On Monday Push Bikes campaigners inspected plans for a cycleway on the A38. We were very pleased to see a high quality, reasonably wide, two way cycle track running from Selly Oak to the ring road. Push Bikes has long been asking the Birmingham Cycle Revolution team to aim high and go for quality rather than length, and they took that on board earlier in the year and have been working on new plans.
Chris and I recently took a trip to Leicester to see for ourselves what is going on there. My attention had been drawn to it by a series of blog posts by the Ranty Highwayman. Leicester has been attracting the attention of cycling campaigners because the city council is getting on with the job of building proper cycling infrastructure. It has done so without any Cycling Ambition Grant funding.
Leicester has been attracting the attention of cycling campaigners because the city council is getting on with the job of building proper cycling infrastructure. It has done so without any Cycling Ambition Grant funding, and the city council has shown itself willing to take space away from motor vehicles. They have already used techniques most commonly seen in the Netherlands to make the city centre people-centric, and now they are extending that good practice outwards, where it is connected with whatever was built in the past.
Up until recently the only place to look for good practice was continental Europe. That is beginning to change, but it remains the place to look for widespread usable cycling infrastructure. Of course to see widespread best practice one must look at the Netherlands.
Think of transport infrastructure as a house. The component parts are items such as bricks, windows, and tiles. The quality of the finished product will be dependent not just on the quality of the components, but also how they are put together. This article will describe some of the important component parts of Dutch system infrastructure that are relevant to cycling, but not how the component parts are put together.
