The road to Hell is paved with ASLs

Whether you call them Advanced Stop Lines and Advanced Stop Zones or prefer the more casual-sounding ‘bike box’, they all amount to the same thing: a piece of crap.

I believe that the real reason for their existence is not to make cycling safe, as you might think, but rather to get cycling campaigners to shut up. Neither of these goals has been achieved, of course.

ASLs make sense in that perfect, ideal world where the Highway Code is set. There, humans can all be trained and/or forced to behave perfectly at all times – a bit like North Korea, or Stepford.

The Highway Code’s idealised version of the UK. There are more people on bikes in this image than there are in the whole of West Yorkshire.

But here in the real world, inhabited by imperfect and fallible human beings, people on bikes still get killed when the traffic lights change, and an ASL does nothing to help a bike user who arrives while the traffic is already flowing. They’re often ignored by drivers too, the police don’t enforce them. Unfortunately, all this means that ASLs have become another endless battle in the War On The Roads™ and some cycling activists spend a large amount of time trying to convince drivers – and the authorities – to respect them.

It does annoy me when I see drivers pull up across the ASL. Of course, I have no problem if, say, an ambulance causes the flow of traffic to stop and the lights change to red leaving a car stranded there. But so many people drive up to a red light and over the first white line right into the bike area. Some drivers even drive across both white lines and into the pedestrian crossing or junction beyond!

I’d argue that if you’re unable to bring your vehicle to a halt before reaching a clearly marked position on the road, you really shouldn’t be operating such a machine at all.

This van has very neatly stopped within the ASZ, note the centimetre-accurate alignment. Maybe the driver mistook it for a parking space?

But for all that, I don’t really care. I’ve been asked to sign petitions to get the police to enforce the rules. (Which would be nice for a change.) But really, I won’t waste my time polishing a turd, and neither should you.

Improving ASLs is not what cycling campaigners should be spending their time on. It would be like, say, environmental campaigners asking Shell and Esso to use a nicer font in a lovely shade of green. Or perhaps it’s more like a slave asking for the chains that bind them to be chrome-plated.

What I’m saying is that the ASL is a pretend friend to a bike rider. They’re there as a kludge, a poor compromise between total motor dominance and calls for cycling infrastructure. They’re rubbish. Yes, I know that drivers should stay out of them, and everybody should follow the rules, but it’s a distraction from the bigger picture. The whole argument is worthless.

Nobody is waiting for ASLs to be enforced before they take up cycling. Nobody is saying “if only there were more areas at traffic lights where I could sit in front of growling motor vehicles, I’d take up riding tomorrow!” In fact, I reckon the idea of sitting on a bike in front of a large motorised vehicle is one of the key points which prevents more people from using a bike for transport.

A rare instance of an ASZ relatively free of motor vehicles. Does this attract people to cycling? “Ooh, lovely, a painted area which allows us to position ourselves in front of heavy vehicles! Let’s do this every day!”

Don’t waste your time campaigning for this rubbish to be enforced or improved. Don’t ask for nicer chains, demand their removal!

There are very few places where an ASL is appropriate, yet the UK is covered in the damned things. There are already tried-and-tested solutions for junctions which don’t involve mixing up motor traffic with bikes – or mixing bikes with pedestrians, as is the current fashion in the UK. Pedestrianise London has a good article covering the right way to do these things so I won’t write about them here.

Sure, they have a few ASLs in Cycling Heaven – ahem! – I mean, the Netherlands. But they’re not common, and are considered an old-fashioned design. Any infrastructure geeks going visiting the Netherlands will find themselves pointing at them excitedly – “Ooh! There’s an ASL, just like at home!”

The worst thing about ASLs is that they’re designed for very low levels of cycling. Sure, one or two bikes are fine. Maybe even five or six. But what happens if twenty people were to arrive on bikes? What about fifty? Where are they all meant to go?

Is the UK ready for the Cycling Revolution^® or are we designing roads for cycling shares of, ooh, say, about 2%?

The photo above shows pretty much an ideal situation for a junction with an ASL. There’s a wide cycle lane and no motor vehicles have encroached beyond the stop line. But the ASZ is already filled with about ten bikes and is overflowing into the cycle lane, where another ten people on bikes are waiting in the van’s blind spot. The ASL does nothing for these people.

