a huge difference to be able to get 10 miles from home rather than 1-2 miles.
I was advising someone with Fibromyalgia yesterday looking for a long (35 miles) off-road route around Derby to e-cycle today in the sun for half the day. It has to be entirely step free as she suffers serious pain from even pushing her cycle up one or two steps or a cycle groove, or any distance; "Cyclists Dismount" - NOPE. Many things we don't have around here; one thing we do have are former pit railways turned into rail trails. We have canal towpaths too, but many of them are barriered off.
One ask for the rumoured Transport Bill was for cycles - handcycles, tricycles, clip on e-cycles for wheelchairs and so on, to be recognised as mobility aids to bring them within the scope of eg motability. As remarked earlier, they are not cheap (a clip-on e-cycle is £2000 to £5000), and disabled people have a higher likelihood of being poorer.
Mobility lanes are also about mobility aids, and the possibility of using them easily and safely avoiding the dangers of being on the carriageway amongst the motor vehicles.
One of the most bizarre things you will see sometimes is clipboard-wielding Council Officers and others who think they are Jesus; they accost disabled people on cycles with legs that don't work properly, and essentially demand "Pick Up Your Mobility Aid and Walk". I have a friend who had that happen in St Pancras Station, when she was actually towing her wheelchair behind her Brompton which she was riding at walking pace. It talk 3 repetitions of "I can't walk; that's my wheelchair" before it sunk in.
"It's not about pedestrians vs cyclists as the main question; don't fall for that one."
It's my own view: all too often, then it the experience for pedestrians. And the cyclist 'lobby' are in denial about it. A pedestrian having to move out o the way because of some inconsiderate @sshat rider does not care if the rider was a 'serious' cyclist or an ASBO cyclist. And IME 'serious' cyclists - pepparami in lycra - are just as likely to be inconsiderate.
This is precisely the sort of attitude that pi**es me off with the cycle lobby. They can never be at fault; they're always the victim; no other road user matters. We saw this with the Huntingdon and the Regent's Park incidents, in different directions.
I recall some posters trying to tell me that the pavement in Huntingdon was a cyclepath...
More people are killed by mobility scooters. Cows. And lightning.
No one likes a deliveroo cyclist whizzing down a pavement, or a MAMIL doing 22mph through a quiet village. But what we've seen over the last week is people completely lose their heads over the issue.
It's not just 'deliveroo cyclists'. And I don't care if more people are killed by Leon's aliens; that doesn't excuse it. As we've seen; cyclist collisions with pedestrians are often unreported and are not investigated by police.
Cyclists are not above other road users. All road users need to muddle along; That is not the attitude that the cycle lobby give out.
I want cyclists to be safer. I want pedestrians to be safer. I want car drivers to be safer. That will only happen when everyone using roads takes responsibility for their actions, and respects the rights of others to use the road.
Sadly, in all three modes, there are people who think it is not 'the' road, but 'their' road.
I don't see why cyclists and motorists and pedestrians are always at each other's throats on here. It's really stupid when we can all just agree that motorcyclists are the scum of the earth.
Looks like the red crescent guys aren't missing at all so that's some good news. However Iran has 'imminent announcement' written all over it at the moment and the rev guards appear to be fortifying Tehran against unrest. Into the teeth of the gale again
Are we expecting them to blame Israel?
That will happen, whether officially or not, but certainly its a high risk thing
If Khameini goes for 'blame Israel' then we are about to find out how far Irans nuke program has come
They are in a bit of a bind, if they blame Israel they are saying that Israel are so good at shit that they can get past Iranian presidential security and strike in the heart of Iran. If they say it’s an accident then people will criticise them for not taking enough care of their president.
Spoiler: parents are not ditching their cars. A BBC Bristol journalist from BBC Bristol has spoken to a couple of left-wing parents in urban areas of what is now one of the UK's most left-wing cities who now cycle their kids to school.
It's entirely unrepresentative, it is very much exaggerated and it is absolutely very BBC. Met and preachy to the core.
I am a big supporter of the BBC - I think the country is trashing a huge soft influence asset by running it down...
But I have to say this is a fair cop Casino - DM or Express levels of journalism. I fear the journalist's/editor's biases got the better of them.
It’s noteworthy that there’s a BBC article that’s remotely biased in that direction given the torrent of Tory talking points the organisation is cowed into spewing on a daily basis.
There have always been weak articles like this on the site. Inevitable when you consider the volume they pump out daily. Though I’d note that at least a third of the parents at our primary school, possibly closer to half, don’t own a car. It’s perhaps of anthropological interest to those living outside big cities to understand the cultural norms and mores of the millions who do.
Yes. I think there's a more interesting story to be written about the inconvenience of bringing up a family without the use of a car that would still fit the topic.
To your point I'm guessing most young families are in cities because that's where the jobs are.
There was a great slightly provocative quote on the school run in the video about Waterbeach I posted yesterday:
"With the local schools team, we said what what do you need in terms of access - how much parking do you need for parents in the morning? They basically said we don't want any because whatever you do outside the front of a primary school it will be chaos.
If you provide 50 parking spaces they'll be filled and more. If you provide none it will all be filled and more. So we'd rather you didn't provide any. So that was actually quite encouraging and not really the answer we'd expected."
(Separate facility provided for staff, disabled access etc. Plus a local mobility hub within walking distance on paths through amenity space.)
My cynical side says that that response was from the developer: who would quite like that car parking space to cram yet more houses in.
Our school has a too-small car park; shared by it and the adjacent secondary. The approach is via a long road that leads from almost outside the village; most people have a long drive just to reach the access road.
There is lots of active travel to the school; a short path leads from the end of a residential road in the village to the main gate. At school times, this is crammed with people and bikes. Noticeably less so in wet weather, though, when the car park gets busier.
But: lots of people park, or drop kids off on, the residential road; it is a much shorter trip for many than negotiating the access road. The road is not designed for that sort of traffic load. I ca guarantee that this will also happen in Waterbeach; lack of provision of a car park will just lead to people using nearby residential roads.
Active travel is fine for people like me, where we live less than a ten minute walk away from the school, especially as I don't work. It may be very different if you need to drive to work immediately afterwards - in other words, the life many people lead.
I'd recommend watching the presentation - it is only 15 minutes. There is car park provision at the mobility hub nearby, which is provision for the area rather than just the school.
"Nearby roads" are tending to be replaced with open landscaped amenity space or walking / wheeling / cycling paths.
I haven't watched the whole thing yet, but I like the way that tactile paving is now deemed unnecessary (coz cyclists hate them). I wonder what the RNIB think of that?
This is one of my bugbears: if a path is to be shared use between cyclists and pedestrians, then cyclist should be restricted in speed relative to the pedestrians. Maybe not to walking speed; but no more than two or three times pedestrian speed. Instead, you get people going very fast. What they've created there is a racetrack for cyclists - and it will be used as such.
I am *very* cynical when it comes to the cycling lobby arguing for cycling infrastructure at the expense of pedestrians. Good infrastructure would involve compromises for all users.
Thoughts. There's a lot about the need to unlearn assumptions, and change cultural expectations. You see that in the hierarchy of road users in the updated Highway Code from 2022 - the pedestrian priority at side road entrances will remain difficult in some measure until general road culture changes, which will take years or perhaps 2 decades, especially when we have no routine continuing education required to maintain a driving license.
Or contraflow cycling on 20mph one way streets. Been done in Cambridge since the 1990s, and now I think (you may know better) on pretty much all one way streets. But try and do a single street in Mansfield, and all the Local Councillors will have a heart attack because it is "so dangerous". Or two way mobility tracks on Binley Road in Coventry and "people will never look both ways" (is it so difficult - Highway Code says it is a basic?and "it is dangerous when I reverse out of my drive into the busy road" (why the f*ck are you reversing *out* of your drive?)
Unlearning habits: One amusing thing that happened at Waterbeach (in the presentation) is that when they created a flat environment where pedestrians get priority, one of the first developers created and built another whole new level of pavements on top with kerbs even higher - not getting the basic philosophy that they were designed out. I'm interested how often tactile paving standards (which have been in place since the 1980s) are often simply not followed when it is installed.
Shared space is in debate. We are trained to make streets with kerbs, tactiles etc to make them readable by visually impaired. "Shared space" was a movement from ~2000-2005 which said "remove all of that and people will be safe because motor vehicle drivers will have do be considerate". That gave us spaces like Exhibition Road, which has failed because it treats shared space as fully including motor vehicles rather than allowing them in as "guests". It missed that that never works in practice because all drivers are human, and VI people / vulnerable road users can't trust their lives to that. Waterbeach is far more thorough, very much circumscribing spaces accessible by motor and changing priorities, but I'm not 100% convinced it will be successful. That's another one around cultural expectations.
Pedestrians vs cyclists. A development over maybe the last 2-3 years has been convergence around common needs, especially amongst disabled charities and organisations like Sustrans. The Cycle Design Vehicle required to be accommodated (and often not) by new cycling infra (1.2m wide by 2.8m long - that is, size plus a dynamic envelope aka wobble room) has almost identical needs to mobility aids.
Personally when lobbying or arguing I always take the PoV of a disabled pedestrian, because I am (or will be) one, I got radicalised on this stuff by not being able to wheel my mum to the GP as all the walkways had wheelchair blocking barriers, and it avoids a lot of spurious distractions, plus has more legal teeth.
There are certain small fringe organisations around - such as those feeding inflammatory videos about 'floating bus stops' to the Mail and the Telegraph - who *want* a cyclists-vs-disabled conflict, and say things like 'cycling organisation Sustrans using disabled people as a human shield'. On bus stop bypasses they ignore that banning them will force mobility aid users out into general traffic at every bus stop - so it's a balance to be struck with factors both sides, and they point blank refuse to acknowledge the other side of the equation. Mark Harper may try a wedge issue on this one before he is finished.
Speeds - my new e-cycle is interesting on that. The 3 levels of assist also reflect speed as well as power, so give me max assist speeds of ~10kph, ~17-18kph, and ~25kph on the flat. I find that 1 is for areas busy with pedestrians, 2 is for shared paths / rough surfaces, and 3 elsewhere.
Enough for now.
Near me, they put “floating bus stops” in. With a black asphalt surface and black curbstones.
After the inevitable happened, they painted white stripes on the curb stones.
Yep - it's in getting decent standards, following the standards and sweating the detail.
In London there has been a real issue for a number of years of Boroughs not following TFL standards, which have in general been good.
On that piccie, it's revealing all the yellow paintwork they had to put in the cycle track to stop ASB drivers abusing it. Something Edinburgh is still working on . There's a wonderful photo of a workteam replacing slabs on the footway smashed by delivery lorries, whilst behind them there is a 7.5 tonne lorry parked on the pavement, delivering.
Err… the double yellow line was there before the cycle lane/floating bus stop. As were the yellow markings on the curb.
The big problem is *lack* of adequate markings. Drivers who don’t know the area are visibly confused at junctions and sometimes only just avoid ending up in the cycle lane.
This is not helped by the idiots who put the cycle lane in changing their… minds?.. three times. Leaving three sets of somewhat faded and painted over markings to choose from.
I had no idea that curb stones could come in black - why would you want them to be?
That's interesting - so they pretty much modified the carriageway rather than reconstruct the whole corridor. It's interesting that they did not feel they could trust them enough to remove the yellow lines .
That will be budgets? Really expensive bits are when you start modifying foundations and underground features, as you start running into services. But grinding and repainting markings is not a big expense in the context of such a scheme, nor is getting it vaguely right first time - though often they need adjusting.
Where is it? What did it look like before?
The square ended island (which may be against a junction at the feet of the photographer?) looks like some of the things done on main roads through places like Peckham, where one complaint (from both user angles) is that some drivers turn their vehicles left into the end of the cycle track by mistake.
The kerb stones one is strange. They are usually a similar colour to the pavement and/or carriageway, and we have not had a history of needing to paint them back and white everywhere across the country.
One help would be for all cycle tracks to have their own surface colour wherever needed, but that would struggle to get adopted in the UK - we are too cheapskate.
On the question of floating bus stops, I'd note that the Hammersmith & Fulham one backs onto a road not a cycle path, and that might be why one is controversial and the other not. It can be easier for pedestrians to cross in the presence of cars than bikes. For a start, cars are easier to see. More subtly, that can work the other way. Car drivers are probably looking ahead. Cyclists, especially if going fast, might be looking mostly at the ground. Even if they've seen you, it is hard to make eye contact to confirm they've seen you.
The ones created on the Mile End Rd / Bow Rd section of the Cycle Superhighway 2 route in East London seem to work pretty well - one of the things they've done is to get buses to line up with the bus shelter before opening their doors.
That means that passengers can't simply exit the bus and take a couple of steps without looking before ending up in the cycle lane - instead, they first have to walk round the bus shelter which gives them a bit more time to gain situational awareness.
Of course, they were lucky in that they had loads of room to work with there - the inner part of the same route, along Aldgate / Whitechapel Rd is both narrower and busier, and as a result is far scarier.
I mean, that's sorta the issue, isn't it? The *pedestrians* have to walk around the bus shelter, coz cyclists have priority. How easy is that with a pram, or with limited visibility, or a dog, or with lots of people queuing, etc, etc?
It's not about pedestrians vs cyclists as the main question; don't fall for that one. That's a trope used by trolling lobbies and politicians wanting wedge issues. ASBO "cyclists" on pavements, of whom the majority of serious problems are likely ASBO motorcyclists with hacked ebikes or unregistered motorbikes such as Surrons, are a cultural and enforcement issue. The City of London are doing interesting stuff at present, including offering "responsible cycling" courses, as are sometimes transformative for lawbreaking motor vehicle drivers.
It's about equal access to the ability to travel. 40% of disabled adults do not have a driving license, compared to slightly more than half of that - 25% - for able-bodied adults. For many of that 40% it is not an option for medical reasons; I may in this category in 15-20 years if Diabetes damages my eyesight.
It's not acceptable that those peoples' autonomy is taken away; cycles (and e-cycles) as mobility aids are a part of that. The difference even on a manual cycle is that it is 6x more efficient than walking, which facilitates wider travel - it makes a huge difference to be able to get 10 miles from home rather than 1-2 miles.
I was advising someone with Fibromyalgia yesterday looking for a long (35 miles) off-road route around Derby to e-cycle today in the sun for half the day. It has to be entirely step free as she suffers serious pain from even pushing her cycle up one or two steps or a cycle groove, or any distance; "Cyclists Dismount" - NOPE. Many things we don't have around here; one thing we do have are former pit railways turned into rail trails. We have canal towpaths too, but many of them are barriered off.
One ask for the rumoured Transport Bill was for cycles - handcycles, tricycles, clip on e-cycles for wheelchairs and so on, to be recognised as mobility aids to bring them within the scope of eg motability. As remarked earlier, they are not cheap (a clip-on e-cycle is £2000 to £5000), and disabled people have a higher likelihood of being poorer.
Mobility lanes are also about mobility aids, and the possibility of using them easily and safely avoiding the dangers of being on the carriageway amongst the motor vehicles.
