I tried cycling to my old work twice never again I am planning to see my kids grow up and this definitely was reducing chances of that ever happening. We don’t have any infrastructure for it. 30cm wide strip of a rad next to 60 mph traffic isn’t stopping any accidents.
> The cuts announced last week…effectively reduce funding for cycle lanes and other schemes outside of London to encourage more walking from £200 million a year to £50 million – a 75 percent reduction.
> The government announced it would spend over £40bn on transport schemes in the next years, which included only £100m on cycling and walking. This means that in England, less than 0.25 per cent of capital funding – which goes on infrastructure projects like HS2, building new roads and cycle ways – is now to be invested into active travel.
Unfortunately the letter never arrived, as the courier thought it a good idea to undertake a bus.
FFS… I love my car but can fully see the benefit of cycling more, which I would do if it wasn’t so bloody dangerous.
Considering the ones in Newham and Whitechapel when I was there, wasn’t even being used.
However, the ones in Westminster are very much used, and cyclists don’t seem able to stop in time to avoid accidents.
What’s so fucking Frustrating and stupid is cycle lanes require relatively little maintenance once set up properly. Once you’ve built it, it’s basically going to stay there for decades. It’s so much cheaper compared to roads which require constant maintenance.
Oh no, does this mean cyclists won’t be able to ride in the road next to the cycle lanes anymore?
What’s the word coming to.
there is honestly no excuse for cities to not have proper cycle lanes, and for the majority of them to be protected car free spaces.
What happened to all the cycle superhighways they had in London?
I would love to cycle to work once or twice a week. It’s about an hour bike ride away but the entire route is an A road.
I think if I did it regularly it would be a matter of when and not if I get hit by a car.
The problem is local councils (I assume) only have a “you must make x meters or kms of cycle lanes” mandate so they end up putting them where ever they can squeeze them in, with zero thought about how they are used, at this point I don’t think safety is even part of the equation they use.
There’s two near me that stand out, one is a 30 or 40cm wide lane IN THE MIDDLE of a trunk road in the city, it’s about 100m long, in theory it’s there to transition cyclists between two of the lower traffic roads, but jesus christ.
The other one is on a junction which has a motorway on & off ramp on it. They’ve put a cycle lane on the other side but again it’s in the middle of two lanes of traffic, with no safe way to get to it, it’s about 10m long and 40cm wide.
The entire thing is utterly a failure of policy, whether it’s the fault of the central government or the local councils, who knows, but central government certainly doesn’t have any motivation to fix the underlying issues.
It’s a bit of a rock and a hard place too, because you can’t create space from thin air, and when councils try to move towards a car free systems they get crucified.
The Dutch invest €595 million—or €35 per resident—annually on cycling (15 times that of nearby England). Seem expensive?
[Amsterdam in the 70s](https://imgur.com/a/NOiJFtT). change is very possible. roads need resurfacing every ~25 years. if we just implement proper cycle infrastructure whenever we resurface, we will be better than the netherlands today in just 15-25 years.
I’d be more mad if this money wasn’t wasted anyway. A line of paint on the road is not a cycle lane and just encourages close passes
On the other hand the reason cycle lanes are just a bit of paint on the road could be down to lack of funding. Either way I don’t want to ride on the road and motorists clearly don’t want me there so it would be nice to see cycle lane funding increased. But that isn’t a vote winner at all
Build segregated cycle lanes and apply a toll for their use, maybe a subscription service to use their bikes in public with an RFID dongle to gain access. Put them in some form of tunnel system away from real people?
So create emission zones and then cut funding for cycle lanes. Yeah that makes absolute sense.
He might as well have written them a letter and set it on fire. Tories do not give a flying fuck about anything but lining their pockets.
Funding should be cut by 100%. Fund local councils, the nhs, teachers and schools, the police. Necessary services. If we bounce back, sure start funding other projects again too.
It’s being defunded because boardman turned ate into a multi million pound fraud in just four months and the DfT don’t want to admit what a colossal fuck up its been.
Brought it on themselves.
The main roads I use (whatever form of transport I am using) are only really suitable for cars and nothing else. Even on my motorbike, they feel especially dangerous.
I live in a rural area, but we still have some significant A roads connecting the cities to the villages, which have heavy traffic flow. This includes a large number of HGVs (there are quarries and what have you near me) as well as farm traffic.
There is no reason why these roads could not have separate cycle lanes. There is space and concept plans have been drawn up before. You could even have the cycle lanes divert from the main road in order to better contour some of the big hills that are in the way and connect to some of the bigger cycle paths that do exist in the cities.
