Buster's Big Adventure

Buster the Brompton below Arthur's Seat

As described in an earlier post, I was all set to go to Edinburgh with a Brompton hire bike. I arrived early at New Street and headed for the dock at Moor street, where I recovered Buster the Brompton. Whilst I wrestled him from his cell I noticed that most of the bays I could see were empty, which I hope is a good sign. I have to say it was quite a struggle getting Buster out, as various brackets and flanges that hold the dock together had to be cleared one by one, plus there was a moulding that meant I had limited scope for tilting Buster. I ended up with my hands covered in chain lube, which was a wee bit annoying. That all said, it was a corner cell and returning him at the end of the week (to a cell in the middle of the dock) was much easier. Unfolding Buster went smoothly, and after a brief bit of bother when I thought the lights were not working (they were switched off, even though they are supposed to be permanently on), I was away.

Back at New Street the train to Edinburgh was waiting for me. Alas it turned out to be a diesel multiple unit Super Vibrator, even though the route is fully electrified (the return journey was on a Pendolino). Fortunately my seat turned out to be far enough away from the engine that I didn't have to endure too much noise and vibration on the four and a half hour journey, and was able to get some work done. However, the carriage was cramped and had insufficient luggage space. I had to shift several crates of supplies for the shop out of one luggage space to make room for Buster. Then I discovered my leg was covered in chain lube, teaching me to make sure a Brompton is the right way round when shuffling along the cramped interior of Britain's miniature railway trains. Thankfully I was wearing shorts, so I was able to clean myself quite quickly, but this could have been embarrassing.

At Waverley Station I was met by the people I was staying with in Scotland. However, our meeting was only brief as I was heading to the flat on Buster, and they were going on the bus. I then promptly got lost looking for the exit I wanted from Waverley Station. After getting directions and making two more lift journeys (with someone with a bike made out of bamboo), I finally escaped the station. It has to be said that Bromptons offer a very harsh ride, which is particularly noticeable on Edinburgh's cobbled streets. However, this turned out to be the biggest compromise in having a folding bike. What I thought was going to be the major problem, gearing, was not a big problem at all. First gear got me up all but a couple of the hills I needed to climb, whilst in third gear I was soon screaming along Queen's Drive (after stopping to take a photo of Buster standing below Arthur's Seat). Despite the delays, I arrived at the flat five minutes before the bus travellers, and had Buster folded up and tucked out of the way. That set the scene for the rest of the week, with Buster comfortably beating the bus every time, and on the longest journey by a margin of about half an hour. Edinburgh has an excellent bus service, but you just cannot beat the flexibility of a form of transport that is direct and unaffected by traffic jams or restrictions on vehicle movements.

One problem with having a Brompton Hire bike is the requirement to not leave it anywhere unattended (I hope this doesn't include locked up in private property, such as a car or a house). I found Buster quite heavy to lug around when having him unfolded was inappropriate. It is supposed to be possible to tow a Brompton like a luggage trolley, but this didn't really work for me, as the bike tends to start rocking from side to side, and lifting the front causes the suspension block to catch on the ground. Lockers are generally too small for a folded Brompton. At Holyrood Palace they offered to look after Buster for me, but given that Brompton Hire will demand £750 if the bike is lost, I wasn't willing to take the risk. The parting comment from the first person who made this offer was something about the queen's security being good enough for the head of state but not good enough for Buster. Further into the palace I was made the offer a second time, but this time it was explained that Buster would be in a proper ticketed cloak room, so I accepted the offer. I had a basic D-lock with me, so I clamped it around the folded bike before leaving Buster with the queen's cloakroom staff. They were amused to learn that Buster was the bike's name, not mine; I wonder what Queen Victoria would have thought.

