Why disused viaducts are the key to the cycling superhighway

pinno

'Cos they are. Lots of them everywhere and the cycling superhighway will preserve them.

Not sure we can track as direct a route as the Ride On Time masterplan but who wants straight roads anyway?

mamba80

Disused viaducts should be turned back into working railways, take all this commuter traffic off the roads, roads become more cycle friendly and the roads become the new super cycle highway

pblakeney

You are both correct.

The roads cannot handle the amount of traffic so re-opening railway services would make sense.

If they are not to be re-opened then turning them into cycle paths would be a logical solution. Fairly straight paths, almost flat, and straight into town centres.

The best solution though is job swaps. How many people pass others going the opposite way to do similar jobs. Better if they didn't have to travel in the first place.

earth

mamba80 wrote:

Disused viaducts should be turned back into working railways, take all this commuter traffic off the roads, roads become more cycle friendly and the roads become the new super cycle highway

I wish bikeradar had a like button.

random man

pinarello001 wrote:

'Cos they are. Lots of them everywhere and the cycling superhighway will preserve them.

Not sure we can track as direct a route as the Ride On Time masterplan but who wants straight roads anyway?

Too late my friend

http://www.cyclingweekly.co.uk/news/lat ... ire-156507

pinno

[Warning: rant]

What fecks me off is that they build a cycle path either by the side of the road or in it's own right and then it is just not maintained. Of the 3 times I have used a cycle path/lane recently, I have punctured twice due to the build of debris, stones, sticks etc.
So RoT needs to pay for mini lane sweepers in his grand plan. Whilst I am at it - dog sh1t, what they...

cont. p94

markhewitt1978

The roads aren't any better maintained it's just that cars are very effective at sweeping away debris.

markhewitt1978

As for railways I live in an area crisscrossed by old railway lines. Some of which are now cycle routes but unfortunately only a small section of one of them has actually been tarmacced, the rest are gravel and mud which means for the majority of the year they're pretty much unusable unless you particularly like cleaning mud and dirt out of your bike every time.

Old railway routes should be given a good quality sealed surface to their full width to make good quality routes for cycling, preferably with a seperation for walkers and their dogs.

There's other lines such as Leamside which just lie totally idle without any usage at all.

tangled_metal

County Durham I think was the birthplace of the railway (Stockton to Darlington railway being the first ever line anywhere in the world and was once part of county Durham I believe at one point). I guess it is inevitable there are a lot of old lines in that neck of the woods. Not just Beeching closed lines but industry lines too. Makes sense to create cycle paths on them IF there is the money for it. In the UK I suspect that is the problem. Unless there is a serious case for benefit of a financial kind (tourism) then they don't get funding. Places like the Peak District have some nice rail line cycle paths (Tissington, High Peaks, etc.).

me-109

Tangled Metal wrote:

County Durham I think was the birthplace of the railway (Stockton to Darlington railway being the first ever line anywhere in the world and was once part of county Durham I believe at one point).

Stockton-Darlington wasn't the first railway, but was the first paying passenger carrying railway.
Stockton was indeed part of County Durham until a never-ending series of minor-authorities-that-no-one-ever-knew-where-they-were came along. Now it's a unitary authority that sometimes happens to be in several counties since some businesses still demand a county as a mandatory address field.
We have a few cycle paths, but not especially any more than other places I've been, and as Pina said they're all covered in crap because they don't get swept.

:Man from Stockton:

tangled_metal

Well it might just be that I live in a semi-rural area without any cycle paths apart from the ones in the roads and parts of the canal towpath with access for bikes but to me all those suburbs of Stockton with those mixed use paths that run between houses. There seems to be a lot of them to me running around and into town. I can say that compared to Lancaster for example, near me, Stockton has a lot. I've ridden the odd one before now and certainly driven past where they've crossed the road a few times to know there are more than in Lancaster. Well the away from traffic ones that is. Lancaster has a lot of those red cycle paths painted on the road carriageway with a dashed line indicating they are not cycle only (can't be since they take over part of the carriageway for vehicles meaning the one way system would be down to 1.5 lanes if the cars had to keep out of those cyclepaths.

Sorry, not jealous of all those suburban cycle paths away from traffic. BTW I have also seen some of the main roads up that way (passing from Darlington but others too) that has surfaced cycle paths running alongside. I think there are a few heading up Newcastle way too. There is a campaign to get something like those on the A6 running from lancaster centre to the university. A separate cycle carriageway away from cars IIRC.

pinno

Worth a look:

http://www.sustrans.org.uk/ncn/map?lat= ... s&filters=