Families to the fore as thousands turn out for Scotland's Pedal on Parliament (+video)

I think oozaveared and I are in agreement. But I would just say, don't let fear of what might happen stop us demanding what should happen.
I have just seen this excellent quote on Hembrow's site:
Rather than designing for the 8-80 age range, so that all Londoners could cycle just as all types of Dutch people cycle, the LCC is still designing for the 18-38 age range who are least concerned about subjective safety.
(http://www.aviewfromthecyclepath.com/search/label/advanced%20stop%20lines)
An admonition to us all!

To summarize your argument:

hoo-ahh the Netherlands!!

Close, but not close enough and certainly no cigar.

Hoo-ahh! is given for the clear decision that cycling is important and consequently to implement pragmatic, working measures with proper funding and leadership so that cycling is a safe, desirable and important travel modality across the country.

It's the basic attitude of "something must be done, we'll find the best something, we'll pay for it and we'll do it (and we'll actually save money in the long term as well as having a nicer place to live in better health)" that makes the Dutch situation relevant to us, not the exact way they've decided to connect up things on their patch. Compare and contrast not the particulars of roundabout design, but more the above with "something must be done, here's some paint, let's get some volunteers to give riding lessons, errrr, have we said we think cycling's really good yet?"

The primary difference that matters is not the topography but the attitude, and behind the attitude the degree of tangible effort spent on actually doing something. And when you look at that attitude and effort, hoo-ahh indeed!

bambergbike: Large swathes of Scotland are pretty much uninhabited. Comparing the highlands and islands of Scotland to Netherlands is a red herring - it's irrelevant to the large proportion of the Scottish population who live in much more dense urban conurbations in and around the central belt. Urban conurbations which are very comparable to those in the Netherlands.

It's just a complete red herring.

Next, hills: The Netherlands has hills in the south, particularly in Limburg. And Belgian Limburg also has hills, as does the rest of Vlaanderen, yet cycling is still popular there! I've also cycled in the Appenine alps in Italy, with their long, steep roads, and seen the locals cycling in ordinary clothes, with their shopping, on town-style bikes!

The rest of the Netherlands may not be hilly and Holland is particularly flat, however that can lead to unrelenting winds. The flat terrain allows Atlantic and North Sea winds to blow without interruption across the land - no local variation in topography to make the wind swirl and give you the odd break. I can promise you that 5 kilometres into a *constant* hard head-wind is way *more* difficult than a hill.

All these excuses about how the Netherlands is denser, flatter, etc. are just poor excuses that ignore the real problem: a lack of will.

The relevance of the example of the Netherlands is questionable if you are a cyclist looking for a way off a fairly remote Scottish, Irish or German mountain pass that is quite a bit higher than anything in the Netherlands in the dark on a foggy night.

My experience of (relatively) remote Dutch roads is they have no segregated track as there is no need for one. What little traffic there is is limited by the road itself, and would be far more limited on a typical Scottish mountain road. And where they feed in to a bigger road you have a fietspad which keeps you away from the fast folk.
And since rural A roads have roughly 8 times the national average for fatalities per billion km for cycles in the UK that'd be rather nice on something like the A93.

So the example holds up very well. Where there's no real point you don't bother, and when there is you do, and you do it so as to serve the cyclists who would want to use it.

I don't really see that altitude is particularly relevant on its own. It's a little colder up high, but the national sport of NL is ice-skating so it's not like they've never heard of it. I know for a fact it does get dark there at times too, and fog is not unknown.

This is what Wikipedia says about the physical geography of the Netherlands:

Elevation extremes:
lowest point: Zuidplaspolder (Nieuwerkerk aan den IJssel) −7 m (−23 ft), below sea level.

highest point on European mainland: Vaalserberg 322.7 m (1,059 ft) above sea level.

highest point (including the Caribbean islands): Mount Scenery on Saba 887 m (2,910 ft) above sea level.

When I look at those figures, I think: well, not exactly like Scotland, then. I'm sure huge swathes of Scotland are very, very comparable to the Netherlands in terms of topography, population density and so on. I was at a fantastic lecture given by a very good Dutch planner at a cycle infrastructure congress in April, and I am sure that Germany, my native Ireland and all parts of the UK including (still?) Scotland all have a HUGE amount to learn from the Netherlands about good cycle infrastructure. Including segregated cycle infrastructure. I am NOT anti-segregation at all, where it's helpful. And I certainly not a "pure" vehicular cyclist who considers that it's never possible to make good progress on a segregated path - I often make excellent progress on segregated cycle paths. I would never dismiss them as useful only to novices, or useless to chain gangs.

