£800k Brighton cycle lanes may be ripped out after just three years at cost of £1.1m

if you think scrapping these particular lanes and are in Brighton this weekend there's a little protest going on...

"From the Green Group of Councillors, Brighton & Hove City Council

Ian & Alex are also asking people to sign their petition at http://www.gopetition.com/petition/43064.html"

'we were always against it because we felt it would not be safe and was unnecessary due to the road already being so wide.'

So why was it installed in the first place then? Surely they had some kind of reasonably objective safety assessment by some sort of safety expert? No council makes a move on anything before extensive assessments of every detail by experts, at great expense.

Surely safety would have been the primary objective of the scheme in the first place.

It's implied that it cost £800,000 to make the situation more dangerous for cyclists and generally worse for everyone, reducing traffic flow into the bargain. How could they have been quite so dim, even taking account that it's a council we're dealing with here?

And the officious language they hide behind. Topslice??? Put up a wall of officous jargon and no one might notice how dim you really are.

Personally, I don't want special cycle lanes, etc.

What I do want, however, is some consideration from motorised vehicle drivers.

how lucky they are .... !!!!!

"We are not anticipating having to pay back the money to Cycling England as they are one of the quangos that the Government is abolishing."

Being detained under the MHA isnt such a bad thing. If you were subject to s3, you would be entitled to all sorts of financial freebies when finally discharged. Could even get a decent bike..............

Hi PJ McNally - just to fill everyone in I have had the dubious pleasure in the past of being "voluntarily" taken into hospital under the threat of being sectioned. If I was to leave I would be sectioned. Not sure how voluntary that really is (a bit too much Hotel California if you ask me).

Without going into too many boring details (like "Ted Striker" in Airplane) a concerned friend who was also a psychiatric nurse misunderstood something I said as evidence of considering self-abuse. She took me down to the drop-in centre. I was prescribed risperidone which I didn't want to take (it stops you exercising which has been my way of dealing with stress for years) so things went downhill from there.

The signature is meant to be a rhetorical question. It isn't meant to be offensive to anyone with mental health problems. I've been assaulted at work for having mental health problems. My current situation is that my condition is so bad I can be threatened with sectioning but not so bad that I get any consideration in the workplace. Absurd is an understatement.

Obviously one of the Councils who managed to avoid Mr Cameron's swingeing cuts. Not sure my Council could afford to waste this sort of cash. Not that I'm saying that they too are not incompetent enough to fork out the cash by cutting another hundred or so council jobs.

Living locally, I know & use these lanes regularly & they are, as Rob says, frighteningly ill conceived. Cars are forced to park in the middle of the road, confusing queueing traffic &, perversely, the road is so wide that there is plenty of room for all road users irrespective. The converse of the situation in London where the nearside lane is often compromised to fit a bike lane in, making the whole situation worse.
The lanes are only wide enough for one rider, so overtaking is not possible, as kerbs on either side & usually blocked with cars, delivery vans & road works, hence throwing you out into the main carriageway with moments notice.
A shocking waste of money to build (wherever it came from) & a regretable further drain in removing, but I applaud the action of the Council in sorting it out.
I fear that this won't be the last story to hit the headlines about the cycling infrastructure of Brighton & Hove as so much of it must have been penned by the same ignorant, inexperienced & irresponsible hand.

I use these lanes frequently - they are indeed as ill-conceived as they appear to be. Traffic cuts across them all over the place, they're forever being blocked as in the photo and you have to make ridiculous dashes across the flow of traffic to turn right. And because they take up quite a bit of space they make cycling on the main carriageway more dangerous too. I think it does make more sense to get rid of them altogether than upgrade them - these are wide avenue-style roads that don't benefit hugely from having cycle lanes.

There are other roads in the area that should be looked at first...the Old Shoreham Road, for instance, is deadly for cyclists and the council's promises to make them safer lent weight to Brighton's request for Cycling England funding. Plans were drawn up, discussed, watered down, then dropped altogether, leading to suspicion among some cynical souls that the council never had any intention of building them but just wanted the funding. As if local politicians could ever be so underhanded!

Google Brighton & Hove Council Leader Mary Mears and look at her photo.

Why is it that such a large percentage of these myopic, car loving, anti-cycling, bigots are obese?

(This isn't about the article, but about the signature above by "hairyairey").

Ah - i haven't seen that one before.

Is that a new signature?

Please can I ask you to reconsider it?

I am a final year medical student, soon to be a junior doctor, and will be taking up a job in psychiatry in August.

The Mental Health Act isn't something to be taken lightly. Not many people realize how controversial it can be.

And cyclists don't come close to having a "mental disorder" under the terms of the act. Not just for cycling, anyway.

Thanks,

James.

In my experience cycle lanes on the road are a bad idea, especially if they colour the lane green. This is because the driver's perception of the width of the road changes so they give less space when passing cyclists than if the road wasn't coloured. (Interestingly they use the same perception trick to slow traffic through villages by using hash marks or brick walls).

I even wrote to my local Council and Ringway to ask them not to put back the green coating on a cycle lane after a road was resurfaced and neither of them replied.

I walked past these cycle lanes every day on the way to work and it never failed to amaze how ill-conceived they are.

Rob

I take it the cycle lane is the bit at the side with the truck blocking it. There don't seem to be any signs indicating that it a cycle lane. Isn't Caroline Lucas from the Green Party MP for the Brighton area? In the age of austerity why are they spending money on this right now I suppose they think that they can always close down the odd library instead.