One of the most bizarre things you will see sometimes is clipboard-wielding Council Officers and others who think they are Jesus; they accost disabled people on cycles with legs that don't work properly, and essentially demand "Pick Up Your Mobility Aid and Walk". I have a friend who had that happen in St Pancras Station, when she was actually towing her wheelchair behind her Brompton which she was riding at walking pace. It talk 3 repetitions of "I can't walk; that's my wheelchair" before it sunk in.
"It's not about pedestrians vs cyclists as the main question; don't fall for that one."
It's my own view: all too often, then it the experience for pedestrians. And the cyclist 'lobby' are in denial about it. A pedestrian having to move out o the way because of some inconsiderate @sshat rider does not care if the rider was a 'serious' cyclist or an ASBO cyclist. And IME 'serious' cyclists - pepparami in lycra - are just as likely to be inconsiderate.
This is precisely the sort of attitude that pi**es me off with the cycle lobby. They can never be at fault; they're always the victim; no other road user matters. We saw this with the Huntingdon and the Regent's Park incidents, in different directions.
I recall some posters trying to tell me that the pavement in Huntingdon was a cyclepath...
I would exile all cyclists to Gaza.
#justkidding
Oh dear. As I cycle... I'd better get peddling. What's the best route?
Incidentally for all the cyclists on here, I used a CO2 canister to pump up my tyre earlier. Blooming heck, they're good.
(Only as an experiment in the garden, ready for when I might need it out and about. And yes, I did deflate the trye again and reinflate it with air. My first time ever dealing with a Presta valve too .)
Looks like the red crescent guys aren't missing at all so that's some good news. However Iran has 'imminent announcement' written all over it at the moment and the rev guards appear to be fortifying Tehran against unrest. Into the teeth of the gale again
Are we expecting them to blame Israel?
That will happen, whether officially or not, but certainly its a high risk thing
If Khameini goes for 'blame Israel' then we are about to find out how far Irans nuke program has come
They are in a bit of a bind, if they blame Israel they are saying that Israel are so good at shit that they can get past Iranian presidential security and strike in the heart of Iran. If they say it’s an accident then people will criticise them for not taking enough care of their president.
It is, whatever the circs, something of a jaw dropper
Spoiler: parents are not ditching their cars. A BBC Bristol journalist from BBC Bristol has spoken to a couple of left-wing parents in urban areas of what is now one of the UK's most left-wing cities who now cycle their kids to school.
It's entirely unrepresentative, it is very much exaggerated and it is absolutely very BBC. Met and preachy to the core.
I am a big supporter of the BBC - I think the country is trashing a huge soft influence asset by running it down...
But I have to say this is a fair cop Casino - DM or Express levels of journalism. I fear the journalist's/editor's biases got the better of them.
It’s noteworthy that there’s a BBC article that’s remotely biased in that direction given the torrent of Tory talking points the organisation is cowed into spewing on a daily basis.
There have always been weak articles like this on the site. Inevitable when you consider the volume they pump out daily. Though I’d note that at least a third of the parents at our primary school, possibly closer to half, don’t own a car. It’s perhaps of anthropological interest to those living outside big cities to understand the cultural norms and mores of the millions who do.
Yes. I think there's a more interesting story to be written about the inconvenience of bringing up a family without the use of a car that would still fit the topic.
To your point I'm guessing most young families are in cities because that's where the jobs are.
There was a great slightly provocative quote on the school run in the video about Waterbeach I posted yesterday:
"With the local schools team, we said what what do you need in terms of access - how much parking do you need for parents in the morning? They basically said we don't want any because whatever you do outside the front of a primary school it will be chaos.
If you provide 50 parking spaces they'll be filled and more. If you provide none it will all be filled and more. So we'd rather you didn't provide any. So that was actually quite encouraging and not really the answer we'd expected."
(Separate facility provided for staff, disabled access etc. Plus a local mobility hub within walking distance on paths through amenity space.)
My cynical side says that that response was from the developer: who would quite like that car parking space to cram yet more houses in.
Our school has a too-small car park; shared by it and the adjacent secondary. The approach is via a long road that leads from almost outside the village; most people have a long drive just to reach the access road.
There is lots of active travel to the school; a short path leads from the end of a residential road in the village to the main gate. At school times, this is crammed with people and bikes. Noticeably less so in wet weather, though, when the car park gets busier.
But: lots of people park, or drop kids off on, the residential road; it is a much shorter trip for many than negotiating the access road. The road is not designed for that sort of traffic load. I ca guarantee that this will also happen in Waterbeach; lack of provision of a car park will just lead to people using nearby residential roads.
Active travel is fine for people like me, where we live less than a ten minute walk away from the school, especially as I don't work. It may be very different if you need to drive to work immediately afterwards - in other words, the life many people lead.
I'd recommend watching the presentation - it is only 15 minutes. There is car park provision at the mobility hub nearby, which is provision for the area rather than just the school.
"Nearby roads" are tending to be replaced with open landscaped amenity space or walking / wheeling / cycling paths.
I haven't watched the whole thing yet, but I like the way that tactile paving is now deemed unnecessary (coz cyclists hate them). I wonder what the RNIB think of that?
This is one of my bugbears: if a path is to be shared use between cyclists and pedestrians, then cyclist should be restricted in speed relative to the pedestrians. Maybe not to walking speed; but no more than two or three times pedestrian speed. Instead, you get people going very fast. What they've created there is a racetrack for cyclists - and it will be used as such.
I am *very* cynical when it comes to the cycling lobby arguing for cycling infrastructure at the expense of pedestrians. Good infrastructure would involve compromises for all users.
Thoughts. There's a lot about the need to unlearn assumptions, and change cultural expectations. You see that in the hierarchy of road users in the updated Highway Code from 2022 - the pedestrian priority at side road entrances will remain difficult in some measure until general road culture changes, which will take years or perhaps 2 decades, especially when we have no routine continuing education required to maintain a driving license.
Or contraflow cycling on 20mph one way streets. Been done in Cambridge since the 1990s, and now I think (you may know better) on pretty much all one way streets. But try and do a single street in Mansfield, and all the Local Councillors will have a heart attack because it is "so dangerous". Or two way mobility tracks on Binley Road in Coventry and "people will never look both ways" (is it so difficult - Highway Code says it is a basic?and "it is dangerous when I reverse out of my drive into the busy road" (why the f*ck are you reversing *out* of your drive?)
Unlearning habits: One amusing thing that happened at Waterbeach (in the presentation) is that when they created a flat environment where pedestrians get priority, one of the first developers created and built another whole new level of pavements on top with kerbs even higher - not getting the basic philosophy that they were designed out. I'm interested how often tactile paving standards (which have been in place since the 1980s) are often simply not followed when it is installed.
Shared space is in debate. We are trained to make streets with kerbs, tactiles etc to make them readable by visually impaired. "Shared space" was a movement from ~2000-2005 which said "remove all of that and people will be safe because motor vehicle drivers will have do be considerate". That gave us spaces like Exhibition Road, which has failed because it treats shared space as fully including motor vehicles rather than allowing them in as "guests". It missed that that never works in practice because all drivers are human, and VI people / vulnerable road users can't trust their lives to that. Waterbeach is far more thorough, very much circumscribing spaces accessible by motor and changing priorities, but I'm not 100% convinced it will be successful. That's another one around cultural expectations.
Pedestrians vs cyclists. A development over maybe the last 2-3 years has been convergence around common needs, especially amongst disabled charities and organisations like Sustrans. The Cycle Design Vehicle required to be accommodated (and often not) by new cycling infra (1.2m wide by 2.8m long - that is, size plus a dynamic envelope aka wobble room) has almost identical needs to mobility aids.
Personally when lobbying or arguing I always take the PoV of a disabled pedestrian, because I am (or will be) one, I got radicalised on this stuff by not being able to wheel my mum to the GP as all the walkways had wheelchair blocking barriers, and it avoids a lot of spurious distractions, plus has more legal teeth.
There are certain small fringe organisations around - such as those feeding inflammatory videos about 'floating bus stops' to the Mail and the Telegraph - who *want* a cyclists-vs-disabled conflict, and say things like 'cycling organisation Sustrans using disabled people as a human shield'. On bus stop bypasses they ignore that banning them will force mobility aid users out into general traffic at every bus stop - so it's a balance to be struck with factors both sides, and they point blank refuse to acknowledge the other side of the equation. Mark Harper may try a wedge issue on this one before he is finished.
Speeds - my new e-cycle is interesting on that. The 3 levels of assist also reflect speed as well as power, so give me max assist speeds of ~10kph, ~17-18kph, and ~25kph on the flat. I find that 1 is for areas busy with pedestrians, 2 is for shared paths / rough surfaces, and 3 elsewhere.
Enough for now.
Near me, they put “floating bus stops” in. With a black asphalt surface and black curbstones.
After the inevitable happened, they painted white stripes on the curb stones.
Yep - it's in getting decent standards, following the standards and sweating the detail.
In London there has been a real issue for a number of years of Boroughs not following TFL standards, which have in general been good.
On that piccie, it's revealing all the yellow paintwork they had to put in the cycle track to stop ASB drivers abusing it. Something Edinburgh is still working on . There's a wonderful photo of a workteam replacing slabs on the footway smashed by delivery lorries, whilst behind them there is a 7.5 tonne lorry parked on the pavement, delivering.
Err… the double yellow line was there before the cycle lane/floating bus stop. As were the yellow markings on the curb.
The big problem is *lack* of adequate markings. Drivers who don’t know the area are visibly confused at junctions and sometimes only just avoid ending up in the cycle lane.
This is not helped by the idiots who put the cycle lane in changing their… minds?.. three times. Leaving three sets of somewhat faded and painted over markings to choose from.
I had no idea that curb stones could come in black - why would you want them to be?
That's interesting - so they pretty much modified the carriageway rather than reconstruct the whole corridor. It's interesting that they did not feel they could trust them enough to remove the yellow lines .
That will be budgets? Really expensive bits are when you start modifying foundations and underground features, as you start running into services. But grinding and repainting markings is not a big expense in the context of such a scheme, nor is getting it vaguely right first time - though often they need adjusting.
Where is it? What did it look like before?
The square ended island (which may be against a junction at the feet of the photographer?) looks like some of the things done on main roads through places like Peckham, where one complaint (from both user angles) is that some drivers turn their vehicles left into the end of the cycle track by mistake.
The kerb stones one is strange. They are usually a similar colour to the pavement and/or carriageway, and we have not had a history of needing to paint them back and white everywhere across the country.
One help would be for all cycle tracks to have their own surface colour wherever needed, but that would struggle to get adopted in the UK - we are too cheapskate.
On the question of floating bus stops, I'd note that the Hammersmith & Fulham one backs onto a road not a cycle path, and that might be why one is controversial and the other not. It can be easier for pedestrians to cross in the presence of cars than bikes. For a start, cars are easier to see. More subtly, that can work the other way. Car drivers are probably looking ahead. Cyclists, especially if going fast, might be looking mostly at the ground. Even if they've seen you, it is hard to make eye contact to confirm they've seen you.
The ones created on the Mile End Rd / Bow Rd section of the Cycle Superhighway 2 route in East London seem to work pretty well - one of the things they've done is to get buses to line up with the bus shelter before opening their doors.
That means that passengers can't simply exit the bus and take a couple of steps without looking before ending up in the cycle lane - instead, they first have to walk round the bus shelter which gives them a bit more time to gain situational awareness.
Of course, they were lucky in that they had loads of room to work with there - the inner part of the same route, along Aldgate / Whitechapel Rd is both narrower and busier, and as a result is far scarier.
I mean, that's sorta the issue, isn't it? The *pedestrians* have to walk around the bus shelter, coz cyclists have priority. How easy is that with a pram, or with limited visibility, or a dog, or with lots of people queuing, etc, etc?
It's not about pedestrians vs cyclists as the main question; don't fall for that one. That's a trope used by trolling lobbies and politicians wanting wedge issues. ASBO "cyclists" on pavements, of whom the majority of serious problems are likely ASBO motorcyclists with hacked ebikes or unregistered motorbikes such as Surrons, are a cultural and enforcement issue. The City of London are doing interesting stuff at present, including offering "responsible cycling" courses, as are sometimes transformative for lawbreaking motor vehicle drivers.
It's about equal access to the ability to travel. 40% of disabled adults do not have a driving license, compared to slightly more than half of that - 25% - for able-bodied adults. For many of that 40% it is not an option for medical reasons; I may in this category in 15-20 years if Diabetes damages my eyesight.
It's not acceptable that those peoples' autonomy is taken away; cycles (and e-cycles) as mobility aids are a part of that. The difference even on a manual cycle is that it is 6x more efficient than walking, which facilitates wider travel - it makes a huge difference to be able to get 10 miles from home rather than 1-2 miles.
I was advising someone with Fibromyalgia yesterday looking for a long (35 miles) off-road route around Derby to e-cycle today in the sun for half the day. It has to be entirely step free as she suffers serious pain from even pushing her cycle up one or two steps or a cycle groove, or any distance; "Cyclists Dismount" - NOPE. Many things we don't have around here; one thing we do have are former pit railways turned into rail trails. We have canal towpaths too, but many of them are barriered off.
One ask for the rumoured Transport Bill was for cycles - handcycles, tricycles, clip on e-cycles for wheelchairs and so on, to be recognised as mobility aids to bring them within the scope of eg motability. As remarked earlier, they are not cheap (a clip-on e-cycle is £2000 to £5000), and disabled people have a higher likelihood of being poorer.
Mobility lanes are also about mobility aids, and the possibility of using them easily and safely avoiding the dangers of being on the carriageway amongst the motor vehicles.
One of the most bizarre things you will see sometimes is clipboard-wielding Council Officers and others who think they are Jesus; they accost disabled people on cycles with legs that don't work properly, and essentially demand "Pick Up Your Mobility Aid and Walk". I have a friend who had that happen in St Pancras Station, when she was actually towing her wheelchair behind her Brompton which she was riding at walking pace. It talk 3 repetitions of "I can't walk; that's my wheelchair" before it sunk in.
"It's not about pedestrians vs cyclists as the main question; don't fall for that one."
It's my own view: all too often, then it the experience for pedestrians. And the cyclist 'lobby' are in denial about it. A pedestrian having to move out o the way because of some inconsiderate @sshat rider does not care if the rider was a 'serious' cyclist or an ASBO cyclist. And IME 'serious' cyclists - pepparami in lycra - are just as likely to be inconsiderate.
This is precisely the sort of attitude that pi**es me off with the cycle lobby. They can never be at fault; they're always the victim; no other road user matters. We saw this with the Huntingdon and the Regent's Park incidents, in different directions.
I recall some posters trying to tell me that the pavement in Huntingdon was a cyclepath...
Looks like the red crescent guys aren't missing at all so that's some good news. However Iran has 'imminent announcement' written all over it at the moment and the rev guards appear to be fortifying Tehran against unrest. Into the teeth of the gale again
Are we expecting them to blame Israel?
That will happen, whether officially or not, but certainly its a high risk thing
If Khameini goes for 'blame Israel' then we are about to find out how far Irans nuke program has come
They are in a bit of a bind, if they blame Israel they are saying that Israel are so good at shit that they can get past Iranian presidential security and strike in the heart of Iran. If they say it’s an accident then people will criticise them for not taking enough care of their president.
