A leading Edinburgh architect has claimed the city’s active travel policy is prioritising “greedy” cyclists over pedestrians, adding that he feels guilty over the space he gets cycling across the city compared to walkers.
Malcolm Fraser, who said he cycles “most days”, told a meeting of Living Streets Edinburgh that, when riding along Middle Meadow Walk in the city, he felt that “I’m one bike and there’s hundreds of people who don’t have enough space, and I feel really guilty,” as reported by The Scotsman.
Elsewhere in the city, he described seeing, “mums with pushchairs having to go in single file because they have got much less width [than cyclists], and that’s the wrong way round. I worry that we’ve been greedy.”
Living Streets Edinburgh is an active travel charity that campaigns for pro-pedestrian policies. Among their policy objectives is to see “walking given the top priority over other forms of travel in all council transport and planning policies.” Charity convenor David Hunter later told the meeting the council’s active travel plans “don’t reflect the importance of walking, supposedly top of the sustainable travel hierarchy.”
Fraser, whose firm’s designs include the Scottish Poetry Library and the Scottish Storytelling Centre on the Royal Mile, also addressed the Leith Walk cycle lane, which has been a recurring topic of conversation for road.cc users on both live blogs and forums. First installed in 2022, the lane was modified the following year to reduce the sharp-angled chicanes and zig-zags. However, the lanes have remained controversial for being frequently blocked by vehicles.
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Fraser is among those unhappy with the lanes, telling the meeting, “Leith Walk has the most dangerous and complex cycle lanes I know, jiggling in and out on the pavement. It bamboozles pedestrians and cyclists alike, raises costs, puts cyclists off from using it and sits very poorly with the simplicity of the urban townscape.”
In response to Fraser and Living Streets’ criticisms, co-founder of active travel association Spokes Lothian Dave du Feu told the ‘paper that Leith Walk’s design “leaves a lot to be desired.”
“However, the perception of danger to pedestrians is very different to the official data which shows pedestrian casualties there have fallen astonishingly since the road was remodelled, from an average of over ten a year to less than two.”
Du Feu added, “Malcolm Fraser is right that space for walking in many parts of the city is inadequate. But additional space should be taken from car traffic, not from another vulnerable category, people cycling.”
Active travel has become a political battleground in the city in recent months, following claims by opposition councillors that the council is covering up statistics showing the number of people cycling either once or five days a week has decreased compared to 2023.
In response, Edinburgh Council’s cabinet member for transport said, “I’m a big fan of statistics. We need to understand why there has been a dip and we need to know whether it is a dip or a trend.
“I do want to encourage more people out of their cars and cycling is an important element of that. If the data and the evidence is telling you something different, you have to adjust.”
1 thought on “Cyclists are “greedy” for taking up more space than pedestrians, claims leading architect who feels “guilty” when riding bike”
Motor-heads are the champions of false equivalence.
Mr Fraser would seem a perfect paraphrase of the old cartoon about the millionaire with a thousand cookies telling the working man with one cookie to watch out or the immigrants will steal his cookie…incidentally, in this age of obesity I often see pedestrians far wider than me and the bike, not to mention people with pushchairs twice as wide or more, they don’t feel guilty about the amount of space they’re taking from me, or so I surmise from the way they wander into the bike lane whenever it suits them…