Portishead path upgraded

The main cycle route from Portishead towards Bristol has received an upgrade – as the first step of a plan to create a direct commuter route.

The path behind the Portbury Docks estate, part of NCN route 26, has been largely resurfaced with tarmac and the vegetation extensively cleared. The route runs beside the derelict Portishead branch railway, itself scheduled to be revived and reopened. 

North Somerset Council says that “we want to increase commuting by cycle in the area, for example between Portishead, Pill and the Portbury Dock area, and longer journeys such as Portishead and Pill to Bristol”.

The improvements, from Portishead to Pill, will be followed by a new roadside path from Pill to Abbots Leigh. The aim is “a continuous and attractive mainly off-carriageway cycle route connecting Portishead, the Portbury Dock area, Pill and Bristol”, at a total cost of £255,000.

Cyclists win in radical Tottenham Court Road plans

Camden Council’s ambitious plans to ban cars from Tottenham Court Road will see a new safe route created for cyclists.

Camden’s £26m plans for the area would see cars banned from the road between 8am and 7pm every day.

In itself this won’t create a cycle panacea – because the street will be busy with two-way bus traffic. However, the parallel roads of Gower Street and Shaftesbury Avenue will be given “protected cycle lanes”, creating a high-quality bike route from Euston to the West End.

This route will cross the existing popular Torrington Place route (‘Route 0’), opening up more opportunities for safe cycling in London. However, Camden’s proposals carefully state that the route will be “protected” rather than “segregated”, suggesting that lightweight rubber ‘armadillo’ barriers will be used rather than full Dutch-style kerbs.

Loading will be restricted to 10am-2pm on Gower Street, reducing the chance of the cycle lanes being blocked. There will be no bus services on the Gower Street route, and therefore no need to accommodate bus stops. Both the parallel route and Tottenham Court Road will be two-way streets, rather than one-way as at present, but Camden expects traffic to drop on both of them.

‘Busier than Heathrow’

The proposals have been prompted by the arrival of Crossrail at Tottenham Court Road station in 2018, which Camden claim will become “busier than Heathrow Airport”. Over 300,000 passengers are expected to use the station every day by 2026.

Other improvements on TCR will include pavements widened by up to 5m, tree planting, and new green spaces on side roads. The council believes that the road is not currently fulfilling its commercial potential, saying that adjacent businesses provide 20% of the West End’s floor space, but account for only 6% of its spend.

Consultation will begin on the project on 9th June. If it gets the go-ahead, work could be complete by 2018.

The initial plans have been welcomed by the Green Party, but public comments on the ITV website were predictably scornful, with one commenter asking “So how are all the shops gonna be stocked? If anything pedestrians should be banned from the road.”

See video of the proposals

Station bike parking gets better sooner

Cambridge railway station will benefit from 550 extra spaces this summer, ahead of the construction of a 3,000-space bike park. The new multi-storey park will open in December 2015, but the double-decker bike racks for it have already been purchased and will be installed next month. Cambridgeshire County Council’s Mike Davies told the Cambridge News that “the bikes should be more secure and the area should be much tidier”.

Rusty bridge to become a shiny cycleway

Work has started on transforming Plymouth’s rusting Laira Bridge into a shining new cycleway.

The railway bridge, last used by freight trains in the early 1990s, has long been earmarked to take cyclists away from the busy adjacent main road. Both Plymouth commuters and cycle tourists on the Devon C2C need to cross the River Plym on their way to the city centre.

After years of delays, scaffolding has now been erected to facilitate work on the bridge. The old structure is to be stripped back to the bare metal and repainted, then new railings and a new deck will be added. Street lighting will be installed to keep the route safe at all times of day.

The crossing is expected to open to cyclists in 2015. It will complete an almost continuous off-road route between Devonport and Stonehouse in the west, to Plymstock and Plympton in the east, via the city centre and East End; several cycle paths already converge at the bridge.

Evening Standard calls for segregated bike lanes

“We can do much better than this,” says the Evening Standard in a leader column on London cycling provision.

The influential paper says the death of another cyclist, this time at Vauxhall, is “a reminder of the urgency of the task of making the capital’s roads safer for cyclists”. Criticising Transport for London for its inaction, the Standard argues that there is only one solution – proper segregation of roads between motor vehicles and bikes. “Junctions are the cause of a disproportionate number of serious injuries and deaths for both cyclists and pedestrians,” it observes.

The Standard’s distinct call for separated bike lanes adds serious weight to the campaign by cycling groups, and ratchets up the pressure on TfL to commit to fixing London’s most dangerous roads and junctions without further delay.