It is, whatever the circs, something of a jaw dropper
It's a disaster for the Iranian government. Raisi was being groomed to replace Khamanei, who is after all 85 and believed to have cancer. Now their succession plans have been tossed out of the window.
The regime could be more vulnerable than at any time in 45 years.
This is potentially fantastic news for the Iranian people - unless someone worse emerges...
(No, I do not think Russia was behind it, before you ask. They wanted Raisi too.)
Looks like the red crescent guys aren't missing at all so that's some good news. However Iran has 'imminent announcement' written all over it at the moment and the rev guards appear to be fortifying Tehran against unrest. Into the teeth of the gale again
Are we expecting them to blame Israel?
That will happen, whether officially or not, but certainly its a high risk thing
If Khameini goes for 'blame Israel' then we are about to find out how far Irans nuke program has come
They are in a bit of a bind, if they blame Israel they are saying that Israel are so good at shit that they can get past Iranian presidential security and strike in the heart of Iran. If they say it’s an accident then people will criticise them for not taking enough care of their president.
It is, whatever the circs, something of a jaw dropper
It's a disaster for the Iranian government. Raisi was being groomed to replace Khamanei, who is after all 85 and believed to have cancer. Now their succession plans have been tossed out of the window.
The regime could be more vulnerable than at any time in 45 years.
This is potentially fantastic news for the Iranian people - unless someone worse emerges...
(No, I do not think Russia was behind it, before you ask. They wanted Raisi too.)
So watch for the wounded Persian Tiger lashing out in rage. Short term may bring pain even if its a long term gain
Looks like the red crescent guys aren't missing at all so that's some good news. However Iran has 'imminent announcement' written all over it at the moment and the rev guards appear to be fortifying Tehran against unrest. Into the teeth of the gale again
Are we expecting them to blame Israel?
That will happen, whether officially or not, but certainly its a high risk thing
If Khameini goes for 'blame Israel' then we are about to find out how far Irans nuke program has come
They are in a bit of a bind, if they blame Israel they are saying that Israel are so good at shit that they can get past Iranian presidential security and strike in the heart of Iran. If they say it’s an accident then people will criticise them for not taking enough care of their president.
It is, whatever the circs, something of a jaw dropper
It's a disaster for the Iranian government. Raisi was being groomed to replace Khamanei, who is after all 85 and believed to have cancer. Now their succession plans have been tossed out of the window.
The regime could be more vulnerable than at any time in 45 years.
This is potentially fantastic news for the Iranian people - unless someone worse emerges...
(No, I do not think Russia was behind it, before you ask. They wanted Raisi too.)
So watch for the wounded Persian Tiger lashing out in rage. Short term may bring pain even if its a long term gain
Nobody is going to believe this was Israel's fault. Even if it was. And even if it was, the Iranians face some very awkward questions over putting two of their top figures on the same helicopter in bad weather over mountainous terrain as part of a convoy when the regime is wobbling and needs stability.
So the real danger might be Hizbollah blaming Israel and lashing out at them.
Glen O'Hara @gsoh31 · 1h Student visas are already down nearly 30%, and I would say between 10 and 20 universities are going to get into deep trouble. Another 10 to 20 will follow rapidly. Imagine sending a further signal that you want the numbers down... (1/2)
We could do with a fundamental restructuring of FE in this county. Clearly I don’t want there to be a collapse of institutions (that serves no-one) but we could do with moving away from the New Labour model of degrees for all.
All want degrees (or many do). It's aspirational, which is supposed to be good. People with degrees, including many in this board, saying other people shouldn't have them is a poor look.
But yes higher education does need restructuring. To be specific undergraduate education needs to be a lot, lot cheaper. Education factories in other words, efficiency two year degrees, longer semesters and more part time degrees. Anyone who starts talking about Oxbridge, world rankings etc is self serving
Not a good week for world leaders, let's hope the in threes rule doesn't come in. Reports that red crescent searchers have now also gone missing looking for him. Bus driver bringing me back from Dads had an interesting new technique. Driving level with passengers at bus stops at 15mph or so then standing on everything like Bambi and a kitten had run into the road with 4 toddlers in tow. My tutting didn't help.
Looks like the red crescent guys aren't missing at all so that's some good news. However Iran has 'imminent announcement' written all over it at the moment and the rev guards appear to be fortifying Tehran against unrest. Into the teeth of the gale again
Are we expecting them to blame Israel?
That will happen, whether officially or not, but certainly its a high risk thing
If Khameini goes for 'blame Israel' then we are about to find out how far Irans nuke program has come
They are in a bit of a bind, if they blame Israel they are saying that Israel are so good at shit that they can get past Iranian presidential security and strike in the heart of Iran. If they say it’s an accident then people will criticise them for not taking enough care of their president.
It is, whatever the circs, something of a jaw dropper
It's a disaster for the Iranian government. Raisi was being groomed to replace Khamanei, who is after all 85 and believed to have cancer. Now their succession plans have been tossed out of the window.
The regime could be more vulnerable than at any time in 45 years.
This is potentially fantastic news for the Iranian people - unless someone worse emerges...
(No, I do not think Russia was behind it, before you ask. They wanted Raisi too.)
Come on Iranian people. Get rid of the twats.
Nothing like a good succession crisis to precipitate revolution.
Looks like the red crescent guys aren't missing at all so that's some good news. However Iran has 'imminent announcement' written all over it at the moment and the rev guards appear to be fortifying Tehran against unrest. Into the teeth of the gale again
Are we expecting them to blame Israel?
That will happen, whether officially or not, but certainly its a high risk thing
If Khameini goes for 'blame Israel' then we are about to find out how far Irans nuke program has come
They are in a bit of a bind, if they blame Israel they are saying that Israel are so good at shit that they can get past Iranian presidential security and strike in the heart of Iran. If they say it’s an accident then people will criticise them for not taking enough care of their president.
It is, whatever the circs, something of a jaw dropper
It's a disaster for the Iranian government. Raisi was being groomed to replace Khamanei, who is after all 85 and believed to have cancer. Now their succession plans have been tossed out of the window.
The regime could be more vulnerable than at any time in 45 years.
This is potentially fantastic news for the Iranian people - unless someone worse emerges...
(No, I do not think Russia was behind it, before you ask. They wanted Raisi too.)
Come on Iranian people. Get rid of the twats.
Nothing like a good succession crisis to precipitate revolution.
To be fair, you can't fault the Iranian people for trying to get rid of them.
Glen O'Hara @gsoh31 · 1h Student visas are already down nearly 30%, and I would say between 10 and 20 universities are going to get into deep trouble. Another 10 to 20 will follow rapidly. Imagine sending a further signal that you want the numbers down... (1/2)
In any country that wants a future the first job of education is to do the absolute best for that country's young people in every possible respect. Everything else comes second and third.
The signals sent out to UK young people who find that there are places available at elite institutions for international students but not for them (this happens all the time) is truly dreadful. This is pure intellectual and cultural suicide and academic prostitution, and demeans our generally very good top universities.
And the signals sent out to millions of good young people by underfunding and underrating local FE vocational provision - which matters just as much as Oxford and Cambridge - is even worse.
Not how it works. Lucrative foreign students cross subsidise domestic students. Without them there would either be higher tuition fees or fewer places. Or both.
The Tories are arguing their issue is with lesser universities (ie the ones they didn’t go to), not the “elite institutions”.
They want these ‘lesser universities’ to fail so our uppity working classes lose their opportunity for further education, leaving their crumbling home towns and broadening their minds, and all become once again insular, parochial manual labourers.
Banging the immigrant drum, if successful, helpfully destroys the former polys that so many working class kids attend.
That’s of course until they realise there’s one of those uppity institutions in their own marginal constituency and they’re asked by local radio if they want it to close.
See, for example, this thread on Teesside University, since Simon Clarke is one of the MPs to have jumped on this.
Lots of local students going into local industries and public services, cross-subsidised by international fees.
Tough shit, people want migration brought under control.
If their business model isn't sustainable without huge numbers of foreign students coming in then they'll have to change their business model to one that can succeed in the domestic market.
Tough shit, we need migration or we’ll end up like Japan or Ukraine. Aged and slowly dying, with no funding for social care. Thankfully unlike Ukraine without a neighbour licking its lips at the land our ageing population is inhabiting.
If we’re getting migrants we might as well have them pay through the nose for one of our few successful export industries post-Brexit.
Looks like the red crescent guys aren't missing at all so that's some good news. However Iran has 'imminent announcement' written all over it at the moment and the rev guards appear to be fortifying Tehran against unrest. Into the teeth of the gale again
Are we expecting them to blame Israel?
That will happen, whether officially or not, but certainly its a high risk thing
If Khameini goes for 'blame Israel' then we are about to find out how far Irans nuke program has come
They are in a bit of a bind, if they blame Israel they are saying that Israel are so good at shit that they can get past Iranian presidential security and strike in the heart of Iran. If they say it’s an accident then people will criticise them for not taking enough care of their president.
It is, whatever the circs, something of a jaw dropper
It's a disaster for the Iranian government. Raisi was being groomed to replace Khamanei, who is after all 85 and believed to have cancer. Now their succession plans have been tossed out of the window.
The regime could be more vulnerable than at any time in 45 years.
This is potentially fantastic news for the Iranian people - unless someone worse emerges...
(No, I do not think Russia was behind it, before you ask. They wanted Raisi too.)
Come on Iranian people. Get rid of the twats.
Nothing like a good succession crisis to precipitate revolution.
To be fair, you can't fault the Iranian people for trying to get rid of them.
Andrew Neil @afneil · 57m Reports of military and security forces being deployed across Tehran.
Looks like the red crescent guys aren't missing at all so that's some good news. However Iran has 'imminent announcement' written all over it at the moment and the rev guards appear to be fortifying Tehran against unrest. Into the teeth of the gale again
Are we expecting them to blame Israel?
That will happen, whether officially or not, but certainly its a high risk thing
If Khameini goes for 'blame Israel' then we are about to find out how far Irans nuke program has come
They are in a bit of a bind, if they blame Israel they are saying that Israel are so good at shit that they can get past Iranian presidential security and strike in the heart of Iran. If they say it’s an accident then people will criticise them for not taking enough care of their president.
It is, whatever the circs, something of a jaw dropper
It's a disaster for the Iranian government. Raisi was being groomed to replace Khamanei, who is after all 85 and believed to have cancer. Now their succession plans have been tossed out of the window.
The regime could be more vulnerable than at any time in 45 years.
This is potentially fantastic news for the Iranian people - unless someone worse emerges...
(No, I do not think Russia was behind it, before you ask. They wanted Raisi too.)
Come on Iranian people. Get rid of the twats.
Nothing like a good succession crisis to precipitate revolution.
To be fair, you can't fault the Iranian people for trying to get rid of them.
Andrew Neil @afneil · 57m Reports of military and security forces being deployed across Tehran.
I'm not surprised. If Raisi's snuffed it there's going to be quite the party.
Raisi’s helicopter fell by accident due to fog, and Fico was shot by a crazy grandfather, and…Olof Palme, and….Kennedy. S*** happens. But it happens most reliably with careful professional training carried out by the rulers of s***.
Glen O'Hara @gsoh31 · 1h Student visas are already down nearly 30%, and I would say between 10 and 20 universities are going to get into deep trouble. Another 10 to 20 will follow rapidly. Imagine sending a further signal that you want the numbers down... (1/2)
In any country that wants a future the first job of education is to do the absolute best for that country's young people in every possible respect. Everything else comes second and third.
The signals sent out to UK young people who find that there are places available at elite institutions for international students but not for them (this happens all the time) is truly dreadful. This is pure intellectual and cultural suicide and academic prostitution, and demeans our generally very good top universities.
And the signals sent out to millions of good young people by underfunding and underrating local FE vocational provision - which matters just as much as Oxford and Cambridge - is even worse.
Not how it works. Lucrative foreign students cross subsidise domestic students. Without them there would either be higher tuition fees or fewer places. Or both.
The Tories are arguing their issue is with lesser universities (ie the ones they didn’t go to), not the “elite institutions”.
They want these ‘lesser universities’ to fail so our uppity working classes lose their opportunity for further education, leaving their crumbling home towns and broadening their minds, and all become once again insular, parochial manual labourers.
Banging the immigrant drum, if successful, helpfully destroys the former polys that so many working class kids attend.
That’s of course until they realise there’s one of those uppity institutions in their own marginal constituency and they’re asked by local radio if they want it to close.
See, for example, this thread on Teesside University, since Simon Clarke is one of the MPs to have jumped on this.
Lots of local students going into local industries and public services, cross-subsidised by international fees.
Tough shit, people want migration brought under control.
If their business model isn't sustainable without huge numbers of foreign students coming in then they'll have to change their business model to one that can succeed in the domestic market.
Tough shit, we need migration or we’ll end up like Japan or Ukraine. Aged and slowly dying, with no funding for social care. Thankfully unlike Ukraine without a neighbour licking its lips at the land our ageing population is inhabiting.
If we’re getting migrants we might as well have them pay through the nose for one of our few successful export industries post-Brexit.
Raisi’s helicopter fell by accident due to fog, and Fico was shot by a crazy grandfather, and…Olof Palme, and….Kennedy. S*** happens. But it happens most reliably with careful professional training carried out by the rulers of s***.
RT need to be careful. If the Iranians think Raisi was killed by the regime’s enemies it might give them a bit of confidence.
Iranian defence analyst dude pointing out copters with high rankers can send out their exact location in case of a problem, unless they blow up or are suddenly destroyed. They flew into a mountain is my best guess.
Glen O'Hara @gsoh31 · 1h Student visas are already down nearly 30%, and I would say between 10 and 20 universities are going to get into deep trouble. Another 10 to 20 will follow rapidly. Imagine sending a further signal that you want the numbers down... (1/2)
In any country that wants a future the first job of education is to do the absolute best for that country's young people in every possible respect. Everything else comes second and third.
The signals sent out to UK young people who find that there are places available at elite institutions for international students but not for them (this happens all the time) is truly dreadful. This is pure intellectual and cultural suicide and academic prostitution, and demeans our generally very good top universities.
And the signals sent out to millions of good young people by underfunding and underrating local FE vocational provision - which matters just as much as Oxford and Cambridge - is even worse.
Not how it works. Lucrative foreign students cross subsidise domestic students. Without them there would either be higher tuition fees or fewer places. Or both.
The Tories are arguing their issue is with lesser universities (ie the ones they didn’t go to), not the “elite institutions”.
They want these ‘lesser universities’ to fail so our uppity working classes lose their opportunity for further education, leaving their crumbling home towns and broadening their minds, and all become once again insular, parochial manual labourers.
Banging the immigrant drum, if successful, helpfully destroys the former polys that so many working class kids attend.
That’s of course until they realise there’s one of those uppity institutions in their own marginal constituency and they’re asked by local radio if they want it to close.
See, for example, this thread on Teesside University, since Simon Clarke is one of the MPs to have jumped on this.
Lots of local students going into local industries and public services, cross-subsidised by international fees.
Tough shit, people want migration brought under control.
