Cycle lanes 'can’t come at catastrophic cost to traffic flow' says MP; Reduction in policing behind increase in road deaths; Manchester council accused of ‘flushing filtered neighbourhood plans down toilet’; Mail froths about speed cameras + more

Well it's a really stupid layout.
Apart from the last one, the drivers were fine.

hirsute wrote:

Well it's a really stupid layout. Apart from the last one, the drivers were fine.

But they did all break the law by not stopping at the stop line.

My guess is that Blunt has done his political sums. We live in a land where bar-room grand talk becomes policy. 
A few of us are battling thiis issue out in the Southampton Echo - every day a new letter appears "aren't the cycle lanes terrible, my 2 mile journey takes twice as long", " you know what, I'm going to pollute even more if they remain by driving more slowly", "will somebody please think of the disabled?", "cars are the lifeblood of the city, the shops will all close without them, how will we get to the football", "cyclists want us all to live In mud huts", "Fluffy the kitten needs to go to the vet's, but it's 4 miles away - you do want him to go,don't you?" 
OK, the last two are a bit of a fabrication on my part,  but there's a real danger of these lanes being a fleeting memory, a lost opportunity - like April 2020. 

David9694 wrote:

My guess is that Blunt has done his political sums. We live in a land where bar-room grand talk becomes policy. 
A few of us are battling thiis issue out in the Southampton Echo - every day a new letter appears "aren't the cycle lanes terrible, my 2 mile journey takes twice as long", " you know what, I'm going to pollute even more if they remain by driving more slowly", "will somebody please think of the disabled?", "cars are the lifeblood of the city, the shops will all close without them, how will we get to the football", "cyclists want us all to live In mud huts", "Fluffy the kitten needs to go to the vet's, but it's 4 miles away - you do want him to go,don't you?" 
OK, the last two are a bit of a fabrication on my part,  but there's a real danger of these lanes being a fleeting memory, a lost opportunity - like April 2020. 

Yes, I know what you mean.  You can win all the arguments with logic, facts and data, but it doesn't make any difference.  Trying to change peoples minds when they believe something is very, very difficult.  There has been quite a lot of research on it, and even when you do change their minds, they revert to the original belief the day after.

I was reading something the other day about how lazy our brains are. Basically we tend to believe the first thing we encounter. They tested it with buffet lines and invariably the first 3 or 4 dishes visited were the most popular even when they reversed the order of the dishes.

Didn't Homer Simpson once complain that he didn't want to learn anything new in case it pushed out stuff that he already had in his brain...?

Not sure we're even changing many minds,  in the polarised world of the comment columns. 

You don't get an answer when you ask "where does it end?" Or "what's the alternative?" 

The 'how will the emergency services get through' seems to be a popular one too,people have just become accustomed to driving out the way instantly,not pull over when it's safe to do so or plan ahead, so popup lanes where you cant move the cones end up with cyclists as the target for peoples anger that because the ambulance cant get through as quickly might cause people to die.

And the implication is always of some kind of mic-drop moment  "ah-ha, you hadn't thought of THAT, had you?". The letter-writers have so much more sense than everyone else. 

I work in The Netherlands and I can tell you that cycle lanes that remove roads do not improve traffic flow, of course there are less cars due to more people cycling, but simply do the math, if you go from 2 lanes to 1, you reduce 50% of the available road, thus you need 50% reduction of cars just to be equal which does not happen, however the dutch (largely) embrace the value of the cycle lane and accept it, this is what we need to do as a country.  Crispin is simply  cycle hater, unfortunately way too many MP's are selfish short sighted idiots  

So in The Netherlands, where I assume the cycle lane will be fully used, if you look at the total throughput of people before and after the cycle lane replaces a car lane (reducing car space by 50%), is the total result positive or negative?

Traffic 'evaporates' though. When filtering / cycle lanes / pedestrianised areas are built the traffic does not 'catastrophically' grind to a halt. The area becomes cleaner, quieter, more friendly and more wealthy. (Houses in quiet, traffic free neighbourhoods increase their value) However when you build a multi lane 'by pass' or 'ring road' - these do grind to a halt. 

what's important to note however is that when the number of available lanes are reduced, less drivers pick that road to drive down because it is no longer an efficient way to get to their destination, so it's not as if there are 2 lanes worth of drivers all still fighting to fit into the 1 lane.

those who still do and then rant and rave about how the loss of a lane has ruined everything, are those incapable of planning ahead their route or thinking in general.

Which road used matters though, because if it's the only road to a location many people go to, there is no alternative option to travel by instead and so you face issues of almost all of the traffic remaining. the solution is to build a purposeful route for cyclists away from traffic, or improve the area's level of accessibility. Crispin is so short-sighted he would make ridiculous statements without even trying to first come up with alternative suggestions.

There's nought so satisfying as a prejudice confirmed. As ever, the Mail strikes a pernicious note, that the police and cycling Mikey should leave "innocent" motorists alone, focus on something that doesn't kill 1,000 people a year (the Mail's source is the HMIC annual report, the same as for the Road.cc story about less road policing = less people alive - "nought to satisfying...")

When there's a Dorset police "No Excuse" bust of a speeding/uninsured/ disqualified/ drug-driving Audi/Rover reported, there's always a minority view of "your a disgrace dorset police" in the comments and then there's Cycling Mikey's current experience...

EddyBerckx wrote:

"Dear Bedford police...I've had an s works venge nicked, a trek madone, a cervelo s5.... if any of them are here I'd like them back please" 😜

Don't forget the Dogma F10! :o)

Did you see their Facebook post about this? They've got a yard full of bikes - looks like Oxford train  Station.

That's not what they're saying, though. They're claiming that camera locations have been determined by the number of speeding drivers (rather than the number of collisions, and that that could only have been motivated by a desire to maximise revenue generation.

But the policy could have been motivated by a number of ways of thinking, from the ostenibly reasonable ('the more speeding drivers we catch, the more that will modify their behaviour and become less dangerous wherever they're driving') to the unthinking ('well, it's just obvious that more enforcement is better, isn't it?'), without having to assume that it was venal.

the cameras at no2 in their list,27,705 tickets issued, are on the A12 Suffolk/Essex border, it has been and probably always will be a notorious local spot for speeding traffic,and the accidents they do cause,the average speed cameras are there to try and curtail that speeding and to protect some very old style little chance of joining at an appropriately similar speed to the dual carriageway junctions there.

but the speed limit on that road is still 70mph, so each of those 27,705 vehicles was travelling faster than the maximum permitted speed on UK roads.

in fact the local police released figures only last month, an Audi (quelle surprise) was caught at 111mph on that stretch of road during lockdown, so thats 27,706 tickets.

and thats not even the highest speed I think theyve recorded on that section of road, but Ill let the Daily Mail tell the story of that one... https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5459793/Soldier-escapes-driving...

so why is there any complaint at all about those people being caught speeding ?

Shock report: police "go out and catch criminals"

There's already dirt. She's on the board of NCP. It stinks of a conflict of interest.

Without having any particular axe to grind in her favour, that's a little misleading. For starters, it's not NCP she's on the board of, it's NCP Manchester, which is a joint venture between NCP and the council. And she's not on the board in a personal capacity, but as a representative of the council as part of her transport role. If she left that role, she'd be replaced on the board by whoever took it over.

You could argue that investing in a joint venture gives the council too much of an interest in promoting car travel, but it doesn't really stack up as a personal conflict of interest.