Following on from the dominant bicycle type in the next decade thread, what are the worst cobbled streets in Edinburgh? Brighton Place and Drummond Place (esp Scotland Street to London Street) have already been suggested.
CityCyclingEdinburgh Forum » Debate!
Worst cobbles in Edinburgh
(45 posts)-
Posted 13 years ago #
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"Drummond Place (esp Scotland Street to London Street)"
Seconded. It's horrible.
Posted 13 years ago # -
Howe Street gets my vote - downhill it is difficult to brake and signal right into great King St...
Or Glouscter Street - it may be short but it's flippin steep, nightmare to slow down on with wet brakes or in snow, nightmare to get grip on uphill in wet and you can forget about snow. Now avoid it and go the long way round via the trinity/roseburn path instead (yes it is more than twice the distance)
Posted 13 years ago # -
spitfire: "downhill it is difficult to brake and signal right into great King St..."
Too true. Brake, signal, maneouvre: I can do any two out of three especially on cobbles and/or downhill.Posted 13 years ago # -
Drummond Place for the win. Badly contoured setts, badly laid and badly supported and subsiding. The place is part of National Cycle Network 75 and it eats narrow bicycle wheels.
Comely Bank Avenue is a shocker, too. Again we have "traditional Edinburgh" cobbles that are not spaced correctly, on a heck of a hill. I once rode down there at 28mph and the vibration killed my front light. Thanks, CEC!
Posted 13 years ago # -
No, worst of all are those places where I think, "yeah, I can beat these cobbles by going along the gutter" only to find that the gutter has dropped inches below the level of the setts leaving a nasty step which can catch the front wheel. Brighton Place is like that, and the bottom of Calton Road going uphill.
Posted 13 years ago # -
West Nicholson St, West Crosscauseway, John Knox section of High Street, StMary's St, Comely Bank Ave... shall I go on! All of these are 'chain de-mounters'! Glad I'm not the guy on the Uni-cycle! He must be sterile by now?
Posted 13 years ago # -
St Mary's Street - I lost my bike computer there when it worked loose from the bracket, fell off and got squashed by a lorry. I wasn't even going fast. St Leonard's Lane. Most of Marchmont. All of them, really.
Posted 13 years ago # -
Brighton place heading towards Porty for me. TBH it used to be not so bad before it got dug up and re-laid by "highly skilled" operatives.
Posted 13 years ago # -
It would be much easier to list Edinburgh's Best Cobbles.
<list begins>
<list ends>Posted 13 years ago # -
North side of Drummond Place, without a doubt, with the corner between Scotland Street and London Street being by far the worst bit of it - setts all over the place, uneven, sunken along what looks like a pipeline but may be due to bus use and with an adverse camber.
It can be fun to attack it though - the closest we've got to Paris-Roubaix - and the contrast of going from the cobbles onto the lovely smooth tarmac on London Street is sheer bliss.
Posted 13 years ago # -
It would be much easier to list Edinburgh's Best Cobbles.
<list begins>
<list ends>To be fair, the High Street is pretty good.
Posted 13 years ago # -
Though they're avoidable, the pinch-point sub-tram cobblysection on Princes Street is deeply irritating just for the tendency to suddenly remember that it's there when travelling at speed and trying to maintain that speed to not warrant being attacked from behind by taxis and forced to cross the tram tracks without sufficient preparation. Other than that, second the bottom of Calton Road (where the gutter is too erratic to provide an escape), West Crosscauseway for being the obvious continuation of going through East Crosscauseway's cycle-cut-through and West Richmond Street for being too useful to avoid despite the unpleasant lumpiness of the cobbles. Brighton Place always seems about a mile long when you're in save-wheels-but-not-hold-up-traffic mode and East Market Street (at least prior to whatever was happening to it recently which might have involved improvement) for being another quiet downhill sneak-route which suddenly turns jarring.
Posted 13 years ago # -
I have to say that when I was looking to move flat, I specifically wrote off Stockbridge as it seems almost impossible to enter or exit the place without taking a beating over some rubbish cobbles!
