Question:
Published research has shown a statistically significant increase in risk associated with an on-road cycle lane, and that such painted lines lead to vehicles passing cyclists more closely. Back in 2019 six cycling commissioners described them as “pointless white lines on the road” and a waste of public money.
The design does not represent best practice for cycleways and due to safety concerns, a build-up of grit from the passing traffic, or the fact that the cycleway diverts from the road to the shared path and back again, it may in fact put cyclists off.
Why hasn’t the Council implemented a properly segregated cycleway on the London Road?
Minutes:
The new cycleway on London Road in Wokingham is not fully segregated and for long stretches cyclists share the road with heavy traffic moving at 40 mph with just a single white painted line between them and the passing cars, lorries and buses.
Published research has shown a statistically significant increase in risk associated with an on-road cycle lane, and that such painted lines lead to vehicles passing cyclists more closely. Back in 2019 six cycling commissioners described them as “pointless white lines on the road” and a waste of public money.
The design does not represent best practice for cycleways and due to safety concerns, a build-up of grit from the passing traffic, or the fact that the cycleway diverts from the road to the shared path and back again, it may in fact put cyclists off.
Why hasn’t the Council implemented a properly segregated cycleway on the London Road?
Answer
The LCN 422 cycle route was completed in 4 phases and dates back to 2014. Until July 2020 the layout of this entire scheme along the A329 met our existing standards and recommended best practice. We need to acknowledge that there are sections where cyclists have to share with pedestrians and change from the carriageway to footway and vice versa and these are not necessarily ideal and are less likely to encourage new cyclists. Unfortunately, we had to strike a balance between the availability of road space and need for right turn areas on some sections of the road.
The final phase of the scheme is the London Road section and this was designed in 2018, with various amendments made due to ongoing consultation with stakeholders and the need to try to establish support for the scheme whilst meeting the original project objectives. Work on site commenced in Spring 2020 and so does not comply with the standards that were released a few months later. It does however meet both our design standards and national guidance from that time. Our scheme designs are always in line with best practice where reasonably practicable and, where not possible due to special constraints, will always be compliant with safety regulation and legislation.
As you will be aware the Council has now committed to meeting LTN1/20 in future projects and so any further projects, including the forthcoming Active Travel Fund scheme and all the LCWIP recommended schemes coming in future will be segregated where appropriate. We had a really good response to the LC WIP consultation, with over 3,000 responses. I am looking forward to implementing improvements to cycleways as a result of that consultation.
Supplementary Question
Thank you for your answer and your acknowledgement that the solution we have is not ideal. It is possible to put in low cost physical segregation measures such as wands, bollards or low level “orcas”. Given that you see the importance of this, when will the Council introduce low cost physical segregation measures to improve cycling on the London Road?
Supplementary Answer
I am very happy to look at this as part of the LC WIP proposals. There are a lot of cycleways in the Borough that we could do with improving. We need to look in balance to see where we can spend the money best to deliver most benefit for cyclists.