Leeds-Bradford cycle superhighway just 75cm wide in places

And another WELL DONE to FIRST BUS LEEDS.  

My wife was on a bus on Monday, and the bus driver decided to take time out from concentrating on not killing people, to shout at a cyclist for not using the superhighway.

ITS NOT EVEN OPEN YET, good on the female cyclist though, she gave the bus driver what for, and pointed to the cones in the roadworks! Shame she couldn't shove one up the drivers fat ass.

My two cents -

Yes it's bad in places, in other places it's actually OK. However the bad sections render it pretty much useless.

The main problem I'm experiencing now is the hostility on the road from motorists who believe that cyclists should stick religiously to the cycle lane, despite the fact that it's not finished and it's full of broken glass and signs. Cyclists are going to be effectively forced to use it.

Contrary to what is said in the article, it doesn't give way at every side road, however a lot (and a lot more than were in the plans) are being built as 'table' junctions (essentially as a cyclist you have to meander about 3 metres left, cross the road on a giant speed bump and then meander back to your right. Ostensibly as a cyclist you have priority, but in reality you're approacing a crossing where cars are coming from your right and slightly to your rear, you would be suicidal to just continue across hoping that they'll stop. Therefore you have to slow and a lot of motorists can't comprehend not having priority so just continue across completely obliviously.

What else, oh yeah, I asked them why they'd deviated from the plans that have been on their site for ages, they told me they were 'in the process' of getting them updated to what had actually been built. Utterly useless.

Oh and there's a few junctions where cyclists have 'priority' lights, if by priority you mean you have to push a button and wait for a full cycle of the main lights. They don't seem to see the irony of calling it a 'superhighway' with these kind of design features.

Awful bike lane, just awful. I won't be using it! We have a great ability in the uk to make an utter ballsup of something that could and should have been so much more. Perhaps a link to this page can be emailed to the designers 

My main use trike is 74 cm wide at axle height, there are other trikes that are wider than mine. 

There's nothing in the above which was mentioned in the public consultation

"The choice of route was questioned, with several respondents noting that Church Bank is particularly steep for cycling, and that there are areas of the route which are too narrow to
incorporate the proposed infrastructure.

Several respondents questioned the rationale for a route between Leeds and Bradford as a priority for the funding with many respondents suggesting alternative areas for investment."

http://cityconnect.sdg-labs.com/documentation/cityconnect-cycle-superhighway/

Some of those narrow bus-stop bypasses are on wide roads with wide grass verges too.  It's like they had a standard cookie-cutter design of narrow lane and sharp bends and just added it wherever a bus stop was, in places where there was adequate space to do something much better.

I use a chunk of this for my commute, it's an absolute nightmare. The parts that are wide enough just end up with people walking dogs and pushchairs in them.

By chance I visited one of the ‘consultation’ sessions and could see straight away that the junction design and priorities were inadequate, and this was before all the corner cutting and back door changes. 

I also suggested that much better routes avoiding the direct Leeds- Bradford road would be more attractive to cyclists:

To the South:Bowling back lane, Tyersal, dismantled railway to Fulneck, Troydale,disused Holbeck viaduct, Leeds Station.

To the North: Fagley, Woodhall hills, Rodley, proper canalside route to Leeds station. 

I am hugely disappointed at what I’ve seen of the finished product and amazed  at how much money it has cost.  

I have started using the Canal road greenway from Bradford to Shipley, and that has its bizarre idiosyncracies. Bins narrowing already tight, gate controlled corners, passing over lay-bys and disused vehicle entrances (Parking spaces!), running out of pavement at an unmarked junction with heavy commercial traffic and suddenly giving up the ghost 200m from the city centre. Still an improvement on Canal road. 

I doubt very much that I will be using the Leeds Bradford path, but then I’m a Bradfordian, and who wants to go to Leeds anyway?

This is what happens when you let inexperienced public sector civil engineers do the job.

I'm genuinely shocked at how dumb the designs in the photos are. I know, British cycle paths/tracks etc are always flawed in some respect, often designed by idiots and really quite embarrassing, but the Idiot Cycle Track Designers of GB have really excelled themselves this time.

Try googling for images of "dutch cycle path" and then googling images for "british cycle path". The only images that come up me for the latter that I think "I would cycle on that"  are, in fact, also from the Netherlands.  For the former, every single image on the first page of my results, I think " I would cycle on that". (Your search results will vary depending on a number of factors)

WHY IS IT SO HARD TO GET IT RIGHT?! USE THE DUTCH DESIGN GUIDE FOR GOODNESS SAKE!

I ride most of the route on my commute on the road and some of it is downright laughable, some of the surfacing is appaling, but in places it's worth popping onto for a few hundred metres (contrary to what some have said, road space has been taken in several places, and it's now too narrow to pass cars on the road from Armley Gyratory up to the dual carraigeway bit, so the track isn't a bad alternative here if you can find a way onto it - they seem to have made switching from road to track very difficult).

They'd have been far better off building a path along disused railway lines between Bradford and Leeds (and for most of the route out to Cross Gates), removing all conflict with cars and providing easier gradients - perhaps looking at the Bristol-Bath path as a very successful example.  Both the railway lines from Leeds - Bradford were built as four tracks but are now only two (with a disused loop through Pudsey and Greenhow tunnel), so have these wide, gently graded undeveloped linear corridors running parallel with them.  Would also make commuting to stations practical too.

