20mph for Manchester and Edinburgh

The 20mph revolution rolls on with two of Britain’s cities taking steps towards more bike-friendly streets.

This week sees large swathes of inner Manchester become 20mph zones, including Hulme, Rusholme, Ancoats, Miles Platting, Longsight and Gorton. Manchester City Council says the scheme is designed to “encourage more cycling and walking in residential areas, where cars would be deterred from using streets as short cuts from busy main roads”.

Maps of the affected streets can be downloaded from the Manchester City Council website. In a creative move, the council is also asking local residents to show their support for lower speeds by printing out a poster and displaying it in their windows.

Meanwhile, in Edinburgh, the City Council is proposing to impose the lower speed limit on almost all the city’s streets. It explains:

“We are proposing 20mph speed limits for a large area of central Edinburgh, all main shopping streets and residential streets throughout the city. Streets with a high level of pedestrians and cyclists are also included. Calmer  road speeds help to make walking and cycling more attractive options.”

If local people agree to the proposals, the speed limit will be introduced from autumn 2015 onwards “over a period of months”.

The City of Edinburgh Council says the limit will apply to cyclists, despite recent concerns that 20mph limits are not enforceable for bikes:

“If a road has a 20 mph limit on it then this would be the legal speed limit for all vehicles using that road. People on bikes can be prosecuted for dangerous cycling if they are caught going over the speed limit.”

The Edinburgh proposals are open for consultation until 17 October.

Vin et velo?

The people behind the EuroVelo European cycling network, keen to encourage wine tasting by bike, have published a handy guide to drink-cycling limits in different countries. Several EuroVelo routes run through wine-producing regions, such as EV15, the Rhine Cycle Route. They observe that in France and Italy, the same limit applies to drivers and cyclists (0.05g/dl); the Czech Republic is a zero-tolerance zone; but that Austria and Germany are more relaxed, at 0.16g/dl for the latter. Curiously they don’t mention the UK, perhaps out of respect for the quality of our wine.

Ordnance Survey introduces new maps for cyclists

Hot on the heels of its new OS Ride app for cyclists, Ordnance Survey has announced another bike-focused product – a new series of ‘Activity Maps’.

The new paper maps show cycle routes superimposed on the familiar Landranger (1:50,000) mapping used by cyclists for many years. But rather than being supplied as one fold-out sheet, they comprise a pack of up to nine ‘pocket-sized maps’, one for each route. Each card includes turn-by-turn directions, crossreferenced to annotations on the map.

The first maps in the series show off-road cycle routes for Hampshire, split into four packs for different areas of the county. Eventually, OS hopes to expand the series to cover the whole of Britain, and to produce road cycling packs as well. It says that the sheets are aimed at “those less confident with their map reading skills”.

Each pack costs £12.99 from the OS online Map Shop, and you can sample them as a £1.99 PDF download. 

National Trust plans “blue remembered cycle routes”

The National Trust is raising funds to create two new off-road cycle routes in the beautiful Shropshire Hills.

The two “family-friendly” routes will follow Wenlock Edge, the rural landscape that inspired A.E. Housman to write of ‘Blue Remembered Hills’ in his 1896 poetry cycle A Shropshire Lad. The routes – one four miles long, the other 7.5 – will start at National Trust car parks.

They will partly use the trackbed of the old Great Western railway from Much Wenlock to Craven Arms – already part of the Jack Mytton Way, a long-distance route for horse-riders and adventurous mountain-bikers.

The estimated cost of the work is £4,000 – a very low price for 11 miles of new cycle route. The money will be spent on surfacing, waymarkers, an information board and a leaflet. The Trust is now seeking donations towards the project, which can be made online via justgiving.com – though with only £20 raised so far, the campaign has some way to go!

European route-planning

Here’s a thread for any ideas, suggestions or problems to do with the brand new European route-planning.

A couple of known issues so far:

• special bike-friendly roads (‘fahrradstraße’ in Germany, ‘fietsstraat’ in the Netherlands) aren’t prioritised and should be
• trunk roads where bikes are permitted (in OpenStreetmap, ‘highway=trunk; bicycle=yes’) get an uplift and shouldn’t do; this is mostly only an issue in Spain

Anything else you spot, add it here!