I never see kids out cycling around here, which is a real shame, but I can understand why – they can’t get anywhere safely (even in my small village).
They’re constantly upgrading the roads. This included a very expensive and lengthy upgrade to a junction where they added a couple of extra lanes on the approach. Just once I’d like to see some of this money spent on a proper cycle lane.
They seem to think that all these villages are just inhabited by farmers who never leave. However, an increasing number of us are people who work in the cities/big towns who cannot afford to live there. I moved out of the city because of the cost of housing, but I still need to get to work. There’s not even a bus line to the city I work in. There are lots of young families and professionals here and, while some can work from home, a lot of us can’t.
I can practically guarantee a cycle lane running alongside the two main A roads here would get heavy use, not just from commuters, but from people in the cities wanting to get out into the countryside too.
Cycling and walking infrastructure is cheap to build and cheap to maintain. It is a very good and cost-effective investment given the potential savings and health benefits. There’s no reason not to.
The Gov doesn’t want you on bikes, moving for free, they want you in cars you borrowed money for, paying high taxes on fuels…
It’s such a short term view
Sorry, but cycle lines really aren’t a top priority right now
With the general obsession with net zero you’d think the government would be doing a lot more to encourage people to cycle.
Can’t afford to fix the pot holes or maintain the road system as is so we certainly cant afford more cycle paths… More funding is needed to keep our current infrastructure in shape and running before we look at expansion.
Are the cycle lanes being paid from ved that we pay for cars? If so, then i want my ved/road fund licence to also go down. I’m both a cycle and car user, but luckily the council where i live is very involved in the cycle paths, they cover the whole city, have blue light incorporated in most of paths and they’re re-tarmac’ed as soon as needed. If they’re cutting the budget for cycle paths, then i want to pay less for ved, if that won’t happen, then i want the budget to stay the same. I’ll contact the local mp
OK…so cut cycle lane funding….but then go for net zero. I’m confused. The two things don’t quite seem to tally
They built an entire new town around a wide, smooth network of cycle paths (Stevenage). It made growing up there brilliant, because you were afforded the freedom of easily getting from one side of town to another without facing any peril, wide tracks with a separate pedestrian walkway parallels to them.
But gung-ho cyclists never used them. They would much rather clad themselves in lycra and take their chances with 2-ton metal boxes piloted by idiots doing 3x the speed that they themselves are capable of.
Unfortunately, the evidence is plain to see – you give cyclists an entirely separate, safe, high-speed infrastructure and they simply won’t use it. Excuses such as “oh but sometimes pedestrians wander onto the cycle paths” or “there’s broken glass in some of the underpaths” – there’s zero common sense being applied here. Some broken glass might cause you a puncture, whilst a pedestrian might make you need to slow down. Getting hit by a careless driver might mean you never see tomorrow, but hey, at least you avoided that broken glass.
Cyclist mindset is a really weird thing. How many have “I was in the right” chiselled into their headstones, and is that of any comfort to their family?!
This is one thing we as a country get really wrong.. cycle routes wherever possible should be nowhere near cars. The last thing I want to do when my heart rate is at 130bpm is take a deep lungfull of diesel fumes and brake dust.
Cycling should be encouraged, not marginalised.
Sunak is stuck in a cycle of underfunding, always backing the £, but never the people.
UK roads aren’t wide enough for anything more than narrow strip between the road and the footpath. If everyone was honest and put safety first, they wouldn’t exist. What we’ve done, especially in London, is dellusional. Just pretend it’s viable and create them anyway. It’s actually ridiculous. It’s the sort of thing people from other countries laugh at.
Funding isn’t the problem unless you’re going to fund the removal of all the buildings on either side of al the roads so you can make them wide enough to accommodate proper cycle lanes.
Worst thing that you could do in an economic crisis is spend a major chunk of your paycheque on car/gas costs, and lots of people in UK and other places too, seem hellbent on doing that
Funding by the UK Government should be 0. Why aren’t bicyclists required to pay road tax or any fee while drivers are?
There are separate lanes that are not on the roads up here in Tyneside and the only people that use them are dog walkers, cyclists still continue to ride the roads instead
Cycling or funding for the millions of migrants. You can have only 1.
33 comments
I tried cycling to my old work twice never again I am planning to see my kids grow up and this definitely was reducing chances of that ever happening. We don’t have any infrastructure for it. 30cm wide strip of a rad next to 60 mph traffic isn’t stopping any accidents.
