Primary position

Me too. Too much Chinese food tonight.

the future of the roads is this

the tesco masses- locked into having ridiculous electric vehicles charged when they buy the weekly shop, all supported by government artificial market in 'green' cars and electricity. happily queueing in and out of every urban centre for hours evry day.
then the business class, corporate cock suckers and politicians- in saloons and luxury vehicles, subsidised by banks, all changed yearly because there is no longevity in production, riding the specially segregated lanes on motorways that must keep moving.
at the bottom of the heap, other vehicles that didnt get converted, running on renegade dwindling supplies of petrol, stolen, black market and unregulated, confined to back roads and countryside where they can get away with living.
and the bike- still pure, perfect, and riders floating above all this, on the remaining spaces like the countryroutes and cycle networks.
keep riding.

corporate cock suckers and politicians

Now you're talking!

the future of the roads is this
.

Outside tesco 2089

Vehicular cycling whether proposed by forrester and american advocates in places like portland takes a fairly militant position equates cars and bike as equal vehicles carrying equal responsibility so even support bike licensing/tax.

That is utter BS. All my foresterite friends are vehemently anti licencing/tax. You been hearing too much from the haters.

More reasonable uk has taken the 'risk management 'principles from forrester through cyclecraft and CTUK manual and has modified it, made it more british and positive and delivered through NS cycle training.
More British than the son of C.S? I doubt it. My gal Keri from Florida has made it more positive and less British with the CycleSavvy. But really the content is same. You playing both sides of the fence if you with the anti-foresterites in the US but pro-NS in Britain.

Perhaps mass assertive/primary poistion cycling on all roads wth low speed limits across towns will encourage mass cycling and make it easier to do so and more effective than segregating drivers from cyclists
That sound nice!

So, I have to ask, why is he not **looking behind **when approaching a pinch point? That would surely help warn road users behind to slow down and give him a greater awareness of any hazard from the rear. There is not one backward glance in that video.

That occurred to me too. In fact his choice of videos is pretty poor. The other one, with the driver beeping, seems to illustrate that while being tooted at is annoying and unpleasant, that is all it is. It is not a good thing (I would be surprised if his trainer had actually said it was a good thing) but nor is it a very terrible thing. More to the point is the rider's inability to stay calm or ignore it, or acknowledge it with just a look round. There is no point shouting about 'the door zone' when someone is beeping at you. Nor is ending your 'conversation' with "Fuck you" something that will help anyone.
I think we have discussed all this before in the What to say to bad drivers thread.
I am not really sure what the blogger's view is, save that he seems disillusioned and despairing and perhaps he had put too much faith in the ability of primary position to change drivers' behaviour quickly.
He also treats positioning as a static rather than a dynamic approach.

+1 ^
Old Dutch Jim should join here and get edumacated in the art of htfu

That is utter BS. All my foresterite friends are vehemently anti licencing/tax. You been hearing too much from the haters.

More British than the son of C.S? I doubt it. My gal Keri from Florida has made it more positive and less British with the CycleSavvy. But really the content is same. You playing both sides of the fence if you with the anti-foresterites in the US but pro-NS in Britain.

Not at all with the anti-foristerites. Admire any man prepared to go to jail for the right to ride his bike. probably have confused points made by the BDA (Bicycle Driver's Association)

When I was in Copenhagen, I get honked at nearly all the time because I was in the primary position when riding on a road that doesn't have cycle path, it strengthen what I know about cycle path/lane giving the illusion that bicycle doesn't quite belong.

Drivers in Copenhagen are defintely not tamed, they make take care around cyclists (strict liablity), but they'll shout and honk at you for going a little further out of the road to avoid getting doored, far more than the London equative of whom are pretty tame.

If anyone said we should look at Copenhagen for cycling, I says differ.

just my two cents worth - the dutch model of (largely) separate infrastructure is not helpful for longer distances, or in my opinion, getting anywhere relatively quickly on a road or fixed bike. The cycle lanes are very bumpy ( brickwork laid over sand in most cases) designed for slow speed pottering on leafy back roads, all good if you're a leisure cyclist or simply popping to the shops, but for long distance commuting in a major city very unsuitable.