Buster the Brompton on the Royal MileI've written about cycling in Edinburgh before, but in summary Edinburgh is car sick. The tour guides will tell you about the way the streets were used as open sewers in the past. They still are, but now the sewerage is motor vehicles. There's not one road in the city centre that isn't used for motor traffic. Even the few sections of road where cars are restricted are still full of motor vehicles at certain times. Most of the Royal Mile, a UNESCO world heritage site, is rammed with motor vehicles. This makes the city most unpleasant for people cycling and walking, and of course the latter group includes the tourists from around the world who fill and block the narrow pavements. The noise from the vast numbers of cars, trucks, and buses cannot be escaped, even up on Arthur's Seat. Arthur's Seat itself is in Holyrood Park, but apart from Sundays the roads through the park are heavily trafficked. I was chased up the hill by cars, taxis, minibuses, and even continental tour coaches. Dudingston Low Road is used as a rat run, despite being narrow and bendy, and twice a black cab tried to overtake me uphill on blind bends. It was so unpleasant and dangerous that I folded up Buster and carried him up the hill to Queen's Drive, on which I used the pavement as a contraflow cycle lane to get me back to the flat. Look at a map of Edinburgh and you will see it has a ring road, formed of the A1/A90 around the north of the city, and the dual-carriageway A720 to the south. Yet the A1 meets the A7 (photo below) and the A900 right outside Waverley Station at a vile, multi-lane junction. Pedestrians are forced by barriers (and the heavy traffic) to use controlled crossings that are biased heavily in favour of carriageway traffic. By comparison the centre of Birmingham (which thirty years ago was just the same) is peaceful and quiet. The Dutch would of course close the city centre to through traffic and force it to use the ring road, but in traffic engineering terms Edinburgh is firmly entrenched in the last century.

Edinburgh street sceneYet the irony is that Edinburgh has built and is building cycling-specific infrastructure that shames what we have in Birmingham (though Edinburgh does have plenty of painted, non-mandatory lanes and ASLs too). A network of abandoned railway lines has been turned into a network of wide, well signposted shared-use paths finished with smooth bitmac. New segregated cycle paths are starting to appear, again in smooth bitmac. That, combined with a large academic population associated with one of the world's foremost universities, has resulted in a remarkable number of people cycling for a British town, people who are not deterred by the steep hills or dark, cold winters, destroying several myths in one go. Of course those people cannot limit themselves to the safe infrastructure, or they wouldn't even be able to access the city centre, so Edinburgh is acquiring a reputation for cycling deaths and injuries. If Edinburgh were to learn from what has been done in the Dutch university town of Groningen, they too would have a cycling modal share of 60%, and the people-friendly city centre that goes with that. As has been shown time and again (including in Birmingham's New Street), people bring trade, whereas passing cars damage it.

Whilst my day-to-day cycling was of necessity on Edinburgh's untamed roads, I did take Buster on a largely off-road route to the beach at Portobello, and that little tour is described pictorially below.

Whilst the wheels appear to be coming off the Birmingham Cycling Revolution, for me the Brompton Hire scheme is a success. The bikes work very well, are cheap and easy to hire, and can be taken with you to other towns and cities on all forms of public transport, as well as in a car (you can leave a Brompton Hire bike in at any dock in the country; Birmingham Bromptons have been turning up in docks very far from Birmingham). The dynamo lights, mudguards, and Brompton bag holder mean they make serious 24/7/365 transport. Although intended for travel around town, the excellent gearing allows them to make good progress if you need to travel a considerable distance on one (I recently learned that Buster has been to Wales and back). That same gearing allowed me to keep up with the Edinburgh motor traffic, and whilst that wasn't exactly pleasant, doing so on a folding bike made the fancy four wheel drives, and especially the Lamborghini on Holyrood Road, look utterly ridiculous. In town, Brom Brom beats Vroom Vroom. I'm really pleased to for once wholeheartedly recommend something that BCR has helped to make possible. I just hope that success doesn't get turned into a failure by lack of progress elsewhere in the BCR project, because most people will refuse to ride a bike surrounded by four wheel drives and the occasional Lamborghini driver trying to make his car sound butch in traffic moving little faster than a middle-aged bloke pedalling uphill on a folding bike.