But it's hardly unreasonable to suggest that there are also huge swathes of Scotland which are really not much like the Netherlands. I don't think it should be taboo to say that certain topographical challenges completely unlike those thrown up by the Netherlands need to be addressed in Scotland (as well as many other challenges where Dutch best practice guidance should simply be followed to the letter.) The relevance of the example of the Netherlands is questionable if you are a cyclist looking for a way off a fairly remote Scottish, Irish or German mountain pass that is quite a bit higher than anything in the Netherlands in the dark on a foggy night.

I wasn't doing it entirely voluntarily, just for kicks - I was cycling for transport because I don't have a car. My meeting with colleagues was in an obscure location which is convenient for most people because it's close to the motorway, and it didn't finish until after the last train had left. I could have cycled away early like Cinderalla to catch a train home, but I don't really want my colleagues to start thinking of me as a Cinderalla figure ("poor thing, musn't be able to afford a car, obviously a luckless freelancer, stay away from working with her.")

I had a (more) "segregated" option for the cycle, but it was no good to me - the road down off the plateau that is only for bikes and local traffic, mostly agricultural, is half as wide, twice as steep, and not well marked with reflectors and edge/centre lines. I fail to see how it could have been any use to a cyclist with less experience than me, or with a worse headlamp than my "committed cyclist" piece of kit. Of course it is a delightful, scenic leisure route for a Sunday afternoon tour, suitable for both chain gangs and pootlers (although the pootlers might need electric bikes for the steep gradient; the main road I came down on last night has had the gradient smoothed out with industrial quantities of dynamite.) So I completely agree with the point that segregated infrastructure can be perfectly adequate for chain gangs. But it is not always good enough for transport cyclists who need to get from A to B at specific times dictated by their schedules.

We need to grow out of this silly pro-vehicular versus pro-segregation debate. I am not on one side of the other, I simply want to enjoy my leisure cycling and to survive my transport cycling. And I want the same for others - I accept that a transport cycling route which strikes me as "survivable" might not meet the transport cycling needs of my three-year old niece.

The bottom line is that we need lots and lots of high-quality options. A cyclist planning to get from A to B needs to be able to look at a map (or at signs en route, or at an app) and pick out a few different options and choose the one best suited to any particular journey. "Dual use" comes in for a bad rap in the UK and Ireland because it has often been very badly implemented (crap on-road solution flanked by another crap off-road solution) but it is widely recognized in the Netherlands and in Germany that cyclists need choices, different ways to make the same journeys in different conditions.

oozaveared,

The dutch cycling path network wasn't introduced gradually over 40 years. When I was very young towards the end of the 70s, they had just started to build cycle paths, after having gotten as "car sick" over the course of the 60s and early 70s as the UK is today. Look at photos of dutch towns in that period, and they look quite a lot like UK towns and cities still do today with regard to the road engineering - i.e. completely for cars, and over-run by cars.

I can remember them building the cycle path that allowed me to later cycle to school - on my own from 6. They had to expand a bridge near me to do it, to add space for the path. I remember I was fascinated by the pile-driver. The Netherlands built out a fairly decent network of cycling paths in less than 10 years. A good chunk of it in a little over 5 years. The committed to it, and did it.

The UK could do the exact same. Density is not the problem: as above, large parts of the UK and Scottish populations live in urban conurbations of similar densities to the Randstad. Similarly, the Netherlands still has low density rural areas, if you get away from Holland, and they still manage just fine to have high-quality, well-maintained cycling path networks there.

What is lacking in the UK is *political will*. Defeatist attitudes don't help building this.

Something the dutch have in spades is an almost ingrained inability to settle for crap, and an amazing ability to complain and complain about anything that isn't quite perfect (this can be very annoying in other contexts though ). Admittedly, they also still had a much larger percentage of the population still cycling in the 60s, 70s than the UK does today (something like circa 30% regularly cycling vs circa 5% in the UK today, are the rough figures I seem to remember from Hembrow's blog). However... that just means those in the UK have to try a bit harder, and accept they may need to keep fighting for longer, to get the sane, safe road infrastructure for *all* that they deserve.

I see that place as being mainly for kids and novices. If like our German friend bambergbike you want to travel a reasonable distance on a bike the bike paths are not much use.

Again, this assumption just doesn't stack up. I am not a novice. Is IJmuiden to Zeebrugge a "reasonable distance"? If it is, how come I found the fietspads a real asset on the journey, and one that speeded me up rather than slowing me down?