This is certainly my experience from Germany. The long-distance tracks that the Dutch have been constructing between towns are said to be a better surface quality, however.

When cycling in Holland anywhere outside of a town center I used the roads as much as possible, even though it is not allowed, because the cycle lanes were so unsuitable.

I suspect I'd do the same, although some friends of mine were ordered off the road by the police and buzzed dangerously by drivers elsewhere despite the absence of any cycle tracks nearby.

Remember their largest city has a population the same as leeds

According to Wikipedia, the metropolitan population of Amsterdam is 2,158,592. The 2008 population estimate for Leeds (could be census-based for all I know, but any exact population data for this country is hard to come by) is 770,800. It is significantly smaller than Amsterdam. You may have counted only the inner-city population of Amsterdam, which is indeed similar to the population of Leeds, but you have to consider the whole conurbation, not the way in which administrative convention slices it up.

is very dense (as is all of holland)

Don't confuse average population density with actual population distribution. Like all countries apart from city-states, the Netherlands have urban and rural areas. They have some dense cities, but then, every European country does. What people typically try to express when they talk about population density is that the Netherlands are comparatively well-planned, i.e. the distribution of centres there is relatively even compared to other countries (although even in the Netherlands this obviously varies from area to area). This has the greatest effect on transport patterns.

That said, the Netherlands are the most densely populated country in Europe. This has certainly provided a historical imperative for the style of development that they have chosen. It is unclear whether average population density measured across any size of an area has a marked effect on transport patterns, as what really counts for those is the distribution of possible origins and destinations of trips, and the relations between these, not the density. I am not aware of any consistent correlation between density and length of trips or mode of transport used, across different cities. They all have their own characteristics and there are extremely interesting differences.

Just left a comment on that post....

Yeah, there is a thread/meme around on the internet/blogs that includes but is not limited to ideas like:

-Cycle groups have "failed" to bring about mass cycling. Only seperate infrastructure can do this.
-Cycle training is like Helmet promotion in that it suggests thst cycling is not safe without training
-"Vehicular Cyclists" are a cult like group that resist any and all attempts to introduse infrastructure on the dutch model
-Cycle training ameloriates the conditions of on road riding and as such collaborates with the maintainance of the status quo with respect the preeminence of the car.

Good summary.

The key thing to understand is that these sectarian disputes are an absolute waste of time. It is abundantly clear that there is a certain role for cycle training, giving people skills, etc., but also a role for cycle tracks where there is a *specific purpose *for them. My favourite example is Eagle Wharf Road, N1, where we wanted the street to be two-way, but it had been made one-way because of a historic rat-run problem from New North Road to City Road. In order not to reactivate that problem, a contraflow (westbound) cycle track was created to prevent drivers from turning into EWR to rat-run, which they would have done en masse if the cycle track had been shorter. This is a clear and specific purpose and a track was the only possible tool for the job there.

Also, where political conditions don't permit higher-order measures at the time, a track can be a stopgap. Pitfield Street, N1, has a track which we don't like at all, but which for the time being maintains the principle of two-way cycling there. We want Pitfield Street to stop being a one-way rat-run, but that is still some years off, unfortunately.

What doesn't work is to just assume that tracks can be used all the time without a specific reason. Chances are that if you do this, you will miss factors which would have been very material to your choice of measure in any given location had you given it more thought.

Likewise, all the rest of the huge toolkit available to planners and engineers is also there and plays by the same rules. Key to understand all these measures is their relative importance and the level of intervention if they are chosen. For instance, it is vastly more powerful to modally filter a network (introduce selective road closures that 'filter out' through motor traffic, allowing it only along the boundary streets, but permit cycling and walking everywhere) than to introduce a 20mph speed limit in the same network. Anyway, this gets incredibly complex if you get into it, and any kind of reductionism can only do it harm.