Update: Since writing this article I've hired a second Brompton, and the experience was nothing like as positive. The dock at Moor Street refused to accept my access code, and it to took two calls to the "emergency" number to get through to a person and get the door opened. Trying to address the problem by myself using SMS, I tried booking a new bike and reporting the bike as faulty. The Brompton Hire software wouldn't let me book a second bike until I had either taken the first bike, or cancelled my booking (with no information about how to do this with SMS). It also told me I couldn't report the bike as faulty until I had taken the bike from the faulty dock. As a result I missed my train, but fortunately there were no repercussions other than lost time. The bike itself had a faulty gear shifter, which was a serious annoyance. On trying to return the bike the dock refused to accept my return code until I had entered it three or four times. I have emailed Brompton Hire about this, but they failed to reply. This is just the sort of customer experience they need to address if the scheme isn't to fail early.

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Taking a Break on Arthur's Seat

Taking a break on Arthur's Seat
Buster's little tour around Edinburgh started with a climb up Arthur's Seat. This road has a single lane with parking spaces, so cars, taxis, minibuses, and a continental tour coach had to wait behind us whilst I pedalled between parking bays. We stopped here to admire the view and adjust the gear change cable slightly, as Buster kept slipping into second (not good on a hill climb). The summit is that lump to the right, but the road doesn't go any higher and I wasn't prepared to carry Buster up there, no matter how much I appreciated his company.

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The Innocent Railway Path

The Innocent Railway Path
After descending Arthur's Seat, slowly accelerating away from the tour buses, I found my way to the Innocent Railway Path. Apparently it's "innocent" because the trains were horse drawn, but I don't pretend to understand that. Whilst I'm intrigued by the idea of a railway path that is distinctly naughty, I have no regrets taking this one.

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Tunnel on the Innocent Railway Path

Tunnel on the Innocent Railway Path
This tunnel is much longer than that at Edgbaston, but it is properly lit. The path is smoothly surfaced and has a low rolling resistance. The barrier you can see at the entrance does not force you to wriggle through a chicane; it is there purely to block anything as wide as a motor car.

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Innocent Cyclists

Innocent cyclists
The likes of the Innocent Railway Path make for relaxed, sociable cycling. The smooth bitmac surface makes that comfortable too. This part of the path isn't lit, but other parts are.

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Buster in East Lothian

Buster in East Lothian
I was able to remain off-carriageway for most of the ride between Arthur's Seat and the coast, briefly entering East Lothian, though not all the paths were of the same quality as the railway paths. Alas at the end of the Brunstane Burn path I reached the A199, and as you can see the cycling provision is the usual British rubbish. However, it's good to see this Lothian Buses driver giving plenty of room to the cyclist cunningly hidden behind the pole (I have a point and wait-for-it camera on my phone). Maybe it helps having eyes in the side of the bus. I was heading in the opposite direction from here, and since I could see a dreadful junction design ahead I elected to stay on the footpath.

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A199 Junction

A199 junction
When people cycle on the pavement that is a sure-fire indication that the infrastructure design is badly wrong. If the response to this is to put up a non-standard sign that says "No cycling on footway", that's a sure-fire indication that the council knows it's done it badly wrong but doesn't respect people enough to fix the problem. I was cycling on the pavement, and the reason is this junction. There was absolutely no way I was going to ride a folding bike along a narrow strip between two lanes of fast-moving cars, trucks, and buses, and then try to merge into the motor traffic just before the junction proper. This type of "meat grinder" lane could be found in the Netherlands many years ago, but they have been removed because they are considered way too dangerous. There's one on Ladywell Walk. It too is dangerous. Push Bikes criticised BCR plans that included "meat grinder" lanes.