This isn't a cherry-picked, worst-of set of pictures - the project is consistently bad, stupid and dangerous.

The City Connect people behind the project are, I think, perfectly aware of this. Their communication strategy has progressed from engaging with cyclists, to fobbing them off, to outright ignoring them - a case in point is that their newly relaunched website no longer features an ability to post comments, they no longer answer emails, and if you see them in person they always reply to any queries with the stock answer of "I couldn't comment on that".

If a major road or rail project was this bad, there would be an inquiry and people would resign. But no one cares about a £29 million cycling project.

I can't imagine it's cost anywhere near the amount allocated to it - I'd be interested to see where the money's really gone and who has benefitted because it's certainly not cyclists - they've produced the longest, crappest cycle lane in the UK.  It's simpy dangerous in (many) places.

Any regular/experienced cyclist will continue to use the road where there's less obstructions, less giving way and is safer despite being subject to the increased aggression from some drivers. 

I know we are looking at a set of pictures that probably showcase the worst aspects of the overall scheme and may not be fairly representative.

But...

What a complete and utter dog's breakfast! Visually it looks awful, confusing and disjointed. People will park on it because there are no yellow lines. Pedestrians, cyclists and drivers will be unsure who is supposed be where. This might be suitable for sheperding the kids on their first bicycle with stabilizers attached. Waiting at each junction to practice crossing the road and taking 15 minutes to travel a half mile to school or to the park, but no commuter or anyone using a bicycle to get around efficiently is going to want to use those facilities.

As others have pointed out, surely the focus of these schemes has to be connecting suburb to town centre and other transport hubs such as the railway or bus station for commuting to the next town or longer distances? I'm really of the opinion that if the council and road planners cannot do it right, then don't do it at all and certainly don't piss £millions of public money away for no benefit. Until proper infrastructure is in place, the kids on stabilizers can still use the pavement and anyone else has to learn some roadcraft and mix it with the traffic. The danger is that once poorly designed cycle paths are implemented then some drivers can become far more aggresive at expressing their opinion that we should be using that infrastructure regrdless of whether we feel it to be suitable or not.

After a recent visit I came away with the impression that there's a lot of good stuff going on in Bradford right now with respect to regenerating the city centre and it seems a shame that cycle infrastructure is being given such an apparently low priority.

Wow.

That is seriously appalling.

I can't imagine many people opting for those dismal "facilities" rather than using the road.

This looks like a scheme where someone had an idea and every penny was spent ensuring that idea was laid out.  A bit like the old painted lanes, where councils could champion the number of "cycle lanes" they had.

It should have been more a case of "let's go for this money and spend it connecting homes, schools and businesses".  You need to remove the school run quota from the roads, and the "drive 2 miles to work and back" people.  Those who commute between Leeds and Bradford are an entirely different issue.

Like everyone else here, I would never use the pictured facilities.  They're utter crap.

This is actually very good provision.

Many motorists will see it as very good provision of another excuse to harrass cyclist from the highway.

UK is never going to get segregated cycle infrastructure. Accept it and spend the money on maintaing the roads, educating all road users and getting the nob-end drivers off the roads!

One has to wonder where the money was actually spent?

You have to seriously question the professional competence of the people who designed and signed off on this project. Badly designed infrastructure wastes public money, those who are responsible for not implementing the best international practice should be sacked.

Why is there such a lack of professional competence in this country? Any complainant civil engineer worth their salt should be able to design and build first class infrastructure and not this crap!

London may now have 'iconic superhighways', but they're by no means perfect either:

Not very wide, change direction abrubptly, and the ramps to the pedestrian crossings are bmx stunt friendly. Also, try finding it having come over tower bridge.

Of course they are much better than the L-B cycleway though.

I don't understand the logic of building a cycle super highway between Leeds and Bradford at all. Surely, the two cities are well connected by rail already. What about providing access from the rest of the Leeds and Bradford suburbs to the city centres. The A660 into Leeds has plenty of cycle commuters, which shows that there is a desire to travel by bike.

There's plenty of money to invest in new railway stations in Leeds. Maybe some of this could be diverted to other sustainable forms of transport?

oh FFS, the bars on my new MTB are 720mm, Are we really going to design cyclepaths with passing places! 

I am originally from Bradford and the idea of starting this route up Church Bank is insane.  Leeds Road is steep enough (and the main route to Leeds, would you believe?) but making people grimp up Church Bank just says "don't bother".  I wouldn't even fancy going down it in the wet.

Plus the design of the route was obviously stupid, the slugs who signed off approval knew it was stupid, the contractors who took on the work knew it was stupid, and the blokes building it knew it was stupid.  But some taxpayers money got transferred to the local masons so it's all good, right?

Road.cc get your facts right! The actual budget for this project is £29 million., no £18 million.

the whole thing is a prime example of how NOT to do cycle infrastructure. It is crying shame that so much money has been pissed up the wall - bad, dangerous infrastructure is worse than no infrastructure. I cycle along the road rather than use the "super" highway. And the towpath is a farce for a huge number of reason.

But, the communications and marketing budget for this project is pushing £3 million, and they employ lots of people to put inane things on twitter. Presumably they are under the impression that inane tweets, rather than proper infrastructure, is what gets people on bikes.