If their business model isn't sustainable without huge numbers of foreign students coming in then they'll have to change their business model to one that can succeed in the domestic market.
When polled, people don’t want migration brought under control via a reduction in overseas students, the vast majority of whom return to their home countries.
Glen O'Hara @gsoh31 · 1h Student visas are already down nearly 30%, and I would say between 10 and 20 universities are going to get into deep trouble. Another 10 to 20 will follow rapidly. Imagine sending a further signal that you want the numbers down... (1/2)
We could do with a fundamental restructuring of FE in this county. Clearly I don’t want there to be a collapse of institutions (that serves no-one) but we could do with moving away from the New Labour model of degrees for all.
All want degrees (or many do). It's aspirational, which is supposed to be good. People with degrees, including many in this board, saying other people shouldn't have them is a poor look.
But yes higher education does need restructuring. To be specific undergraduate education needs to be a lot, lot cheaper. Education factories in other words, efficiency two year degrees, longer semesters and more part time degrees. Anyone who starts talking about Oxbridge, world rankings etc is self serving
Perhaps “degrees for all” was a bad choice of words. I believe that we need to look at making sure all qualifications are high quality and that everyone has the chance to access them. Where I am not convinced, is that a university degree in the traditional academic sense is appropriate for all trades, professions and wants/needs of young people. We need to move away from elitist interpretations of universities needing to be the places to go to get on in life, and see that there is better careers advice and more flexible pathways for the future workforce.
Glen O'Hara @gsoh31 · 1h Student visas are already down nearly 30%, and I would say between 10 and 20 universities are going to get into deep trouble. Another 10 to 20 will follow rapidly. Imagine sending a further signal that you want the numbers down... (1/2)
In any country that wants a future the first job of education is to do the absolute best for that country's young people in every possible respect. Everything else comes second and third.
The signals sent out to UK young people who find that there are places available at elite institutions for international students but not for them (this happens all the time) is truly dreadful. This is pure intellectual and cultural suicide and academic prostitution, and demeans our generally very good top universities.
And the signals sent out to millions of good young people by underfunding and underrating local FE vocational provision - which matters just as much as Oxford and Cambridge - is even worse.
Not how it works. Lucrative foreign students cross subsidise domestic students. Without them there would either be higher tuition fees or fewer places. Or both.
The Tories are arguing their issue is with lesser universities (ie the ones they didn’t go to), not the “elite institutions”.
They want these ‘lesser universities’ to fail so our uppity working classes lose their opportunity for further education, leaving their crumbling home towns and broadening their minds, and all become once again insular, parochial manual labourers.
Banging the immigrant drum, if successful, helpfully destroys the former polys that so many working class kids attend.
That’s of course until they realise there’s one of those uppity institutions in their own marginal constituency and they’re asked by local radio if they want it to close.
See, for example, this thread on Teesside University, since Simon Clarke is one of the MPs to have jumped on this.
Lots of local students going into local industries and public services, cross-subsidised by international fees.
Tough shit, people want migration brought under control.
If their business model isn't sustainable without huge numbers of foreign students coming in then they'll have to change their business model to one that can succeed in the domestic market.
Tough shit, we need migration or we’ll end up like Japan or Ukraine. Aged and slowly dying, with no funding for social care. Thankfully unlike Ukraine without a neighbour licking its lips at the land our ageing population is inhabiting.
If we’re getting migrants we might as well have them pay through the nose for one of our few successful export industries post-Brexit.
It's one possible solution. However I suggest you think about how we are going to manage the cultural diversity such migration will bring. The advocates of mass migration have shown so far that they haven't got a clue.
This is a disturbing story in the Torygraph on antisemitism in schools. I don't know London or its schools very well but these paragraphs do not fill me with confidence.
“The children affected don’t want anyone to know for fear of the repercussions. Parents are also keen not to make a fuss. They want to keep a good relationship with their children’s school, don’t want to be blamed for widening rifts between communities, and are intimidated too.”
“Many staff at schools are either complicit or silent,” says Hughes. “I’ve been told that some staff have worn keffiyehs [Palestinian scarves] or badges with ‘from the river to the sea.’ Often they have been asked to remove the badges, but the statements have already been made.”
She’s aware of many well-intentioned teachers who have been concerned about the Jewish children’s wellbeing. “But they are also keen to keep all the parents happy and maintain the status quo in the school community,” she says.'
So they don't want racism in schools but fear doing something about it will prove 'divisive' among the parents.
Glen O'Hara @gsoh31 · 1h Student visas are already down nearly 30%, and I would say between 10 and 20 universities are going to get into deep trouble. Another 10 to 20 will follow rapidly. Imagine sending a further signal that you want the numbers down... (1/2)
In any country that wants a future the first job of education is to do the absolute best for that country's young people in every possible respect. Everything else comes second and third.
The signals sent out to UK young people who find that there are places available at elite institutions for international students but not for them (this happens all the time) is truly dreadful. This is pure intellectual and cultural suicide and academic prostitution, and demeans our generally very good top universities.
And the signals sent out to millions of good young people by underfunding and underrating local FE vocational provision - which matters just as much as Oxford and Cambridge - is even worse.
Not how it works. Lucrative foreign students cross subsidise domestic students. Without them there would either be higher tuition fees or fewer places. Or both.
The Tories are arguing their issue is with lesser universities (ie the ones they didn’t go to), not the “elite institutions”.
They want these ‘lesser universities’ to fail so our uppity working classes lose their opportunity for further education, leaving their crumbling home towns and broadening their minds, and all become once again insular, parochial manual labourers.
Banging the immigrant drum, if successful, helpfully destroys the former polys that so many working class kids attend.
That’s of course until they realise there’s one of those uppity institutions in their own marginal constituency and they’re asked by local radio if they want it to close.
See, for example, this thread on Teesside University, since Simon Clarke is one of the MPs to have jumped on this.
Lots of local students going into local industries and public services, cross-subsidised by international fees.
Tough shit, people want migration brought under control.
If their business model isn't sustainable without huge numbers of foreign students coming in then they'll have to change their business model to one that can succeed in the domestic market.
When polled, people don’t want migration brought under control via a reduction in overseas students, the vast majority of whom return to their home countries.
You’re just being an apologist for Boris Johnson’s reckless policies.
Iranian defence analyst dude pointing out copters with high rankers can send out their exact location in case of a problem, unless they blow up or are suddenly destroyed. They flew into a mountain is my best guess.
Or blew up due to bad maintenance.
The copter in question looked both elderly and rather small. Poor maintenance has been something of an issue recently.
Iranian defence analyst dude pointing out copters with high rankers can send out their exact location in case of a problem, unless they blow up or are suddenly destroyed. They flew into a mountain is my best guess.
Those bastard Jewish Zionist mountains. And those Jewish Fog Banks.
Iranian defence analyst dude pointing out copters with high rankers can send out their exact location in case of a problem, unless they blow up or are suddenly destroyed. They flew into a mountain is my best guess.
Or blew up due to bad maintenance.
The copter in question looked both elderly and rather small. Poor maintenance has been something of an issue recently.
I see no reason to think it wasn't an accident. Poor weather, mist and cloud; and remote, hilly terrain. Makes it a hard target for a missile attack, and very easy for accidentally running into the ground (controlled flight into terrain).
Another option would be bomb on board, but the wording from the Iranians ("hard landing") makes me feel that it simply ran into a mountain. In which case, all on bard will be dead.
On thread - hasn't the term 'one nation Tory' lost all meaning? Just seems to now be a catch all term for people who don't want to bang on about Europe all the time.
Glen O'Hara @gsoh31 · 1h Student visas are already down nearly 30%, and I would say between 10 and 20 universities are going to get into deep trouble. Another 10 to 20 will follow rapidly. Imagine sending a further signal that you want the numbers down... (1/2)
In any country that wants a future the first job of education is to do the absolute best for that country's young people in every possible respect. Everything else comes second and third.
The signals sent out to UK young people who find that there are places available at elite institutions for international students but not for them (this happens all the time) is truly dreadful. This is pure intellectual and cultural suicide and academic prostitution, and demeans our generally very good top universities.
And the signals sent out to millions of good young people by underfunding and underrating local FE vocational provision - which matters just as much as Oxford and Cambridge - is even worse.
Not how it works. Lucrative foreign students cross subsidise domestic students. Without them there would either be higher tuition fees or fewer places. Or both.
The Tories are arguing their issue is with lesser universities (ie the ones they didn’t go to), not the “elite institutions”.
They want these ‘lesser universities’ to fail so our uppity working classes lose their opportunity for further education, leaving their crumbling home towns and broadening their minds, and all become once again insular, parochial manual labourers.
Banging the immigrant drum, if successful, helpfully destroys the former polys that so many working class kids attend.
That’s of course until they realise there’s one of those uppity institutions in their own marginal constituency and they’re asked by local radio if they want it to close.
See, for example, this thread on Teesside University, since Simon Clarke is one of the MPs to have jumped on this.
Lots of local students going into local industries and public services, cross-subsidised by international fees.
Tough shit, people want migration brought under control.
If their business model isn't sustainable without huge numbers of foreign students coming in then they'll have to change their business model to one that can succeed in the domestic market.
When polled, people don’t want migration brought under control via a reduction in overseas students, the vast majority of whom return to their home countries.
You’re just being an apologist for Boris Johnson’s reckless policies.
Certainly, immigration levels into this country are pretty much entirely the result of Conservative government policy.
On thread - hasn't the term 'one nation Tory' lost all meaning? Just seems to now be a catch all term for people who don't want to bang on about Europe all the time.
I would have thought exactly the opposite. One Nation Tories seem to be the ones who DO want to bang on about Europe all the time these days.
Iranian defence analyst dude pointing out copters with high rankers can send out their exact location in case of a problem, unless they blow up or are suddenly destroyed. They flew into a mountain is my best guess.
Or blew up due to bad maintenance.
The copter in question looked both elderly and rather small. Poor maintenance has been something of an issue recently.
Can I utterly unpedantically point out that helicopter = helico as in helix, whirly and pter as in pterodactyl, wing. Copter is not a satisfactory abbreviation.
Glen O'Hara @gsoh31 · 1h Student visas are already down nearly 30%, and I would say between 10 and 20 universities are going to get into deep trouble. Another 10 to 20 will follow rapidly. Imagine sending a further signal that you want the numbers down... (1/2)
In any country that wants a future the first job of education is to do the absolute best for that country's young people in every possible respect. Everything else comes second and third.
The signals sent out to UK young people who find that there are places available at elite institutions for international students but not for them (this happens all the time) is truly dreadful. This is pure intellectual and cultural suicide and academic prostitution, and demeans our generally very good top universities.
And the signals sent out to millions of good young people by underfunding and underrating local FE vocational provision - which matters just as much as Oxford and Cambridge - is even worse.
Not how it works. Lucrative foreign students cross subsidise domestic students. Without them there would either be higher tuition fees or fewer places. Or both.
The Tories are arguing their issue is with lesser universities (ie the ones they didn’t go to), not the “elite institutions”.
They want these ‘lesser universities’ to fail so our uppity working classes lose their opportunity for further education, leaving their crumbling home towns and broadening their minds, and all become once again insular, parochial manual labourers.
Banging the immigrant drum, if successful, helpfully destroys the former polys that so many working class kids attend.
That’s of course until they realise there’s one of those uppity institutions in their own marginal constituency and they’re asked by local radio if they want it to close.
See, for example, this thread on Teesside University, since Simon Clarke is one of the MPs to have jumped on this.
Lots of local students going into local industries and public services, cross-subsidised by international fees.
Tough shit, people want migration brought under control.
If their business model isn't sustainable without huge numbers of foreign students coming in then they'll have to change their business model to one that can succeed in the domestic market.
Tough shit, we need migration or we’ll end up like Japan or Ukraine. Aged and slowly dying, with no funding for social care. Thankfully unlike Ukraine without a neighbour licking its lips at the land our ageing population is inhabiting.
If we’re getting migrants we might as well have them pay through the nose for one of our few successful export industries post-Brexit.
The whole world is going to have to adapt to a shrinking population. At what point do you call an end to increasing the British population to avoid the worst effects of the demographic transition? 80 million? 100 million?
It might be better to think about creating comfortable ex-pat retirement villages in Rwanda. Export the old people instead of importing the young.
Iranian defence analyst dude pointing out copters with high rankers can send out their exact location in case of a problem, unless they blow up or are suddenly destroyed. They flew into a mountain is my best guess.
Or blew up due to bad maintenance.
The copter in question looked both elderly and rather small. Poor maintenance has been something of an issue recently.
Can I utterly unpedantically point out that helicopter = helico as in helix, whirly and pter as in pterodactyl, wing. Copter is not a satisfactory abbreviation.
I see no reason to think it wasn't an accident. Poor weather, mist and cloud; and remote, hilly terrain. Makes it a hard target for a missile attack, and very easy for accidentally running into the ground (controlled flight into terrain).
Another option would be bomb on board, but the wording from the Iranians ("hard landing") makes me feel that it simply ran into a mountain. In which case, all on bard will be dead.
On thread - hasn't the term 'one nation Tory' lost all meaning? Just seems to now be a catch all term for people who don't want to bang on about Europe all the time.
I think they all like to claim it. It appears to me they seem to use it now as a "I want everyone to vote for me" rather than in its classical reading.
Glen O'Hara @gsoh31 · 1h Student visas are already down nearly 30%, and I would say between 10 and 20 universities are going to get into deep trouble. Another 10 to 20 will follow rapidly. Imagine sending a further signal that you want the numbers down... (1/2)
We could do with a fundamental restructuring of FE in this county. Clearly I don’t want there to be a collapse of institutions (that serves no-one) but we could do with moving away from the New Labour model of degrees for all.
All want degrees (or many do). It's aspirational, which is supposed to be good. People with degrees, including many in this board, saying other people shouldn't have them is a poor look.
But yes higher education does need restructuring. To be specific undergraduate education needs to be a lot, lot cheaper. Education factories in other words, efficiency two year degrees, longer semesters and more part time degrees. Anyone who starts talking about Oxbridge, world rankings etc is self serving
Perhaps “degrees for all” was a bad choice of words. I believe that we need to look at making sure all qualifications are high quality and that everyone has the chance to access them. Where I am not convinced, is that a university degree in the traditional academic sense is appropriate for all trades, professions and wants/needs of young people. We need to move away from elitist interpretations of universities needing to be the places to go to get on in life, and see that there is better careers advice and more flexible pathways for the future workforce.
I agree with everything you say but that doesn't address the affordability issue. The problem is we can't afford 50% of young people going to university at current costs and prices. Employability is fine. In general graduates can find jobs more easily than non graduates. The cost isn't fine.
So that gives us three choices I think:
1. Increase the fees so only the wealthy can afford them 2. Limit the numbers and subsidise these 3. Reduce the cost so more people can go to university who are qualified and could benefit from it
3 seems obviously the right answer to me but that will need radical changes to universities. They need become Premier Inns (where the bed and shower are better anyway) and no longer pretend to be the Savoy.
I am taking about undergraduate education. Postgraduate is a different requirement entirely.
