Showing posts with label quietways. Show all posts
Showing posts with label quietways. Show all posts

Monday, 26 August 2019

Going Dutch in Hackney Central

The very northern section of Mare Street is Hackney Centrals high street, known as the Narroway. A Narrow street along most of its length (hence the name) it was part of the Hackney Central one way system until the 1980s but remained one way (southbound) when the gyratory was removed but only to be used by local buses, people cycling and deliveries. This made it unpleasant to walk on, due to narrow footways, and was an obstacle for people cycling, who could only do so in one direction and so faced a lengthy diversion. Although many would still cycle the wrong way, often on the pavement, causing further issues for people walking. Ten bus routes served this street but the bus stop at the southern end of the street could only accommodate a couple of buses so any delays in passengers loading, unloading or paying (in the pre contactless and oyster days) could result in a long line of stationary buses queueing along this street. I'm not exaggerating by stating that on some days it took me ten minutes to get from the top of the street down to the bottom on a bus; a distance of less than a quarter of a kilometre.

The pedestrianisation of the Narroway was an obvious improvement for both pedestrians and bus journey times so in June 2013 all buses were removed from the Narroway and diverted to use the same route northbound buses used; via Dalston Lane and Amhurst Road. Cycling was also permitted along the street in both directions but in order to prevent cyclists from "owning" the roadspace it was redesigned to ensure it was clear this was "shared space"

A photo I took of the Narroway in 2013, shortly after the buses had been removed, you can see how narrow the pavements were, with the space on the right a loading bay for deliveries 
Image taken from the architecture practice who designed the temporary layout
Hackney conservative councillors came from their wards in the north of the borough to protest alongside local traders who feared removing the buses would result in a loss of trade, however following a six month trial the scheme was deemed to be a success and a bid was made to TfL for funding for a permanent  redesign of the street. A consultation took place in late 2015 where 90% of people responded supported the plans, with only 6% against them.

A total of 8% of respondents to the consultation expressed concern at the risk of conflict between people walking and cycling in the new layout, this was the highest concern of all responses. Hackney Council claimed in late 2015 that there had been no reported collisions between people cycling and walking since the start of the trial in 2013. I really want to thank Hackney Council for making the sensible decision to allow cycling on the Narroway and taking an evidence based approach to this decision

A high street in Northampton, typical of many pedestrianised high streets in the UK that do not allow cycling. Since I took this picture part of this street has had the pedestrianisation removed to allow motor vehicles to return 
I've cycled on many shopping streets in the Netherlands which, like the new Narroway in Hackney, are signposted as pedestrian zones with cycling allowed, and have never found conflict between people walking and cycling to be an issue

Nijmegen 
Although I have noticed that these motor traffic free streets will sometimes have the markings of a road and footway on them, to indicate roughly where people can expect bicycles or service vehicles to be (although people can, and do, walk anywhere they like on the street)

Zwolle

The Narroway was also initially planned to have a similar layout, to reduce conflict between people walking and cycling


However the Royal National Institute of Blind people stated that they did not support the tactile strips, instead calling for detectable kerbs to separate the "cycle lane from the footway". The council agreed to remove these strips and any features that may resemble cycle lanes from the scheme, with the road designated a "Pedestrian Zone" which allowed considerate cycling. The scheme was budgeted at £3.25m, with nearly £2m supplied by TfL, just over £1m from the council and the rest via S106 agreements. Reconstruction began in January 2017 and was meant to last for a year but hit delays and took until late 2018 before it was fully completed

Reconstruction underway in 2017
The Northbound street remains no entry for all vehicles, except cycles



Southbound the street is signed as a pedestrian and cycle only zone, except for loading between 6pm and 10am. There are no loading bays marked on the street with local retailers asked to observe considerate parking when loading

Entering the street Southbound 
New seating, trees and additional cycle parking has been added



The cycle parking is well used, although I'm not personally keen on the steel designs and would have preferred traditional cycle stands 


Catenary lights have been used, suspended from wires attached to the buildings either side of the street to avoid the need to use poles 

Catenary wire systems are also often seen in the Netherlands to hold lights and tram wires on main roads in cities, leaving more space on the carriageway for cycling infrastructure 

It's a really lovely street to walk, cycle and sit to have lunch on now, much improved from the bus clogged place it used to be, and certainly a huge upgrade from the gyratory days of the 1970s! 

