Want more high quality cycling infrastructure? Then stop building sh**e.

Before 2022 I lived in London, and it was bloody brilliant for cycling.

I had routes and routes of high quality and well-thought-out cycling infrastructure. I was using the Q1 Quiet Route before it was Q1, and I was one of the first cyclists using the new bike lanes over Blackfriars. For anybody who complains that they aren’t used enough, all you need to do is sit beside almost any piece of cycling infrastructure in central London for five minutes and you will see dozens of cyclists using it. They aren't perfect, but they’re still amazing in my opinion. 

Then, I moved to the countryside. 

There is basically no cycling infrastructure around me in my small village, which is generally fine because I can use these tiny and beautiful country lanes, and come across only one or two cars on every ride. It is blissful for my long weekend rides. 

However, it has meant that travelling to anywhere useful by bike means taking your life in your hands. I have found a very complex route only available by using my gravel bike to get into Stratford-upon-Avon that avoids A-roads. It adds around 40 minutes on to a ride which should take only 20, though.

On the other side of Stratford there is a very impressive segregated bike lane which has just been completed, and it's something that I would absolutely love to have from where I live - but unfortunately its very presence actually decreases the chance of me or anybody else getting anything. That is because, unfortunately, it is shite. 

The path itself is well made. It’s lovely and wide, and despite all the wet weather we’ve had recently it has excellent drainage, so I have barely seen a puddle on it, let alone a flood.

The problem it has, and the very essence of why it’s shite, is that it goes from an area of town with not much in it to an area outside of town with almost nothing in it at all. It means that the only people who tend to use that route are people doing long rides for pleasure rather than for travel, and those people don’t want to use a shared use path that demands stopping every 200m because of a road or driveway, so they often use the road as they’re perfectly entitled to do. 

For me the path is fine. It hasn’t impacted the flow of traffic now it is open, in the summer it is useful for a caravan park in that direction, and it was paid for from the active travel budget, so it hasn’t impacted our council tax payments. However, I would argue that this bike path has done more harm than good.

Firstly, we have a rural council who don’t really give much of a jot about active travel. It means that the box has been ticked for cyclists for probably the next 10 years because ‘a’ bike lane was built. Never mind that of all the places it could have been built, it's on the one road that will have the least impact. 

This bike path is not well used because it goes nowhere at all, which then gives rise to the idea that because it is not well used, other bike paths will be equally barren. It means that the kind of person who complains about bike paths has ammunition to stop more of them being installed in future. 

However, the biggest issue is that the road it was built on is the main tributary road from the nearest motorway to a town where basically everybody drives. This meant that the chaos this caused on the roads for six months was huge, and people genuinely avoided the town during peak times because the traffic was so bad. It means that bike lanes and huge disruption are conflated in the minds of many. 

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Stratford is not alone in this, and we've seen reported across the road.cc site so many shite cycling projects, or ones that almost seem to have been deliberately put in place just to justify having them ripped out again. In Birmingham, a council that declared bankruptcy in 2024, they spent money to build a bike lane that was just 2.4m long. road.cc also recently covered the story of a bike rack being installed over the top of a disabled parking space in Beccles, and the infamous 'zig-zag' bike path in Edinburgh's Leith Walk is another prime example. 

As cyclists we understand that a lot of people have a bizarre aversion to us, so with councils making awful decisions without effective consultation, they are not helping move their towns or cities towards becoming the next Amsterdam. They’re just giving ammunition to everybody who opposes cycling.

People love to latch on to one simple example as something that perfectly sums up their own biases. If I write the words ‘bendy bananas’, those of us with two brain cells who can recall the spread of this myth will know it was nonsense that the EU wanted to ban them, but everybody else used this to confirm their biases about the barmy bureaucrats in Brussels. 

So please councillors, building contractors, and anybody else involved in infrastructure planning: please take the time to do it properly, otherwise you’re just giving the opposition more bendy banana-shaped ammo.