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As a Dutch person who lived in the UK for a year, yes. Bicycle lanes are nearly non-existent outside of London and the boroughs seem to be hostile to the idea i

As a Dutch person who lived in the UK for a year, yes. Bicycle lanes are nearly non-existent outside of London and the boroughs seem to be hostile to the idea in general. The few bicycle lanes you do find often end as abruptly as they start, there's nothing connecting them and there are no bicycle crossings when you meet a road. However if you get a mountain bike and stick to the dirt roads along the rivers and hills, it is a great place to enjoy cycling through the countryside. One of the best bike trips I've done is cycling for 30 miles along the Thames river. So the UK is great for scenic cycling, terrible for a cycling commute. And yes, any Dutch expat you meet is silently judging your country on the safety of its cycling infrastructure.

DrBazza 6y ago
> Yes, any Dutch expat you meet is silently judging your country on the safety of its cycling infrastructure. And so you should. The UK's cycling infrastructure is embarrassingly bad. An example. Local to me, recently, the government spent over £100m on a new road junction, to replace an old one. One of the main reasons that they had to build a new junction was that they claimed they could not remove traffic lights from the roundabout to improve traffic because pedestrians and cyclists both crossed the junction at 'street level'. A local cycle organization submitted a proposal with modelling (I can't find the link atm.), that showed that the desired increase in capacity could be achieved by adding bridges for pedestrians and cyclists, removing traffic lights, and altering the road layout. And save about £90m. Needlessly to say, the junction was built. I have no idea whether their proposal was considered, or not, unless I submit a freedom of information request to the UK government. Regardless, the bridges should have been built anyway, because the junction is between two suburbs. The new junction did get a new cyclist/pedestrian bridge to replace the old one. Except it's about 1km further away from the suburbs that the previous junction, so adding 2km to bike journeys.
- markvdb 6y ago
  Actually, bicycle tunnels - with a limited slope of course, like all other bicycle infrastructure - are recommended over bicycle bridges. These are more comfortable for cyclists. Gravity helps one cycle down, and the kinetic energy gained helps cyclists on the way up in the second half of the tunnel.
  - Muximize 6y ago
    Also they can be smaller and cheaper to build. Because they only carry bicycles and pedestrians, a height clearance of about 2.5 meters is enough, while a bridge needs around 5 meters to let cargo trucks pass underneath. This also results in much shorter ramps.
  - DrBazza 6y ago
    Agreed. In England, however, tunnels particularly in towns tend to attract anti-social behaviour, which is rather unfortunate.
mytailorisrich 6y ago
A problem in the UK is that in general we are hostile to build roads and certainly wide roads. So roads are as narrow as possible and congested, which in itself is not great for bikes but also makes bike lanes near impossible. And when a bike lane is built (i.e. painted on the road or pavement) it is usually also very narrow and interferes with traffic. Obviously this is difficult to change for existing roads, but we could at least make sure that new roads are wide enough, but this is not the case.
- throwaway2245 6y ago
  Do you think the centre of Amsterdam has wide roads? It does not.
  - mytailorisrich 6y ago
    That's great but I fail to see the relation with my comment. I'm not talking about very central roads that can be mostly restricted to pedestrians, or city areas with narrow streets but also little to no traffic. I'm talking about roads in general. Amsterdam has many roads that look hugely wide for British standards. Example: hhttps://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.7524584,-1.2749531,3a,75y,81.37h,70.28t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1s3Mk1fV_F6xCPtK-BgT8eLg!2e0!6s%2F%2Fgeo3.ggpht.com%2Fcbk%3Fpanoid%3D3Mk1fV_F6xCPtK-BgT8eLg%26output%3Dthumbnail%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26thumb%3D2%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D107.590294%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i13312!8i6656 https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.7524584,-1.2749531,3a,75y,... This is one of the main roads into Oxford. Note the "cycle lane"... Still, that road is not too bad because it has an exceptionally wide pavement on one side. It's usually more like this: (Henley on Thames, where Boris Johnson used to be MP, again one of the main accesses to the town) https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.5375008,-0.8998416,3a,75y,296.4h,70.09t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sNPg6kPII1CROWH6Cqrmrxg!2e0!7i13312!8i6656 https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.5375008,-0.8998416,3a,75y,...
    - throwaway2245 6y ago
      1. Botley Road - there is plenty of space for a two-way cycle path in the photo you show. Just a couple of photos down, you can see the road fits three vehicles abreast: in other words, it would comfortably fit two road lanes and a double cycle lane, if only that had been or was constructed. There are much trickier problems solved in the Netherlands. 2. Henley Bridge - Overall, Henley could be ideal for cycling around. OK, one of the main routes into the town crosses a river. Yet, if this was in the Netherlands, they would simply have built a parallel cycle bridge at some point in the last 20 years. Or, if there still wasn't one, they'd build one now. Here you go, Rijswijk swingbrug, opened 2014 (watch the video for relevant commentary): https://www.oozo.nl/video/rijswijk/84608/rijswijk-cycle-bridge https://www.oozo.nl/video/rijswijk/84608/rijswijk-cycle-brid... Or Delft's Gelatinebrug, scheduled to open in 2023: https://www.delft.nl/wonen/bouwen/bouwprojecten-de-stad/schieoevers/gelatinebrug https://www.delft.nl/wonen/bouwen/bouwprojecten-de-stad/schi... There are plenty of other examples. Amsterdam's narrow roads have little to no traffic only because of political decisions that cars are not the only form of transport that need to be considered. You can see in archive footage that this wasn't always the case.

