Peterborough ignores consultation responses as shopping street cycling ban extended to Sundays

They will ban pushchairs next...

Seriously, this is a pretty dangerous little stretch as a pedestrian and not having bikes down there at peak shopping times is reasonable to me.

As my chum Watlinga says, there are alternatives to that piece of road adding little journey time.

Regarding not riding on Bridge Street adding danger to your journey, its my opinion that the worst of Peterborough's roads would have been covered before hitting that stretch.

highlighted the danger that some irresponsible cyclists cause to pedestrians

So, decent cyclists are banned but irresponsible cyclists will cycle past the shops regardless. Stupid law.

So the actual consultation was a box that must be ticked, to confirm that a consultation had been held. There was no intention of allowing the result of that consultation to affect already-decided policy.

watlina said "You can get off and walk or just divert down Wentworth St which probably only adds 50m extra"

personfrompeter... said "The problem is that there's no other safe way through the city "

So who's right? It makes a big difference.

It's worth noting Nigel Brigham's point that there really isn't any other route to cycle through the city centre, caused by a mixture of one way systems and the fact that Peterborough uses a lot of very fast roads to filter fast traffic out of the centre (to good effect). I don't particularly want to cycle down Bridge Street during the day – it's full of very unpredictable pedestrians and it was very much the best of a lot of not very good options.

The problem is that there's no other safe way through the city – you have to take your chances on a dual carriageway or take a huge diversion around by the cycle paths. In a so-called Environment Capital that prides itself on its cycle paths, this isn't good enough. Hopefully this setback can lead us to campaign for a proper route through the city centre, as it would only take a couple of well-placed contraflow lanes and short pavement cycle lanes to achieve this. The cycle provision in Peterborough is very, very good over a lot of the city and surrounding countryside, it just needs the missing link in the city centre to be filled.

Is it purely pedestrian then?

Or is it like most of these streets where vehicle access is permitted for "loading" which usually seems to include loading one's wallet from the cashpoint, or popping to Greggs?

If the latter is the case then the cycle ban is completely wrong and unjust

Never been there, but, looking at streetview, they could surely provide a fine parallel cycle route, if they just demolished that huge churchy-looking-thing just to the east of the shopping area.

Look this is what councils do. This ban has been in place for decades during busy shopping periods. The council now find that Sunday is increasingly a busy shopping day. So fair enough.

The interesting part for me is that their logic makes sense. Cycling is banned all the other days when the shops are busy and now Sunday is just as busy. So, it's a reasonable extension of the ban.

So why they bothered doing a consultation is odd. And then having spent out for the consultation which is usually the predicatble points of view of the usual suspects they then ignore the result. Because lo and behold the extension of the ban makes sense.

This is the sort of council moneywasting nonsense that people complain about. But if they are ever asked if they could save money they can't think how.

Well by doing what you need to do and what makes sense and not wasting money asking people what they think and then ignoring them and doing what you wanted to do in the first place anyway, That's how!

Pavement cycling should be legalised on the provision that in a cyclist vs pedestrian collision the cyclist has presumed liability. Making riders dismount to cross pedestrianised areas is pretty stupid considering that a cyclist takes up less space than a person walking with a bicycle. Alternatively leave the roads in place but prevent cars being able to use them.

If "This has been one of the most difficult decisions we have had to make." then what are they actually trusted to do? Idiots like this are trusted with budgets funded by our taxes have to wonder how many consultants were employed to help them make this decision.

sounds like a "nonsultation" to me, they'd already made their minds up...

All seems reasonable to me. I wouldn't ride up there during shop opening hours.

I work 100m from Bridge Street and as much as I love cycling it's not safe to do so down there during the day. It's been spoiled by the many complete idiots that tear through with no regard for anyone but themselves.

It's not a big section probably only about 200m just the bit where the trees are down the middle in the photo below.

You can get off and walk or just divert down Wentworth St which probably only adds 50m extra

I think this is a bit of a storm in a teacup too. I can think of several pedestrian shopping streets that don't to my knowledge have a ban on cycling (Sheffield, Nottingham), but I wouldn't want to - or probably be able to - cycle up and down them at busy times for fear of hitting a pedestrian.

There's an awful lot of fuss being made about this, considering it's only extending an existing ban to Sunday, which is now as busy a shopping day as any other in this country. If we assume that the ban is appropriate for any other day of the week (which is obviously up for debate too) then it probably should be applied to Sunday also.

I broadly agree with banning cycling from areas where there is a very high volume of pedestrian traffic, as long as alternative and separate cycling infrastructure is in place. In this case it doesn't appear to be - which is disappointing, but not entirely surprising.