Posted 13 years ago # -
.......to keep the riff raff out.
Posted 13 years ago # -
I'm not one to often make sweeping statements, however:
Leith - Good; City Centre - Bad.
Posted 13 years ago # -
I've got to agree with wingpig, the cobbled section on Princes Street is, in my book, a bad planning move.
They used this layout to 1) mark the tramstops and 2) to be in keeping with Edinburgh's status as a World Heritage site.
But introducing another hazard for cyclists?! Meh.
Posted 13 years ago # -
hey used this layout to 1) mark the tramstops
Perhaps ASL boxes demarcated in red cobbles would prove more hard wearing than the current paint / tarmac options!
Posted 13 years ago # -
2) to be in keeping with Edinburgh's status as a World Heritage site.
Hence my earlier comment about Edinburgh's "traditional cobbles", which bear no relation to the smooth ones I encountered in London, and which I find hard to believe were as bad a hundred years ago. No-one could ever have had eggs or crockery delivered intact by horse and cart.
The Princes Street section is almost intentionally anti-bike. There are any number of other ways the tram stop could have been demarcated, such as a single peripheral line of setts, and even given the desire for full ground cover, why couldn't they have bloody well laid them properly? *fume* >:-(
Posted 13 years ago # -
Tons of good quotes here for my next book 'Asphalt: A Love Story' (not kidding, I'm really doing a book with that title).
It's a book on the history of roads and good surfaces. Naturally, setts will be part of the book.
Cyclists in US and UK played a big part in getting better road surfaces, from 1880s, long before motorists came on the scene.
If I use any quotes I'll get back to forum members asking if they'd like to use real names.
Posted 13 years ago # -
It's unfortunate that there's no way of making a cobbly road surface which causes cars to go more slowly whilst still being pleasant to cycle along.
I've never gone down it by mistake but occasionally forgetfully turn up Howe St and spend the next minute wondering if it's worth U-turning and going somewhere else. Like Bell's Brae, even at uphill-speeds the surface irritates, unlike St Mary's Street and the High Street which are quite tolerable at 15mph or less, though I do find myself tending to try to stick to the longditudinal stones at the edge.
Posted 13 years ago # -
I'd love to see a motorway with cobbles, and see how the motorist react to that.
Posted 13 years ago # -
The section of cobbles on Randolph Place, uneven and gappy, with a couple of manhole covers thrown in for good measure, seem almost deliberately set to catch out unwary cyclists being, as they are, positioned right at the dropped kerb for the national cycle network sponsored cut-through to Charlotte Square.
Posted 13 years ago # -
When setts (cobbles) are lifted and sometimes taken away, they never get re-laid in the same place, hence all the hundreds of years of wear by hooves/cartwheels etc and planar bedding is lost, and it is like starting again from new; so it takes time for setts to gain that worn, polished and weathered topface; this takes many years, meantime our bikes get burst to bits!
This is not an excuse for not laying them right though! or for bad re-instatement and poor foundation preparation. 50% of sunken setts are related to bad utility re-instatement, excessive axle weights, poor prep of foundation, or undermining by water etc!Posted 13 years ago # -
Posted 13 years ago #
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"(note date)"
"Working in tandem creates what sports scientists refer to as a ‘Dual Optimum Performance Environment’"
Posted 13 years ago # -
Obviously based on pseudoscience. Load is always measured in Newtons, not kilogrammes.
Posted 13 years ago # -
I hope they washed the mud (or at least "the possibility of mud") off before heading round the vélodrome.
Though they're reasonably flat I'm starting to quite dislike the Canongate/Jeffrey Street/St Mary's Street cobble-junction. If you're not going straight over you have to watch the ground rather than the other traffic to avoid mishap.
Posted 13 years ago # -
I went along Croft-an-Righ last night. Hadn't been along it for a while. Won't be going along it on the bike for another while.
Posted 12 years ago #
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