Cycle Infra, York Station to Knavesmire Road
18th August 2021
Cycling in Yorkshire
Cycling in Yorkshire
18th August 2021
The other day I cycled from York Station to Knavesmire Road.
There's probably a better route. From the council's cycle map, it looks as though I could have gone via Lowther Terrace to Holgate Road. I went the obvious way - Station Road, Queen Street, Blossom Street, The Mount.
The phrase 'a curate's egg' could have been invented for York's cycle infrastructure. There's quite a lot of good, and York is light years ahead of Harrogate. This particular route, though, is more bad than good.
The biggest disappointment is the track on The Mount, pictured above - because it gets your hopes up by looking quite good at the start, only to be a total hopeless let-down.
The first part of this route is Station Road. There's an old-fashioned 'murder-strip' advisory painted cycle lane, that's about a metre wide.
The infrastructure doesn't meet the standards of LTN 1/20 Cycle Infrastructure Design for several reasons.
It provides no protection from motor vehicles.
The cycle lane is about half the Desirable Minimum width, and about two thirds of the Absolute Minimum Width.
It's a busy road, there's not space to overtake when there's oncoming traffic, and a bend in the road means drivers can't see far ahead.
The practical consequence of the infrastructure is that Must Get In Front drivers are either too close to your back wheel and edging out as they consider a risky overtake, or they actually carry out a dangerous close pass.
Overtaking here almost always means getting to wait a few seconds longer in the queue of cars at the Blossom Street junction.
This is a busy junction. The main facility for cyclists is the early release signal that allows you about 4 seconds headstart on motor vehicles. That is worthwhile and helpful.
Overall, the arrangements for cycling at this junction are not safe enough for inclusive cycling, and don't meet LTN 1/20 standards. Facilities for pedestrians are also poor, as the pavement width on the corner of Queen Street and Micklegate is not sufficient, and the wait time to cross is long.
Separating streams of motor vehicles and cycles would appear to be necessary at this junction due to volume of traffic.
Another option would be to create a quieter parallel route to avoid the junction altogether (para 10.2.3, LTN 1/20). Perhaps there has been an attempt to do this, but I don't know if it is direct and convenient enough; certainly, a significant number of cyclists still pass through this junction.
On the first part of Blossom Street, there's no cycle infrastructure, and you're asked to cycle in mixed traffic. This breaches the LTN 1/20 guidance, paragraph 7.1.1, because there are far more than 2,500 vehicles per day.
On the next part of Blossom Street, there's an advisory painted cycle lane that's about 1m50 wide, but in between the door zone of parked cars and a main traffic lane, with no protection.
It breaches all the provisions of LTN 1/20 that I've already identified for Station Road/Queen Street. The one useful purpose it serves is as a filter lane past stationary traffic.
A solution could be to use a design of cycle track that passes behind the parking bay, allowing sufficient buffer for car doors to be opened.
On The Mount, you're back on the road with no cycle facilities, then there's a wafer-thin painted advisory cycle lane.
It's after the junction with Scarcroft Road that you get the promising-looking cycle track pictured at the top of the page, but if you ride onto it, you soon regret it. After about 15 metres, it gives way to a tiny side road, Mill Mount Court.
This arrangement breaches the LTN1/20 guidance. Space should be reallocated from the road not the footway.
Cycle tracks shouldn't give way to minor side roads. The Core Design Principle that routes should be Direct includes the idea that they should not involve lots of stopping and starting.
Maybe 12 metres further on you give way to Mill Mount.
Then you go about 20m before reaching another break in the continuity of the route at Albemarle Road.
There's a Toucan crossing of Albemarle Road. To be fair, this is a light-controlled junction and so a light-controlled crossing for cyclists is appropriate. However if green-time is skewed too much in favour of motor vehicles, that makes the designated cycle route much less attractive. I think they've used the wrong sort of tactile paving.
The other side of Albemarle Road, you're back to a very narrow cycle lane with white paint to divide it from the pavement, where there should be a level difference or trapezoidal paving.
Fifty metres further on, the path ends and you're chucked back onto the main road and a painted advisory cycle lane that's about 80cm wide. Perhaps the sign means that the footway continues to be shared use?
Knavesmire Road is a little further on, on the left.
Overall, the quality of provision on The Mount is so poor that you'd only use it once. In the words of the philosopher LeAnn Rimes, 'shame on you if you fool me once...' As soon as you know that it's going to involve lots of extra stopping, then chuck you back onto a dangerous cycle lane on the road anyway, why would you bother with it?
I know what the response will be: 'this is legacy cycle infrastructure from before LTN 1/20 was published.'
Maybe so, but some of the cycle track on The Mount looks nearly brand new. Even if it was designed and built before LTN 1/20, it wasn't designed and built before people knew anything about good cycle infrastructure design. For example, the London Cycle Infrastructure Design standards have been around for several years.
To spend public money on infrastructure that is plainly (to anyone who rides a bike) unusable rubbish is very disappointing.
There's a huge amount of work to be done to bring cycle infrastructure up to standard, not just in York but in towns and cities around the country. We're supposed to have world-class cycle networks by 2040, according to the government's Transport Decarbonisation Plan.
This is not an issue so much for local authority active travel officers as for:
I suppose the design standards of routes like The Mount are the responsibility of transport planners and engineers, though.
The York, Selby and Church Fenton road bike ride is one of the eighteen routes in the book Bike Rides In and Around York.