The Narroway in 1975 and 2019 
At the top of the street the original plan was to have an uncontrolled crossing over Dalston Lane / Lower Clapton Road, which seems like an odd decision considering how busy the road is. During construction this plan was changed and thankfully a wide signalled crossing was installed instead



although this meant that it was illegal for people cycling to use this crossing, although there was really no other choice. Thankfully within a few months this was changed and the crossing became a toucan crossing



The new toucan crossing allows people to cycle onto the footway on the other side and then up Clarence Road, which is a fairly quiet road to cycle on, due to all streets to the west of it filtered to through motor traffic at Pembury Road and a left turn only onto Lower Clapton Road, forcing drivers coming from the top of Clarence Road or from Lower Clapton Road back in the direction they have just come from. This means that Clarence Road is not a useful through route for cars and only really serves as an access road to the streets leading off it. It does however serve as a popular cycling route from Hackney Downs to the Narroway due to its directness and quietness.


Unfortunately it is still illegal to cycle up Clarence Road from the Narroway, as a clear "no entry " sign demonstrates. The plan outlined in the consultation was for a "No entry except cyclists" sign to replace it but nearly three years on from the beginning of the scheme construction and a year after it was completed this has still not yet happened for some reason. There are also no signs to indicate the pavement at the bottom of Clarence Road is shared but surely as it is a toucan crossing it must be. Perhaps a short bidirectional cycle track from Clarence Road to the crossing and a clearly marked bicycle and pedestrian crossing, as there is on Hackney road at Columbia road, might have been better.


The wide toucan crossing is a vast improvement on the staggered crossing that it replaced, however the new central strip on Dalston Lane forces cyclists into primary position on a very busy road and one of Hackneys busiest bus routes. The space here could have been used for protected cycle tracks instead.

Dalston Lane has changed a lot in recent years, due to the Pembury Circus / Atkins Square development on the north side of the road, which has delivered over 200 new homes, a new supermarket, a cafe and a community centre, where the Hackney cycling campaign hold their monthly meetings. As part of this development the footway was extended and is now gigantic all the way from Pembury Circus to the Narroway



A rather wasteful use of the space available when right alongside people are expected to cycle on a narrow road either in the doorzone of parked cars or on a very badly surfaced road. This road is used by over a hundred buses an hour at peak times and over 10,000 motor vehicles everyday which means families in the new development have no safe way to cycle to the Narroway, although in reality most will simply cycle on the huge footway instead.

Five years on from Hackney Council declaring that they want their roads to be the safest roads for cycling in the UK, where it is second nature for anyone, no matter what their age to cycle. Dalston Lane certainly isn't somewhere where that can happen

A better use of the space would have been a bidirectional cycleway linking Pembury Circus with the Narroway, whilst still leaving ample space for pedestrians, trees and street furniture

It's better to make the roads safer for everyone 
Whilst the Narroway does have a safe route leading to it from the north, via Clarence Road, the same cannot be said about accessing it from the south (unless you count an awkward and indirect route through St. Johns Churchyard from Q2 at Churchwell Path). The vast majority of people cycling on the Narroway will want to get to and from the Hackney Grove cycleway that leads to London Fields and you really only have one option; to brave cycling on Mare Street. Cycling towards the Town Hall you'll almost certainly first meet a wall of buses and other motor vehicles at a red light at the Graham Road junction, with no ASL and no way to filter through



Once through the green light you'll then have to manoeuvre across into the second lane as the lane you're in is for left turning traffic only. Often this will involve using lane one until you get to the lights at Morning Lane, only to then try and swing right into the ASL, assuming it isn't blocked. I've downloaded a couple of TfL traffic camera clips from one recent morning rush hour below to show a typical example of this



It may not surprise you the hear I've never once seen a child cycling to school at during the rush hour here!