Why are we designing infrastructure which cannot handle more than a dozen people on bikes? The design is so weak, it’s proof positive that the government has low cycling targets, because the infrastructure they’re putting in simply can’t handle more than a very small number of people on bikes.

But imagine if the orange van was a lorry – should all bikes wait behind it? What if the ASZ looks clear and the lights change while passing the lorry? What’s the goal of this infrastructure? Suddenly it’s all rather confusing.

Or even take a look at the Highway Code’s idealised image of how an ASL works at the top of this post. Note that even in their perfect world’s green-ticked scenario, there’s a bike on the left-hand side of the left-turning car. Even if that bike moves to the front of the ASZ, what happens when a fourth or a fifth bike arrives? The system just can’t cope with more than a few bikes.

So that’s why I don’t like ASLs, and that’s why I want rid of them.

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If you’re not convinced by my arguments, feel free to try one of these other esteemed bloggers: the Davids Hembrow, Arditti or Brennan, and also Paul James, Freewheeler or Londonneur.

 

Update: And there’s more, from NI Greenways, Cyclegaz and WillCycle. Thanks to Stripymoggie, Mark Skrzypczyk and WilliamNB in the comments below for these links.

 

Also, I just noticed this comment which I made on David Hembrow’s blog in May 2012, making the same point. I must have been mulling this over in my mind for quite some time!

Britain can do it!

My last post — the one about bus stops — turned out to be very popular for some reason. Thanks to all who shared it, and hello, new readers!

One thing that I discovered as a result of that post is that bus stop cycle bypasses already exist in the UK — they’re not a new thing, they’re just very rare. (Do they even have a more concise name? I think I’ll call them BSCBs.)

Here’s a new example in Brighton:

New BSCB on Lewes Road in Brighton. (Photo courtesy of Mark Strong)

Three cheers for Brighton & Hove City Council for installing this, and for the cycling advocates (including Mark Strong) who pushed for it!

There’s another photo here. I don’t know what the rest of the road looks like for bikes, but this is much better than the old design, which can still be seen on Google Maps:

If you prefer this then you’re insane. (Photo: Google Maps)

The old design really is awful. Buses have to cross the cycle lane to get to the bus stop, and bike users have to overtake a rumbling bus (which will almost certainly not be stopped perfectly within the bus stop, but sticking out across the cycle lane). That’s not going to convince people to start using a bike for transport.

I also received word (thanks to Ambrose White) of a BSCB in Sheffield:

A BSCB in Sheffield. (Photo: Google Maps)

It’s rather odd that this exists at all, as the road it’s on is very wide and yet there’s only a poxy advisory cycle lane for the rest of its length. (At least, that’s what it looks like on Streetview, maybe it has changed since.)

But this BSCB does the job pretty well. I like that the cycle path is red, which alerts pedestrians. And the priority is unclear but well marked, too – there are bike icons (as well as the red surface) which tell pedestrians that they’re crossing a cycle-path, but there’s also a give way which warns bike users to be careful of pedestrians. It looks fairly decent to me.

Either way, I know that one place which is never pleasant to be is on the right-hand side of a rumbling bus.

(Stop press! I found another BSCB example on CycleStreets.)

Cycles and buses and lights, oh my!

While I’m on the subject of Dutch cycle infrastructure which can be done in the UK but rarely is, here’s a traffic signal bypass:

“Bloody cyclists, always riding through red lights! Oh…”

As Mark Wagenbuur explains, bike users heading straight on at a T-junction aren’t actually interacting with the junction so there’s no reason to hold them at the red light. (They should give way to, and merge with, bikes coming from the right, however.)

And it turns out there’s lots of other Dutch touches around the UK, too. Here’s an example of a “free left” in Cambridge, combined with separate signals for bikes heading straight on:

It’s a bit too British, but Dutch enough. (Photo: Google Maps)

So bike users turning left aren’t held at the signals (but they must give way to traffic coming from the right, ideally the bike lane/path would continue around the corner), while bike users going straight on have their own traffic lights. When the bike lights are green, motor traffic in the left-turn lane is held at a red signal. When the left-turning motor traffic gets a green light, straight-on bike traffic is held at a red. So no conflict – they’re segregated in time.

Again, it’s odd that such good infrastructure exists here at all (though it could be better). There’s nothing behind the camera but to regular vehicle lanes, and the only way to turn right is to get into the right-hand lane (one thing which I’m sure puts off many would-be bike users). But it’s still an improvement over the usual UK habit of ignoring bike users altogether.

