Council set to scrap £100k leisure cycling route – after bike riders branded it a “waste of money”

North Yorkshire Council must be one of the worst in the country, if not the absolute worst. It is not 'well done' in any sense/

They won funding in 2017 for a cycleway on the very busy Otley Road. They have failed to build it, other than an isolated 300m section in 2021.

The plan to divert £100K to Nursery Lane was preposterous. It has next-to-no traffic, and already has modal filters. It's not a particularly useful route, but if you want to use it, it is safe as houses.

The upshot is the council has abandoned its idiotic Nursery Lane plan, but we're still not getting a cycleway on Otley Road where it is needed. Instead that part of the cash is going to routine maintenance of an existing route.

Clearly you'll know far more about it than I but at least a partial well done for not spending the money on a useless route and maintaining an existing (presumably useful?) route instead? But not spending the money on the route for which it was allocated does sound shite.

They abandoned the original plan to create a route where it was needed.

The part-replacement £100K for Nursery Lane idea was something no one had ever asked for, and was ludicrous.

Now they have cancelled it. They can cancel things, but what they are unable or unwilling to do is anything positive and ambitious for cycling.

Maintenance of existing routes should come out of general council transport budget, not from a 2017 funding bid that was supposed to expand the cycle network.

Dealing with North Yorkshire Council would challenge anyone's sanity.

There's nothing "well done" about what NYCC has achieved or indeed not achieved in Harrogate. The Otley Rd bike lane is a tribute to terrible design, designed purely to give motorists an excuse to be angry at riders choosing not to use it.

It's bloody awful going up, as you need to give way at EVERY SINGLE side road. None of the beg buttons on the crossings have authority to interrupt the normal light cycle, so you have to wait several minutes at each one. Then the actual bike lane has multiple 90 degree turns and drops off and clambers onto the pavement via steep ramps and slippery edges. You can do 15mph up the road, or average 5mph on the bike lane.

Coming down it's just pointless, because you can just freewheel at 20-30mph. Try doing that on the bike path. There are also multiple steep little ramps that get covered in black ice in the winter and which catapult you into traffic. Then the pavement section is deliberately blocked by a cafe owner dumping his van and tables across it.

I'd be willing to put decent money on a council employee having a family member in the design business because there's no way that this abomination should have made it past the design stage, especially when multiple groups were outspoken in how terrible it was.

It is a poor design, and the arrangements at the traffic-light controlled junctions are terrible.

It's not true to say you give way at every single side road - they have put cycle priority across minor side roads, which is the one good thing about the design.

I can't agree.

Having campaigned for a cycle network in Harrogate & Knaresborough for a decade, we are getting absolutely nowhere with a council that is unmotivated and incompetent.

Yep. There's loads of potential even to improve the Beryl Burton cycleway for winter use. At the moment the section past the horses is unusable for commuting because the slurry from the field drains down it. The owner of the big house half way down also has an anger management problem and has a tendency to drive straight at oncoming walkers / riders while on his phone.

Well, bizzarolledner, money spend on proper quality cycle infra (which actually connects destinations / is part of a network) is never a waste of money.  Much UK cycle infra has been a waste of money - generally by being inadequate in several ways but also because for every penny spent on it tens of pounds have been spend on making it easier to drive.

Going forward could there be a middle way (also here)?  Moving closer to your side of the mirror than the other perhaps ... but something like:

• Get the maximum usage out of current streets as part of a cycling network. (Modal filters / LTNs, reduce speed limits / road widths / a serious look at parking etc.
• Apply road diets - if the problem is "too many motor vehicles here" that answer is very rarely "build more / wider connections for motor vehicles" because of induced demand and that motor infra suppresses other modes.
• Ensure that new developments with streets are built suitably (less permable to motor traffic, cycle parking etc.).  Is a redevelopment an opportunity to make a new connection for active travel?
• Major routes with high traffic volumes / > 20mph speeds - need proper quality separate cycle infra.
• Fix the junctions already (like this, or this, or this)!
• If a road can be downgraded from a main route or when a road might be abandoned e.g. a bypass is built (probably still a case for some of these) consider keeping the old road but restricting this to active travel only.

I can't reply in any other way than 'Hear, Hear'!

Disagree totally. Huge amounts of money spent in cycling infrastructure are irrelevant or detrimental to cycling. They are not even sops to cyclists. They are spending target exercises. Government scheme provides £millions to be spent in a particular year or two. Use it or lose it. I've been involved as community forum chair as a resident where we saw through such stuff to oppose or support it and, for final 17 years of working life, as council employee mining incoherent data systems for data to generate meaningful performance planning and monitoring information.

I'm sure this applies to much public funding, but would you say this is worse for cycling / active travel monies than e.g. roads?  I don't know but suspect so because:

a) active travel infra and specifically cycle infra is much less (not) regulated than other road infra - seems no-one is "in charge" other than the relevant council and no "standards" apply (LTN1/20 and others are still "more what you'd call 'guidelines' than actual rules").

b) the way funding for this works appears to be "sometimes throw some crumbs out for the pigeons" than any long term programme that the bureacracy can rely upon.  This looked like it *could* change with Active Travel England but I believe that has all fallen by (ATE still exists but funding for schemes seems to have been essentially removed).  In Wales and certainly Scotland levels of funding are much higher but I'm hazy on how this is actually to be managed.

I'd comment that those areas assessed by ATE as having capacity to deliver active travel are the ones with stable long term funding, eiter via Regional Mayors of finding not dependent on Govt (eg Nottingham Workplace Parking Levy).

I agree but limited resources should be carefully prioritised