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Buster at the Beach

Buster at the beach
Buster and I arrived at the beach on the Firth of Forth. We would have gone for a swim, but neither of us had our trunks, and it was raining. I did return to Portobello with Buster later in the week and went for a swim - sort of. It wasn't cold, it was beyond cold, and that's from someone who has swum in the Baltic. I think even Buster would have found it cold. I was in the water no more than five minutes.

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Dutch Style in Portobello

Dutch Style in Portobello
This is an encouraging sign. People will not cycle on a roadster with children in front and rear child seats unless they can do so away from traffic (you see this sort of thing routinely in the Netherlands). The promenade is traffic free from Joppa to Craigentinny, a distance of about 3km. From there there you can get to the railway path network, but it does require some on-carriageway cycling. The woman who rides this bike is something of a pioneer. I wonder if Edinburgh City councillors could sleep at night if she and her family were wiped out trying to negotiate the bits the council hasn't yet made accessible. I've often heard it said that people do not consider cycling aspirational. I wheeled the £750 Brompton into the Beach House café and discovered it is not for those who are short if money. I bought a cheese and pickle sandwich to eat whilst sitting on the wall outside. It was a very nice cheese and pickle sandwich (made with "artisan bread" and posh pickle), but seven pounds in money? I did check the paper bag afterwards to see if there was a free iPhone in there, but alas no. Earlier in the week we had tried a cheaper establishment at the other end of the beach, but what they had on offer was strangely unappealing ("hot egg sandwich with crisps" sticks in my memory), so I decided to go with expensive. Just this once.

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Leith Links (1)

Leith Links (1)
At the Craigentinny end of the Portobello promenade the C2C cycle route (www.uppertweed.railwaypaths.org.uk) joins a shared-use footway, despite there being plenty of space to do the job properly. However, this section is not very long, and after crossing the A199 the route joins split-use footpaths that connect Seafield Street to this point on Links Gardens. Here a build-out has been built to narrow the road where cyclists cross to this brand new split-use path. It's not especially wide, but it has been built with machine-laid bitmac, so it is nice and smooth.

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Leith Links (2)

Leith Links (2)
Edinburgh City Council has built a split-use path across Leith Links (a park, not a golf course) using machine-laid bitmac. The surface of this will be good for decades. Why does Birmingham City council insist on messing about with spray and chip, which is hell for cycling for two years, and then becomes a patchy, bumpy mess? The path has been sensibly and clearly split, and internationally recognised signs erected along its length. This will reduce conflict as pedestrians learn to avoid the cycle track, but it wont be as good as a dedicated cycleway.

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Duncan Place Cycle Crossing

Duncan Place cycle crossing
The cycle route through Leith Links crosses Duncan Place here. This is so new it was still having the finishing touches applied. Note there is no stymie gate (there are none on this route), a feature that just renders cycling slow, difficult, or even completely impossible. Given the open nature of the park such a gate would fail to block cars anyway, but that doesn't stop Birmingham City Council pointlessly erecting these gates at great expense. They are so inconvenient that people just walk and cycle around the outside, creating a mud-bath. Most people wouldn't even consider driving along a narrow path, but those that do are deterred by the presence of legitimate users. The more usable is the path, the more legitimate users there are. The build-outs make it easier to cross the road, because they narrow the carriageway to one lane (forcing motorists to slow down and give way), and they prevent parking across the cycleway. The bollards enforce the build-outs. Gulleys ensure rain water doesn't pool either side of the build-out. Naturally there is a 20mph speed limit. This is almost a textbook design. It would be better if the cycleway was taken over the road on a raised platform with colour differentiation for the cycle track, as that discourages speeding even more, and gives visual priority to cyclists. This is aided further by bringing the road into the crossing through a chicane. Finally there is the British problem of cyclists on the carriageway being bullied off the road as they approach the narrowing. This last problem will only go away once we make real progress with modern infrastructure, but at least this crossing is a move towards that, providing as it does a cycle crossing. However, a narrowing like this is better than a conventional British pinch point, because it forces motorists into conflict with other motorists, and a potential head-on collision with another motor vehicle is more threatening than a cyclist. Additionally in this case the problem probably wont be that great, as it's a low speed road by design and parking either side of the crossing narrows the road anyway.