The real trick is, my 10 year-old can ride on them too, with or without me to look after her, and an even bigger trick is any of her friends who don't have a vehicular cycling instructor as a dad can as well! That they can use it doesn't make it harder for me.

On crap bike paths (like many in the UK) you may have a point, but PoP isn't asking for crap bike paths.

I've been in the "cycle tracks are needless crutches for any experienced cyclist" brigade before now, but having been faced with a dose of reality the other side of the North Sea I just have to admit I was wrong. Cycling provision as provided in NL is between as good and fundamentally better than what we have in Scotland on all levels, especially when you realise that on those nice wee backroads with no traffic we all like you'd be on the same roads anyway.

Yes I have ridden and driven extensively in the Netherlands. NL has a population of just under 17m it's densely populated. It's cycling infrastructure is an urban /suburban one.

Not that extensively, by the sounds of it.

The high density manifests itself outside the cities and towns by you never being out of sight of the next small village, not by being extensively built up everywhere. Where do you think they grow all those tulips and have square km of glasshouses for quite a bit of the contents of the veg. aisle at your local Tesco?

In that regard it resembles a series of medium sized towns.

Yet my wife had to cycle several km to high school in Alkmaar because her home village (and not only that one) was too small to support a high school. Said village is also where my sister-in-law's dairy farm is too, and they have a farm machinery hire business that rents stuff out to many nearby farms. None of that really chimes with "a series of medium sized towns" with an implication of little else.

There is plenty of rural cycling in NL, and that's where the Chain Gangs like to go. Just like back here, it would be a bit crap going out for your weekend hack if you had to stop every few hundred meters.

There are plenty of medium sized towns as well, but there's no shortage of space between and around them. Polders are not heavily built on because, not too surprisingly, they're a bit aware of flooding risk.

And both in the towns and out of them you get experienced cyclists who are happy with fietspads, and you get different driver behaviour, and you get cyclists going places to get there in reasonable time.

Have I just been warped back into the 1970s? Can we put the lid back on this ancient "debate" about vehicular cycling? It has done little to #GetBritainCycling. No one is stopping people from choosing to cycle on the roads; and installing Dutch-style segregated paths won't either, as others here have commented. Let's all work together this time - decades on - to make cycling better for everyone 8-80, as the saying goes.

In other but related news, expect an announcement at this week's Cycle City event in Leeds from the DfT about a consultation on what the DfT called a 'radical overhaul' of the signage legislation...

‘Radical overhaul’ coming ‘very soon’ for the UK’s traffic signs legislation

~Andrew~

That's a lovely story but you're clearly a fit, confident and experienced cyclist. The argument for cycle paths is to make cycling accessible to those who aren't so well equipped.

I missed a train tonight, so I cycled 70 km to get home. Mostly on roads. I was really, really happy with those roads - very little traffic, white line at the edge, dotted centre line, reflective posts every 20 metres or so, reflective markers on bends, decent surfaces, warning signs on the stretches where encounters with wildlife were especially likely. And priority over most side roads, so I could just pedal thoughtlessly for a very long stretch.

Everytime I crested a little rise and started accelerating down the other side I seemed to drop straight into yet another patch of thick fog. Visibility was limited.

It was also pretty important, because this is a road with a lot of wildlife crossing. The last time I used that road at night, I had a fairly close encounter with a deer. This time, it was a big hare that hopped out in front of my bike.

If I'd been on a cycle path, that hare could have come out of a hedge and been under my wheels, causing me to tumble, with just a single hop. On the road, nothing could come from nowhere, not even in thick fog, because I was able to stay several metres out from the edge of the road and several metres in from the centre line and control enough space to ensure I would have enough time for any evasive action required. Even on downhills, even in the dark, even in thick fog. There was a ditch at the edge of the road (for clearing snow into in winter) and a verge between the road and the ditch, so I was pretty much guaranteed to see any rabbits, deer, wild boar family groups etc. before they came closer than within 5 or 6 metres of my position.

Now, this was in Germany, not the UK or the Netherlands. It was an area with a very low population density, and the road I was on was also very lightly travelled because there is a parallel stretch of motorway which takes up most of the traffic, and because a lot of traffic stays down the river valleys anyway, rather than taking the shorter route up, across and down the other side of a plateau.

But I can imagine that there are similar roads in Scotland and in many places in the North of England. And if I were cycling on one of them, I wouldn't wish myself on a cycle path. That's not an argument against cycle paths in areas where cyclists have problems they might solve - but it is an argument against cycle paths everywhere.

