CityCyclingEdinburgh Forum » Infrastructure

Edinburgh Dissapoinment

(24 posts)

  1. emuir
    Member

    As a cyclist who spends most of his time in Glasgow I'm used to motoring centric infrastructure but I had the impression that Edinburgh was trying to-do things differently. However, when I spent a day cycling through it I found nothing that would be worthy of the title of "good cycling infrastructure".

    Below is a complaint I sent to Edinburgh City Council conveying these thoughts:

    To Whom it may concern,

    I'm writing to you to express my disappointment at the disparity between the pro-cycling rhetoric coming from Edinburgh City Council and the reality on the roads.

    I recently cycled through a large part of Edinburgh including Morningside, the City Centre and Leith and during my ride at no point did I come across any good quality cycling infrastructure. Instead I had to make an emergency stop due to a driver not looking properly when crossing a junction, I experienced pass so close and fast I won't ever cycle on that route again, I got lost on a "signposted" cycle route which just ended and I generally had a stressful time mixing with buses and avoiding the dreaded tram tracks. The cycling infrastructure I did find was at best bike boxes (paint on the road) and the meadows bike paths. In short I'm very disappointed and annoyed that Edinburgh City Council makes it out to be cycling friendly but the storey on the ground is far from it. I normally cycle in Glasgow where cyclists are simply ignored and was expecting far better in Edinburgh. The only discernible difference I found was the roads are smaller and narrower in Edinburgh meaning reduced traffic speed and volume.

    Was the whole cycling transport budget misspent on making the inconvenient Haymarket bike bypass? Which no-one will ever use. Or has the money simply been used for other "cycling" related projects?

    Regards,

    Posted 10 years ago #

  2. condor2378
    Member

    #thisISedinburgh

    Though in my experience,smaller and narrower just means more conflict. Ah well.

    Posted 10 years ago #

  3. gembo
    Member

    Always good to see ourselves as others see us. Also always good to keep up the pressure on the council but to be honest we can moan plenty on this forum without a gentleman or gentlewoman from the west gie-ing it Laldy. :-) just joking. I think that is a good letter to the council and helps maintain pressure to improve.

    Sorry the reality doesn't match the rhetoric and cycling somewhere for the first time is never easy.

    However, my view with all the very recent, but admittedly very local improvements listed on this forum is that the city of Edinburgh council in the month before April end of financial year initiated many improvements to cycling paths. The new Tarmac related to trams in west of Edinburgh also dandy. So at the moment despite it being invisible to visitors we know on this forum that things are getting better. (Slowly). I therefore ask politely if we can also start reducing the moaning a little please.

    Posted 10 years ago #

  4. SRD
    Moderator

    ONE good thing they have done that is more than rhetoric is gritting many of the bike paths in winter. Not much help this winter, but worth credit, and appreciated on icy mornings.

    Depressing that that is about the best we can say? I've got hope for some of the stuff currently being planned.

    Posted 10 years ago #

  5. cc
    Member

    @emuir I was quite surprised, when I met a friendly bunch of Glaswegians a year or two back, to find that they thought of Edinburgh as some kind of cycling paradise. In reality most major Edinburgh roads are awful for cycling. It's best to stick to quiet roads. Edinburgh does have some quite usable shared paths and it's possible to get around a lot of the city without going on the road - as long as you go slowly and have a loud bell, as the paths are also used by people having a stroll or walking the dog. But we're a long way yet from being able to just pick a random busy street and know that it'll be safe to cycle on. As gembo says we do seem to be moving in the right direction though, and as he says some of the current plans seem hopeful.
    The cyclestreets.net route planner can help, though even that sometimes directs you on to busy roads which I'd avoid.

    Posted 10 years ago #

  6. Morningsider
    Member

    emuir - seems a little harsh. If you cycled through the Meadows then I would say you did encounter some good quality cycle infrastructure. I agree thet the city centre is something of a black hole for cycle infrastructure, with most routes feeding in from the suburbs and ending at the edge of the centre itself.

    To be fair to the Council, they know this and have plans to connect these routes across the city centre over the next couple of years. Any pressure to ensure these routes are high quality is welcome though.

    Posted 10 years ago #

  7. PS
    Member

    There is some decent cycling infrastructure (or, perhaps more accurately, infrastructure that can be used by cyclists) in Edinburgh but you need to know where it is. You won't find it by accident or by instinct, unless you have trained your instinct to look for round-about routes.

