Designing for cyclists: a guide to good practice

A product of one of the key targets of the Essex Cycling Strategy, this design guide for cycling by Essex County Council stems from the authority’s desire to ‘move towards a more sustainable transport system and an improved environment’. Although produced for the promotion and management of cycling in Essex, the guide is useful for anyone in the UK concerned with improving cycling facilities: designers, engineers, planners and developers.

Essentially the guide is a simplification of national guidelines (Institute of Highways and Transportation’s much quoted Cycle Friendly Infrastructure: Guidelines for Planning and Design) insofar that it presents more technical guidelines through diagrams rather than being rich in text. This may appeal more to the engineer who is looking for quick solutions as opposed to any in-depth theory.

Chapter one begins with an explanation of the principles of designing for cyclists. This section provides particularly useful information on the design vehicle and the design user for those readers who may not have first-hand experience of operating a bicycle, let alone planning for its enhanced use – a rather common scenario.

Chapter two provides some basic guidelines and key considerations in relation to network planning. The remaining chapters offer a more technical approach and are organised in relation to the so-called sequential hierarchy of measures to improve cycling conditions namely:

• traffic reduction and traffic management;
• traffic calming and speed management;
• junction treatment; redistribution of carriageway;
• off-road provision.

Subsequent chapters deal neatly with crossings, bridges and subways; signs and markings; and cycle parking. The latter are not particularly imaginative in terms of layout and design, but there is a useful chart of cycle parking standards for different land uses which other authorities might wish to glean or to compare with their own.

The final chapters deal swiftly with Cycle Audit and Cycle Review and also Monitoring. Useful referencing is provided throughout particularly to the Department of Transport’s useful freely available Traffic Advisory Leaflets.

Overall, although simplified and well presented, it is difficult to see the need for Designing for Cyclists in the plethora of guidelines currently available that stand as daughter documents to Cycle Friendly Infrastructure (for example London Cycling Design Standards).

More importantly, the guidelines now look rather dated in light of the recent publication of the updated Dutch Guidelines by CROW Sign Up for the Bike (the ‘bible for cycle planners’ worldwide) – currently being translated into English with planned Spring 2007 publication.

The imminent publication of UK guidelines Cycle Friendly Infrastructure II also offers more up-to-date advice. Having said that, if this document is put to good use by stakeholders in Essex and a few interested parties around the UK, and better provision for cycling results, this has to be preferable than unread theoretical tomes gathering dust on bookshelves in offices of the UK.