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The coned-off lane along Newarke Street, Leicester (Google Streetview)After 3-month experiment, will Leicester mayor make bike lane permanent?
What happens to motor traffic if you close a lane of a busy city road? In Leicester, they've been finding out by allocating a lane of a major city artery to pedestrians and cyclists.
In an experiment that ends February 10, Leicester mayor Sir Peter Soulsby closed a lane of Welford Road, coning it off so it could be used by non-motorised road users.
The Leicester Mercury reports that the mayor said he wanted to see what impact it would have on traffic if the lane were to be permanently turned into an extended footpath and cycleway.
Council officers will now spend a few weeks "crunching the numbers" to decide whether the change should be permanent.
He said: “I want to closely examine the impact it has had on traffic at peak time.
“At off peak times there has been little effect at all but it is crucial that we see what happens at rush hour.
“We are very clear that giving over a lane of Newarke Street to pedestrians and cyclists has had minimal impact on traffic flow.”
If the numbers come out favourably, the council will draw up plans to widen the footpath and add a separate cycle lane in place of the current left hand lane between Newarke Street and Mandela Park.
But the idea of even experimenting with traffic flow is anathema to some. Motorist Mark Radymski created a petition against the lane closure which has garnered more than 1,500 signatures.
The city's cyclists have supported the trial. Eric Ludlow of the Leicester Cycling Campaign Group said: “The experiment in our view was working.
“We spent some time at the road expecting to be able to chat to motorists as they were stuck in the rush hour traffic.
“It didn’t happen. I hope the mayor presses ahead with it.”
Opposition Tory councillor Ross Grant said: “The experience of most motorists has caused problems especially in conjunction with some of the mayor’s other schemes.
“He tells us Newarke Street has had no impact on traffic. It has so I don’t have any faith in the way the numbers will be crunched.
“It perhaps makes sense to lift the restriction before the New Walk Centre is demolished later this month but whatever replaces that will change the whole situation anyway so the experiment’s been a bit of a waste of time.”
The possible effect on motor traffic has been the basis of some of the most vocal opposition to London's planned east-west and north-south cycle superhighways.
When the plans were announced Richard Massett of the London Taxi Drivers Association claimed they would "make driving a taxi or any other kind of vehicle a nightmare because journey times are likely to increase dramatically" by reallocating road space to cycling.
Leicester's experiment is on a smaller scale than London's plans for Victoria Embankment, but traffic experts will be watching the conclusions closely.
John has been writing about bikes and cycling for over 30 years since discovering that people were mug enough to pay him for it rather than expecting him to do an honest day's work.
He was heavily involved in the mountain bike boom of the late 1980s as a racer, team manager and race promoter, and that led to writing for Mountain Biking UK magazine shortly after its inception. He got the gig by phoning up the editor and telling him the magazine was rubbish and he could do better. Rather than telling him to get lost, MBUK editor Tym Manley called John’s bluff and the rest is history.
Since then he has worked on MTB Pro magazine and was editor of Maximum Mountain Bike and Australian Mountain Bike magazines, before switching to the web in 2000 to work for CyclingNews.com. Along with road.cc founder Tony Farrelly, John was on the launch team for BikeRadar.com and subsequently became editor in chief of Future Publishing’s group of cycling magazines and websites, including Cycling Plus, MBUK, What Mountain Bike and Procycling.
John has also written for Cyclist magazine, edited the BikeMagic website and was founding editor of TotalWomensCycling.com before handing over to someone far more representative of the site's main audience.
He joined road.cc in 2013. He lives in Cambridge where the lack of hills is more than made up for by the headwinds.
Latest Comments
- squired 18 min 35 sec ago
I think anyone cycling in the City of London would freely admit that the vast majority of cyclists do indeed ignore red lights. Sometimes I wonder...
- Secret_squirrel 35 min 18 sec ago
Im betting these come out of the same factory as the SG and the Grip grab gloves. Identical apart from the Silicon overlay....