Oozaveared: There are parts of Scotland with large conurbations as densely populated as the major ones of the Netherlands. E.g. the greater area around Glasgow bounded by Paisley, Johnstone, Barrhead, East Kilbride, Hamilton, Airdrie, Kirkintilloch, Milngavie and Clydebank. A significant proportion of Scotland's population live within that area too. Many of the roads in and around the towns and cities there are wide, multi-lane roads - plenty of space.

Further, there are parts of the Netherlands that are far less densely populated than the Randstad of Den Haag, Rotterdam, Utrecht and Amsterdam in Holland (which the Glasgow conurbation has a relatively similar density to). E.g. Drenthe, Flevoland and Friesland. These have population densities comparable to East Lothian, South Lanarkshire, North Ayrshire (112 to 182 people/km² versus 150 to 176), yet still manage to find good cycling infrastructure worthwhile.

I just don't buy this "We don't have the same high density". It's plain wrong for good chunks of the Scottish population that live in high-density conurbations, and similarly plain wrong for those dutch who live in smaller towns in low-density provinces. Which makes it sound like a defeatist excuse.

Segregation is a solution that appeals to motorists and people that don't ever cycle and some novice cyclists. It has benefits for some short commuting routes. The type of paths and speeds provided are suited to novice and slower cyclists. It generally doesn't require a change of behaviour amongst motorists.

Oh dear.
You've not spent much time in NL have you?

Go over and spend some time and you'll see that segregation appeals to lots of folk there who have decades of experience. It appeals to Chain Gangs operating at high speed. You'll find that where there are inevitable conflicts at junctions that the driver behaviour is remarkably different (and deferential to cyclists) to that found in the UK. So your summary is, in summary, wrong.

Calls for segregation (where it's appropriate) are calls to do it properly, as it typically is in NL. Not as you may have experienced it in the UK. (And yes, I'm quite happy with "vehicular cycling", to the point that I actually teach it to people as a Cycling Scotland CT+). Cycling in NL is a fundamentally better experience at practically every level aside from getting away from it all in remote wilderness or getting your hills in, and neither are connected with the road model.

I've got mixed views on segregation; I do think that it has its place though.

In urban/suburban environments I simply don't see the point. Segregation results in complex junctions which either slow down everyone, turn cyclists into pedestrians or increase the liklihood of collisions. Urban roads need to be designed for use by all types of vehicles/people with peds and cyclists given the greatest priority.

On the other hand I would love to see segregated cycle routes running paralel to big, fast A-roads and motorways to provide cyclists with safe and efficient means to cover the distance between our towns and cities.

Oooh, I'm famous! (that's me in the top pic about half way up the right hand edge in the pink cycle cap, chatting with my daughter).

The announcement just before PoP was in large part Bikeability funding, and as a Bikeability instructor, one or two cheers for that. Bikeability will make things "safer", but that's only in terms of "safer than they'd be without it", which isn't your actual safe.

A good thing about Bikeability Scotland is it costs peanuts and you get a national programme that does some tangible good for your peanuts (after all, mugs like me do a lot of the work on the ground as volunteers, I'll be training up 6 new volunteer CTAs on Wednesday). But when it comes down to it all we're really achieving with it is a leg up for the next generation of out-group cycling enthusiasts, but nothing much for the majority. The enthusiasts will be there anyway, as we saw at PoP with a sea of day-glo and crash helmets, but the day-glo and crash helmets shows that for the most part even the enthusiasts don't believe they're safe, even though they are educated.

Infrastructure that's worth having costs Real Money(TM), (not only does it have to be well engineered at any point, it has to be properly connected to every other piece) so political types are rather un-keen to go on too much about it if they're actually in charge of purse-strings. But championing Bikeability lets you tick the Cycling Box and pay hardly anything for doing it.

Keith Brown said: “We have to educate our children if we’re to make the network safe for children and their parents."

Well, we already do by creating a terrifying environment so they stop cycling. That'll cut down cycling deaths in children soon enough.

How about you fund the police to increase road patrols? And instruct them to pull over and fine/prosecute every infraction seen?

Contrast that with another politician at least making amenable statements:

Labour's Claudia Beamish said: “I’m a rural cyclist who’s experienced how terrifying urban cycling can be. I have to keep getting off and walking – this situation needs to change. We need transformational change. I will push strict liability with my party. I want to emphasise that it’s about how the infrastructure is designed but segregated tracks along busy roads – it shouldn’t just be lines on the roads. It’s about a good quality of life for the whole of Scotland urban and and rural.”

to be fair, he said 'education and infrastructure'. I don't think there's a need for a 'but' in the byline - otherwise it's misleading