> The cuts announced last week…effectively reduce funding for cycle lanes and other schemes outside of London to encourage more walking from £200 million a year to £50 million – a 75 percent reduction.
> The government announced it would spend over £40bn on transport schemes in the next years, which included only £100m on cycling and walking. This means that in England, less than 0.25 per cent of capital funding – which goes on infrastructure projects like HS2, building new roads and cycle ways – is now to be invested into active travel.
Unfortunately the letter never arrived, as the courier thought it a good idea to undertake a bus.
FFS… I love my car but can fully see the benefit of cycling more, which I would do if it wasn’t so bloody dangerous.
Considering the ones in Newham and Whitechapel when I was there, wasn’t even being used.
However, the ones in Westminster are very much used, and cyclists don’t seem able to stop in time to avoid accidents.
What’s so fucking Frustrating and stupid is cycle lanes require relatively little maintenance once set up properly. Once you’ve built it, it’s basically going to stay there for decades. It’s so much cheaper compared to roads which require constant maintenance.
Oh no, does this mean cyclists won’t be able to ride in the road next to the cycle lanes anymore?
What’s the word coming to.
there is honestly no excuse for cities to not have proper cycle lanes, and for the majority of them to be protected car free spaces.
What happened to all the cycle superhighways they had in London?
I would love to cycle to work once or twice a week. It’s about an hour bike ride away but the entire route is an A road.
I think if I did it regularly it would be a matter of when and not if I get hit by a car.
The problem is local councils (I assume) only have a “you must make x meters or kms of cycle lanes” mandate so they end up putting them where ever they can squeeze them in, with zero thought about how they are used, at this point I don’t think safety is even part of the equation they use.
There’s two near me that stand out, one is a 30 or 40cm wide lane IN THE MIDDLE of a trunk road in the city, it’s about 100m long, in theory it’s there to transition cyclists between two of the lower traffic roads, but jesus christ.
The other one is on a junction which has a motorway on & off ramp on it. They’ve put a cycle lane on the other side but again it’s in the middle of two lanes of traffic, with no safe way to get to it, it’s about 10m long and 40cm wide.
The entire thing is utterly a failure of policy, whether it’s the fault of the central government or the local councils, who knows, but central government certainly doesn’t have any motivation to fix the underlying issues.
It’s a bit of a rock and a hard place too, because you can’t create space from thin air, and when councils try to move towards a car free systems they get crucified.
The Dutch invest €595 million—or €35 per resident—annually on cycling (15 times that of nearby England). Seem expensive?
Those 17 million people collectively cycle 15.5 billion km.—or 912 km. per resident—annually, saving their healthcare system €19 billion (3% of their GDP)[.](https://twitter.com/modacitylife/status/1089561066802049031)
And that’s only health care cost savings. How smart governments do the math on mobility[.](https://www.google.com/search?q=dutch+spending+millions+active+travel+vs+savings+billions+healthcare&rlz=1C1GCEA_enGB977GB977&oq=dutch+spending+millions+active+travel+vs+savings+billions+healthcare&aqs=chrome..69i57.11123j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8)
[Amsterdam in the 70s](https://imgur.com/a/NOiJFtT). change is very possible. roads need resurfacing every ~25 years. if we just implement proper cycle infrastructure whenever we resurface, we will be better than the netherlands today in just 15-25 years.
I’d be more mad if this money wasn’t wasted anyway. A line of paint on the road is not a cycle lane and just encourages close passes
On the other hand the reason cycle lanes are just a bit of paint on the road could be down to lack of funding. Either way I don’t want to ride on the road and motorists clearly don’t want me there so it would be nice to see cycle lane funding increased. But that isn’t a vote winner at all
Build segregated cycle lanes and apply a toll for their use, maybe a subscription service to use their bikes in public with an RFID dongle to gain access. Put them in some form of tunnel system away from real people?
So create emission zones and then cut funding for cycle lanes. Yeah that makes absolute sense.
He might as well have written them a letter and set it on fire. Tories do not give a flying fuck about anything but lining their pockets.
Funding should be cut by 100%. Fund local councils, the nhs, teachers and schools, the police. Necessary services. If we bounce back, sure start funding other projects again too.
It’s being defunded because boardman turned ate into a multi million pound fraud in just four months and the DfT don’t want to admit what a colossal fuck up its been.
Brought it on themselves.
The main roads I use (whatever form of transport I am using) are only really suitable for cars and nothing else. Even on my motorbike, they feel especially dangerous.
