CityCyclingEdinburgh was launched on the 27th of October 2009 as "an experiment".
IT’S TRUE!
CCE is 14years old!
Well done to ALL posters
It soon became useful and entertaining. There are regular posters, people who add useful info occasionally and plenty more who drop by to watch. That's fine. If you want to add news/comments it's easy to register and become a member.
RULES No personal insults. No swearing.
You've all probably seen this report http://road.cc/content/news/93687-bikes-faster-public-transport-most-london-journeys-under-8-miles
Would it be worth trying to do something similar for Edinburgh? If only for the media splash?
It must be true for a huge proportion of Edinburgh's residential areas.
My 6.5ish mile commute (city centreish to South Gyle) takes me 25ish minutes by bike.
Publich transport / walking combinations offered door-to-door start at 48 minutes.
Google estimates 24 minutes "in current traffic" for drivering. Wonder what it offers for getting to work at 9AM or leaving at 5PM?
Interestingly Google also offers a fuel cost estimate. For driving it started at £1.67. At least it's cheaper by bus, if slower.
It really depends on the journey but any bus route involving transiting town the bike must be quicker. However up to Balerno the bus quicker from around Slateford if the traffic is with it though the great stonking hill doesn't exactly help the cyclist.
I used to get the bus from Roseburn into town, this whole process including waiting for the bus could take me up to 45minutes to get to the South Bridge, the same journey by bike is just 12 minutes on average.
Similarly it used to take me 1hr to get to Portobello from Roseburn, by bike it takes 30minutes maximum.
R
My 4(ish) mile commute takes nearly forty minutes if I time the bus correctly, nearly twenty if I take the bike. Off peak the bus is only a little faster, it spends more time at bus stops and going slowly.
Definitely quicker for me. Since I started cycle commuting I've always managed to beat the buses I used to take. It's actually quite an eye-opener to realise just how slow buses actually are. On the few times I now use the bus I find it incredibly frustrating - I keep thinking how much faster I'd be on my bike!
According to Lothian Buses, it is cyclists holding up all their buses that are the reason they are so slow. Nothing to do with just how many buses they try cram onto the road and how close they pack the stops. Nothing whatsoever. No, sirree.
1hr 45min down to 55min. I laid the breakdown out in a piece I wrote for .citycycling, but interestingly 55min was my figure for tanking it, and that's how long I spent on the bike during yesterday's not pushing it because I did 85 miles yesterday and I can't be bothered commute.
Sneaky residual fitnesscats ho!
@kaputnik - didn't someone on this forum use their GPS on a bus to show the average speed was well below 20mph?
And I'm beating buses going along green lanes in rush hour (and I'm certainly no racer!) so it's the sheet quantity of stops that are the cause. A stop every 200 yards seems excessive.
By bus: For me coming in from Darkest 'The Sunny Kingdom of Fife (TM)' its an hour Door ro Door by bus, but the bus stop is 20 yards from my gate, and I work above the bus station.
By Train, its ~15 mins door to getting on the train, ~35 - 40 mins by train and ~5 mins, Train to work. So Sstill an hour.
By bike its around an hour but thats taking the faster A90 with its inherent traffic, potholes, traffic lights problems. After 9pm I can wizz home in ~55 mins, but on a normal commute I'll ride through Dalmeny and take the longer NEPN which spits me out at Tesco Broughton before heading up to York Place. Time is usually ~1 hour, 10 mins.
The down sides of Public Transport are getting stuck in traffic, just after I've had that extra cuppa meaning I'm bursting for a wee as we crawl down the A90! The train is not so bad, but you have to pay in Edinburgh station. The bike is no probs, I just water the plants, somewhere quiet! ;O)
Perhaps best to leave the last bit out of your press release 'Weak Bladder? take the bike and water the plants!'
There have been discussions of travel-time maps before - I'm sure I've played with an interactive one for Edinburgh, but my Google-Fu only is coming up with London ones, or train times to Edinburgh from various commuter stations, etc.
Robert
"
Journey times across the city are expected to improve significantly once all tram works are lifted on October 9
"
That's all right then.
Time to stop cycling.
Three and a half miles - twenty mins on the bike.
Forty mins on the bus.
As others have said buses stopped for longer than they move, as well as bikes have the freedom to filter, switch route etc.
I'm about the same as Steveo, 4 miles, door to door it's 40-45 mins by bus, 15-23 mins cycling - averaging 18 mins. Cycling time depends more on the wind and traffic than how I feel!
"A stop every 200 yards seems excessive."
I need to measure the distance between the two stops alongside the back of Meadowbank on Marionville Road. I'd assumed they'd be used by different services but the other morning the same vehicle went past both.
Dave sat on a bus with GPS, as referenced by GreenerLeith the other day when they revealed Lothian Buses' no-cycles-on-Leith-Walk backstabbing.
I've never yet got round to actually taking the bus into work one morning to see how long it would take, but as it would involve a bus going up Leith Street I'm fairly certain one of my <15' short-route (3.24-3.71 mile) options would beat it. I'd prefer to set off on bike, watch for a bus coming past at the end of the road, note its number plate, cycle in as normal then watch for it coming past the appropriate stop at the other end so that I wouldn't have to actually sit on a bus.