- Steve K 40 min 33 sec ago
Oh, and for long rides (100 miles ish) a whole pack of fig rolls and a couple of jam sandwiches normally does my fuelling.
- stonojnr 52 min 13 sec ago
That "old lane" as you call it, is 1) very much open, some misguided cyclists still use it. I used it once, vowed never to again and I block ride...
- Backladder 57 min 23 sec ago
Confusingly there seem to be two Millicent roads which cross at approximately right angles, the one that is north-east to south-west is the one...
- Owd Big 'Ead 1 hour 6 min ago
Indeed....
- SaveTheWail 3 hours 9 min ago
"Although other neighbours were outside, nobody else had thought to alert her mum and siblings because there was no car on the drive so they didn’t...
- Tech Noir 3 hours 44 min ago
"Aldi apologised for the blocked bike racks and said "we have spoken with the store to make sure that the cycle bays are clear for use at all times...
- essexian 4 hours 20 min ago
Interesting..... but perhaps I'll wait for the LIdl or Aldi copy and save a couple of hundred quid.....
Add new comment
11 comments
How so? If more people forgo the car in favour of the bike, won't car journey times actually decrease?
That's what he's really afraid of, but can't bring himself to publicly admit.
Shorter journey times mean smaller fares. The horror...
It may or may not, depending on how it's metered. Longer journey times and stop/start behaviour can also be frustrating, more polluting and lead to more wear and tear for the vehicles and the road surface.
One thing long journey times would mean is there would be less potential fares during the same working period, so it's hard to agree that it's in a cabbies interests to make each journey longer -or indeed against them to have them shorter.
Why sound motorists have the priority of land use simply because they're vehicles are larger.
Surely the priority ought to me moving the most people in the same time, whether that be pedestrians/bikes or buses. I really resent the fact that cars are often at a standstill and therefore move minimal numbers through Manchester city centre and yet have priority over other examples of transport. It's clearly a poor system for city centre travel, I prefer the Dutch model (as I understand it) of cars using perimeter roads (which have received substantial funding over the decades) but within city centre ring roads the priority of to other modes of transport.
Some of the commenters in the Leicester Mercury reports say that they never see cyclists using the lane. It's mistaken to assume that the lane is never used at all (perhaps the council could install a bike counter along it) as I doubt those commenting rarely spend more than a minute or two travelling along its length.
But it's possibly more suggestive that, in isolation, the lane is never going to encourage people to use their bike if they don't already, or attract existing cyclists from other nearby routes. What's needed is a network of routes that are safe for everyone to cycle on.
There's another POV, which is that if the additional lane provides little or no benefit to driving travel times, then driving should not be the default use of that public space -- even if it turns out not to be that valuable an addition to a cycling network either/yet.
Why does a slight increase in journey times for drivers (if any) get people so wound-up? Taxi drivers will still get paid and people will get to where they want to go. This need for cutting journey times at all costs is crazy. We all use roads and should all be able to do so in relative safety and if this means that roads have to be split into cycle paths, footpaths and lanes for vehicles because some drivers can't "play nice" then that is what should happen. It seems politicians assume that only car drivers can vote and will try to get on their side as soon as possible in any discussion or scheme like this. And why do taxis assume they have some divine right to drive from A to B faster than anyone else? We need more schemes like this given a chance to work - if designed properly.
“He tells us Newarke Street has had no impact on traffic. It has so I don’t have any faith in the way the numbers will be crunched."
Not one to let evidence get in the way of hi opinions, then.
I don't use that stretch of road but do use the new stretch along Newarke Street which is not pleasant. The well marked cycle path is full of student pedestrians staring at their phones oblivious to their surroundings and half way along a side road crosses it. Cars rarely stop before they pull across thecycle lane.
When going into town the cycle path just ends leaving you crossing a pedestrian crossing to go the wrong way up a one way street. I like the mayor's intentions, but it's all a bit disjointed.
They were just blocking the lane off to test how bad the queue would be.
Why is there a sign in the middle of it after 10 yards?