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news
bournemouth.jpg£12,000 digital signs warn Bournemouth promenade cyclists to cut their speed
Four digital signs have been installed on Bournemouth’s promenade warning cyclists riding at more than 10 miles per hour to cut their speed – although Cycling UK says the £12,000 outlay would have been better spent targeting “the few troublemakers, rather than vilifying all cyclists.”
The Times reports that three of the digital signs, similar to those found on some roads that use radar to assess the speed of vehicles and tell motorists to slow down if they exceed the speed limit, have been funded by Bournemouth Borough Council.
The fourth has been paid for by owners of beach huts on the seven-mile stretch of seafront where the speed limit applies.
The newspaper reports Ann Gerard, chairwoman of the Bournemouth Beach Hut Association, as claiming that bike riders “absolutely fly by on some parts of the prom.”
She added: “We have tried to stop people and tell them the speed limit but we just get a lot of verbal abuse.”
Sam Jones, senior campaigns officer at Cycling UK, highlighted that the charity encourages people to ride with consideration for others and that there were better ways of spending the money.
He said: “We always encourage people to go carefully and considerately and people shouldn’t be using the promenade as a cycle motorway, it is a shared space.
“But £12,000 for four signs seems a bit excessive. Maybe the money would be better spent addressing the few troublemakers, rather than vilifying all cyclists.”
Ann Gerrard, chairwoman of the Bournemouth Beach Hut Association, said cyclists “absolutely fly by on some parts of the prom. We have tried to stop people and tell them the speed limit but we just get a lot of verbal abuse.”
The perception of conflict between cyclists and pedestrians on Bournemouth’s promenade is a story we have had cause to revisit a number of times over the past decade here on road.cc.
In August, the Conservative-controlled council rejected a call to install a separate cycle lane there, but acknowledged that the presence of cyclists “is perhaps the most commentated on and divisive challenge we have.”
Bicycles are banned from some parts of the promenade throughout the year, and from the whole length of it from 10am to 6pm during the peak summer months of July and August.
Councillor Pat Oakley, who holds the Tourism, Leisure & The Arts portfolio at the council, said: “The option of a cycle lane has been looked at in detail several times and has always been discounted because it would cause more conflict between cyclists and pedestrians with them both claiming their own space and would, indeed, encourage cyclists to cycle faster.
“Much of the pedestrian traffic on the promenade is across the prom – children from the beach huts to the sea and beach and so on – and implementing a route which gives cyclists the right of way will only exacerbate the current issues.
“The current system of shared space generally works well and the pedestrian has clear priority,” he added.
“The safety issue with regards to cycling is more to do with speed.”
In 2009, the council used speed guns in an operation aimed to encourage cyclists to ride within the 10 miles per hour speed limit the council has imposed on the promenade, with fines regularly handed out to those deemed to be going faster.
Simon joined road.cc as news editor in 2009 and is now the site’s community editor, acting as a link between the team producing the content and our readers. A law and languages graduate, published translator and former retail analyst, he has reported on issues as diverse as cycling-related court cases, anti-doping investigations, the latest developments in the bike industry and the sport’s biggest races. Now back in London full-time after 15 years living in Oxford and Cambridge, he loves cycling along the Thames but misses having his former riding buddy, Elodie the miniature schnauzer, in the basket in front of him.
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29 comments
It's a promenade, and therefore should only be used for prominading. Which does seem to imply a leisurely pace.
In fact, to me, for some reason, the word also seems to require an air of self-concious pomp, complete with ostentatious nods of acknowledgement and hat-tipping to your fellow promenaders and comments about what a fine day it is for taking the air, my good fellow. Definitely no whizzing along, though. Promenaders make stately progress while wearing their Sunday best.
I’ll bet most runners can’t do 6 minute miles.
You don't need to be capable of a six minute mile in order to exceed 10mph, for the same reason that sprinters travel faster than marathon runners.
With all due respect, Ann, without a speedometer I'll be struggling to comply with any unenforcable speed limit. Also could you tell me what speed is reflected by "flying by", please?
As an aside, I passed three residents of a Buckinghamshire village standing on the verge counting cars that were passing and, I guess logging, the number that went through at a higher speed than their digital radar flagged up.
1. Have they really got nothing better to do?
2. Are their own lives that perfect (This applies to Ann too)?
3. I suggest that their time would have been better spent having a pop at all the parents who parked where the fuck they wanted while dropping off Tarquin and Jemima (what's wrong with boarding schools anyway?).
Can people just stop sticking their fucking noses in other people's business and get own with their own lives. There's bigger shit out there that needs dealing with first.
£12k seems pretty high, and 10mph seems pretty low. Having said that, I’ve got no sympathy for the car drivers I often hear saying “but it’s perfectly safe for me to go faster than that, because I have faster reflexes/better brakes/greater importance” and I often tell people to drive to the conditions and that sometimes they just have to wait to allow other traffic to get where it wants to in safety. And kids are always going to run out into the paths of things without looking. Yes, there should be good facilities for bikes, but we don’t need unlimited speed everywhere, and if everyone went at what the broader society perceived as a reasonable pace then that 12k could have been spent on prosecuting some bad drivers instead...
Proportionate spending on policing driving? What are you injecting, and where can I get some?
£12k better spent on stopping those in big boxes with a motor from killing and maiming in the locality or actually putting in a cycle only route to completely dissuade cyclists from wanting to use the prom as a through route. yet more bias and discriminatory actions by an anti cycling authority.