When I was 'young', I used to race the bus from Livingston, the bus would win now.
Can only comment on journeys I've done, going West by bike from work used to take about 30 minutes to the Gogar roundabout. Same journey by car used to take about the same. Car journey to Livingston would take about 45 mins in total, an hour and 10 (for me, now) by bike. Once you get past the city limits car starts to become much quicker going West.
Going North to Fife seems to be different, it's a horrible drive (at peak times). Takes me an hour and five minutes to get to Ferry Toll by bike, and about 20 mins by car from there to home. Car all the way would take about the same, maybe 10/15 minutes more when somethings happened on the bridge.
I tried the bus one morning, 2hrs!!!! from Burntisland, and it cost as much as the train. If I don't cycle I get the train, bout an hour and 10 mins including walking etc.
30 min by bus or 10 min by bike
RonnieJ made an important point about including the time spent waiting for the bus.
We could also add in the time it takes to walk to the bus stop, and the time to walk from the stop you descend at to your actual destination.
If I'm at the tesco on Nicolson St, I'm actually faster walking home to Meadowbank than getting a #5 bus - even in mid-morning when the buses are every 15 mins and there's less traffic.
That's down to
(1) No walk to the bus stop
(2) No 7.5 min wait (median wait)
(3) No bus stops
(4) No traffic lights
(5) More direct route
(6) No walk home from bus stop
~gibbo, yes I included walking to public transport, in my earlier post.
I thought I'd set up a wee test for Googol maps: travelling from Haymarket Terrace to Portobello beach, a route that inevitably involves crossing the city centre. Default is to set off now, so early afternoon, roads fairly quiet.
Googol suggests different routes but if we take the first suggestion for each mode:
Car - suggests rat-running via Grassmarket/Cowgate and Holyrood Park - 20 mins
Bus - walk to stop, get on 26, walk from Porty High St - 45 mins
Walk - similar route to the car - 1 hour 38 mins
Cycle - routes via Meadows and Innocent railway/Bingham etc. - 38 mins
Car definitely quickest at this time of day, but in peak commuting time? The braver cyclist might go via Prince St/London Rd/Portobello Rd and shave 4 mins off the time, depending on traffic lights, close passes etc. Of course Googol does not build in time for car driver faffing around trying to find a parking space in Haymarket or Porty...
Many commutes won't be directly comparable. My trip is massively quicker by bike than by bus but this is mainly because it's direct. The bus option involves a very long way round, a change of buses and therefore two waits at bus stops. At a total of 1hr, the bus trip is actually 5 mins slower than walking. (But the one bus plus long walk option can cut this down to 35 mins.)
A few summers ago, the girlfriend and I were in Musselburgh for some evening event*. Somehow** she had arrived by bus and I was on the bike.
She jumped on the 26 and I set off in front of the bus. Keeping to the same route I was a little bit behind. By Portobello, the bus and I were leapfrogging. I made it through the lights at Kings Road but the bus didn't. And by Meadowbank (home) I had a good 3 minutes on the bus.
This would have been around 10pm on a weekday evening. No traffic and the bus was running slightly behind schedule. Perfect conditions for the bus.
With that in mind, sounds more than possible during rush hour, etc.
*I say 'event', probably just an late evening trip to Tesco. **In no way was I already planning a bike race home. Honest.
Depending on traffic conditions I will be faster or just as quick on my bike as the x12 limited stop express bus from Morrison st to Ingliston P&R. That's me obeying all the rules of the road that the bus does plus i'm going up and over gogarburn roundabout, unless there is a strong tailwind which there never seems to be when heading west at 5pm!!
Oh I ought to qualify my above post by adding that Googol "bicycling" seems to use a fairly low average speed. Not leisure pootling slow, but not commuter racing fast either...
@crowriver it would be great if you could punch in an average speed for a route, and then it could estimate time taking elevation into account for other routes.
I reckon strava could use the data you input to do something similar, see how fast you are on the flats, and hills.
I started cycle commuting in the first place because of the appalling amount of time it took me to get to work on the bus.
35 mins in the morning on the bike now - I get an extra 15 - 20 mins in bed in the morning. Woo!
crowriver, I recently raced my gf from Broughton Street to Portobello. She was in a taxi and I was on my fixie. I won, but if the taxi hadn't missed her street it would have been a tie. I might have had to amber gamble twice.
I often beat the no 3 from Liberton Road up to Gilmerton. Lots of stops with people getting off.
Bike is faster for me by a big margin (Corstorphine to Leith, 35 mins on bike, up to an hour or more on the bus).
But more importantly, journey time is much more predictable. I can choose when to leave on my bike knowing I'll be home at a specific time (give or take a minute or two). Bus times can fluctuate hugely and means I would have to leave much earlier if I had to do child pickups etc
You must log in to post.
Cycling in Edinburgh Flickr group
Video embedded using Easy Video Embed plugin
posts