Gateshead Revisited - Still A Shockingly Bad Bike Lane?
Some of you may remember the video I made last year about The World’s Shortest Cycle Lane. This was in Gateshead, next to their shiny new college, and a mere ten metres long.
At the time, several commenters, and Gateshead Council’s extremely friendly and approachable* Team Leader for Traffic Projects and Rights of Way said that I wasn’t really being fair, as the path clearly wasn’t finished. I should wait to see how it was completed before whining about how hard-done-by people on bikes are.
Well, it’s finished now. So I took my camera along to see the finished article, and make like an extremely dangerous terrorist suspect from Croydon to take a few snaps of the infrastructure:
What an improvement - they’ve included all sorts of great features to make riding your bike extra fun!
- The cycle lane on the road’s a space-saving 980mm wide
- It then mounts the pavement (that’s sidewalk to you), and increases in width to 990mm
- To mount the pavement, you have a handy 125mm high (5 inches) kerb to simply bunny-hop up, having approached it at an oblique angle. As we all know, approaching a kerb at an angle can easily lead to a fall, if you don’t see the ridge before your wheels hit it. There’s almost no danger of that, with this five-inch monster, so it’s completely safe.
- And then just ten short metres up the pavement, you can practice stopping & starting your bike on a hill, as the bike lane gives way to pedestrian access to the road. I’m all in favour of pedestrians, as the most vulnerable of all road users, they need protecting. But when it’s only bikes (and not cars, as they would under Rule 195 of the Highway Code if there were a zebra crossing here) that have to give way, it makes me wonder where people on bikes fit into the council’s hierarchy. Probably somewhere close Mackems.
I know that there are actually worse bike lanes than this - the Warrington Cycle Campaign has even published a book of them. But this was supposed to be a flagship development, designed by enlightened engineers who’ve realised that Predict & Provide for cars is madness, while for bikes, it may just save their bacon. We have a right to expect better than the solution they’ve provided here.
Or am I being unreasonable again?
*Warning - this post does contain Industrial Strength Sarcasm.
LMAO!
Another classic post Karl!
Actually, there’s a new set of bike lanes added recently to the Lake Washington Loop… they’re much longer than 10 meters… why they probably go a whole city block… but they actually dead end right into the sidewalk… RIGHT AT AN INTERSECTION….
What’s the most dangerous place for a cyclist? Yep, the intersection… so how do we keep cyclists safe on the Lake Washington Loop?
Make them merge into traffic at the most dangerous location possible of course!
But hey, they had a bike lane for like… A WHOLE BLOCK… you know!
What else do you want?
Fantastic video. I nearly fell off my chair with laughter. Such quality of design. You can see why they said you were premature in your comments…
BTW, it’s possible for kerbs to be shaped so that they’re not dangerous.
Also, you missed the additional danger of how the UK for some odd reason puts textured paving for blind people the wrong way around. In Britain, it’s arranged parallel with direction of travel for cyclists which can have much the same effect as a kerb in icy conditions and so that it’s difficult to feel by moving a stick from side to side.
Over here the blind have the lines parallel with their direction of travel, which means it’s easier to feel when moving a stick from side to side but also generally means you cycle over it at a right angle - which is safer for the cyclist too.
lmao…you couldn’t have picked a better score…it is indeed ‘deliverance’
Meanwhile, I obviously sob with you. This bike lane is an insult and waste of money in the process. They might as well have slapped each and every cyclist in the face, same result.
Godawful. It would probably cost only slightly more money to employ someone from the council to shout “BIKE ARE ALLOWED ON THE ROAD” in the face of every driver in Gateshead, and almost certainly be more effective that this.
Marc - please don’t make suggestions like that! Somewhere, someone in a council will read it, and spend thousands of pounds setting up special cyclist-face-slapping teams along major cycle routes…
This is beyond pathetic- no wonder some cyclists campaign against bike lanes if this is what they look like. I hope someone from Gateshead council reads this and is thoroughly embarrassed by it…
This is the standard that UK Highway Engineers aim for. The problem is entrenched attitudes. ‘They’ think they know best and we don’t. They think any cycle facilities should be received with gratitude. They think cycling isn’t a transport mode just as walking isn’t. If it doesn’t have an engine, it’s a minor issue.
I’ve met typical UK Highway Engineers and they think like this: “because I have a degree in Transport Engineering and know how the required spec for motor traffic design and pavement layout, I therefore know about cyclists’ needs as this is somewhere in between. Cycle infrastructure is about what can be built with the cash left over from local transport budgets but which can still meet X metres of new cyclelane created in order to tick the box in the Local Transport Plan targets.”
Cambridge spends less than 0.1% of its transport budget on cycle infrastructure. Most other local authorities spend even less. If that is possible.