Received a leaflet from the council asking for my comments on new proposals to link the Meadows to the Innocent path. It’s a great idea that no doubt some cycle campaigners will be salivating at the thought of…. I am not. Why? Not because this isn’t, in theory, a good idea – it is.
But, if your roof was leaking and the catflap broken? Would you fix the catflap or the roof? I would fix the roof. The council would fix the catflap and probably also clean the windows. Maybe they’d repaint the letterbox too. Anything other than the complex and messy task of fixing the roof.
And this is where we are in Edinburgh.
Where do I cycle on a daily basis, every day, rain or shine, winter or summer? Clerk Street, the Bridges, Leith Street, Leith Walk and elsewhere. And every day I see hundreds of cyclists alongside me, up ahead of me, coming in the other direction. I see cyclists first thing in the morning, all during the day, in the evening, late at night. And each and every one of them is battling traffic, being wedged between buses and parked cars and ill-thought-out roadworks. It is a nightmare. I hate it. Yet I cycle there as I have no choice, just like the others I see all around me. We cycle there because it leads to the places we are going – the shops, the bank, where we work. We don’t all wake up each day and say “oo, I know, I think I will go for a bike outing along the Bridges”.
Is this where the council is spending its cycling money? Good god no! They are instead aiming most of their money at “families” and allowing cycling on the pavement between two other routes, plus some changes to a crossing.
Think on this – normally when you hear of some major announcement on a route upgrade, it will be accompanied by words like “XX thousand cars a day use this route” or “this investment will reduce congestion” or “there have been xx accidents at this junction in the past three years”, ie there is a pressing need to spend the money and do the work.
Not in Edinburgh, not when it comes to cycling. Does there exist anywhere any data showing how many people currently cycle between the Innocent and Meadows paths? Have they done any modelling to show how many people would use it if you could cycle on the pavement between the two? Have there been any accidents recently on that route to show why it should be prioritised? I cannot find anything.
In contrast, 21% of peak-time commuter vehicles on Lothian Road are cycles, so we are told – yet for cyclists there is nothing. Nothing at all. There is now no cycle provision on Princes Street and in places the lanes are so narrow that buses cannot overtake a cyclist. A cyclist was hit by a bus there the other day. At Haymarket Station it is especially bad for cyclists and has been designed that way deliberately and in fact I can see very little in the way of a legal/safe way to cycle into the station. York Pl is a cycling nightmare and they re-oponed it recently without the merest hint of cycle facilities – imagine what they could have done all that time the street was shut and with all that space – how about a way of turning right from Broughton St onto York Place for example, without having to go all the way round the Picardy Place roundabout? What is proposed for Leith Walk is an opportunity flushed away.
I cycle through these areas every single day and every single day I see countless other cyclists doing the same. But the council have not one single plan or intention of doing anything to make these streets (the ones we are obliged to use) safe for cycling. But it’s OK – we are being allowed to cycle on the pavement between the Meadows and the Innocent paths, and they’re even putting in a new set of pedestrian traffic lights to make this possible. Fantastic.I predict the following (and I will put in links once each one happens):
- Spokes will welcome this as further evidence of how great things are for cycling in Edinburgh, the results of their many years of lobbying.
- The online cycling forums will be full of people saying that this bit or that bit should be improved and getting quite excited talking about the minutiae of cycling design.
- Councillors will welcome the spending and will queue up to be photographed with bright yellow children on opening day.
- Some online cycle campaigners will get excited too – they will be legally allowed to cycle on the pavement with their children on the occasional Sunday that they go on a long bike ride with them (after all, that is the priority of the cycling budget).
- Sustrans will laud another “improvement” to their national cycle network.
- It will then be ignored as useless by the vast majority of cyclists – useless because of its design and useless because of where it goes.
……… and yet another second-rate bit of pavement cycling will be built, but Edinburgh will creep up the ranking for Scottish councils supposedly investing in cycling. Very few people will stand up and shout “this is total rubbish”.
……….. and the day that we get decent continental cycling infrastructure in Edinburgh will be just that little bit further away.
