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Cycling up Snowdon is the preserve of the adventurous mountain-biker. But wouldn’t you like to cycle around it instead, taking in some of Wales’s finest scenery?
That’s the ambition of the Snowdonia National Park Authority – and a new path opened this month brings it another step closer.
The path runs from the tourist village of Beddgelert to the hikers’ hamlet of Rhyd Ddu, the start of one of the ascents of Snowdon and home to a celebrated pub (the Cwellyn Arms). The five-mile surfaced path for cyclists, walkers and horse-riders is part of Lôn Gwyrfai, which already runs for a short way out of Caernarfon.
According to Emyr Williams from the National Park Authority:
“This path will be an important addition to the economic prosperity of the area, and will also form an important link to the wider scheme of creating a network of trails that will surround Snowdon and eventually form the Snowdon Circuit.”
The next challenge will be to extend the path from Rhyd Ddu to Waunfawr, where the Caernarfon path currently terminates. Once that’s done, it will be possible to cycle from Caernarfon right into the heart of Snowdonia without encountering more than a tiny amount of traffic.
Read more at the Snowdonia National Park Authority website.
How do you stop drivers passing you with only inches to spare? According to a new study published by the University of Bath, even the brightest hi-vis won’t dissuade dangerous motorists.
A researcher, Dr Ian Garrard, spent several months recording his daily commute. On some days, he wore a hi-vis vest with “novice cyclist” printed on the back; on others, he wore racing-style lycra. He even occasionally wore a vest with police-style checks and the word ‘POLITE’ emblazoned on it.
The outfit that worked best was a vest that said Dr Garrard was video-recording his journey. But, crucially, even that made no difference to the most dangerous overtakes. Whatever was worn, around 1-2% of motorists passed less than 50cm from the rider.
Dr Ian Walker from the University of Bath’s Department of Psychology analysed the data. He said:
“No matter what you wear, it will do nothing to prevent a small minority of people from getting dangerously close when they overtake you. This means the solution to stopping cyclists being hurt by overtaking vehicles has to lie outside the cyclist.
“We can’t make cycling safer by telling cyclists what they should wear. Rather, we should be creating safer spaces for cycling – perhaps by building high-quality separate cycle paths, by encouraging gentler roads with less stop-start traffic, or by making drivers more aware of how it feels to cycle on our roads and the consequences of impatient overtaking.”
The full paper will be published in the journal Accident Analysis and Prevention and can be downloaded from the University’s website.
Transport for London has announced its cycling plans for Nine Elms, the new quarter on London’s South Bank – and campaigners say the organisation might finally have cracked it.
TfL says that Nine Elms is “a unique opportunity to design-in a high cycling mode share”; in other words, an area which is built for cycling from the ground up, rather than grafting cycling lanes onto existing roads. As their document says:
“Cycling has potential as a mainstream means of transport when every journey in and around the area can be made by bike. This requires a route network that links all origins and destinations and is as safe, direct, consistent and well-connected as possible.”
To achieve this, they promise to take guidance from the Netherlands, the undisputed world capital of urban cycling. On main roads, “continuous segregated cycle tracks will be provided, separated from traffic and pedestrians”. Bus stop bypasses will be provided to reduce conflict with motor traffic.
Meanwhile, on residential streets, 20mph limits will be imposed, and bollards and other blocks placed to stop through car traffic – the “filtered permeability” model popular in Hackney. There’ll also be off-road trails (or Greenways), including a full cyclable path along this section of the River Thames.
The Cycling Embassy of Great Britain is jubilant, writing: “The Embassy feels that this is a document which TfL should be proud of, and it should form a blueprint for all cycling projects.”
Cycling academic Rachel Aldred agrees: “I was very happy to see a Strategy that did not constantly hedge its bets with ‘where feasible’ and ‘where practical’.”
And if the reality should fall short of the ambitious plans, one Nine Elms resident will be the first to notice. The Dutch Embassy itself will be moving into Nine Elms in 2017 – and no doubt they’re expecting cycle facilities as good as at home.
Cycling is awesome. Amazingly, beautifully so. This humble machine, invented some 150 years ago, gets us to work, into town, and to see friends… faster, cheaper and plain more fun than the alternatives. It gets us to Britain’s best scenery entirely under our own steam. It gets us away from the daily grind.
Cycling gets us places. That’s why this site is called cycle.travel.
Not everyone wants to be Bradley Wiggins. There’s a lot of cycle.sport and cycle.performance on the web. We aim to be something different. For us, it’s not about the bike; it’s about the ride, and making better, more liveable cities and countryside with the bicycle as our chosen weapon.
We’re here to get more people cycling, more often. We aim to do that by providing:
We don’t and can’t know everything. We’re not the experts on cycling in your city; you are. But what we can do is make it easy to share your knowledge, so more people will have the information they need to take up cycling.
We believe infrastructure is the sine qua non of mass cycling: roads and paths that are designed for safe, enjoyable, efficient cycling. We have the greatest respect for organisations such as Sustrans who build this infrastructure, and for those such as the Cycling Embassy of Great Britain, CTC, and countless local cycle groups, who campaign for it.
We believe everyone, everywhere has the right to ride. From a 5-year old to an 80-year old, from London to Lerwick. We believe unfashionable industrial towns have just as much right to quality infrastructure as the capital. Sprinkling a few grants on ‘Cycle Cities’ is not enough. In our league table of people called John, Grimshaw, J. and Starley, J. come a lot higher than Forester, J.
cycle.travel is edited by Richard Fairhurst: formerly editor of Waterways World and Heritage magazines, launch editor of British Waterways’ waterscape.com website, an OpenStreetMap activist since the project’s first months in 2004, Sustrans volunteer ranger, and a lifelong cyclist.
We’re entirely bootstrapped – we have no shareholders or external funding. Yes, we are a business: the site is supported through advertising. But if you’ll excuse the jargon, we’re a “mission-focused business”. Our goal is to promote cycling as well as to pay our rent.
The site looks lovely entirely due to the work of Simon Clayson Design. We’re built with all manner of top-notch open source tools such as Mapnik, OSRM, Leaflet and PostGIS. We’re a Ruby+Rack site, but our own framework (Kite), not Rails. Our map data is, of course, from OpenStreetMap.
We swoon in gratitude whenever a new cycle bridge opens across a river, or a roundabout is built with a barely adequate cycle lane. In the Netherlands, meanwhile, they don’t do things by halves.
Visual News brings the stunning Hovenring to our attention, a ‘floating cycle roundabout’ above a busy road junction in Eindhoven. While drivers wait below at a traffic light-controlled crossroads, cyclists can flow freely around the ring above. But this doesn’t mean there’s a taxing climb up to the roundabout level; instead, the road beneath has been lowered so that cyclists needn’t stray far from the level. The bridge is suspended from an elegant thin central tower.
Eindhoven is known as the ‘City of Light’, not least because Philips is based in the city. There’s LED lighting all the way around the deck, so that cyclists can safely navigate the roundabout.
Best of all, though, is the lighting underneath the bridge deck, giving it the look of a flying saucer. To quote Apple’s Steve Jobs out of context: “It looks like it's from another planet, a good planet. A planet with better designers.”
See more at the official Hovenring website.
Made in the Cotswolds. Published by Éditions Système D Ltd.
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