Spoiler: parents are not ditching their cars. A BBC Bristol journalist from BBC Bristol has spoken to a couple of left-wing parents in urban areas of what is now one of the UK's most left-wing cities who now cycle their kids to school.
It's entirely unrepresentative, it is very much exaggerated and it is absolutely very BBC. Met and preachy to the core.
I am a big supporter of the BBC - I think the country is trashing a huge soft influence asset by running it down...
But I have to say this is a fair cop Casino - DM or Express levels of journalism. I fear the journalist's/editor's biases got the better of them.
It’s noteworthy that there’s a BBC article that’s remotely biased in that direction given the torrent of Tory talking points the organisation is cowed into spewing on a daily basis.
There have always been weak articles like this on the site. Inevitable when you consider the volume they pump out daily. Though I’d note that at least a third of the parents at our primary school, possibly closer to half, don’t own a car. It’s perhaps of anthropological interest to those living outside big cities to understand the cultural norms and mores of the millions who do.
Yes. I think there's a more interesting story to be written about the inconvenience of bringing up a family without the use of a car that would still fit the topic.
To your point I'm guessing most young families are in cities because that's where the jobs are.
There was a great slightly provocative quote on the school run in the video about Waterbeach I posted yesterday:
"With the local schools team, we said what what do you need in terms of access - how much parking do you need for parents in the morning? They basically said we don't want any because whatever you do outside the front of a primary school it will be chaos.
If you provide 50 parking spaces they'll be filled and more. If you provide none it will all be filled and more. So we'd rather you didn't provide any. So that was actually quite encouraging and not really the answer we'd expected."
(Separate facility provided for staff, disabled access etc. Plus a local mobility hub within walking distance on paths through amenity space.)
My cynical side says that that response was from the developer: who would quite like that car parking space to cram yet more houses in.
Our school has a too-small car park; shared by it and the adjacent secondary. The approach is via a long road that leads from almost outside the village; most people have a long drive just to reach the access road.
There is lots of active travel to the school; a short path leads from the end of a residential road in the village to the main gate. At school times, this is crammed with people and bikes. Noticeably less so in wet weather, though, when the car park gets busier.
But: lots of people park, or drop kids off on, the residential road; it is a much shorter trip for many than negotiating the access road. The road is not designed for that sort of traffic load. I ca guarantee that this will also happen in Waterbeach; lack of provision of a car park will just lead to people using nearby residential roads.
Active travel is fine for people like me, where we live less than a ten minute walk away from the school, especially as I don't work. It may be very different if you need to drive to work immediately afterwards - in other words, the life many people lead.
I'd recommend watching the presentation - it is only 15 minutes. There is car park provision at the mobility hub nearby, which is provision for the area rather than just the school.
"Nearby roads" are tending to be replaced with open landscaped amenity space or walking / wheeling / cycling paths.
I haven't watched the whole thing yet, but I like the way that tactile paving is now deemed unnecessary (coz cyclists hate them). I wonder what the RNIB think of that?
This is one of my bugbears: if a path is to be shared use between cyclists and pedestrians, then cyclist should be restricted in speed relative to the pedestrians. Maybe not to walking speed; but no more than two or three times pedestrian speed. Instead, you get people going very fast. What they've created there is a racetrack for cyclists - and it will be used as such.
I am *very* cynical when it comes to the cycling lobby arguing for cycling infrastructure at the expense of pedestrians. Good infrastructure would involve compromises for all users.
Thoughts. There's a lot about the need to unlearn assumptions, and change cultural expectations. You see that in the hierarchy of road users in the updated Highway Code from 2022 - the pedestrian priority at side road entrances will remain difficult in some measure until general road culture changes, which will take years or perhaps 2 decades, especially when we have no routine continuing education required to maintain a driving license.
Or contraflow cycling on 20mph one way streets. Been done in Cambridge since the 1990s, and now I think (you may know better) on pretty much all one way streets. But try and do a single street in Mansfield, and all the Local Councillors will have a heart attack because it is "so dangerous". Or two way mobility tracks on Binley Road in Coventry and "people will never look both ways" (is it so difficult - Highway Code says it is a basic?and "it is dangerous when I reverse out of my drive into the busy road" (why the f*ck are you reversing *out* of your drive?)
Unlearning habits: One amusing thing that happened at Waterbeach (in the presentation) is that when they created a flat environment where pedestrians get priority, one of the first developers created and built another whole new level of pavements on top with kerbs even higher - not getting the basic philosophy that they were designed out. I'm interested how often tactile paving standards (which have been in place since the 1980s) are often simply not followed when it is installed.
Shared space is in debate. We are trained to make streets with kerbs, tactiles etc to make them readable by visually impaired. "Shared space" was a movement from ~2000-2005 which said "remove all of that and people will be safe because motor vehicle drivers will have do be considerate". That gave us spaces like Exhibition Road, which has failed because it treats shared space as fully including motor vehicles rather than allowing them in as "guests". It missed that that never works in practice because all drivers are human, and VI people / vulnerable road users can't trust their lives to that. Waterbeach is far more thorough, very much circumscribing spaces accessible by motor and changing priorities, but I'm not 100% convinced it will be successful. That's another one around cultural expectations.
Pedestrians vs cyclists. A development over maybe the last 2-3 years has been convergence around common needs, especially amongst disabled charities and organisations like Sustrans. The Cycle Design Vehicle required to be accommodated (and often not) by new cycling infra (1.2m wide by 2.8m long - that is, size plus a dynamic envelope aka wobble room) has almost identical needs to mobility aids.
Personally when lobbying or arguing I always take the PoV of a disabled pedestrian, because I am (or will be) one, I got radicalised on this stuff by not being able to wheel my mum to the GP as all the walkways had wheelchair blocking barriers, and it avoids a lot of spurious distractions, plus has more legal teeth.
There are certain small fringe organisations around - such as those feeding inflammatory videos about 'floating bus stops' to the Mail and the Telegraph - who *want* a cyclists-vs-disabled conflict, and say things like 'cycling organisation Sustrans using disabled people as a human shield'. On bus stop bypasses they ignore that banning them will force mobility aid users out into general traffic at every bus stop - so it's a balance to be struck with factors both sides, and they point blank refuse to acknowledge the other side of the equation. Mark Harper may try a wedge issue on this one before he is finished.
Speeds - my new e-cycle is interesting on that. The 3 levels of assist also reflect speed as well as power, so give me max assist speeds of ~10kph, ~17-18kph, and ~25kph on the flat. I find that 1 is for areas busy with pedestrians, 2 is for shared paths / rough surfaces, and 3 elsewhere.
Enough for now.
Near me, they put “floating bus stops” in. With a black asphalt surface and black curbstones.
After the inevitable happened, they painted white stripes on the curb stones.
Yep - it's in getting decent standards, following the standards and sweating the detail.
In London there has been a real issue for a number of years of Boroughs not following TFL standards, which have in general been good.
On that piccie, it's revealing all the yellow paintwork they had to put in the cycle track to stop ASB drivers abusing it. Something Edinburgh is still working on . There's a wonderful photo of a workteam replacing slabs on the footway smashed by delivery lorries, whilst behind them there is a 7.5 tonne lorry parked on the pavement, delivering.
Err… the double yellow line was there before the cycle lane/floating bus stop. As were the yellow markings on the curb.
The big problem is *lack* of adequate markings. Drivers who don’t know the area are visibly confused at junctions and sometimes only just avoid ending up in the cycle lane.
This is not helped by the idiots who put the cycle lane in changing their… minds?.. three times. Leaving three sets of somewhat faded and painted over markings to choose from.
I had no idea that curb stones could come in black - why would you want them to be?
That's interesting - so they pretty much modified the carriageway rather than reconstruct the whole corridor. It's interesting that they did not feel they could trust them enough to remove the yellow lines .
That will be budgets? Really expensive bits are when you start modifying foundations and underground features, as you start running into services. But grinding and repainting markings is not a big expense in the context of such a scheme, nor is getting it vaguely right first time - though often they need adjusting.
Where is it? What did it look like before?
The square ended island (which may be against a junction at the feet of the photographer?) looks like some of the things done on main roads through places like Peckham, where one complaint (from both user angles) is that some drivers turn their vehicles left into the end of the cycle track by mistake.
The kerb stones one is strange. They are usually a similar colour to the pavement and/or carriageway, and we have not had a history of needing to paint them back and white everywhere across the country.
One help would be for all cycle tracks to have their own surface colour wherever needed, but that would struggle to get adopted in the UK - we are too cheapskate.
On the question of floating bus stops, I'd note that the Hammersmith & Fulham one backs onto a road not a cycle path, and that might be why one is controversial and the other not. It can be easier for pedestrians to cross in the presence of cars than bikes. For a start, cars are easier to see. More subtly, that can work the other way. Car drivers are probably looking ahead. Cyclists, especially if going fast, might be looking mostly at the ground. Even if they've seen you, it is hard to make eye contact to confirm they've seen you.
The ones created on the Mile End Rd / Bow Rd section of the Cycle Superhighway 2 route in East London seem to work pretty well - one of the things they've done is to get buses to line up with the bus shelter before opening their doors.
That means that passengers can't simply exit the bus and take a couple of steps without looking before ending up in the cycle lane - instead, they first have to walk round the bus shelter which gives them a bit more time to gain situational awareness.
Of course, they were lucky in that they had loads of room to work with there - the inner part of the same route, along Aldgate / Whitechapel Rd is both narrower and busier, and as a result is far scarier.
I mean, that's sorta the issue, isn't it? The *pedestrians* have to walk around the bus shelter, coz cyclists have priority. How easy is that with a pram, or with limited visibility, or a dog, or with lots of people queuing, etc, etc?
It's not about pedestrians vs cyclists as the main question; don't fall for that one. That's a trope used by trolling lobbies and politicians wanting wedge issues. ASBO "cyclists" on pavements, of whom the majority of serious problems are likely ASBO motorcyclists with hacked ebikes or unregistered motorbikes such as Surrons, are a cultural and enforcement issue. The City of London are doing interesting stuff at present, including offering "responsible cycling" courses, as are sometimes transformative for lawbreaking motor vehicle drivers.
It's about equal access to the ability to travel. 40% of disabled adults do not have a driving license, compared to slightly more than half of that - 25% - for able-bodied adults. For many of that 40% it is not an option for medical reasons; I may in this category in 15-20 years if Diabetes damages my eyesight.
It's not acceptable that those peoples' autonomy is taken away; cycles (and e-cycles) as mobility aids are a part of that. The difference even on a manual cycle is that it is 6x more efficient than walking, which facilitates wider travel - it makes a huge difference to be able to get 10 miles from home rather than 1-2 miles.
I was advising someone with Fibromyalgia yesterday looking for a long (35 miles) off-road route around Derby to e-cycle today in the sun for half the day. It has to be entirely step free as she suffers serious pain from even pushing her cycle up one or two steps or a cycle groove, or any distance; "Cyclists Dismount" - NOPE. Many things we don't have around here; one thing we do have are former pit railways turned into rail trails. We have canal towpaths too, but many of them are barriered off.
One ask for the rumoured Transport Bill was for cycles - handcycles, tricycles, clip on e-cycles for wheelchairs and so on, to be recognised as mobility aids to bring them within the scope of eg motability. As remarked earlier, they are not cheap (a clip-on e-cycle is £2000 to £5000), and disabled people have a higher likelihood of being poorer.
Mobility lanes are also about mobility aids, and the possibility of using them easily and safely avoiding the dangers of being on the carriageway amongst the motor vehicles.
One of the most bizarre things you will see sometimes is clipboard-wielding Council Officers and others who think they are Jesus; they accost disabled people on cycles with legs that don't work properly, and essentially demand "Pick Up Your Mobility Aid and Walk". I have a friend who had that happen in St Pancras Station, when she was actually towing her wheelchair behind her Brompton which she was riding at walking pace. It talk 3 repetitions of "I can't walk; that's my wheelchair" before it sunk in.
"It's not about pedestrians vs cyclists as the main question; don't fall for that one."
It's my own view: all too often, then it the experience for pedestrians. And the cyclist 'lobby' are in denial about it. A pedestrian having to move out o the way because of some inconsiderate @sshat rider does not care if the rider was a 'serious' cyclist or an ASBO cyclist. And IME 'serious' cyclists - pepparami in lycra - are just as likely to be inconsiderate.
This is precisely the sort of attitude that pi**es me off with the cycle lobby. They can never be at fault; they're always the victim; no other road user matters. We saw this with the Huntingdon and the Regent's Park incidents, in different directions.
I recall some posters trying to tell me that the pavement in Huntingdon was a cyclepath...
More people are killed by mobility scooters. Cows. And lightning.
No one likes a deliveroo cyclist whizzing down a pavement, or a MAMIL doing 22mph through a quiet village. But what we've seen over the last week is people completely lose their heads over the issue.
It's not just 'deliveroo cyclists'. And I don't care if more people are killed by Leon's aliens; that doesn't excuse it. As we've seen; cyclist collisions with pedestrians are often unreported and are not investigated by police.
Cyclists are not above other road users. All road users need to muddle along; That is not the attitude that the cycle lobby give out.
I want cyclists to be safer. I want pedestrians to be safer. I want car drivers to be safer. That will only happen when everyone using roads takes responsibility for their actions, and respects the rights of others to use the road.
Sadly, in all three modes, there are people who think it is not 'the' road, but 'their' road.
Spoiler: parents are not ditching their cars. A BBC Bristol journalist from BBC Bristol has spoken to a couple of left-wing parents in urban areas of what is now one of the UK's most left-wing cities who now cycle their kids to school.
It's entirely unrepresentative, it is very much exaggerated and it is absolutely very BBC. Met and preachy to the core.
I am a big supporter of the BBC - I think the country is trashing a huge soft influence asset by running it down...
But I have to say this is a fair cop Casino - DM or Express levels of journalism. I fear the journalist's/editor's biases got the better of them.
It’s noteworthy that there’s a BBC article that’s remotely biased in that direction given the torrent of Tory talking points the organisation is cowed into spewing on a daily basis.
There have always been weak articles like this on the site. Inevitable when you consider the volume they pump out daily. Though I’d note that at least a third of the parents at our primary school, possibly closer to half, don’t own a car. It’s perhaps of anthropological interest to those living outside big cities to understand the cultural norms and mores of the millions who do.
Yes. I think there's a more interesting story to be written about the inconvenience of bringing up a family without the use of a car that would still fit the topic.
To your point I'm guessing most young families are in cities because that's where the jobs are.
There was a great slightly provocative quote on the school run in the video about Waterbeach I posted yesterday:
"With the local schools team, we said what what do you need in terms of access - how much parking do you need for parents in the morning? They basically said we don't want any because whatever you do outside the front of a primary school it will be chaos.
If you provide 50 parking spaces they'll be filled and more. If you provide none it will all be filled and more. So we'd rather you didn't provide any. So that was actually quite encouraging and not really the answer we'd expected."
(Separate facility provided for staff, disabled access etc. Plus a local mobility hub within walking distance on paths through amenity space.)
My cynical side says that that response was from the developer: who would quite like that car parking space to cram yet more houses in.
Our school has a too-small car park; shared by it and the adjacent secondary. The approach is via a long road that leads from almost outside the village; most people have a long drive just to reach the access road.