Don’t believe me? Take a look at the “link” between the end of the Roseburn Path at Haymarket and the Water of Leith Path at Murrayfield.
- Just like Meadows-Innocent, it links up two fairly major off-street, long distance cycle paths.
- Just like M-I, it uses quiet streets and has a “dedicated” cycle pedestrian crossing over a big road.
- Just like the newly-proposed route, it is a mixture of pavement cycling and on-street.
In fact it is very similar. The key difference is that when you are on the pavement, it is demarcated by a white line or some other marking making it marginally better than what is proposed in Newington.
Try it – the paint has practically faded away, in places you would hardly know it is meant to be a cycle route at all. It’s not swept. There is bugger-all signage to say where you should be cycling, and in fact nothing at all when you leave the Roseburn path to say that you can carry on along the pavement. Nothing to suggest to pedestrians that it is a “shared use” pavement. At one point you are on one side of the road on the pavement, then you have to cross to the other. You fight with pedestrians for limited pavement space. It’s neglected and clearly hasn’t been touched in ages.
And nobody uses it! I have never ever seen a single other cyclist use the “dedicated” space on the pavements. I have tried it and simply got frustrated at the stop-start nature of it, while I watch other cyclists glide past on the road. Frankly, I’ll take the road.
Yet what they are proposing in the much more heavily pedestrian-trafficked part of town that is Newington is even worse than what they built a long time ago at Roseburn. It too will fall into neglect – after all, if this kind of “link” was so important they would have maintained the ones they had already rather than utterly ignore them (try the bit of path alongside St Mary’s school on Leith Links – dire. They forgot all about it when they upgraded the surrounding paths. UPDATE – they are finally doing something about that now it seems).
It’s bad news for pedestrians who will now have cyclists weaving all around them (except they won’t – there will be very few, so they’ll be even more surprised when there is one and will probably shout at them).
So why is the council fixing the catflap rather than the roof? The answer is in the dreaded words “family network for less confident cyclists”. And there’s more to come on that.
PS – I see that we will be able to legally cycle on the pavement right outside St Leonard’s police station. This means the police will have to go a little bit further for their next clampdown on pavement cycling – funny how a blue circle with a person and a bike on it, pinned to a lampost, makes everything OK.
poorqualityinedinburgh 
Hope you will be making your views known to the council during the consultation, and also supporting the longstanding calls by Spokes and others for investment in main road corridors too. e.g. See the “What Next” section in this article… http://www.spokes.org.uk/wordpress/2013/11/bikes-up-cars-down-again/. This needs courage by councillors to tackle car supremacy, and that will most likely happen only through loads of people telling them so.
Meanwhile the current proposals, hopefully improved to remove some of the problems you rightly mention, should be useful to the commuters using the Innocent path, people heading to the Clerk St shops from the Meadows, and for other local trips, as well as the probably smaller number of “families” (as you call them) who may use the entire route from Meadows to Innocent.
It’s not me that calls them “families” – it’s the council and their “family” network. And these proposals are not really especially child-friendly or commuter friendly.
The “consultation” gives no real room for real comments and the plans very difficult to read and follow, deliberately in my opinion. In any case, the track record of the council in taking on board consultation comments is very poor – just look at the “q”bc.
This should be condemned outright, just like the poor-quality cycle corridor should have been. It isn’t the councillors who draw up these plans – it is officials who clearly have no courage.
The vast majority of commuters use the main roads – this is where the priority is. And all the while the cycling team have been having fun on little schemes like this, the city centre has become a danger zone for cyclists post tram – it’s all happened on their watch.
The nonsense way that the new section along Seafield Rd interacts with the road, where cyclists have no dedicated way of mounting the pavment and it’s merely a pedestrian facility that cyclists are allowed to use, shows that this is the kind of “infrastructure” the council is intent on replicating. It was rubbish in 1960 and it is rubbish now – but they were congratulated for that, and as a result look at the staggered pedestrian crossing that cyclists have to contend with on Queen St at St Andrew Sq or the new one they are building over towards Edinburgh Park and of course this new proposal for yet more.
