I'm a cyclist and I'll be avoiding this brand new bike path – why does a genuinely good piece of infrastructure feel like asking the impossible?
How one new path left drivers annoyed, pedestrians worried and riders less than convinced, and it's the same old story
A brand new, empty streak of black tarmac ribbon, especially for bike riders. Sounds like utopia, doesn't it? One such example has popped up not far from where I live in Surrey, in the south of England, connecting one town with another. Lucky you, you might think. Except I'm not entirely sure we are.
Driving past it the other day, I was afforded a car's-eye view of a few of the things that are getting people so exercised about it in the local community groups: lovely new tarmac especially for bike riders (that's the perspective, but in fact it's a shared path), at a cost of endless jams at temporary traffic lights and roadworks and, at the last count, more than £1.5 million – and apparently not a soul using it. Even worse, the final, teeth-grinding straw from the driver's perspective, is that some cyclists are instead choosing to use the road, which has in fact been made narrower to accommodate the path.
But the motorist's take is just one side of the cycle path coin and, as is sadly often the case, that of the cyclist is rather different. Somewhere in the middle of the two lie all the issues that continue to come between bike riders and drivers in the UK, even when dedicated infrastructure is being built.
Approached from a cyclist's point of view, this new path near me (and so many others like it – no doubt there's one near you too) suffers from a couple of fairly major flaws. For one, the surface, despite being brand new, is not smooth. Riding on it at, say 15mph, it feels rippled – like wet sand when the tide goes out. You wouldn't know it driving by, and if you were out for a 10mph jaunt with the kids on the mountain bike, you probably wouldn't know it either. On a road bike though, it's not unrideable, but it's a lot less pleasant than the lovely smooth-surfaced road next to it.
Perhaps more of a concern is that this path is all under trees (we're in Surrey, after all) and mere weeks after construction, it's strewn with debris, from slimy-looking spreads of seeds to twigs and even branches. And as far as I can tell, ain't nobody on their way to clean it up. What will it look like in six months? Again, mountain biking on this is fine, once you've negotiated the branches, but it isn't road bike territory.
There are other flaws we'll all be familiar with – riders have to give way to every side road for example. And it's not that easy to get onto – this path runs along one edge of a busy road and if you're heading in the other direction you'll need to cross over it. In addition to all of that, like many others, it's a two-way bike path shared with pedestrians. What could possibly go wrong?
Given my extensive moaning about the path (apologies), it might come as a surprise to learn there is no way I'll be choosing the road option over it. And the reason for that is yet another indictment: its very existence has ramped up tensions locally to the point where I would now feel too vulnerable taking the clearly more comfortable and more efficient road option – which was previously pretty safe, at least for adult road bike riders.
These tensions are spilling out in local community forums, where overwhelmingly negative views range from a weary “it's a waste of money”, to “cyclists shouldn't complain if they use the road and get hit by a car”, and the well-trodden, “they don't pay road tax so have no right to be there”. What began as a way to encourage active travel and engender less tension between two types of road users has, at this point, resulted in peak levels of friction between them instead.
It's not even as if these things are created on a post-pub Friday afternoon by an uninvested team. This path, and many like it, was planned over a long period in consultation with local cycling groups. It's clear that creating the 'perfect' bike path around already existing infrastructure is extremely difficult. As in this case, there will often be compromises.
Our local path has the potential to have great benefits once it is finished, enabling young families and cycle commuters to travel safely to the next town by bike. But the faster road riders who choose not to use paths like this are undoubtedly at greater risk than they were before it existed, and that isn't right.
Either councils need to ensure these paths have road bike-ready surfaces and are maintained as such, or they need to be far more visible in defending the rights of roadies not to use the path – as per the UK's Highway Code.
We shouldn't regard non-shared, cyclist-only paths as an impossible dream either. From both the cyclist and the pedestrian perspective, this is surely the ideal, and projects like London's Cycling Superhighway – not to mention the utopia that exists across the North Sea in the Netherlands – have demonstrated their feasibility.
Let's keep on pushing. One day maybe we'll get there, but for the moment it seems the perfect bike path in the UK is still a struggle.