Its fair, cyclist have a duty of car to other persons on the public highway, especially in this instance where small children might be walking.
So do pedestrians, skateboarders, rollerbladers, rollerskaters, scooter riders and so on, but do you see any of those groups being
persecutedtargeted in this way?And I bet all of them (except maybe the skateboarders?) can beat 10 mph. For a pedestrian, I think they call it "running". Apparently its a very common pastime.
I'm a mature and sensible adult! Yet I speed up for those road signs that tell me my pedalling speed even if I can't get anywhere near their 30mph limit.
So I can imagine exactly what encouragement to every kid under the sun 10mph warning signs will be. Some councillors need educating in the strange perversities of human nature.
As I’ve said, they wouldn’t need to implement any such law. They could just implement a law requiring you to observe the speed limit. How you do that is your problem.
But the signs along the promenade are just blue 'advisory' signs, not instruction/mandatory signs (according to streetview, anyway).
Isn't that the council saying, "We'd really prefer it / recommend it that you ride slower than 10 mph along here if you don't mind"? Like all those "We'd really prefer you get out of your car and push it along this stretch of road, if you don't mind" signs. Wait, sorry, I meant "Cyclist dismount".
These signs went up months ago, so I'm not sure why it is only now being reported on?
It's worth noting that proposed alternative, all-year routes for commuters on the overcliff were recently shelved due to 'concerns about safety'; ie local residents not wanting cycling in those areas either.
So maybe the answer is safe on-road routes using porper cycle infra? Well, the local 'lifestyle' magazine recently had a high profile letter in it calling for the few bits of proper infra that we do have in Bournemouth to be ripped out. Cyclists can 'cycle on the pavements' instead, claimed the writer.
Meanwhile, I had a contractor drive their van straigh at me on the underlciff last week where they are doing winter beach works - but he wasn't on a bike so that's fine. And the section between the piers that is accessible to cars as a car park turns into a boy-racer playground in the summer evenings, yet I never hear calls to ban cars there, or even to enforce the existing 20mph limit. No digital speed signs on that stretch, incidentally. Don't want to upset the drivers...
Fairly easy to run more than 10mph.
Be interested to know how enforceable this is and whether it is ultra vires.
I don't know but I'd assume the fines are not "speeding" fines, they'll be public order offences or similar.
Does the council not realise that folk will be out to see how high they can trip the camera?
Memo to self - Stick garmin in pocket if I ever cycle here . . no speedo means they cannot issue fines, as you have no means to check speed. Cycles are not required to have a speedo by law, and many that are controlled by a magnet on the wheel are wildly inaccurate as they use a "guestimate" of the wheel's circumference.
If the law - hypothetically speaking - said you can’t cycle above a certain speed then it could conceivably be your responsibility to assess that speed yourself. If you can’t do that because you can’t make use of a reliable speedometer, then it would presumably be your responsibility to err on the side of caution and ride slowly. That’s the law in other countries. It may not be the law here, but that’s not to say it couldn’t be.
I don't disagree with the sentiment, however that assumes that the speed is permanent feature of every screen.
There are no road-legal cars with no speedo AFAIK, but my Wahoo's default screen is configured to have all sorts of other info but no speed. Are they going to implement a law that every data screen should have speed too? Speed is of no importance to me since I know I'm slow. BPM, RPM, time, distance, etc are more important to me.
A bunch of busybodies if you ask me.
I'd definitely contest any fine handed out to me based on 'perceived' speed.
I'd simply argue that I percevied my speed to be under 10mph, how am I wrong?
Fine or not, the speeds are not 'perceived' by a random someone but taken from the radar 'gun' in the signs. The reference to perception was related to conflict (or not).
But if they are like those speed signs you encounter on some rural roads,I'd question their accuracy for cyclists and what bit of the bike they are really measuring,as i regularly can set them off with a displayed speed that is 20-50% higher against my Garmin...which has a separate speed sensor, ie I'm doing 15mph,the sign claims nearer 27mph
I find the ones around here to be fairly accurate but hey, I can well believe some of them are shite. My issue was mainly that the point about 'perceived speed' was just a strawman.
If you and your frame and fork are moving at 15mph, and the bottom of your wheel is stationary (it is touching the ground) then the top of your wheel will be moving at 30mph. Not sure whether a radar could see the top of your wheel, but this could explain it.
"Your honour, as I was cycling peacefully along the promenade taking great care to look out for children and animals, I observed a seagull flying along carrying a piece of tinfoil. I can only assume that it caused a false reading..."
Can a council legally impose a speed limit on bikes? Does that mean that they have to provide speedos for every bike or is it just that no-one has bothered to contest the fines yet?
The prom isn't part of the road network so byelaws come into effect. e.g. no dogs beach May-October. They can do pretty much what they like.
As a regular visitor to Bournemouth beach there is a minor problem with cyclists and I think Bournemouth Council are particularly sensitive about it because a young girl was seriously injured a few years back in collision with a cyclist. Hit on a pedestrian crossing and the cyclist was jailed from what I recall.
The issue with the prom is that it's wide and there's level access to the beach so you get kids running from the beach onto the prom without looking.
It's popular with cyclists because it's flat, traffic free, and the surface is good. Speed limit makes a lot of sense in this particular case - you do get a few idiots bombing along there, and it tends not to be the "kids who happen to be riding bikes" crowd popping wheelies everywhere - it's people on road bikes.