Royal Parks Police accused of targeting cyclists; "Can he play centre-back?" Angry Arsenal fans to club's Geoghegan Hart tweet; LTNs "biggest transport controversy of the century?"; Froome's one-off Dogma F12 (+ bonus saddle tips) + more on the live blog

Frankly, the accent maketh the man. As for Froome I would love to see the bar chart of how much time he has ever spent in the UK.

"Being born in a stable does not make one a horse!"

A well known Irishman (The Duke of Wellington)

OldRidgeback wrote:

I don't think LTNs are that constroversial. I just don't think they're the right solution.

You don't think they're the right solution, but you seem to imply LTNs are designed to be the entire solution to a very narrowly defined problem. The issue that you suggest is most pressing (crashes causing death and injury) is definitely tackled by LTNs but of course it doesn't address all of them in all contexts. I know that you don't think that the driver of that car in your examplre was only acting like a prat due to there being an LTN, or that he would have been deterred by speed bumps; so it didn't really back up your point.

More people die early from respiratory illnesses, affected by pollution, than in crashes; also, more people are a burden on the NHS due to low physical activity levels. We have a climate emergency and rising poor health due to sedentary lifestyles. Any measures that make it more attractive to walk or cycle in residential neighbourhoods should be welcomed. Of course there can also be additional measures to reduce depency on motor vehicles on the main roads but spreading pollution round quiet streets shouldn't be one of them.  

What he said.

It's not about KSIs. If there's too much traffic or it's moving too fast, most people won't cycle at all.d

LTNs make driving less convenient, but they make streets much nicer for the people who live there, they reduce the amount of traffic, and they enable people to ride bikes there.

But the LTNs don't tackle exhaust pollution. They just shift it to the main roads, which are more congested and even more polluted as a result.

The driver of the sports car was a prat. The LTN did not cause him to drive dangerously, however it did not stop him from doing so. You've misunderstood my comment. Speed bumps would stop him from doing so and also would've stopped him from risking the life of the cyclist he scared out of her wits.

The LTN does little to encourage cycling and active travel as it does so little to improve safety for cyclists. It goes nowhere and provides no new cycling route.

Ensuring vehicles drive at the 20mph limit in quiet streets would however encourage active travel, by providing safer routes. The LTNs don't do this.

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OldRidgeback wrote:

But the LTNs don't tackle exhaust pollution. They just shift it to the main roads, which are more congested and even more polluted as a result.

That's assuming a constant level of traffic whereas traffic changes according to how well it suits people. Building more roads often makes driving seem more attractive and often increases congestion and similarly reducing the available roads can often reduce traffic.

The road adjacent to where I live has speed bumps, they have no effect on speeding.

Enforcement by camera or human is the answer.

Properly specified speed bumps, and enough of them, will indeed stop speeding. If the ones in the road next to yours don't do the job, it's because your local council didn't specify them properly.

Proper speed bumps will ensure that vehicles drive over them at the required speed (5,10, 15, 20mph or whatever). Driving over them faster will cause damage to the vehicle. That this isn't happening shows your council didn't do the job properly.

whilst I agree its possible for councils to stuff up sizing of speed bumps so that they make them next to useless for their purpose.

even with ones of the correct size they dont on the whole slow vehicles down much, because whilst driving over them faster ultimately does cause damage I dont really think some drivers care that much about that issue.

those that do slow for the bumps, inevitably then drive much faster between them instead.

Ill often whilst riding at 15mph on a 20mph road with speed bumps soon find Im being tailgated (usually by an Audi) who will force a pass, who then often jams the brakes on at the last second to get over the speed bump, and then speeds off & repeats

OldRidgeback wrote:

 

I don't believe LTNs reduce pollution, as traffic just backs up on the main roads instead.

 

Actually, the long term evidence is that they do work. They facilitate modal shift and ultimately reduce main road traffic.

Exactly this. In other words, they make driving less of an obvious option, so you start to think about whether you could walk or cycle, and at the same time it makes those options better. Think of LTNs as active travel rat-runs.

We need to give them a bit of time, we have had 70 odd years of the motor vehicle being the answer to whatever question is being asked.

LTNs do not stick with this particular answer.

What strikes me is what a miserable and unsatisfying thing driving has become in that time - a real source of anger and division. 

Dark for the journey home this evening, was a bit down when unlocking the bike, dark now, dark when going home for months.

I had forgotten how much fun it could be hooning it about through the woods in the dark.

Never mind them cycling, walking is a start too. I used to live 100 from nearest shop in a straight line. 200m to walk. I regularly saw neighbours going out to their car, drive around, into the carpark behind the shop, walk into the shop behind me, when they drove out their drive as I passed them. Then then drove home with a litre of milk and packet of fags.
Currently I have a 400m walk to local store, 600m drive, and most people walk for smaller items, but I still see some drive it. I still get there as quickly. It's also not the elderly driving, it's the 30-50 yr olds.

Some of the routes motorists have been taking through inappropriate streets weren't common before google maps/ sat nav etc became dominant, unless you were a cabbie with the knowledge.  Everyone has felt entitled to shave some distance and/or time off their journey because they have an app that shows them how to. Even some large HGV drivers seem to prefer to keep moving down side streets than stop at the occasional red light on a main road. Now some of these routes are being prevented, for the good of the residents, they are whining like babies.

On the online consultation for my neighbourhood, which has successfully reduced rat-runners and people winding round the streets hoping for a parking space where they won't get a ticket, there are seriously people arguing to reverse the filtered permeability claiming our streets are 'an important route' between two main roads.  They aren't, they're just the ones you've been anti-socially taking for the past ten years. Cheerio

The Google Maps-induced rat-running is a large part of the problem I think.  Even away from LTN considerations, out on a bike ride a few weeks ago I was sat at a junction on a country lane near the Bristol ring road for over ten minutes simply unable to get out because of the weight of traffic.  Turned out that there was a problem on the M4 and hundreds of cars were being diverted off at one junction, down a lot of little roads not intended to carry long-distance traffic, around and back to the motorway. 

Now, clearly that's just because the software had worked out it was a faster route, but in the interest of communities and general safety, there's a good argument that Google Maps should understand that you're heading from e.g. Reading to Wales and *not* tell you to get off the motorway.

It's bad enough when you're driving cross-country and it routes you down little farm tracks because it thinks they're a minute faster: in an area you know well you probably know that's not right and can ignore it, but in rural areas sometimes you can't tell that a turning isn't the actual main road.

well I was going to cite Betteridge's law of headlines, so the answer is no. But Ive never seen the point debating the car lobby, their minds are made up and closed to debate, so no amount of witty fact refuting gets through to them.

Why would they want to? They've still unfortunately got everything stacked in thier favour with the status quo so they have no need to be open to change (yet). 

Unfortunately for those of us who are keyboard warriors, most of the idiocy takes place on Twitter - and Twitter is specifically designed to work against debate, discussion and refutation in favour of likes, top-level comments, blue ticked garbage suckers, whataboutery and number of voices rather than quality of contribution.

I would dearly love to wipe that garbage website from the face of the earth.

I saw that during the live coverage. What was that all about?

Something to read on the long descents. 

And if you over-shoot a hairpin on the way down the Stelvio you can use it as a parachute