I think this is deliberate. Why?

Genuine question.

Obviously the left hand side of this is supposed to be for bikes and right hand side for walkers. What puzzles me is the stretch of ribbed paving. On the bike side, the ribs are parallel with the kerb, on the walk side the ribs are transverse.

When I first started noticing these I assumed that the contractors who had implemented the design had misunderstood and got them the wrong way round. A set of ‘tram tracks’ going in the direction of travel is, at very best, scary for a cyclist becuse you fear it might catch your wheel like actual tram tracks. At worst it actually might be dangerous. Yet every example of this treatment has the ribs arranged like this so it must be deliberate. Why?

Is there some advantage to visually impaired people in having tactile paving with transverse ribs? Are the longitudinal ribs a subtle form of traffic calming – it is intended that cyclists are disconcerted? As I say, this is a genuine question.

There are plenty of examples of this in Bristol but I took this photo, funnily enough, just outside Warrington, famous in bike-blog circles, for their documentation of bad bike infrastructure.

Advertisement

Noticed on Gloucester Road

From this it appears that people actually try to take their bikes into a shop. I find this quite strange – it would just get in the way wouldn’t it? You might get oily marks on things. Honestly, some people. Tut.

But it might be an example of behaving like traffic – forgetting that the bike is an actual large lump of encumbering metal and thinking oneself a natural unencumbered pedestrian and behaving accordingly.

Or it could be an attempt to reduce the faff factor – all you want to do is pop into the shop for a quick nosey – 2 mins, tops – but if you have to faff about finding a bikestand and then faff around with a huge heavy lock, then it’s hardly worth it.

The big infrastructure bunfight

Small groups of people seem to go in for ferocious infighting – the internal politics of amateur recorder consorts and country-dance groups is, I have been told, rather scary. When a group is small and also beleaguered the ferocity is doubled . I suspect that this is because people who are on ones own side, but with whom we disagree on some minor point, are simply more available than the true enemy. The energy that ought properly to be sent outward into the wider world seems to have no obvious clear target … but your fellow small-and-beleagured-group colleagues are right next door. It’s a variation on kick-the-cat.

There are a number of these rows simmering away in the cycle-campaigning micro-community, and of course the internet amplifies everything. Mention on a e-list that you think all those yellow-jackets and hi-viz kit look like a rather jolly uniform and you get a whirlwind of response. No, no, no, we really must not admit that some people look good in lycra. The line we simply must take is that hi-viz makes us look WEIRD. Have you got that? Oh all right then … it was only an innocent remark that I thought luminous yellow looks nice on rainy day for goodness sake. Or mention on a different e-list that, as a re-starting cyclist, you think you were better off twenty years ago without any of these cycle lanes and you discover you have accidentally pedalled into a minefield. Apparently, combatants have been at it for decades and vast grudges have had time to build up. If you want to be a proper cycling campaigner you really must pick a side on all the big points of discord so you can have some fun beating up the opposition.

So what, exactly was the minefield that I pedalled into (and rapidly out of, I might add). Dear imaginary reader, I really find it difficult to know where to start.

Let’s go back to my own cycling history, as described previously. My formative cycling experiences were in a world with no bike-specific infrastructure – not even Advanced Stop Lines. I stopped cycling and walked for a couple of decades and when I tried the bike again in the noughties there were loads more cyclists and there were all these painted cycle lanes everywhere – there were even a very few sections of physically separated bike lane. There was lots of new signage which acknowledged that cycling did in fact take place. It all looked very encouraging and I assumed it was going to make for a pleasant experience. It didn’t

And I was not alone in finding this. It turned out that there was a whole literature, on the net and in print, about the general ghastliness of cycle lanes, cycle tracks, cycle paths. They are dangerous. The best way to keep yourself safe on a bike is to be alert and assertive – plonk yourself where you can be seen, be clear in your intentions and so on – just as I had discovered for myself back in the eighties. In fact there is excellent book about this called Cyclecraft. I recommend it. It’s by a chap called John Franklin. He was at the Cyclenation conference in fact. “Ooh” I thought, “will there be a scrap?”.

To be continued … which is why comments for this one are closed.

Behaving like traffic

Our minds are amazing because they can do far, far more than they evolved to do (just look around you). Nevertheless that does not mean that they can do all these 21st century things easily, or particularly well, or with no practice. And the fact that the limits of our minds are to some extent unknown, does not mean that our minds are unlimited. ‘Evolutionary psychology’ gets laughed at, not because it suggests that we are in some ways constrained by our evolutionary history (of course we are), but because it can seem so over-confident in suggesting the precise ways in which it is so constrained. In other words, the criticism is not of the endeavour itself (provide behavioural explanations in an evolutionary framework) but of the flimsiness of some of the assertions which are presented as ‘findings’.

So with that in mind, let me try this one out on you.

Hom sap is a walker and runner. Natural selection has not had time to help us with the speeds now available to us from driving. So it is not unreasonable to suppose that our default behaviour in traffic of all kinds is in fact ‘walking behaviour’. That is to say, to drive (and to a much lesser extent, cycle), in order to cope with the extra danger created by speed, we need to have extra and/or different behaviour artificially trained into us (for example ‘mirror signal manoeuvre’ repeated endlessly during driving lessons). When that training slips or decays we will, by default, ‘behave like walkers’.

Continuing the ‘mirror signal manoeuvre’ example, when you are in pedestrian mode you don’t give explicit signals of your intentions to move or change direction. The reason seems obvious – at walking speed collisions very rarely happen and on the rare occasions that they do, almost never cause serious injury. Why are walking collisions so rare though? We don’t give conscious and explicit signals of intentions, but we do give unconscious and implicit signals – we read each other without thinking about it and more or less know what the people around us are going to do, without being consciously aware of this.

As a pedestrian, you cannot help but notice how many drivers don’t bother signalling. So much so, that the absence of a signal from a car is no indication that it not going to turn into your path. I would suggest that they are simply ‘behaving like walkers’, their driver training is not at that moment operational and it no more occurs to them to signal than it would to a pedestrian. They just unconsciously assume that their intentions are transparent – just as the intentions of a pedestrian actually are transparent to other pedestrians.

Another example is tailgating. I am a rather aggressive walker, prone to getting annoyed when held up behind a bunch of dozy tourists occupying the pavement, given to walking very close behind them, tutting impatiently and trying desperately to force a way through. This might be rude (thinking about it, this was definitely London behaviour) but it is not dangerous. Tailgating in a car is dangerous. Everyone knows, in some sort of theoretical way, that it is dangerous. Remember that chart of stopping distances on the back of the highway code? How often do you see the safe distances observed? Once again, I would suggest that the imposed driver training has switched off so it feels safe, just as it actually is safe to tailgate on foot.

So I would suggest that in the broadest sense we don’t behave like cyclists or behave like drivers; we all ‘behave like traffic’ – revert to our natural behaviour as walkers.

Does this have any campaigning relevance?

Indirectly. A quick online stroll will reveal huge amounts of shouting. Cyclists jumping red lights, dozy pedestrians who never look before stepping out, dumbass motorists who park on the pavement. Well shouting is great fun so please just get on with it. I quite like reading it sometimes. But shouting is all it is. It would be useful in campaigning effectively to be able to think strategically. Even though one’s own immediate situation is important, it is equally important to be able to think beyond it – and it gets us absolutely nowhere to start adopting a moralising tone or thinking of other people as stupid.

More importantly, although training is important and of course people can learn to do all sorts of new things, and learn to old things much better, even with this, perhaps one should beware of expecting training or education to pull too much weight. Folks will be folks.