DrBazza 6y ago

> Yes, any Dutch expat you meet is silently judging your country on the safety of its cycling infrastructure. And so you should. The UK's cycling infrastructure is embarrassingly bad. An example. Local to me, recently, the government spent over £100m on a new road junction, to replace an old one. One of the main reasons that they had to build a new junction was that they claimed they could not remove traffic lights from the roundabout to improve traffic because pedestrians and cyclists both crossed the junction at 'street level'. A local cycle organization submitted a proposal with modelling (I can't find the link atm.), that showed that the desired increase in capacity could be achieved by adding bridges for pedestrians and cyclists, removing traffic lights, and altering the road layout. And save about £90m. Needlessly to say, the junction was built. I have no idea whether their proposal was considered, or not, unless I submit a freedom of information request to the UK government. Regardless, the bridges should have been built anyway, because the junction is between two suburbs. The new junction did get a new cyclist/pedestrian bridge to replace the old one. Except it's about 1km further away from the suburbs that the previous junction, so adding 2km to bike journeys.

markvdb 6y ago
Actually, bicycle tunnels - with a limited slope of course, like all other bicycle infrastructure - are recommended over bicycle bridges. These are more comfortable for cyclists. Gravity helps one cycle down, and the kinetic energy gained helps cyclists on the way up in the second half of the tunnel.
- Muximize 6y ago
  Also they can be smaller and cheaper to build. Because they only carry bicycles and pedestrians, a height clearance of about 2.5 meters is enough, while a bridge needs around 5 meters to let cargo trucks pass underneath. This also results in much shorter ramps.
- DrBazza 6y ago
  Agreed. In England, however, tunnels particularly in towns tend to attract anti-social behaviour, which is rather unfortunate.

mytailorisrich 6y ago

A problem in the UK is that in general we are hostile to build roads and certainly wide roads. So roads are as narrow as possible and congested, which in itself is not great for bikes but also makes bike lanes near impossible. And when a bike lane is built (i.e. painted on the road or pavement) it is usually also very narrow and interferes with traffic. Obviously this is difficult to change for existing roads, but we could at least make sure that new roads are wide enough, but this is not the case.

throwaway2245 6y ago
Do you think the centre of Amsterdam has wide roads? It does not.
- mytailorisrich 6y ago
  That's great but I fail to see the relation with my comment. I'm not talking about very central roads that can be mostly restricted to pedestrians, or city areas with narrow streets but also little to no traffic. I'm talking about roads in general. Amsterdam has many roads that look hugely wide for British standards. Example: hhttps://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.7524584,-1.2749531,3a,75y,81.37h,70.28t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1s3Mk1fV_F6xCPtK-BgT8eLg!2e0!6s%2F%2Fgeo3.ggpht.com%2Fcbk%3Fpanoid%3D3Mk1fV_F6xCPtK-BgT8eLg%26output%3Dthumbnail%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26thumb%3D2%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D107.590294%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i13312!8i6656 https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.7524584,-1.2749531,3a,75y,... This is one of the main roads into Oxford. Note the "cycle lane"... Still, that road is not too bad because it has an exceptionally wide pavement on one side. It's usually more like this: (Henley on Thames, where Boris Johnson used to be MP, again one of the main accesses to the town) https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.5375008,-0.8998416,3a,75y,296.4h,70.09t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sNPg6kPII1CROWH6Cqrmrxg!2e0!7i13312!8i6656 https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.5375008,-0.8998416,3a,75y,...
  - throwaway2245 6y ago
    1. Botley Road - there is plenty of space for a two-way cycle path in the photo you show. Just a couple of photos down, you can see the road fits three vehicles abreast: in other words, it would comfortably fit two road lanes and a double cycle lane, if only that had been or was constructed. There are much trickier problems solved in the Netherlands. 2. Henley Bridge - Overall, Henley could be ideal for cycling around. OK, one of the main routes into the town crosses a river. Yet, if this was in the Netherlands, they would simply have built a parallel cycle bridge at some point in the last 20 years. Or, if there still wasn't one, they'd build one now. Here you go, Rijswijk swingbrug, opened 2014 (watch the video for relevant commentary): https://www.oozo.nl/video/rijswijk/84608/rijswijk-cycle-bridge https://www.oozo.nl/video/rijswijk/84608/rijswijk-cycle-brid... Or Delft's Gelatinebrug, scheduled to open in 2023: https://www.delft.nl/wonen/bouwen/bouwprojecten-de-stad/schieoevers/gelatinebrug https://www.delft.nl/wonen/bouwen/bouwprojecten-de-stad/schi... There are plenty of other examples. Amsterdam's narrow roads have little to no traffic only because of political decisions that cars are not the only form of transport that need to be considered. You can see in archive footage that this wasn't always the case.