The ideological ding-dong battle between reductionists of different stripes is just silly nonsense.

For my self I will say that I became a cycle trainer as a response to my frustration with cycle campagining...

Where did you campaign?

The way I see it, we are just quietly helping those who wish to ride to do so as well as encouraging new generations. I only read Cyclecraft after about 30 years cycling in London and I could see, at once, the value of the advise therin.

For me it was similar--I had just joined the LCC (having cycled in London for about three years up to that point) and there was an article in the LCC magazine with a ten-point summary written by John Franklin. That was a major eye-opener.

According to Wikipedia, the metropolitan population of Amsterdam is 2,158,592. The 2008 population estimate for Leeds (could be census-based for all I know, but any exact population data for this country is hard to come by) is 770,800. It is significantly smaller than Amsterdam. You may have counted only the inner-city population of Amsterdam, which is indeed similar to the population of Leeds, but you have to consider the whole conurbation, not the way in which administrative convention slices it up.

The area with the freakish bike modal share is the Amsterdam municipality which is mostly inside the ring road, which circles about 5km from Dam square. Considering the actual city the home-to-work area, you have to think Randstaad that's a conurbation of Dam, den Haag , Rotterdam and Utrech with a gaping hole of coutryside in the middle (where the suburbia should be, ha ha). Hence the Randstad meaning round town. The motorways going thru the hole are the busiest in Europe.

Netherlands has had an anti sprawl policy since the end of ww2. Prolly motivated originally by protecting farmland for growing tulips and feeding the nation. (Hasn't there been some protection of countryside policy in England too? Protecting the hunting grounds of the lords? U no have nice suburbia, just victorian slums?) The anti-sprawl policy dictated by necessity has turned in to a win in the 2000's world. A nice country for rail + pedestrian combination. Much of the pedestrianism is rolling thanks to flatness.

Turning the spilled-milk nations into Netherlands like pattern will not happen with their lip service to density politics (I remember reading some German givument material about honey we need to shrink teh cities, hilarious). If it will happen, it would happen because the masses don't afford to live the sprawled style anymore.

*"They tried all the positions: on top, doggy and normal."

*- Garth Marenghi

I have to agree to an extent with the blogger's point: after my cycle training (cheers again, Londonneur), I started riding 'primate' with a vengeance, and for the most part it has hugely improved my feeling of control over the traffic around me. Then last week I was riding through several sets of lights in Marylebone and a van just kept overtaking me (often only 50 yards from static junctions), once going round the wrong side of an island crossing to do so, then violently cutting me up, horn blaring. After the third time I started getting genuinely fearful for my safety, and took off down a side road to chill out and get away from it. Bit pissed off I didn't say anything, but I really didn't fancy a confrontation with the two meatheads in the front seat.

Obviously some people are just arseholes, and there's not a lot we can do about that. It would be useful though, if the idea of primary/secondary positioning was more widely known. Does anyone know of any efforts to spread that knowledge beyond the base of interested cyclists?

*"They tried all the positions: on top, doggy and normal."

*- Garth Marenghi

Ha! I <3 Garth Marenghi (& Merriman Weir).

Sorry, back to serious discussion…

The area with the freakish bike modal share is the Amsterdam municipality which is mostly inside the ring road, which circles about 5km from Dam square. Considering the actual city the home-to-work area, you have to think Randstaad that's a conurbation of Dam, den Haag , Rotterdam and Utrech with a gaping hole of coutryside in the middle (where the suburbia should be, ha ha). Hence the Randstad meaning round town. The motorways going thru the hole are the busiest in Europe.

Yes, what a lot of people overlook is that the Netherlands have also created considerable motor traffic capacity.

Netherlands has had an anti sprawl policy since the end of ww2. Prolly motivated originally by protecting farmland for growing tulips and feeding the nation. (Hasn't there been some protection of countryside policy in England too? Protecting the hunting grounds of the lords? U no have nice suburbia, just victorian slums?) The anti-sprawl policy dictated by necessity has turned in to a win in the 2000's world.