So it seems that almost everything we desire is already legally possible in the UK, but there’s often just not the knowledge or the will to do it. If the DfT produced clear national guidelines on how to provide these facilities – and made them mandatory, too – we would start to see them appearing all over the place.

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Sorry, Northern Ireland — this post should have been called “The UK can do it!” I’d change it, but once WordPress has sent out the feed to other blogs, Twitter, etc., it causes all sorts of problems. At least I didn’t just say “England” though, eh?

 

How to suppress bike riding #2: Bus stops (and also, the solution)

I wrote much of this post ages ago, but never got around to finishing it. Events have somewhat overtaken me in the meantime, with TfL announcing plans to implement the very solution I was describing! The new designs have also been recently covered at As Easy As Riding A Bike, and David Hembrow has previously discussed this Dutch bike-friendly bus stop design too.

If you require physical, concrete proof that the authorities don’t care about cycling, take a look at a bus stop. The design will almost certainly give priority to private motor vehicles, with public transport a poor second and bikes a very distant third.

Consider this fairly standard bus stop design (although it’s lacking the yellow ‘bus stop box’ markings).

What will happen when the bus pulls in?

A bus about to block the bike lane so that cars can pass freely. (Source: Google Maps)

The bus pulls in and blocks the cycle lane, so that cars can pass freely. Here’s such an event occurring at a different location (actually further back the same road):

This bus has pulled in to the bus stop, which blocks the cycle lane, enabling those very important cars to pass freely. (Source: Google Maps)

This is the contempt with which the UK authorities see cycling — and buses are given second-rate status too. For not only do people riding bikes have to pull out to pass the bus (a terrifying place to be for most people) but when the bus is ready to set off it has to wait until there is a gap in traffic before it can pull out itself!

There, in one pithy design, is proof that the private car comes above all else. And it’s the standard design for bus stops in the UK, and it’s one reason why ‘normal’ people don’t ride bikes for transport. The constant leapfrogging between bikes and buses is a terrible way to organise traffic flow.

Go Dutch, go behind the bus stop

Returning back to the top photo, here’s a better alternative:

An alternative bus stop design, the likes of which are now being suggested by TfL.

This design enables people riding bikes to pass buses without having to ride around the outside of the bus in the flow of traffic. (Remember, dear Cyclists: normal people aren’t willing to do that. Like the woman calmly riding while drinking a coffee there.)

Note the angled kerbs. I’m a big fan of these. If you’re using a wheelchair or pushing a pram, they’re easier to roll across. If you’re riding a bike, running into them will cause you no harm. They’re known as ‘forgiving kerbs’ and they’re a tiny change which makes a big difference. (One of the major flaws of the Torrington cyclepath in central London is the high, straight kerbs which mean that you must ride well away from the edge. Making these into 45º kerbs would enable the full width of the path to be used… but that’s another post!)

But that’s just version one. The bus stop island is too narrow for my liking, but because we’ve moved the bus stop and ticket machine onto the island there’s now space on the pavement available to move the cyclepath across, so we can make the bus island wider:

Plenty of space for people to get on and off the bus

There’s no loss of space to pedestrians, as the cyclepath would run over where the bus stop is currently located (i.e. you can’t walk there anyway). In fact, add the footpath and the bus stop island together and there’s actually more space for people on foot because the part of the road which was previously covered in stripes of paint is now the bus island!

TfL sees the light

I never thought I would praise TfL, but that is what we must do, for they have finally seen the light and realised that nearly everyone doesn’t like riding bikes amongst motor traffic. (Seems fairly obvious to me, but there you go.) Congratulations to whoever got this new design through!

More specifically to this article, they’ve realised that people don’t like overtaking buses while riding a bike. (Except for these selfish bastards, of course, but they’re extreme sports fanatics and adrenaline junkies, so we really shouldn’t base transport policy on their desires any more than we should design roads for boy racers.)

So it’s great that TfL are now planning this kind of design for the extension to Cycle Superhighway 2, and it’s the kind of thing which is normal in the Netherlands, and it works very well. Once you’re already dealing with a separate cyclepath it makes sense to put the bus stops on islands between the cyclepath and the road.