    It is not there for the direct routes that people want to take - taking emuir's example, if you are cycling from Morningside to Leith via the city centre, you won't find any cycle infrastruture worthy of the name down Morningside Road, Bruntsfield Place, Lothian Road, Princes Street, Leith Street, Leith Walk.

    It's back to Professor Pooley's first requirement: segregated infrastructure on arterial roads.

    Posted 10 years ago #

  8. condor2378
    Member

    "you won't find any cycle infrastruture worthy of the name down Morningside Road, Bruntsfield Place, Lothian Road, Princes Street, Leith Street, Leith Walk."

    My daily commute. Can confirm.

    Posted 10 years ago #

  9. chdot
    Admin

    "you won't find any cycle infrastruture worthy of the name down Morningside Road, Bruntsfield Place, Lothian Road, Princes Street, Leith Street, Leith Walk."

    But of course the road is cycle infrastructure.

    Shared use too.

    But the big boys (and girls) don't like sharing.

    As I write this it is the 4th thread - under physical activity, road repairs and health.

    The first and last of those overlap and the middle one is relevant to to this thread!

    Of the roads mentioned at the top, it would be nice if they had segregated cycle lanes (pretty much impossible on Princes Street (unless they remove everything except bikes and trams - not that long since they planned to ban bikes!).

    Would be good if they just had continuous cycle lanes - even if they were parked on outside 'rush hour'.

    But above all a decent road surface would make a MASSIVE difference to cycle safety, and, perhaps, encourage more people to cycle.

    Posted 10 years ago #

  10. kaputnik
    Moderator

    What Edinburgh lacks is good provision (or really, any provision) on "arterial" routes as mentioned above. The off-the-road but not along-side-the-road path network is pretty good, where it exists.

    We seem to have a problem where we have wide roads (like Lothian Road, London Road Leith Walk etc.) which the council looks at, scratches its head and then says "no room for cycling" before sticking in 4 or 6 lanes of vehicular traffic...

    Posted 10 years ago #

  11. wingpig
    Member

    Morningside Road/Bruntsfield Place are, despite everything about them, components of my second-favourite regular medium-length inward-commute. The best position to take is determined by not only the various traffic islands, crossings, parking spaces, binrefuges, build-outs and the weight of traffic but also (possibly predominantly, on skinny tyres) the excruciatingly bad surface, though it's this which gives me hope that one day it'll go beyond temporary patching and require a decent-length closure to resurface the lot, at which point it would be only sensible to redesign the entire space from building-edge to building-edge. It's one of those bits of roads where the pavement-edge of the lane is so erratic that the only obvious positioning-reference is the middle of the road, or at least the point just inside the offside of approaching traffic.

    Posted 10 years ago #

  12. chdot
    Admin

    "which the council looks at, scratches its head and then says "no room for cycling" before sticking in 4 or 6 lanes of vehicular traffic..."

    Yep, Queen Street too.

    Any 'sensible' council would wonder about the point of dynasoar legacies of highway/town planning like Calder Road.

    Does the dual carriageway really get people to Stenhouse Road quicker and safer?? (not even worrying about cyclists or local residents).

    Pennywell Road is even more absurd really.

    Waste of land/tarmac.

    No doubt looked wonderful to post/war 'visionary planners' - the sort that built Red Road flats but didn't want to spend the money looking after them.

    Posted 10 years ago #

  13. Nelly
    Member

    @emuir - cant say I disagree at all !

    I think the acid test whenever I visit somewhere new on the bike is - does the infra / signage work?

    e.g. I have had to cycle on the A9 down to Dunkeld due to terrible / unuseable bike path at one point - not nice !

    Back to Edinburgh, my daily commute is made up of some very busy roads, some quiet ones, and some bike path.

    What I cant do is cycle from my home to my place of work without havign some type of conflict with fast moving and potentially lethal vehicles.

    Furthermore, we live 0.3 mile from my sons school (Sciennes) which is in - arguably - the most cycle friendly part of the city, and I wont countenance my son using the road to cycle to school.

    So, well done on writing to CEC, and look forward to hearing the response !

    Posted 10 years ago #

  14. Dave
    Member

    I'm constantly amazed at the places that the council can't fit any cycle provision whatsoever.