I live in a rural area, but we still have some significant A roads connecting the cities to the villages, which have heavy traffic flow. This includes a large number of HGVs (there are quarries and what have you near me) as well as farm traffic.
There is no reason why these roads could not have separate cycle lanes. There is space and concept plans have been drawn up before. You could even have the cycle lanes divert from the main road in order to better contour some of the big hills that are in the way and connect to some of the bigger cycle paths that do exist in the cities.
I never see kids out cycling around here, which is a real shame, but I can understand why – they can’t get anywhere safely (even in my small village).
They’re constantly upgrading the roads. This included a very expensive and lengthy upgrade to a junction where they added a couple of extra lanes on the approach. Just once I’d like to see some of this money spent on a proper cycle lane.
They seem to think that all these villages are just inhabited by farmers who never leave. However, an increasing number of us are people who work in the cities/big towns who cannot afford to live there. I moved out of the city because of the cost of housing, but I still need to get to work. There’s not even a bus line to the city I work in. There are lots of young families and professionals here and, while some can work from home, a lot of us can’t.
I can practically guarantee a cycle lane running alongside the two main A roads here would get heavy use, not just from commuters, but from people in the cities wanting to get out into the countryside too.
Cycling and walking infrastructure is cheap to build and cheap to maintain. It is a very good and cost-effective investment given the potential savings and health benefits. There’s no reason not to.
The Gov doesn’t want you on bikes, moving for free, they want you in cars you borrowed money for, paying high taxes on fuels…
It’s such a short term view
Sorry, but cycle lines really aren’t a top priority right now
With the general obsession with net zero you’d think the government would be doing a lot more to encourage people to cycle.
Can’t afford to fix the pot holes or maintain the road system as is so we certainly cant afford more cycle paths… More funding is needed to keep our current infrastructure in shape and running before we look at expansion.
Are the cycle lanes being paid from ved that we pay for cars? If so, then i want my ved/road fund licence to also go down. I’m both a cycle and car user, but luckily the council where i live is very involved in the cycle paths, they cover the whole city, have blue light incorporated in most of paths and they’re re-tarmac’ed as soon as needed. If they’re cutting the budget for cycle paths, then i want to pay less for ved, if that won’t happen, then i want the budget to stay the same. I’ll contact the local mp
OK…so cut cycle lane funding….but then go for net zero. I’m confused. The two things don’t quite seem to tally
They built an entire new town around a wide, smooth network of cycle paths (Stevenage). It made growing up there brilliant, because you were afforded the freedom of easily getting from one side of town to another without facing any peril, wide tracks with a separate pedestrian walkway parallels to them.
But gung-ho cyclists never used them. They would much rather clad themselves in lycra and take their chances with 2-ton metal boxes piloted by idiots doing 3x the speed that they themselves are capable of.
Unfortunately, the evidence is plain to see – you give cyclists an entirely separate, safe, high-speed infrastructure and they simply won’t use it. Excuses such as “oh but sometimes pedestrians wander onto the cycle paths” or “there’s broken glass in some of the underpaths” – there’s zero common sense being applied here. Some broken glass might cause you a puncture, whilst a pedestrian might make you need to slow down. Getting hit by a careless driver might mean you never see tomorrow, but hey, at least you avoided that broken glass.
Cyclist mindset is a really weird thing. How many have “I was in the right” chiselled into their headstones, and is that of any comfort to their family?!
This is one thing we as a country get really wrong.. cycle routes wherever possible should be nowhere near cars. The last thing I want to do when my heart rate is at 130bpm is take a deep lungfull of diesel fumes and brake dust.
Cycling should be encouraged, not marginalised.
Sunak is stuck in a cycle of underfunding, always backing the £, but never the people.
UK roads aren’t wide enough for anything more than narrow strip between the road and the footpath. If everyone was honest and put safety first, they wouldn’t exist. What we’ve done, especially in London, is dellusional. Just pretend it’s viable and create them anyway. It’s actually ridiculous. It’s the sort of thing people from other countries laugh at.
Funding isn’t the problem unless you’re going to fund the removal of all the buildings on either side of al the roads so you can make them wide enough to accommodate proper cycle lanes.
Worst thing that you could do in an economic crisis is spend a major chunk of your paycheque on car/gas costs, and lots of people in UK and other places too, seem hellbent on doing that
Funding by the UK Government should be 0. Why aren’t bicyclists required to pay road tax or any fee while drivers are?
There are separate lanes that are not on the roads up here in Tyneside and the only people that use them are dog walkers, cyclists still continue to ride the roads instead
Cycling or funding for the millions of migrants. You can have only 1.