There is lots of active travel to the school; a short path leads from the end of a residential road in the village to the main gate. At school times, this is crammed with people and bikes. Noticeably less so in wet weather, though, when the car park gets busier.
But: lots of people park, or drop kids off on, the residential road; it is a much shorter trip for many than negotiating the access road. The road is not designed for that sort of traffic load. I ca guarantee that this will also happen in Waterbeach; lack of provision of a car park will just lead to people using nearby residential roads.
Active travel is fine for people like me, where we live less than a ten minute walk away from the school, especially as I don't work. It may be very different if you need to drive to work immediately afterwards - in other words, the life many people lead.
I'd recommend watching the presentation - it is only 15 minutes. There is car park provision at the mobility hub nearby, which is provision for the area rather than just the school.
"Nearby roads" are tending to be replaced with open landscaped amenity space or walking / wheeling / cycling paths.
I haven't watched the whole thing yet, but I like the way that tactile paving is now deemed unnecessary (coz cyclists hate them). I wonder what the RNIB think of that?
This is one of my bugbears: if a path is to be shared use between cyclists and pedestrians, then cyclist should be restricted in speed relative to the pedestrians. Maybe not to walking speed; but no more than two or three times pedestrian speed. Instead, you get people going very fast. What they've created there is a racetrack for cyclists - and it will be used as such.
I am *very* cynical when it comes to the cycling lobby arguing for cycling infrastructure at the expense of pedestrians. Good infrastructure would involve compromises for all users.
Thoughts. There's a lot about the need to unlearn assumptions, and change cultural expectations. You see that in the hierarchy of road users in the updated Highway Code from 2022 - the pedestrian priority at side road entrances will remain difficult in some measure until general road culture changes, which will take years or perhaps 2 decades, especially when we have no routine continuing education required to maintain a driving license.
Or contraflow cycling on 20mph one way streets. Been done in Cambridge since the 1990s, and now I think (you may know better) on pretty much all one way streets. But try and do a single street in Mansfield, and all the Local Councillors will have a heart attack because it is "so dangerous". Or two way mobility tracks on Binley Road in Coventry and "people will never look both ways" (is it so difficult - Highway Code says it is a basic?and "it is dangerous when I reverse out of my drive into the busy road" (why the f*ck are you reversing *out* of your drive?)
Unlearning habits: One amusing thing that happened at Waterbeach (in the presentation) is that when they created a flat environment where pedestrians get priority, one of the first developers created and built another whole new level of pavements on top with kerbs even higher - not getting the basic philosophy that they were designed out. I'm interested how often tactile paving standards (which have been in place since the 1980s) are often simply not followed when it is installed.
Shared space is in debate. We are trained to make streets with kerbs, tactiles etc to make them readable by visually impaired. "Shared space" was a movement from ~2000-2005 which said "remove all of that and people will be safe because motor vehicle drivers will have do be considerate". That gave us spaces like Exhibition Road, which has failed because it treats shared space as fully including motor vehicles rather than allowing them in as "guests". It missed that that never works in practice because all drivers are human, and VI people / vulnerable road users can't trust their lives to that. Waterbeach is far more thorough, very much circumscribing spaces accessible by motor and changing priorities, but I'm not 100% convinced it will be successful. That's another one around cultural expectations.
Pedestrians vs cyclists. A development over maybe the last 2-3 years has been convergence around common needs, especially amongst disabled charities and organisations like Sustrans. The Cycle Design Vehicle required to be accommodated (and often not) by new cycling infra (1.2m wide by 2.8m long - that is, size plus a dynamic envelope aka wobble room) has almost identical needs to mobility aids.
Personally when lobbying or arguing I always take the PoV of a disabled pedestrian, because I am (or will be) one, I got radicalised on this stuff by not being able to wheel my mum to the GP as all the walkways had wheelchair blocking barriers, and it avoids a lot of spurious distractions, plus has more legal teeth.
There are certain small fringe organisations around - such as those feeding inflammatory videos about 'floating bus stops' to the Mail and the Telegraph - who *want* a cyclists-vs-disabled conflict, and say things like 'cycling organisation Sustrans using disabled people as a human shield'. On bus stop bypasses they ignore that banning them will force mobility aid users out into general traffic at every bus stop - so it's a balance to be struck with factors both sides, and they point blank refuse to acknowledge the other side of the equation. Mark Harper may try a wedge issue on this one before he is finished.
Speeds - my new e-cycle is interesting on that. The 3 levels of assist also reflect speed as well as power, so give me max assist speeds of ~10kph, ~17-18kph, and ~25kph on the flat. I find that 1 is for areas busy with pedestrians, 2 is for shared paths / rough surfaces, and 3 elsewhere.
Enough for now.
Near me, they put “floating bus stops” in. With a black asphalt surface and black curbstones.
After the inevitable happened, they painted white stripes on the curb stones.
Yep - it's in getting decent standards, following the standards and sweating the detail.
In London there has been a real issue for a number of years of Boroughs not following TFL standards, which have in general been good.
On that piccie, it's revealing all the yellow paintwork they had to put in the cycle track to stop ASB drivers abusing it. Something Edinburgh is still working on . There's a wonderful photo of a workteam replacing slabs on the footway smashed by delivery lorries, whilst behind them there is a 7.5 tonne lorry parked on the pavement, delivering.
Err… the double yellow line was there before the cycle lane/floating bus stop. As were the yellow markings on the curb.
The big problem is *lack* of adequate markings. Drivers who don’t know the area are visibly confused at junctions and sometimes only just avoid ending up in the cycle lane.
This is not helped by the idiots who put the cycle lane in changing their… minds?.. three times. Leaving three sets of somewhat faded and painted over markings to choose from.
I had no idea that curb stones could come in black - why would you want them to be?
That's interesting - so they pretty much modified the carriageway rather than reconstruct the whole corridor. It's interesting that they did not feel they could trust them enough to remove the yellow lines .
That will be budgets? Really expensive bits are when you start modifying foundations and underground features, as you start running into services. But grinding and repainting markings is not a big expense in the context of such a scheme, nor is getting it vaguely right first time - though often they need adjusting.
Where is it? What did it look like before?
The square ended island (which may be against a junction at the feet of the photographer?) looks like some of the things done on main roads through places like Peckham, where one complaint (from both user angles) is that some drivers turn their vehicles left into the end of the cycle track by mistake.
The kerb stones one is strange. They are usually a similar colour to the pavement and/or carriageway, and we have not had a history of needing to paint them back and white everywhere across the country.
One help would be for all cycle tracks to have their own surface colour wherever needed, but that would struggle to get adopted in the UK - we are too cheapskate.
On the question of floating bus stops, I'd note that the Hammersmith & Fulham one backs onto a road not a cycle path, and that might be why one is controversial and the other not. It can be easier for pedestrians to cross in the presence of cars than bikes. For a start, cars are easier to see. More subtly, that can work the other way. Car drivers are probably looking ahead. Cyclists, especially if going fast, might be looking mostly at the ground. Even if they've seen you, it is hard to make eye contact to confirm they've seen you.
The ones created on the Mile End Rd / Bow Rd section of the Cycle Superhighway 2 route in East London seem to work pretty well - one of the things they've done is to get buses to line up with the bus shelter before opening their doors.
That means that passengers can't simply exit the bus and take a couple of steps without looking before ending up in the cycle lane - instead, they first have to walk round the bus shelter which gives them a bit more time to gain situational awareness.
Of course, they were lucky in that they had loads of room to work with there - the inner part of the same route, along Aldgate / Whitechapel Rd is both narrower and busier, and as a result is far scarier.
I mean, that's sorta the issue, isn't it? The *pedestrians* have to walk around the bus shelter, coz cyclists have priority. How easy is that with a pram, or with limited visibility, or a dog, or with lots of people queuing, etc, etc?
It's not about pedestrians vs cyclists as the main question; don't fall for that one. That's a trope used by trolling lobbies and politicians wanting wedge issues. ASBO "cyclists" on pavements, of whom the majority of serious problems are likely ASBO motorcyclists with hacked ebikes or unregistered motorbikes such as Surrons, are a cultural and enforcement issue. The City of London are doing interesting stuff at present, including offering "responsible cycling" courses, as are sometimes transformative for lawbreaking motor vehicle drivers.
It's about equal access to the ability to travel. 40% of disabled adults do not have a driving license, compared to slightly more than half of that - 25% - for able-bodied adults. For many of that 40% it is not an option for medical reasons; I may in this category in 15-20 years if Diabetes damages my eyesight.
It's not acceptable that those peoples' autonomy is taken away; cycles (and e-cycles) as mobility aids are a part of that. The difference even on a manual cycle is that it is 6x more efficient than walking, which facilitates wider travel - it makes a huge difference to be able to get 10 miles from home rather than 1-2 miles.
I was advising someone with Fibromyalgia yesterday looking for a long (35 miles) off-road route around Derby to e-cycle today in the sun for half the day. It has to be entirely step free as she suffers serious pain from even pushing her cycle up one or two steps or a cycle groove, or any distance; "Cyclists Dismount" - NOPE. Many things we don't have around here; one thing we do have are former pit railways turned into rail trails. We have canal towpaths too, but many of them are barriered off.
One ask for the rumoured Transport Bill was for cycles - handcycles, tricycles, clip on e-cycles for wheelchairs and so on, to be recognised as mobility aids to bring them within the scope of eg motability. As remarked earlier, they are not cheap (a clip-on e-cycle is £2000 to £5000), and disabled people have a higher likelihood of being poorer.
Mobility lanes are also about mobility aids, and the possibility of using them easily and safely avoiding the dangers of being on the carriageway amongst the motor vehicles.
One of the most bizarre things you will see sometimes is clipboard-wielding Council Officers and others who think they are Jesus; they accost disabled people on cycles with legs that don't work properly, and essentially demand "Pick Up Your Mobility Aid and Walk". I have a friend who had that happen in St Pancras Station, when she was actually towing her wheelchair behind her Brompton which she was riding at walking pace. It talk 3 repetitions of "I can't walk; that's my wheelchair" before it sunk in.
"It's not about pedestrians vs cyclists as the main question; don't fall for that one."
It's my own view: all too often, then it the experience for pedestrians. And the cyclist 'lobby' are in denial about it. A pedestrian having to move out o the way because of some inconsiderate @sshat rider does not care if the rider was a 'serious' cyclist or an ASBO cyclist. And IME 'serious' cyclists - pepparami in lycra - are just as likely to be inconsiderate.
This is precisely the sort of attitude that pi**es me off with the cycle lobby. They can never be at fault; they're always the victim; no other road user matters. We saw this with the Huntingdon and the Regent's Park incidents, in different directions.
I recall some posters trying to tell me that the pavement in Huntingdon was a cyclepath...
More people are killed by mobility scooters. Cows. And lightning.
No one likes a deliveroo cyclist whizzing down a pavement, or a MAMIL doing 22mph through a quiet village. But what we've seen over the last week is people completely lose their heads over the issue.
It's not just 'deliveroo cyclists'. And I don't care if more people are killed by Leon's aliens; that doesn't excuse it. As we've seen; cyclist collisions with pedestrians are often unreported and are not investigated by police.
Cyclists are not above other road users. All road users need to muddle along; That is not the attitude that the cycle lobby give out.
I want cyclists to be safer. I want pedestrians to be safer. I want car drivers to be safer. That will only happen when everyone using roads takes responsibility for their actions, and respects the rights of others to use the road.
Sadly, in all three modes, there are people who think it is not 'the' road, but 'their' road.
Iranian defence analyst dude pointing out copters with high rankers can send out their exact location in case of a problem, unless they blow up or are suddenly destroyed. They flew into a mountain is my best guess.
Or blew up due to bad maintenance.
The copter in question looked both elderly and rather small. Poor maintenance has been something of an issue recently.
Can I utterly unpedantically point out that helicopter = helico as in helix, whirly and pter as in pterodactyl, wing. Copter is not a satisfactory abbreviation.
The very best “word” for helicopter comes from the pidgin English of Papua New Guinea
A helicopter in that language is “magimicks bilong Jesus”. I believe it was coined after a visit from a British royal (still the sovereigns of PNG)
Spoiler: parents are not ditching their cars. A BBC Bristol journalist from BBC Bristol has spoken to a couple of left-wing parents in urban areas of what is now one of the UK's most left-wing cities who now cycle their kids to school.
It's entirely unrepresentative, it is very much exaggerated and it is absolutely very BBC. Met and preachy to the core.
I am a big supporter of the BBC - I think the country is trashing a huge soft influence asset by running it down...
But I have to say this is a fair cop Casino - DM or Express levels of journalism. I fear the journalist's/editor's biases got the better of them.
It’s noteworthy that there’s a BBC article that’s remotely biased in that direction given the torrent of Tory talking points the organisation is cowed into spewing on a daily basis.
There have always been weak articles like this on the site. Inevitable when you consider the volume they pump out daily. Though I’d note that at least a third of the parents at our primary school, possibly closer to half, don’t own a car. It’s perhaps of anthropological interest to those living outside big cities to understand the cultural norms and mores of the millions who do.
Yes. I think there's a more interesting story to be written about the inconvenience of bringing up a family without the use of a car that would still fit the topic.
To your point I'm guessing most young families are in cities because that's where the jobs are.
There was a great slightly provocative quote on the school run in the video about Waterbeach I posted yesterday:
"With the local schools team, we said what what do you need in terms of access - how much parking do you need for parents in the morning? They basically said we don't want any because whatever you do outside the front of a primary school it will be chaos.
If you provide 50 parking spaces they'll be filled and more. If you provide none it will all be filled and more. So we'd rather you didn't provide any. So that was actually quite encouraging and not really the answer we'd expected."
(Separate facility provided for staff, disabled access etc. Plus a local mobility hub within walking distance on paths through amenity space.)
My cynical side says that that response was from the developer: who would quite like that car parking space to cram yet more houses in.
Our school has a too-small car park; shared by it and the adjacent secondary. The approach is via a long road that leads from almost outside the village; most people have a long drive just to reach the access road.
There is lots of active travel to the school; a short path leads from the end of a residential road in the village to the main gate. At school times, this is crammed with people and bikes. Noticeably less so in wet weather, though, when the car park gets busier.
But: lots of people park, or drop kids off on, the residential road; it is a much shorter trip for many than negotiating the access road. The road is not designed for that sort of traffic load. I ca guarantee that this will also happen in Waterbeach; lack of provision of a car park will just lead to people using nearby residential roads.
Active travel is fine for people like me, where we live less than a ten minute walk away from the school, especially as I don't work. It may be very different if you need to drive to work immediately afterwards - in other words, the life many people lead.
I'd recommend watching the presentation - it is only 15 minutes. There is car park provision at the mobility hub nearby, which is provision for the area rather than just the school.
"Nearby roads" are tending to be replaced with open landscaped amenity space or walking / wheeling / cycling paths.
I haven't watched the whole thing yet, but I like the way that tactile paving is now deemed unnecessary (coz cyclists hate them). I wonder what the RNIB think of that?