It needs to be shouted loudly – pedestrian facilties with a blue bike sign or green cycle light are NOT cycle infrastructure.
If a pavement can be widened, then there is space for a dedicated protected bike lane. It really is as simple as that. There is yet to be an example of Edinburgh’s cycle officials proposing one single bold bit of segregated dedicated cycle engineering anywhere in the city. So the councillors havent even been given the chance to be bold and brave.
The council will only start building the main corridor stuff that you mention and want to campaign for when cycle campaigners themselves are brave enough to stand up say “no more rubbish – address the priorities first”. The LCC take this approach and their opposition to the blue stripes now seems to be paying off.
Once this is built, it would be interesting for a census of how many people actually use it and how many bits of it are just ignored – maybe Spokes could build that into their next count?
Very minor point, but the council talks about families, you talked about “families”.
As for counts on the new route, there are now automated counters on a number of routes and you could suggest one here if you feel it useful and if you do decide to respond.
It is obvious from the comments on CCE forum that people will use the new route. As in my original comment, and as with most travel infrastructure, many people will use part of the route, to tie in with their own local access needs, rather than the whole route. The connection from Meadows area to Southside being a likely case in point, given the complaints over many years about getting from North Meadow Walk to Clerk St.
Again I totally agree with you that main traffic corridors are a big priority. Quite apart from usage levels, the casualty stats show that main roads (as well of course as rural roads) are the top areas for casualties – see data on page 5 of Spokes Bulletin 117. This does not mean that other connections cannot also be tackled.
It is worth noting the difference between Edinburgh and Seville. In Edinburgh cycling has been monitored for over 20 years, in that time cycle commuting rates have increased from 0.5% to 7%.
Whereas in Seville they local authority put in a joined up network of dedicated cycle routes to encourage a shift to cycling as a means of everyday travel. In the space of five years cycle modal share (for all journeys) went from 0.5% to +7%. Spot the difference.
There is clearly a problem in Edinburgh, it is not a lack of desire for good quality cycling and walking infrastructure, it is getting the powers that be to recognise this and actually do something about it. The council has now committed 7% of the transport budget to cycling (or is it active travel), but is not spending the money wisely. Money spent on building rubbish is money wasted. We have to get angry and put a stop to maladministration and waste of public money.
Realise I’m late to this topic, but can’t help but agree with everything in this post. A ‘Family Network’ is yet another excuse to develop substandard infrastructure (because families are never in a hurry) instead of making routes that are useful for all people (families, commuters, people going to the shops) that go places they want to go.
There should be no congratulatory messages for this kind of stuff. Note that SPOKES “supports the principle of developing a family friendly cycling network”. I’ve no idea why. They also are excusing the council for not building high-quality Dutch-style segregated infrastructure: “[segregation] may be politically unacceptable due to the number of car spaces displaced”. Both those quotes from http://www.spokes.org.uk/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/1312-Spokes-response-final.pdf
I’m afraid I agree with the author of the article. The proposal does everything it can to sneak cyclists around the edge of where the route ought to be, and makes it ten times more complicated than it should be.
The whole Meadows area needs a revamp as it has bags and bags of space for cycle paths to go everywhere, and completely replace the on-road provision on Melville drive. That could link up with a revamped junction of Melville Drive and Hope Park Terrace, which could be approached from multiple directions from the Meadows, instead of the apologetic entry/exit further north.
By making South Clerk Street/Newington Road the priority artery for cars you could then siginificantly calm traffic on Causewayside/Ratcliffe Terrace and make it a priority cycle/pedestrian corridor for north south travel. From the Meadows then the logical course to the Innocent cycle path would be causewayside -> West Preston Street -> East Preston Street – Dalkeith Road -> Holyrood Park Road. These streets are generally wide and could easily accommodate segregated cycle lanes if you removed parking, and could link up a major schools route between the Meadows, Sciennes Primary and Preston Street Primary.
But like you said, it’s much easier to fix the cat flap …