The traffic lights are on red at the Mare Street / Morning Lane junction as I took this photo. The ASL is almost completely blocked by a bus and two cars. Would you filter through that queue of cars and lorries with your family on bikes here?
Once you get a green light on Morning Lane you either choose to swing back to the left again to allow traffic to pass or, knowing you're about to turn right onto Reading Lane to get to the cycleway leading to London Fields, stay on the right of the lane in the middle of the carriageway and have motor traffic passing you on both sides until you "take the lane" at the pinchpoint to use the right turn filter.


Cycling south from Reading Lane to the Narroway isn't much better, or possibly even worse. If you scroll up to the top of this page you'll see my header image is a picture of this road, a shared bus lane on a road six lanes wide. Once though the Morning Lane lights you can then use the left hand lane to go ahead, rather than being forced to manoeuvre into lane two, but often you're either sandwiched between traffic or will have to brave it and filter through



Before you get to the Narroway where you want to turn right into it



If you're lucky the pedestrian crossing will be on red round the corner, giving you a clear chance to do so. Often though it won't so you either block the road waiting to turn right, and get honked at, or wait in the middle of the road with buses passing close by on both sides of you



Cycling through Hackney Central is for the brave few, and certainly not for the many. Last week I saw this family cycling along the fantastic new Narroway, perfectly safe and chatting away with each other



To be fair to them, when they got to the bottom of the Narroway they waited and then carefully made their way up Mare Street cycling in the carriageway. Then they got to Graham Road and a wall of motor traffic greeted them where they, understandably, crossed over the pedestrian crossing and continued up to the Hackney Grove cycleway by cycling considerately on the pavement. Who can blame them? Cycling with your family on the road here is frankly not safe and I would never do it.



The other issue is that Mare Street is also a destination for families, with the Picturehouse cinema holding family screenings at the weekend and the Hackney Empire regularly often featuring shows for children. It makes sense for some local families to arrive here by bike but they are really left with little option but to use the pavement



Give these families a safe route through Hackney Central and they won't be cycling on the pavement. The present layout is simply not safe enough and is one of the worst locations for cycling collisions in the borough


It was very disappointing that a few years ago the local police announced that pavement cycling was the priority crime that they would be dealing with


Yes, pavement cycling is annoying but lets focus on the real danger here, which is people walking and cycling being inured or killed by motor traffic.

A pavement on Mare Street in Hackney Central. Is pavement cycling really the issue here?

If you want to stop people cycling on the pavement in Hackney Central then providing safe conditions for them to cycle is the clear solution. This solution was presented to Hackney Council back in 2015 when Andrew Gillian was the cycling commissioner and Quietway 2 was planned to go via the most obvious route, linking the Hackney Grove cycleway and the Narroway

Option 1 - a bidirectional cycle track running along the western side of Mare Street, linking Reading Lane with the Narroway and finally making Hackney Central a place that is safe enough for anyone to navigate on a bike. Option 2 was stepped cycle tracks running on either side of the road
Hackney Council had the funding, plans and support to go ahead with this years ago but instead chose an indirect and unsafe, busy back street route instead

Hackney Council in their 2015-2025 cycling plan 

The future of Hackney Central - have your say

Two years ago Hackney Council received £10m in funding to finally introduce protected cycle tracks on Mare Street in Hackney Central, redesign the Pembury Junction and make Amhurst Road, which runs between the two, a through route for buses only.

Amhurst Road is already four lanes wide so with a bus gate protected cycle tracks can easily be accommodated. Bus priority is achieved without the need for bus lanes, because the private motor traffic will have been removed 
Hackney Council are inviting you to have your say on these improvements. Obviously protected cycle tracks running the length of Mare Street though Hackney Central will be required as that is what the TfL funding is for. Any reversal of this proposal with an attempt to force people cycling in with buses would have to result in the funding being withdrawn and given to other councils who are enabled the necessary changes to ensure their roads safer for everyone.