    Example 1

    Example 2

    Posted 10 years ago #

  15. ianfieldhouse
    Member

    >Example 2

    @Dave I wish the council would just make the whole of the southside pavement from Napier to Firrhill shared use. Hardly anyone walks on it (other than students getting off the bus to instantly enter Napier campus) and it would provide a large portion of a Safe Route to School for students coming from the area surrounding the crossroads of Colinton Road with Craiglockhart Avenue.

    Posted 10 years ago #

  16. Cyclingmollie
    Member

    emuir: "The cycling infrastructure I did find was ... the meadows bike paths."

    I believe it took SPOKES over three years of campaigning to get a bike lane on Middle Meadow Walk. Edinburgh District Council objected on safety grounds and also challenged the authority of the Regional Council to build a cycle path in the Meadows. There were also objections from councillors. Ralph Brereton wrote in a letter to The Scotsman:
    "Parks are for quiet, decent people. SPOKES can get lost and take its Commie friends with it. Who wants a proletarian dictatorship anyway? Not me, and not Marchmont."

    Posted 10 years ago #

  17. gembo
    Member

    Great quote from Ralph.

    Meadows seems to be a peace zone where Peds and cyclists rub along together in the absence of cars

    Posted 10 years ago #

  18. Min
    Member

    Nice letter. The council are extremely interested in visitors and don't give much of a toss about residents so the more people from foreign parts (like Glasgow) who can write in and tell them they are rubbish the better. Though as some folks have already said, there are some fragments of enjoyable infra, so long as you know where to find them and so long as they take you to where you are going.

    Posted 10 years ago #

  19. minus six
    Member

    fragments of enjoyable infra

    when i write my memoirs, there's the title right there

    Posted 10 years ago #

  20. wee folding bike
    Member

    Make sure your memoirs are a story and not a storey.

    That had been annoying me since yesterday and I had managed to avoid saying anything for a whole day.

    Posted 10 years ago #

  21. Nelly
    Member

    @wfb

    In that case......you would love the complimentary therapy room in my office.

    It really, really likes you - and says so !

    Posted 10 years ago #

  22. gembo
    Member

    I saw an old episode of cheers on free view last week. Kirstie alley managed to keep gossip about Frazier and Lilith inside herself for a whole hour.

    When Norm was asked if Vera would have an affair, he said Yeah, like it could rain beer?

    We also recently had a drawer in the office marked stationary. I kept an eye on it periodically and can confirm it did not move.

    Nobody is perfect though

    Posted 10 years ago #

  23. emuir
    Member

    @condor2378 I agree that narrower roads do invite more conflict but 4 lane single carriageways feel terrifying to cycle on.

    @gembo The letter was not meant to belittle the hard work by all those who have been campaigning for improvements and although it may have come across as a moan, it was meant to add to voice from a different perspective, to the reality on the roads and to prompt a response. I felt particularly annoyed at almost being hit.

    @cc Thanks for passing on the cycle planner. I do normally size up a route before heading out although I do have a tendency of getting lost and going a different way!

    @Morningsider To me the meadows could do with improvement by having greater distinction between the cyclist side and the pedestrians, and made wider. Also the pedestrian lights on Melville Drive took an age to change. Why aren't don't they default to green for peds and cyclists?

    @PS I found Lothian Road disgusting. Just how many lanes are needed for motor traffic in the city?

    @Nelly You're a brave person cycling on the A9! I've also heard other horror stories where cyclists have ended up on the motorway by accidently taking a slip road.

    @Cyclingmollie That's a depressingly long time for the meadows bike path. There is definite irony to the safety concerns. How can it be acceptable to let cyclist mix with dangerous motor traffic?

    I'll post the response when/if I get it!

    Posted 10 years ago #

  24. PS
    Member

    Just how many lanes are needed for motor traffic in the city?

    It would seem always one more than is strictly necessary, which means there isn't room for a segregated cycle lane on one of the widest streets in the country (and one which has high cycle-use).

    That also applies for pretty much all of that route from Morningside to Leith.

    I suspect that the sheer number of traffic lanes on some of these streets actually makes driving in the city more stressful because you have to try and work out which lane you should be in for any given junction in order to avoid the wrath of fellow drivers.

    Posted 10 years ago #

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