London cycling Crossrail

Long awaited plans for TFL's cycling crossrail from Acton to Barking.

900 million cost, segregated cycle tracks, heading along the embankment from tower hill to parliament square, major junction modifications.

North-South details
East-West details

(Nb. Don't appear to be live yet...)

Whether you love or hate segregated bike paths this is a major political statement.

It would also be great to hear that crossrail itself will have a proper cycle carriage on every train, for use at all hours ...

Not trying to derail your thread, honest.

^^ This

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-29042532

The north-south route will run for more than three miles from King's Cross to Elephant and Castle.

Massive fail that. More than three whole miles! Walkable!

RAC grumbling about only 4% of commutes are by bike... Not in central London they're not, maybe over greater London but then the RAC have their own agenda.

looks pretty good to me!

Routes will be created for other parts of the City, West End and London suburbs. The routes are due to open in March 2016.

^interested to see what these are

RAC grumbling about only 4% of commutes are by bike.

Yes you fucking idiots, and that's a bad thing, that's the point!

I wish a could invent a "getting it" bat by which you could forcibly insert understanding into someone's head.

Yeah that RAC comment is just pathetic.

They will be the non-tfl/non boris(gilligan) controlled pieces owned by the boroughs... Expect reasonable from Camden and bullshit from Westminster.

Maybe if the roads weren't so full of dickheads in deathtraps more people would cycle? How'd you like them apples RAC?

The image of the westway looks like fun...

https://consultations.tfl.gov.uk/cycling/f3f3bddb

Does RAC stand for Right Arsehole Comments?

4% eh...

From TFL stats: Bikes now make up around a quarter of rush hour traffic in central London

"It would be a mistake to think London is clogged up with selfish drivers in their cars," he (RAC nobber) said.

"Much of the traffic is essential freight and commercial movements, not to mention buses and taxis, and if you cut capacity then business costs will rise and deliveries put at risk."

Yeah, I'm sure it's essential that lorries drive past the houses of fucking parliament.

Also, aren't we spending a shitload of money on an east/west railway tunnel right now? I've heard trains are rather good at carrying freight.

damn just posted a link about this else where :
http://cyclelondoncity.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/if-you-want-londons-largest-ever.html

Does anyone know if this scheme has protected funding? I'm sure I remember Boris promising £1bn of cycling investment over the next decade. I hope this isn't going to use up 90% of it.

Generally though a good news story. We can argue over the details in the future, but the big picture is positive.

Now this is going to make drivers in London fairly mad... closing and narrowing lanes on the A40 Westway to replace them with elevated and segregated cycleways:
https://consultations.tfl.gov.uk/cycling/f3f3bddb

And even though I live West, I can never see me using this.

Who wants to cycle down a weather exposed lane, that will be right beside thunderously loud and highly polluting traffic, when there is no option or ability to get out of that situation?

I'll continue, like everyone I suspect, to do the North side of Hyde Park to Notting Hill and to make route deviations from there according to conditions at the time.

Does anyone actually want that, or did it just make for a nice line on a map and an easy way to connect the route to Acton without them having to look into how it really is on the ground?

If its anything like the M2 Cycle bridge, near Rochester, it will be full of glass and other crap. I choose to ride miles out of my way rather than cross that bridge

I'd do it to try QOM that section... that's about it

Who wants to cycle down a weather exposed lane, that will be right beside thunderously loud and highly polluting traffic, when there is no option or ability to get out of that situation?

totally agree

It's a bit of a freak of a bike lane and I worry that it was the only way to get through Westminster, and is now a bit of a white elephant. It does look like fun though, miles of unbroken cycle track to bomb along...

Now I've read through the plans for each section, this seems almost purposefully designed to fail.

Some small sections are good, and should be done... but there are large chunks which just don't work as advertised (the A40 Westway being glaringly obvious).

When you look at this as it should be looked upon, from the many perspectives of everyone's transit needs... it has some parts that aren't going to make it through consultation.

If I were being cynical (and I'm not, I want a great East/West route) I'd wonder whether there was an element in the design to save money by not having some parts get through... by encouraging some parts to be delayed to a later stage that never materialises.

Quite why they didn't view this as a great opportunity to go along Bayswater Road > Holland Park Avenue > Uxbridge Road... where cyclists already successfully force the traffic into a single lane (of the two lane each direction flow) for most of that... I don't know. It would have formalised the existing arrangement, recognised one of the routes that the vast majority of West based cyclists choose to use, and strengthened a lot of the businesses along that route.

For the North/South route, this is all brilliant and should be done. Some changes in the actual design, but it's the right route, and it's pretty well thought out.

For the East/West route, I guess they'll do the Embankment, and a little bit each side... a few bits of the East section, and that the rest will be binned when the consultation rejects the other bits. Oh, maybe they'll put more cycle parking at Acton Main Line too.

Also... Lancaster Gate is designed to be a death trap at the Northern point of that junction.

The way people drive around that isn't going to be substantially changed by the new design, and the flow of cyclists hasn't been designed to work with how the traffic moves around that junction.

I've gone through that junction in excess of a couple of thousand times in years of commuting, with that design I would choose to stay in the flow of traffic and not use the segregated lane that then has to intersect traffic at a blind spot.

Velocio is spot on. Its bad enough cycling east out along the CS3 next to the A13. Also as has been said you can't leave the cycle way when you want to. I wouldn't want to cycle past where I wanted to be because I couldn't leave.

I mostly agree, the East West desire line is further North I feel, Clerkenwell and Theobalds to the East and Bayswater to the West. Anyone traveling along the embankment is probably going South West to Brixton and Richmond and as such it feels a bit out of place, but then starting from near zero there is no existing route to join up.

As such I think this is more important politically than commutingly, it's a big statement about who the roads are for...