This is one of my bugbears: if a path is to be shared use between cyclists and pedestrians, then cyclist should be restricted in speed relative to the pedestrians. Maybe not to walking speed; but no more than two or three times pedestrian speed. Instead, you get people going very fast. What they've created there is a racetrack for cyclists - and it will be used as such.
I am *very* cynical when it comes to the cycling lobby arguing for cycling infrastructure at the expense of pedestrians. Good infrastructure would involve compromises for all users.
Thoughts. There's a lot about the need to unlearn assumptions, and change cultural expectations. You see that in the hierarchy of road users in the updated Highway Code from 2022 - the pedestrian priority at side road entrances will remain difficult in some measure until general road culture changes, which will take years or perhaps 2 decades, especially when we have no routine continuing education required to maintain a driving license.
Or contraflow cycling on 20mph one way streets. Been done in Cambridge since the 1990s, and now I think (you may know better) on pretty much all one way streets. But try and do a single street in Mansfield, and all the Local Councillors will have a heart attack because it is "so dangerous". Or two way mobility tracks on Binley Road in Coventry and "people will never look both ways" (is it so difficult - Highway Code says it is a basic?and "it is dangerous when I reverse out of my drive into the busy road" (why the f*ck are you reversing *out* of your drive?)
Unlearning habits: One amusing thing that happened at Waterbeach (in the presentation) is that when they created a flat environment where pedestrians get priority, one of the first developers created and built another whole new level of pavements on top with kerbs even higher - not getting the basic philosophy that they were designed out. I'm interested how often tactile paving standards (which have been in place since the 1980s) are often simply not followed when it is installed.
Shared space is in debate. We are trained to make streets with kerbs, tactiles etc to make them readable by visually impaired. "Shared space" was a movement from ~2000-2005 which said "remove all of that and people will be safe because motor vehicle drivers will have do be considerate". That gave us spaces like Exhibition Road, which has failed because it treats shared space as fully including motor vehicles rather than allowing them in as "guests". It missed that that never works in practice because all drivers are human, and VI people / vulnerable road users can't trust their lives to that. Waterbeach is far more thorough, very much circumscribing spaces accessible by motor and changing priorities, but I'm not 100% convinced it will be successful. That's another one around cultural expectations.
Pedestrians vs cyclists. A development over maybe the last 2-3 years has been convergence around common needs, especially amongst disabled charities and organisations like Sustrans. The Cycle Design Vehicle required to be accommodated (and often not) by new cycling infra (1.2m wide by 2.8m long - that is, size plus a dynamic envelope aka wobble room) has almost identical needs to mobility aids.
Personally when lobbying or arguing I always take the PoV of a disabled pedestrian, because I am (or will be) one, I got radicalised on this stuff by not being able to wheel my mum to the GP as all the walkways had wheelchair blocking barriers, and it avoids a lot of spurious distractions, plus has more legal teeth.
There are certain small fringe organisations around - such as those feeding inflammatory videos about 'floating bus stops' to the Mail and the Telegraph - who *want* a cyclists-vs-disabled conflict, and say things like 'cycling organisation Sustrans using disabled people as a human shield'. On bus stop bypasses they ignore that banning them will force mobility aid users out into general traffic at every bus stop - so it's a balance to be struck with factors both sides, and they point blank refuse to acknowledge the other side of the equation. Mark Harper may try a wedge issue on this one before he is finished.
Speeds - my new e-cycle is interesting on that. The 3 levels of assist also reflect speed as well as power, so give me max assist speeds of ~10kph, ~17-18kph, and ~25kph on the flat. I find that 1 is for areas busy with pedestrians, 2 is for shared paths / rough surfaces, and 3 elsewhere.
Enough for now.
Near me, they put “floating bus stops” in. With a black asphalt surface and black curbstones.
After the inevitable happened, they painted white stripes on the curb stones.
Yep - it's in getting decent standards, following the standards and sweating the detail.
In London there has been a real issue for a number of years of Boroughs not following TFL standards, which have in general been good.
On that piccie, it's revealing all the yellow paintwork they had to put in the cycle track to stop ASB drivers abusing it. Something Edinburgh is still working on . There's a wonderful photo of a workteam replacing slabs on the footway smashed by delivery lorries, whilst behind them there is a 7.5 tonne lorry parked on the pavement, delivering.
Err… the double yellow line was there before the cycle lane/floating bus stop. As were the yellow markings on the curb.
The big problem is *lack* of adequate markings. Drivers who don’t know the area are visibly confused at junctions and sometimes only just avoid ending up in the cycle lane.
This is not helped by the idiots who put the cycle lane in changing their… minds?.. three times. Leaving three sets of somewhat faded and painted over markings to choose from.
I had no idea that curb stones could come in black - why would you want them to be?
That's interesting - so they pretty much modified the carriageway rather than reconstruct the whole corridor. It's interesting that they did not feel they could trust them enough to remove the yellow lines .
That will be budgets? Really expensive bits are when you start modifying foundations and underground features, as you start running into services. But grinding and repainting markings is not a big expense in the context of such a scheme, nor is getting it vaguely right first time - though often they need adjusting.
Where is it? What did it look like before?
The square ended island (which may be against a junction at the feet of the photographer?) looks like some of the things done on main roads through places like Peckham, where one complaint (from both user angles) is that some drivers turn their vehicles left into the end of the cycle track by mistake.
The kerb stones one is strange. They are usually a similar colour to the pavement and/or carriageway, and we have not had a history of needing to paint them back and white everywhere across the country.
One help would be for all cycle tracks to have their own surface colour wherever needed, but that would struggle to get adopted in the UK - we are too cheapskate.
On the question of floating bus stops, I'd note that the Hammersmith & Fulham one backs onto a road not a cycle path, and that might be why one is controversial and the other not. It can be easier for pedestrians to cross in the presence of cars than bikes. For a start, cars are easier to see. More subtly, that can work the other way. Car drivers are probably looking ahead. Cyclists, especially if going fast, might be looking mostly at the ground. Even if they've seen you, it is hard to make eye contact to confirm they've seen you.
The ones created on the Mile End Rd / Bow Rd section of the Cycle Superhighway 2 route in East London seem to work pretty well - one of the things they've done is to get buses to line up with the bus shelter before opening their doors.
That means that passengers can't simply exit the bus and take a couple of steps without looking before ending up in the cycle lane - instead, they first have to walk round the bus shelter which gives them a bit more time to gain situational awareness.
Of course, they were lucky in that they had loads of room to work with there - the inner part of the same route, along Aldgate / Whitechapel Rd is both narrower and busier, and as a result is far scarier.
I mean, that's sorta the issue, isn't it? The *pedestrians* have to walk around the bus shelter, coz cyclists have priority. How easy is that with a pram, or with limited visibility, or a dog, or with lots of people queuing, etc, etc?
It's not about pedestrians vs cyclists as the main question; don't fall for that one. That's a trope used by trolling lobbies and politicians wanting wedge issues. ASBO "cyclists" on pavements, of whom the majority of serious problems are likely ASBO motorcyclists with hacked ebikes or unregistered motorbikes such as Surrons, are a cultural and enforcement issue. The City of London are doing interesting stuff at present, including offering "responsible cycling" courses, as are sometimes transformative for lawbreaking motor vehicle drivers.
It's about equal access to the ability to travel. 40% of disabled adults do not have a driving license, compared to slightly more than half of that - 25% - for able-bodied adults. For many of that 40% it is not an option for medical reasons; I may in this category in 15-20 years if Diabetes damages my eyesight.
It's not acceptable that those peoples' autonomy is taken away; cycles (and e-cycles) as mobility aids are a part of that. The difference even on a manual cycle is that it is 6x more efficient than walking, which facilitates wider travel - it makes a huge difference to be able to get 10 miles from home rather than 1-2 miles.
I was advising someone with Fibromyalgia yesterday looking for a long (35 miles) off-road route around Derby to e-cycle today in the sun for half the day. It has to be entirely step free as she suffers serious pain from even pushing her cycle up one or two steps or a cycle groove, or any distance; "Cyclists Dismount" - NOPE. Many things we don't have around here; one thing we do have are former pit railways turned into rail trails. We have canal towpaths too, but many of them are barriered off.
One ask for the rumoured Transport Bill was for cycles - handcycles, tricycles, clip on e-cycles for wheelchairs and so on, to be recognised as mobility aids to bring them within the scope of eg motability. As remarked earlier, they are not cheap (a clip-on e-cycle is £2000 to £5000), and disabled people have a higher likelihood of being poorer.
Mobility lanes are also about mobility aids, and the possibility of using them easily and safely avoiding the dangers of being on the carriageway amongst the motor vehicles.
One of the most bizarre things you will see sometimes is clipboard-wielding Council Officers and others who think they are Jesus; they accost disabled people on cycles with legs that don't work properly, and essentially demand "Pick Up Your Mobility Aid and Walk". I have a friend who had that happen in St Pancras Station, when she was actually towing her wheelchair behind her Brompton which she was riding at walking pace. It talk 3 repetitions of "I can't walk; that's my wheelchair" before it sunk in.
"It's not about pedestrians vs cyclists as the main question; don't fall for that one."
It's my own view: all too often, then it the experience for pedestrians. And the cyclist 'lobby' are in denial about it. A pedestrian having to move out o the way because of some inconsiderate @sshat rider does not care if the rider was a 'serious' cyclist or an ASBO cyclist. And IME 'serious' cyclists - pepparami in lycra - are just as likely to be inconsiderate.
This is precisely the sort of attitude that pi**es me off with the cycle lobby. They can never be at fault; they're always the victim; no other road user matters. We saw this with the Huntingdon and the Regent's Park incidents, in different directions.
I recall some posters trying to tell me that the pavement in Huntingdon was a cyclepath...
More people are killed by mobility scooters. Cows. And lightning.
No one likes a deliveroo cyclist whizzing down a pavement, or a MAMIL doing 22mph through a quiet village. But what we've seen over the last week is people completely lose their heads over the issue.
It's not just 'deliveroo cyclists'. And I don't care if more people are killed by Leon's aliens; that doesn't excuse it. As we've seen; cyclist collisions with pedestrians are often unreported and are not investigated by police.
Cyclists are not above other road users. All road users need to muddle along; That is not the attitude that the cycle lobby give out.
I want cyclists to be safer. I want pedestrians to be safer. I want car drivers to be safer. That will only happen when everyone using roads takes responsibility for their actions, and respects the rights of others to use the road.
Sadly, in all three modes, there are people who think it is not 'the' road, but 'their' road.
The suggestion that Khamanei's son may be behind it if it is an assassination is an interesting and in fact amusing one.
Could this be the moment to hit the IRGC?
Please don't give Netanyahu ideas.
Not him. Nato. Iran is supporting terrorist proxies all over the place. Should they be allowed to act with impunity? At the risk of sounding incredibly hawkish Reagan and Trump hit them directly and they were more cautious as a result. The regime in Iran is hardly rock solid and survival seems their main concern.
Glen O'Hara @gsoh31 · 1h Student visas are already down nearly 30%, and I would say between 10 and 20 universities are going to get into deep trouble. Another 10 to 20 will follow rapidly. Imagine sending a further signal that you want the numbers down... (1/2)
In any country that wants a future the first job of education is to do the absolute best for that country's young people in every possible respect. Everything else comes second and third.
The signals sent out to UK young people who find that there are places available at elite institutions for international students but not for them (this happens all the time) is truly dreadful. This is pure intellectual and cultural suicide and academic prostitution, and demeans our generally very good top universities.
And the signals sent out to millions of good young people by underfunding and underrating local FE vocational provision - which matters just as much as Oxford and Cambridge - is even worse.
Not how it works. Lucrative foreign students cross subsidise domestic students. Without them there would either be higher tuition fees or fewer places. Or both.
The Tories are arguing their issue is with lesser universities (ie the ones they didn’t go to), not the “elite institutions”.
They want these ‘lesser universities’ to fail so our uppity working classes lose their opportunity for further education, leaving their crumbling home towns and broadening their minds, and all become once again insular, parochial manual labourers.
Banging the immigrant drum, if successful, helpfully destroys the former polys that so many working class kids attend.
That’s of course until they realise there’s one of those uppity institutions in their own marginal constituency and they’re asked by local radio if they want it to close.
See, for example, this thread on Teesside University, since Simon Clarke is one of the MPs to have jumped on this.
Lots of local students going into local industries and public services, cross-subsidised by international fees.
Tough shit, people want migration brought under control.
If their business model isn't sustainable without huge numbers of foreign students coming in then they'll have to change their business model to one that can succeed in the domestic market.
Tough shit, we need migration or we’ll end up like Japan or Ukraine. Aged and slowly dying, with no funding for social care. Thankfully unlike Ukraine without a neighbour licking its lips at the land our ageing population is inhabiting.
If we’re getting migrants we might as well have them pay through the nose for one of our few successful export industries post-Brexit.
The whole world is going to have to adapt to a shrinking population. At what point do you call an end to increasing the British population to avoid the worst effects of the demographic transition? 80 million? 100 million?
It might be better to think about creating comfortable ex-pat retirement villages in Rwanda. Export the old people instead of importing the young.
In time we can start to demolish the surplus starter homes and "executive" homes and hand the land back to nature.
BTW, of all the people I've known living in executive homes, not one of them has been an executive.
The suggestion that Khamanei's son may be behind it if it is an assassination is an interesting and in fact amusing one.
Could this be the moment to hit the IRGC?
Please don't give Netanyahu ideas.
Not him. Nato. Iran is supporting terrorist proxies all over the place. Should they be allowed to act with impunity? At the risk of sounding incredibly hawkish Reagan and Trump hit them directly and they were more cautious as a result. The regime in Iran is hardly rock solid and survival seems their main concern.
Add this moment, with their proxies at war with Israel and their backers at war with Ukraine and claiming NATO involvement, it really wouldn't be a good idea.
The Israelis might do it, because Netanyahu is a complete loon, but NATO is hopefully a little more cautious.
Iranian defence analyst dude pointing out copters with high rankers can send out their exact location in case of a problem, unless they blow up or are suddenly destroyed. They flew into a mountain is my best guess.
Those bastard Jewish Zionist mountains. And those Jewish Fog Banks.
Sadly I'd put good money someone on the internet is unironically saying something to that effect right this minute.
Glen O'Hara @gsoh31 · 1h Student visas are already down nearly 30%, and I would say between 10 and 20 universities are going to get into deep trouble. Another 10 to 20 will follow rapidly. Imagine sending a further signal that you want the numbers down... (1/2)
We could do with a fundamental restructuring of FE in this county. Clearly I don’t want there to be a collapse of institutions (that serves no-one) but we could do with moving away from the New Labour model of degrees for all.
All want degrees (or many do). It's aspirational, which is supposed to be good. People with degrees, including many in this board, saying other people shouldn't have them is a poor look.
But yes higher education does need restructuring. To be specific undergraduate education needs to be a lot, lot cheaper. Education factories in other words, efficiency two year degrees, longer semesters and more part time degrees. Anyone who starts talking about Oxbridge, world rankings etc is self serving
Perhaps “degrees for all” was a bad choice of words. I believe that we need to look at making sure all qualifications are high quality and that everyone has the chance to access them. Where I am not convinced, is that a university degree in the traditional academic sense is appropriate for all trades, professions and wants/needs of young people. We need to move away from elitist interpretations of universities needing to be the places to go to get on in life, and see that there is better careers advice and more flexible pathways for the future workforce.