Here’s TfL’s artist’s impression of a bus bypass:

TfL’s artist’s impression of a cyclepath with bus stop bypass. Note their fast Cyclist, no doubt about to collide with those innocent pedestrians.

It’s good but not quite right for me. Note the 90º kerbs and typical London Cyclist (capital-C intentional) complete with helmet, dropped handlebars, lurid jacket and probably gritted teeth (though he’s facing away so we can’t see that). (The Cyclist looks a bit too big to me too, but never mind.)

Here’s my slightly modified version:

My amended version of TfL’s design. I also changed the cyclist to a lovely middle-aged woman who isn’t going to run anyone over. “Please, go ahead.” “No, after you!” “Why, thank-you!” “You’re welcome. Have a nice day!” Etc. etc.

Nicer kerbs for starters – really, these are essential in any modern cyclepath design. I’ve also got rid of TfL’s Cyclist and replaced him with a middle-aged female who is merely using a bike for transport. (She doesn’t know anything about bikes, nor has she ever watched the Tour de France. She’s just going down the pub.)

I’m still not keen with how the cyclepath crosses the footpath – who has priority here? For me, this could be clearer.

If pedestrians have priority then can’t we add zebra-stripes to the cyclepath, or at least a ‘pedestrian’ icon on the surface? If bike users have priority then the surface should remain blue throughout the crossing area, which will make it clear to pedestrians that they’re crossing a cyclepath. (Also, maybe the footpath should lower to the cyclepath level rather than the cyclepath rising to footpath level as in the images above.)

While you’re here…

While I’m on the subject, here’s what the Cycle Superhighway looks like at the southern end of Southwark Bridge in London:

TfL’s current solution: pull out into the stream of cars and vans to overtake the buses! (Photo: Alan Perryman)

That’s really dreadful, isn’t it? Expecting people to pull out into a lane of traffic which will be overtaking the bus? And we wonder why cycling is dominated by fit young men! (And I’m not going to talk about the awful pinch point in the distance there…)

So what would be better? Something like this:

A better way to handle buses and bikes at Southwark Bridge.

The bikepath runs along where the bus shelter was, and the bus shelter has been moved to where the bus stopping area was. The bus stop markings are now in the main carriageway, which means – shock, horror – that cars have to wait behind stopped buses while people on bikes can ride past.

Anyway, that’s all I have to say about bus stops for now.

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If you like the sound of this you should respond to TfL’s consultation telling them how much you love this design.

 

The National Cycle Network in London

If the hot air generated by successive UK governments talking about cycling could somehow be harnessed, then we could stop importing gas. They keep on talking about increasing bike usage, and yet cycling rates in the UK have stagnated since the 1970s. This might have something to do with our road and street design!

According to the cyclists’ group CTC, the National Cycle Network “is a comprehensive network of safe and attractive routes to cycle.“

Perhaps that should be changed to “a patchwork of theoretical routes which sometimes go near where you want to go.”

While I acknowledge that the CTC aren’t responsible for the NCN, and that the quality of NCN routes in central London may not be typical of the UK as a whole, here are three examples of the safe and attractive NCN Route 4 in my area:

London’s cycling revolution?

Heading North on Belvedere Road near the London Eye, the citizen who has fallen for the current government hype about cycling will come across the lovely arrangement above. Is this really meant to encourage people to start riding a bike?

I assume Boris Johnson never comes this way.

On Park Street near the Tate Modern gallery, the cycle lane is blocked by roadworks, with not even the usual “Cyclists Dismount” sign! It shows the contempt with which people on bikes are held in London that there is no warning, diversion or provision for bike riders here – not that I could see, anyway.

NCN4 on Clink Street. Safe, convenient and attractive, or just treacherous, narrow and difficult?

This part of NCN4 passes through a “shared space” zone. These shared space areas seem to me to be unfair to everyone – especially people on foot or riding bikes. Nobody ever seems to know what’s going on in them.

Does the map of NCN4 below look convenient to you, or does the main road look more direct?

NCN Route 4 winds and twists its way around the South Bank, while the roads smoothly glide by.

 

 

The NCN seems to be endorsed by the DfT, and it’s part of the UK street and road network, so it seems a relevant subject for this blog. I don’t mean to slag off the good people of Sustrans or CTC, but this sort of thing really isn’t going to convince anyone to switch to pedal power.

Gary Mason, killed by poor design?