Yes, that is one of the key policies. Countryside protection in this country has consisted largely in 'green belt' protection at the expense of sprawl and satellite towns beyond this. Put simply, the belt could never have been wide enough to counteract the attractive power of London. Post-war, lots of people moved to remote suburbs and the satellite towns, if not somewhere else altogether, as the dawn of hypermobility suggested that it didn't matter where you lived. This led to a comparative decline of the bulk of Inner London.

Unfortunately, I understand that anti-sprawl policies are under threat in the Netherlands, if they have not already been formally weakened. It would be interesting to hear from any Dutch planners if there are any on here.

Turning the spilled-milk nations into Netherlands like pattern will not happen with their lip service to density politics (I remember reading some German givument material about honey we need to shrink teh cities, hilarious). If it will happen, it would happen because the masses don't afford to live the sprawled style anymore.

Sprawl obviously has a considerable potential for densification in it. This is now happening everywhere in London and will in due course reach even orbital areas with relatively high land values, provided London politics doesn't change dramatically. A couple more financial crashes would also decelerate it.

The green belt was largely put in place after the sprawl happened in the 30s. That's why in Redrbidge and Havering the car is king and using your feet for transport is deviancy!

The key thing to understand is that these sectarian disputes are an absolute waste of time.

Amen to that!

I live in a northerly bourough that operates under the command of one Brian Coleman. Cycling is thought of in terms of some sort of trotskyist plot. We are scum.

Can you guess where I live? Joined the local LCC when my children were younger and tried really hard to make a change... totally hacked off with providing a "stakeholder consultation" box ticking service to the local authority whose policy is, "roads roads roads!" Cycle training just feels better baby!

This morning I was approach the lights at The Foundry from the west. The lights were red. There are three lanes. Tow fork to the right and one to the left. The left lane is a bus lane until just before the junction. As I was intent on forking right, I rode in the middle lane. Most cars drive in the right lane as the left lane filters out shortly after the junction. I was slowing to a halt at the lights and ridign in the primary position.

As I came to a halt, a car immediately behind me used its horn. I looked round and the man wound down his window and explained to me in ungentle tones that I should be riding in the left gutter. I said that this was not so. I rode on as the lights changed and he passed me still screaming. He then was held us in a traffic jam and I went passed him and didn't see him again.

He was not delayed by my road position. He got where he was going as quickly as he would if I had stayed at home. What was his problem? Should I have done anything diffferently?

Sound like you were doing fine, that particular driver just have to learn to get used to cyclist in general.

His problem? Misinformed; rationality overpowered by both his misguided faith in the dogma of car advertising, and the claustrophobia-inducing qualities of his vehicle; insecurity about penis size and/or sexual frustration.

Your behaviour? For once, Clive, it sounds like you were cycling responsibly, and not jumping reds with the bourgeois indifference of a Canonbury landowner.

To be fair, Clive, you were probably riding in the gutter, technically speaking, but for some reason sort of extended out into the carriageway further than other cyclists riding in the gutter.

His problem? Misinformed; rationality overpowered by both his misguided faith in the dogma of car advertising, and the claustrophobia-inducing qualities of his vehicle; insecurity about penis size and/or sexual frustration.

Your behaviour? For once, Clive, it sounds like you were cycling responsibly, and not jumping reds with the bourgeois indifference of a Canonbury landowner.

To be fair, I determined not to jump the red light more out of malice than any urge to be law abiding. I uncliped during my discussion and, as a result, took longer to get away than i otherwise would, thus increasing his frustration. Tomorrow, he will probably take his revenge on an innocent cyclist.

To be fair, Clive, you were probably riding in the gutter, technically speaking, but for some reason sort of extended out into the carriageway further than other cyclists riding in the gutter.

Fattist.

I am fat in order to make myself more visible to motorists.

Tomorrow, he will probably take his revenge on an innocent cyclist.

Oh well, at least you'll be safe.