I agree with everything you say but that doesn't address the affordability issue. The problem is we can't afford 50% of young people going to university at current costs and prices. Employability is fine. In general graduates can find jobs more easily than non graduates. The cost isn't fine.
So that gives us three choices I think:
1. Increase the fees so only the wealthy can afford them 2. Limit the numbers and subsidise these 3. Reduce the cost so more people can go to university who are qualified and could benefit from it
3 seems obviously the right answer to me but that will need radical changes to universities. They need become Premier Inns (where the bed and shower are better anyway) and no longer pretend to be the Savoy.
I am taking about undergraduate education. Postgraduate is a different requirement entirely.
If we compare to Ireland then the statistics I can find most easily are that, in 2022, 63% of Irish 25-34 year olds had a third level education. And that's in a country where the agricultural sector still makes up about a tenth of the economy.
It's kinda mind-boggling that the 50% target for university is still a matter of debate (although, of course, the great weakness in Britain is that an academic degree is seen as the only third level education worth having).
Iranian defence analyst dude pointing out copters with high rankers can send out their exact location in case of a problem, unless they blow up or are suddenly destroyed. They flew into a mountain is my best guess.
Or blew up due to bad maintenance.
The copter in question looked both elderly and rather small. Poor maintenance has been something of an issue recently.
Can I utterly unpedantically point out that helicopter = helico as in helix, whirly and pter as in pterodactyl, wing. Copter is not a satisfactory abbreviation.
The suggestion that Khamanei's son may be behind it if it is an assassination is an interesting and in fact amusing one.
Could this be the moment to hit the IRGC?
Please don't give Netanyahu ideas.
Not him. Nato. Iran is supporting terrorist proxies all over the place. Should they be allowed to act with impunity? At the risk of sounding incredibly hawkish Reagan and Trump hit them directly and they were more cautious as a result. The regime in Iran is hardly rock solid and survival seems their main concern.
Add this moment, with their proxies at war with Israel and their backers at war with Ukraine and claiming NATO involvement, it really wouldn't be a good idea.
The Israelis might do it, because Netanyahu is a complete loon, but NATO is hopefully a little more cautious.
Why? How do things get worse for Ukraine by hitting the IRGC? How do things get better for Hamas? Iran simply isn't being deterred in any way. When will ANYTHING be done to change that. At the moment we are all playing their game in the middle east (including Netanyahu). They'll never run out of proxies that they can support.
Also I just had a basically vegetarian dinner. Orrechiete pasta with bitter broccoli tops and chicory and chili and garlic and capers and breadcrumbs - supposedly there was anchovies in there but I didn’t detect them
Absolutely delish. Very bitter yet weirdly moreish. Great with a robust primitivo
I hate veggie food yet this was cracking. Also extremely basic - cucina povera. Italian cuisine at its simple best
Also I just had a basically vegetarian dinner. Orrechiete pasta with bitter broccoli tops and chicory and chili and garlic and capers and breadcrumbs - supposedly there was anchovies in there but I didn’t detect them
Absolutely delish. Very bitter yet weirdly moreish. Great with a robust primitivo
I hate veggie food yet this was cracking. Also extremely basic - cucina povera. Italian cuisine at its simple best
I had my fifth beef day in a row, which is kinda mad, but there was family visiting, so I guess the boat was pushed out.
I see no reason to think it wasn't an accident. Poor weather, mist and cloud; and remote, hilly terrain. Makes it a hard target for a missile attack, and very easy for accidentally running into the ground (controlled flight into terrain).
Another option would be bomb on board, but the wording from the Iranians ("hard landing") makes me feel that it simply ran into a mountain.
Known in the trade as Controlled Flight into Terrain
Glen O'Hara @gsoh31 · 1h Student visas are already down nearly 30%, and I would say between 10 and 20 universities are going to get into deep trouble. Another 10 to 20 will follow rapidly. Imagine sending a further signal that you want the numbers down... (1/2)
We could do with a fundamental restructuring of FE in this county. Clearly I don’t want there to be a collapse of institutions (that serves no-one) but we could do with moving away from the New Labour model of degrees for all.
All want degrees (or many do). It's aspirational, which is supposed to be good. People with degrees, including many in this board, saying other people shouldn't have them is a poor look.
But yes higher education does need restructuring. To be specific undergraduate education needs to be a lot, lot cheaper. Education factories in other words, efficiency two year degrees, longer semesters and more part time degrees. Anyone who starts talking about Oxbridge, world rankings etc is self serving
Perhaps “degrees for all” was a bad choice of words. I believe that we need to look at making sure all qualifications are high quality and that everyone has the chance to access them. Where I am not convinced, is that a university degree in the traditional academic sense is appropriate for all trades, professions and wants/needs of young people. We need to move away from elitist interpretations of universities needing to be the places to go to get on in life, and see that there is better careers advice and more flexible pathways for the future workforce.
I agree with everything you say but that doesn't address the affordability issue. The problem is we can't afford 50% of young people going to university at current costs and prices. Employability is fine. In general graduates can find jobs more easily than non graduates. The cost isn't fine.
So that gives us three choices I think:
1. Increase the fees so only the wealthy can afford them 2. Limit the numbers and subsidise these 3. Reduce the cost so more people can go to university who are qualified and could benefit from it
3 seems obviously the right answer to me but that will need radical changes to universities. They need become Premier Inns (where the bed and shower are better anyway) and no longer pretend to be the Savoy.
I am taking about undergraduate education. Postgraduate is a different requirement entirely.
If we compare to Ireland then the statistics I can find most easily are that, in 2022, 63% of Irish 25-34 year olds had a third level education. And that's in a country where the agricultural sector still makes up about a tenth of the economy.
It's kinda mind-boggling that the 50% target for university is still a matter of debate (although, of course, the great weakness in Britain is that an academic degree is seen as the only third level education worth having).
Britain needs an educated workforce.
I think Ireland provides third level education at a lower cost per student than the UK. Certainly used to be the case.
Also I just had a basically vegetarian dinner. Orrechiete pasta with bitter broccoli tops and chicory and chili and garlic and capers and breadcrumbs - supposedly there was anchovies in there but I didn’t detect them
Absolutely delish. Very bitter yet weirdly moreish. Great with a robust primitivo
I hate veggie food yet this was cracking. Also extremely basic - cucina povera. Italian cuisine at its simple best
"You've taken your first step into a larger world!"
Comments
One is for home students to pay more in fees (tricky with our current funding model run by the government), the other is for employers to take on the training that currently happens on these courses. Which doesn't necessarily help the public finances when so many of those employers are tendrils of the state.
Not liking those options is why the government encouraged universities to go all-in on recruiting foreign students, ignoring the risk that a backlash like this would happen.
People may well want migration numbers down. The question is whether they will be any happier with the consequences of cutting them in this way.
But c'mon Casino. You can think more than one move ahead, you're smarter than the government.
It's my own view: all too often, then it the experience for pedestrians. And the cyclist 'lobby' are in denial about it. A pedestrian having to move out o the way because of some inconsiderate @sshat rider does not care if the rider was a 'serious' cyclist or an ASBO cyclist. And IME 'serious' cyclists - pepparami in lycra - are just as likely to be inconsiderate.
https://x.com/dawnbutlerbrent/status/1791451841122722124?s=61
But if you want to ensure your party never gets into power again - letting a lot of local universities close will be a sure way of making the Tory party as popular as the Sun in Liverpool.
It's also worth saying that last week I saw a survey that highlighted the 10 attempts across the past 25 years to regenerate Middlesborough. Literally the only one that has worked is attached to the University (and to a lesser extent the Northern College of Art).
I don’t have a problem with Unis taking in foreign students and bringing money into the UK but bringing dependents is a thorny issue clearly.
https://x.com/mike_fabricant/status/1792198466661433784?s=61
It's a huge deal in the north of Scotland when kids get driving licenses for the first time. We all get shipped off to Aberdeen to watch horrific videos of the aftermath of car crashes in a desperate attempt to slow us down.
Your "serious" cyclists are unlikely generally to be on pavements; they will usually be on roads and sometimes at inappropriate speeds on rural multiuser paths; the general cycling communities I am in discourage such behaviour and speak out about it. One real issue is that everything always gets built to the absolute minimum legal quality standard for eg width and visibility.
It can work in places where there are good sightlines and a very low density of pedestrians. I have newish decentish shared cycling / walking surfaces alongside the A617. When I get say 1.5 miles out of town on the way to somewhere 5 or 6 miles away, I have never seen a pedestrian on it.
Here's a piece from road.cc some time ago about excessive speeds on a shared path in Swansea, and a range of views. Interestingly there's the same Strava overestimating issue as in the Telegraph last week, though not dishonestly, but that does not detract from the need to be sensible.
https://road.cc/content/news/172209-swansea-strava-users-told-cut-speed-shared-use-paths
Equally the behaviour of a small minority (yes, we need stats) does not mean that blanket bans should be applied. Fortunately on this we have equality law.
We know about here that from kneejerking Councillors in Mansfield. There was an issue with teens doing wheelies once or twice on Saturday afternoons, and a total ban by PSPO - which was softened slighty after a High Court legal action. Which means that kids going to the Rebecca Addlington swimming centre on one side of town have to walk their bikes through town for 15 minutes on dark winter evenings, or cycle around dangerous roads.
We do not seek to ban all driving because of the hoon minority in areas where motor vehicle ASB happens, nor all pedestrians because of muggings by young men in hoodies. The argument is the same.
I recall some posters trying to tell me that the pavement in Huntingdon was a cyclepath...
(Although actually Lancaster is a Russell Group uni. Do you mean Lancashire, which is different?)
If Raisi is dead, it will be very sad indeed... that the fat old creep Khamanei wasn't on the same helicopter.
We all have to get along. As it happens, IMV all too often, the attitude on road.cc absolutely stinks, with zero thought for other road users.
No one likes a deliveroo cyclist whizzing down a pavement, or a MAMIL doing 22mph through a quiet village. But what we've seen over the last week is people completely lose their heads over the issue.
As for Raisi, plenty of videos of fireworks going off in Iran at the news. People happy. Evil old bastard. Rot in hell. If he’s dead.
#justkidding
Cyclists are not above other road users. All road users need to muddle along; That is not the attitude that the cycle lobby give out.
I want cyclists to be safer. I want pedestrians to be safer. I want car drivers to be safer. That will only happen when everyone using roads takes responsibility for their actions, and respects the rights of others to use the road.
Sadly, in all three modes, there are people who think it is not 'the' road, but 'their' road.
Incidentally for all the cyclists on here, I used a CO2 canister to pump up my tyre earlier. Blooming heck, they're good.
(Only as an experiment in the garden, ready for when I might need it out and about. And yes, I did deflate the trye again and reinflate it with air. My first time ever dealing with a Presta valve too .)
The regime could be more vulnerable than at any time in 45 years.
This is potentially fantastic news for the Iranian people - unless someone worse emerges...
(No, I do not think Russia was behind it, before you ask. They wanted Raisi too.)
So the real danger might be Hizbollah blaming Israel and lashing out at them.
Which might weaken their hold on Iran...
But yes higher education does need restructuring. To be specific undergraduate education needs to be a lot, lot cheaper. Education factories in other words, efficiency two year degrees, longer semesters and more part time degrees. Anyone who starts talking about Oxbridge, world rankings etc is self serving
Nothing like a good succession crisis to precipitate revolution.
If we’re getting migrants we might as well have them pay through the nose for one of our few successful export industries post-Brexit.
Congratulations to Arsenal on their giving it everything till the end trophy. Snicker.
Andrew Neil
@afneil
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57m
Reports of military and security forces being deployed across Tehran.
Raisi’s helicopter fell by accident due to fog, and Fico was shot by a crazy grandfather, and…Olof Palme, and….Kennedy. S*** happens. But it happens most reliably with careful professional training carried out by the rulers of s***.
Do your own maths
I don't think a Bayesian analysis comes out in favour of survival.
Not impossible, but the regime clearly thinks he's dead.
https://x.com/craigmurrayorg/status/1792208125422162223?s=61
This is a disturbing story in the Torygraph on antisemitism in schools. I don't know London or its schools very well but these paragraphs do not fill me with confidence.
“The children affected don’t want anyone to know for fear of the repercussions. Parents are also keen not to make a fuss. They want to keep a good relationship with their children’s school, don’t want to be blamed for widening rifts between communities, and are intimidated too.”
“Many staff at schools are either complicit or silent,” says Hughes. “I’ve been told that some staff have worn keffiyehs [Palestinian scarves] or badges with ‘from the river to the sea.’ Often they have been asked to remove the badges, but the statements have already been made.”
She’s aware of many well-intentioned teachers who have been concerned about the Jewish children’s wellbeing. “But they are also keen to keep all the parents happy and maintain the status quo in the school community,” she says.'
So they don't want racism in schools but fear doing something about it will prove 'divisive' among the parents.
The copter in question looked both elderly and rather small. Poor maintenance has been something of an issue recently.
Another option would be bomb on board, but the wording from the Iranians ("hard landing") makes me feel that it simply ran into a mountain. In which case, all on bard will be dead.
It does happen:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_Mull_of_Kintyre_Chinook_crash
Nah, it's done.
https://www.meforum.org/65899/if-raisi-is-dead-implications-for-the-islamic
The suggestion that Khamanei's son may be behind it if it is an assassination is an interesting and in fact amusing one.
It might be better to think about creating comfortable ex-pat retirement villages in Rwanda. Export the old people instead of importing the young.
But frankly that seems rather unlikely.
So that gives us three choices I think:
1. Increase the fees so only the wealthy can afford them
2. Limit the numbers and subsidise these
3. Reduce the cost so more people can go to university who are qualified and could benefit from it
3 seems obviously the right answer to me but that will need radical changes to universities. They need become Premier Inns (where the bed and shower are better anyway) and no longer pretend to be the Savoy.
I am taking about undergraduate education. Postgraduate is a different requirement entirely.
Sky report.
“It said Ebrahim Raisi's chopper was discovered by search and rescue teams.” 😮
https://x.com/skynews/status/1792261003213668473?s=61
What about his helicopter?
A helicopter in that language is “magimicks bilong Jesus”. I believe it was coined after a visit from a British royal (still the sovereigns of PNG)
BTW, of all the people I've known living in executive homes, not one of them has been an executive.
The Israelis might do it, because Netanyahu is a complete loon, but NATO is hopefully a little more cautious.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUn6C7xfVDw
It's kinda mind-boggling that the 50% target for university is still a matter of debate (although, of course, the great weakness in Britain is that an academic degree is seen as the only third level education worth having).
Britain needs an educated workforce.
Heli = scary
Copter = as feck
At least that was my experience.
Absolutely delish. Very bitter yet weirdly moreish. Great with a robust primitivo
I hate veggie food yet this was cracking. Also extremely basic - cucina povera. Italian cuisine at its simple best
https://youtu.be/070OfzZDvgI?si=mJv-ygl9OwiLKAqi