CityCyclingEdinburgh was launched on the 27th of October 2009 as "an experiment".
IT’S TRUE!
CCE is 15years 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.
I'm pretty reticent these days about trusting my journey to the National Cycle Network without previous experience or a strong recommendation. It's too easy to end up on NCN 223:
Is there a website out there with reviews of the routes? An annotated map with the quicksand and the anti-tank boulders marked?
A review of routes would be really useful, I avoid NCN routes as it's not unusual to come across barriers or steps which mean I have to retrace my route and try to find an alternative.
It also sounds like Sustrans know they've got a serious problem, they're releasing a review tomorrow!
National Cycle Network has many 'crap' paths, says charity in charge
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/nov/11/national-cycle-network-has-many-crap-paths-says-charity-in-charge
One of the routes quoted in the article is NCN76 near Stirling with a dodgy section on a busy main road, they could also include the barriers on either side of both the Dalmeny and Hopetoun Estates which are limiting factors on this NCN route.
Enjoying the Sustrans headline - Our paths are crap.
Obviously they are not all crap and Sustrans has the confidence to call itself out, which is nice. It is not Gerald Ratner.
Some of them do go a very long way so variability is inevitable. London to Brighton is hilarious. Or I might mean hysterical. At one point you go down the back of a vineyard and also through some sort of secret Catholic Church campus. Also locals twisting the poles round.
Stirling route does have the man road very busy very bad. Also if you follow to the letter fu NY ponds down by the forth where you have to push or carry your bike.
Works better say going out of reading lovely quiet country lanes villages with pubs, cricket on the village green, gammon brexit Eers beneath the chocolate box veneers, creeping into south Oxfordshire, all art studios and alternative therapies until didxot massive defunct power station and on to the Isis at Oxford. (Some of this would not work for a handcyclist e.g. NeAr Oxford there is a fare before you get on the towpath next to the Isis.
I have had many happy times on Sustrans routes with Sustrans maps. Favourite was to a port in Harwich. The route number was on the boat that took you across to Felixstowe, and dropped you on a beach, D-Day landing style. Then a hefty push up the bank - fortunately a kind bloke helped me out at this point.
So I do rather like their absurd "rolling English road" quality which is because of the constraints Sustrans works under - no compulsory purchase, only allowed to operate in the forgotten ways, and the wasteland and derelict railways. Rather like found sculpture....
"no compulsory purchase, only allowed to operate in the forgotten ways, and the wasteland and derelict railways. "
Which rather sums up the problem with cycling in the UK.
OTOH I quite like traversing these "hidden" routes: it's an adventure. Not much fun on a regular commute mind.
Article in praise of NCN routes in this week's Spectator*: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-parallel-universe-you-can-explore-on-two-wheels.
It would seem that the routes are in fairly OK nick in the author's neck of the woods.
I'm not sure about her remark: "I don’t like being made to feel I’m doing a bike ride in order to pursue a sustainable mode of transport," though. IMO it's pretty much implicit and unavoidable, in the current circumstances. There certainly seems to be a common view amongst the Gammon community that all cyclists have a "holier than thou attitude". (Also, I suspect the word that the author was looking for in the preceding sentence was "conflation", not the one that ended up there. Unless it was intended to have some kind of sardonic shock value, in which case I'm afraid it failed with this reader.)
* Not a periodical I read on anything like a regular basis; on this occasion I was taken there by a link in the Wiki article about BBC adaptation of 'The Roads to Freedom', which they have chosen to broadcast for the first time since 1977, to the obvious delight of many of those who remember it fondly.
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