Glasgow city council is currently rolling out its new Connecting Yorkhill and Kelvingrove active travel scheme. It’s also nearing the completion of connecting Woodside a similar project that was initially branded as a mini Holland. In this video, I navigate the almost completed sections around Haugh Street and Radnor Street as well as the final piece of connecting Woodside. St George’s Road. I also look at the Avenues plus Kyle street and north Hanover street. That will open up the fantastic Sighthill bridge to the heart of the city. Let’s see how they will connect. While these individual sections look great, the problem with a lot of UK infrastructure is that it can be fragmented. This infrastructure kind of joins together and I was mostly on segregated cycle lanes with a few quiet cycleway roads. Great infrastructure should really let you point your bike in any direction and pedal knowing you will be safe! Glasgow is doing a decent job so far but it isn’t going fast enough. Bi directional cycle lanes in my opinion seem to be planners pandering to car centric businesses and a public that has still to be convinced of the benefits these lanes will bring to the city. #GlasgowCycles #ActiveTravel #ConnectingYorkhill #GlasgowCycling #CyclingInfrastructure #RoadBike
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10 Comments
Looks like a good start, still a lot to do but most (all?) what is there of the new infrastructure is good quality.
This video highlights urban cycling infrastructure in Glasgow. £9.3 million funding from Transport Scotland aids projects like Connecting Yorkhill and Kelvingrove. Do these new layouts on streets such as Haugh Street and Radnor Street represent a true continuous network? Subscribe so that you can see more about these updates in my future @GlasgowCycles videos.
I think the problem with UK infrastructure was highlighted to me on BBC Northwest news the other day. There was an article about how they are not enough drop curbs in parts of Liverpool for people in wheelchairs. And my thought was, this is still very car centric thinking they should’ve been thinking less about dropping curbs and more about continuous pavements and raising it across rather than dropping it. Letting the cars slow. Active travel and Dutch design is better for everyone.
I think I missed that moment, what is the problem with the UK's infrastructure?
Great video, so depressing that Edinburgh is quite far behind, especially in the centre
Bro, why do they put sticks there? 1:40 Its dangerous. In NED there are no sticks in the bicycle paths. PS Thanks for your genius vids!
Doing a great job. We need to keep the pressure on for (Utrecht style) cycling infrastructure. Atb
St. George's Road is fully completed and looks much better now 💯..
The problem I have with so much of the infrastructure we have and are still building is the junctions, specifically the signals. The lanes are the easy part, it's where you have to cross roads that things get more complicated.
There are so many places where your wait for a green light on the cycle phase of a set of signals can be a couple of minutes long. I stopped using the SCW a few years ago solely because the two junctions with cycle phasing towards the south end of Victoria Road took so long to give me a green, while 4 phases of traffic were prioritised. The junction at Cumberland St/Pollokshaws Road is also badly designed for cyclists heading south because you need to wait for not one but two sets of lights to get across a single junction, and the few times I bothered to do this route they seemed deliberately timed so you would always have to wait at the second one.
It's so stupid and detracts significantly from the value of the lanes themselves.
When you then factor in the widespread use of bidirectional lanes which need to swap from side to side every so often it exacerbates the problem by requiring additional signals and incurring additional delays for cyclists every time this happens.
The inevitable results are that people are going to ignore the lights and/or the lanes.
We could be doing so much better at implementing intelligent traffic signals. The Dutch seem to have a ton of this tech already, I don't understand why we aren't already using it here.
Even drivers should have nothing to complain about: the number of times I've sat at a junction with no traffic coming through on green while a queue builds up behind a red is ridiculous, everyone would benefit from better traffic flow.
P.S. been watching your videos for a while and I find them really useful as a way to keep on top of how things are progressing, I cycle in/through Glasgow a lot but don't get to many of the areas you show all that often!
It's amazing the changes they have achieved so far, would love this same commitment to updating safe active travel routes to come to South Wales.