Blogs

Don't we all love to see that word END. The people who paint it, and the planners who inscribe it on the plans - what do they think they're saying to cyclists? Good luck, now you're on your own... Sorry mate, there isn't room for you here - have to make space for two lanes of vehicles who probably won't leave enough room for you as they try to overtake. I tend to see it and think "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here".

This evening I spent 15 minutes in the company of Mark Burns-Williamson, West Yorkshire's Police Crime Commissioner. You can read all about who he is and what he does here, but in a nutshell his job is to hold our police force to account - and as far as cycling goes he has some work to do. 

This fine sunny spring evening a group of us decided to try out cycling around the centre of Leeds. The idea was to do the sort of thing a normal human might want to do in this fine city - go to the train station, bus station, and visit the splendid Peddalers' Arms ('cos it's great) - on a bike. To be honest our expectations weren't that great. Most of us already had some experience of cycling in Leeds and had a fair idea of the sort of issues we might face.

This evening, Ben Hamilton-Baillie talked at Leeds Met Rose Bowl about cutting edge street design - cars, cyclists, pedestrians, junctions and the need to rethink the best way of mixing all these together in both a functional and elegant way. His approach is to do away with all the usual paraphernalia of paint, signals, signs etc and replace all this with...well, nothing really. Perhaps a bit of subtle paving to hint at some shapes, but that's it.