Help with cycle route plan

a copy of the the English cycle infrastructure design is here

http://www.cycling-embassy.org.uk/document/cycle-infrastructure-design

and the manual for streets is here

http://www.cycling-embassy.org.uk/document/manual-streets

Also if you look in the documents section, there are a lot of docs from the old Cycling England site with guidelines on junctions etc. – start with their design checklist

http://www.cycling-embassy.org.uk/document/design-checklist

UK cycle infrastructure as built is often pretty poor, but the design guidelines are not that bad – it all goes horribly wrong somewhere in the middle.

Good luck! I’ve also tweeted your question to see if anyone out there can be more specific

Hi Thomas,

go for it, we are doing similar stuff up in the north east as you’ll see from the other thread.

Generally I hear figures of £100,000 per mile for bikeways, which I assume is tarmac on a level surface. Obviously paint is much cheaper, or at the other extreme if what you envisage impacts on drainage of the existing highway it gets much more expensive. Toucan crossings are expensive (figure of £30,000 quoted to me).

Both directions on one side can be done, but gets difficult if you have a lot of side roads (junctions = risk).

The approach we’ve adopted is to draw enough to show it can be done, and to illustrate ideas, but make it clear that there would come a point at which any project would be handed over to Sustrans or Highways engineers. At this point we become the conscience of the project to try and ensure that it is not bastardised by those who implement it. We’ll see….. :-)

Good to hear you have been inspired to try this Thomas. I think getting a group of like-minded people around you is the most important part.

The questions:
How wide? There is no official answer on this one I think, since there are so few cases where it has been done in the UK. My answer would be: well bus lanes are normally about 3m wide, and a one-way cycle track should not be less than 1.5m wide, add in 0.5m both sides for segregating strip, gives 10 metres minimum between pavement edges.
Same side of road? The advantage of this is that you require less total width for the cycle facility. You could get away with a 2.5m wide track plus 0.5m of segregation so its a slight saving of width, but at the expense of more problems getting cyclists on and off track where that involves crossing the road. On a two way road, tracks on both sides are definitely better.
Cost? Even in a simple case in Camden we found it was about £1 million per km. But I wouldn’t mention that. Leave it to professionals to cost it.

David
Vole O’Speed

also has some resources – including costings here http://www.sustrans.org.uk/assets/files/connect2/17%20costs¹.pdf

The whole of the Connect2 guide – mainly for greenways rather than tracks, but worth a look, is here http://www.sustrans.org.uk/what-we-do/connect2/connect2-resources

Thomas

You might want to contact this guy from the Waverley Cycle Forum who has been a moving force in a couple of new cycleways in Farnham. The Scholars Greenway will connect some major housing areas to the east of the town with a series of schools, and the Weyside Greenway will connect the principal arts venues like the Maltings. The Scholars is nearly live. The Weyside has one final bottleneck to negotiate which, if you can believe it, is whether some Leylandii hedge can be grubbed out to widen the path!

The two projects have involved some years of building a coalition with Sustrans (the Weyside will form part of NCN 22 London-Portsmouth which, sadly, won’t go via Hindhead due to the lack of co-operation from the Highways Agency over the Hindhead Tunnel cycle route alternatives), the affected schools and arts venues, and the local councils. I have a feeling even the local CTC right-to-ride rep got involved!

His name is Thomas Lankester, email cyclerights.farnham@ntlworld.com.