In January 2011, former pro boxer Gary Mason was killed at the junction of Sandy Lane South and Woodcote Road in South London. He was either riding or walking with his bike when he was hit by a van cutting the corner of the junction. (Map here, I recommend you have a look around on Street View to appreciate the awfulness of this junction.)

Who the hell is responsible for this mess?

I would like to ask those responsible for this junction: What the hell is this? Your shitty designs contributed to the death of an innocent man. I don’t know whose fault this is – was the designer in a rush, or were there cost restrictions from above which meant that a lick of paint was the only option? Or were they just following orders – is this what the DfT manual demands? Or is it a legacy design from decades ago, when road standards and traffic levels were lower? Either way, it’s time for those in charge to either sort this out or get a new job, because this won’t do.

With all those design rules and official guidance, with decades of experience and data collected, is this really the best junction design? This seems typical of poor UK road design. There’s tons of space here for a safe junction design, yet here we have this failure instead. Rather than design a safe junction for everyone – cars, vans, people on foot, people on bikes, people with prams, disabled people – we cover a large area with tarmac, slap on some white paint, and hope for the best.

(Furthermore, on a related but separate point, rather than implement residential zones which prevent rat-running and make our streets pleasant for children to play, it seems the UK standard is for all streets to be through-roads to relieve the strain on the main routes. It seems insane to me that any residential streets are used by motor vehicles just passing through. Good road design would make this impossible, or at the very least, slow and undesirable. So, is this junction needed at all? There is another road a little further north called Woodcote Green which provides access to the streets to the east.)

While the driver of the van that hit Mason can’t be excused, poor driving will always occur. How many of us can claim to have 100%,  360º concentration on our driving 100% of the time? The roads should be designed to mitigate mistakes and reduce conflict. UK road design leaves little margin for error, and does little to protect those not encased in the metal shell of a motor vehicle. The real guilty party is successive UK governments who have encouraged us to be dependent on cars and shoddily designed our living space around them moving around as fast as possible, to the detriment of all else.

Maybe the DfT would say that the junction design here follows best practice, that they’ve scientifically worked out the safest way to design a junction, or that mistakes will happen so try not to worry about it too much. Well, if this is the result then something has clearly gone very wrong somewhere.

How the hell did this junction get approved? It’s not as if some passing council worker just decided to get out the Dulux and make it up as he went along. It required a whole slew of people to mess this up. This junction was designed by a technical planner who probably went to university to study this sort of thing. It was approved by his boss at the council’s roads department. It was signed off by the road markings committee.* It was installed by a road painting crew who must wonder why those designing and approving the paint plans get paid so much.

SOMEBODY WAS PAID ACTUAL MONEY TO DESIGN THIS JUNCTION!

The UK is covered in crap designs like this, and it’s not good enough. I hope to be covering many more half-arsed designs as this blog progresses.

UPDATE: I’ve had a fiddle with the photo, and if you’ll excuse the amateurish editing, here’s one design which massively improves the safety at this junction. There’s other options, of course, and I haven’t even looked into cycle paths or pedestrian crossings here, but if the junction had been laid out like this in January 2011, then the van that killed Gary Mason wouldn’t have been able to make the corner-cutting manoeuvre that caused the accident.

Seems obvious to me, but then this might slow someone’s journey by about ten seconds, so it’s obviously no good.

Simply by widening the path, making this into two standard junctions instead of the crazy hotch-potch of markings which are there currently, would make this junction much safer.

* I don’t know the exact procedures that road designs go through before they reach the paint crew, but these things must be designed and approved in a department of more than one person, surely?

 

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Update, 26th October 2012:

Two things:

1. The van driver cut the corner at a speed high enough to kill Gary Mason (who may not have actually been on the bike but may have been pushing it – either way it’s thought that he was either stationary or walking with the bike) and yet the incident was described as a “cycling accident” or “cycle crash” in most news reports. He was hit by a van breaking the rules at a criminally badly designed junction, the bike was pretty irrelevant! It could just as easily be described as a “racial incident” as a “cycling incident”.

2. Eighteen months later, the deadly junction where Gary Mason was killed has still not been re-designed. Is this professional negligence? Corporate manslaughter? Is there really nothing the authorities can do to improve this junction? It sickens me that nothing has changed here. This was an “accident waiting to happen” and while the junction remains this way, it’s waiting to happen again.