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Academy Street

Academy Street
The good practice in Edinburgh ends abruptly here. What on Earth is going through the minds of people who allow this? Note the children taking advantage of the queuing traffic to cross the road. There are people trying to live in this vile, polluted environment. What is causing the queue, which extends far to the left, is heavy traffic approaching the multi-lane junction in the middle of a local centre that you can just see in the distance. This is a monumental barrier to sustainable transport, and it had me scouring the A-Z to find a less hostile alternative. There wasn't one, so it was time to put my helmet on and ride down the middle of the lane, heading for the Water of Leith path. I found it intensely unpleasant, and most people wouldn't do it. You might think this is an important A road. It isn't. It isn't even a B road. When a road this minor has traffic this bad a city is dangerously ill with car sickness. The junction in the distance is with Leith Walk, a road that has become infamous. Leith Walk is an A road (the A900), but in a Dutch context it would take you into the city centre but no further, so it would be quiet. In Edinburgh it allows you to drive straight through the city centre via the awful junction outside Waverley Station. Leith Walk is infamous because the shops along its length lost huge amounts of their income (and some went under) whilst the road was dug up in preparation for the tram. Unfortunately the tram was built in the usual British style (expensively over-engineed but badly constructed), and the hopelessly overrunning project was abandoned. So Leith Walk is back to being a bloated monstrosity rammed with private motor vehicles. Local cycle campaigners look at the width and wonder why there's no #spaceforcycling. In a more civilised country there would be.

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Dublin Street

Dublin Street
The railway paths took me from Leith to Royal Crescent. The signed cycle route directs cyclists to Dublin Street via cobbles so harsh that they have a very noticeable effect on how much effort is required to pedal a bike. Fortunately Dublin Street is not cobbled, because it is a steep hill. The last section was one of just two inclines that proved too steep for me on the three-speed Brompton Hire bike. However, there is at least an example of filtered permeability at the top. Alas it's spoiled by the usual slow toucan crossing across Queen Street. On the opposite side above North Andrew Street you can see the overhead wires for the tram that has caused so many problems in Edinburgh.

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St Andrew Square

St Andrew Square
South St Andrew Street has been closed to south-bound traffic, including cycles, undoing the good practice at Dublin Street. This means that cyclists are expected to make a right turn across two tram tracks whilst chased by motor vehicles, which of course is a recipe for being dismounted. The cyclist has to choose between keeping on the left and praying that those behind don't go straight on anyway (which of course will be true in the case of a tram), or using the poorly implemented, obsolete ASL to take the lane and make the angle of crossing the tram track very shallow. In short, this is a dangerous mess, but it is brand new. It also means cyclists have to take a lengthy detour to cover the 100 metres or so to Princes Street. It should be obvious that there was more than enough space here to do this correctly, and allow cyclists to go straight on. That is in fact what I did, and judging from Google Street View, I'm not the only one to choose to do that. Incidentally, there was a tram coming the other way, and I didn't even come close to conflicting with it.

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The Poor Engineering of the Edinburgh Tram

The poor engineering of the Edinburgh tram
This is Edinburgh City Council's answer to one of the problems created by the poorly engineered tram line; tiny, non-standard signs, one of which I found mounted directly behind a traffic light box. The tram line includes a combined tram, bus, taxi, and cycle lane, proclaiming loudly the incompetent design. Cyclists are required to take a shallow angle across the tram tracks to follow the cycle route, and as a result there have been many injuries. The Dutch keep trams and cycles as far apart as possible, or have them cross at 90 degrees to each other, but where having cyclists cross tram rails at a shallow angle is unavoidable, there is a standard solution called VeloSTRAIL (www.strail.de/index.php?id=197&L=1). Edinburgh has opted for a cheap retrofit that will not solve the problem.

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