As well as submitting your comments on moving through Hackney Central you can also add comments to a map, which covers a wider area. Perhaps you'd like to see Chatham Place filtered on Q2 or modal filters on the Naverino Road cycle route? Perhaps the contraflow cycle track on Paragon Road should be made bi-directional and run all the way from Mare Street to Morning Lane to link the proposed cycle tracks on Mare Street with the recently constructed cycle track on Wick Road?


If you live, work, shop or travel through Hackney Central then please do let the council know what changes you'd like to see to the roads and junctions that would enable families to get about by bike and ensures that the safety of people walking and cycling comes first.
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , ,

Wednesday, 30 January 2019

An upgrade to Quietway 2 on Queensbridge Road

Quietway 2 runs between De Beauvoir Town and London Fields via Middleton Road. One of the obstacles of this long popular cycling route has always been crossing the busy Queensbridge Road, which usually involved a wait for a gap in traffic to cross, and often a risky manoeuvre between two streams of moving traffic. There was a pedestrian crossing just south of the junction and so this did help, providing a pedestrian pressed the button, although I've also witnessed people cycling down to the pedestrian crossing via the footway on occasions, to cross there instead.

Middleton Road (quietway 2) running East / West across Queensbridge Road

A year ago Hackney Council ran a consultation on installing traffic lights at these crossroads, following eleven recorded collisions over the previous five year, four of them involving cyclists. The consultation also included some changes to Queensbridge Road just south of the junction, with all of these changes carried out in 2018.

Hackney Council have been looking at installing protected cycle tracks on Queensbridge Road for some time now. It's an obvious road to choose as it is very wide road

Queensbridge Road in 1983, via Alan Denney on flickr 
The same location on Queensbridge Road today, with the Holly Lane Estate demolished and a wide road remaining. The houses on the left and Queensbridge Primary school in the distance, remain

Queensbridge Road remains wide all the way down to Hackney Road (with the exception of where it crosses the Regents canal) and so suffers from motor traffic (including lorries) travelling at high speed and making it an unpleasant road to cycle on

Queensbridge Road further south from the Middleton Road junction 

Therefore Queensbridge Road is an easy target for Hackney Council to upgrade as creating the space for cycle tracks could be achieved with no reduction in motor traffic capacity, as well as maintaining car parking, trees and street furniture. Another advantage is dealing with cycle tracks at the bus stops, as it carries just one bus route, the lightly used 236 to Hackney Wick, along the northern section of the road, with no buses at all using the southern end of the road.

In the consultation last year Hackney Council correctly described Queensbridge Road as a "busy distributor road" with "above average wide lanes, high traffic speeds and volumes for a 20mph road" and took the opportunity to create changes to a small section of it at the same time as upgrading the Quietway 2 crossing. This involved extending the pavements outside Queensbridge Road Primary School to "create a quiet space"

Before and after the changes on Queensbridge Road
I'm not sure how extended the footway slightly helps to create a quiet space, as the road remains just as busy as it was before. Very little extra space has been added for pedestrians as most of the space taken from the roadway has been reallocated to "greenery"


Which makes Queensbridge Road much worse if you're on a bike, as you now have to negotiate pinch points as you approach the school and are pushed closer towards lorries on the road 



It wasn't so long ago that there were four lanes of traffic outside this school so it seems a real wasted opportunity that this space was not instead used for protected cycle tracks to allow children, and their parents, to cycle safely to school here. A wide road still remains and children and most parents instead cycle on the pavement, rather than alongside lorries

Before and after: a child cycles on the pavement on one side of the road and visible in the distance is a parent cycling on the pavement  on the other side of the road, with a child on the back of their bike. I don't blame them. 
Even with the extended pavements the road does still remain wide, showing how there was ample space to create protected cycle tracks here 


In the delegated powers decision documents Hackney Council claimed that:

 "narrowing the road will help change the nature of the road from a busy distributor road to a calmer road with reduced speeds but this might not be the ideal situation for cyclists"

Narrowing the road could have been achieved by creating protected cycle tracks of course, which actually could have resulted in an even narrower road here as the proposals:

 "were designed with minimum lane widths of 4.0 metres and meet the minimum requirements of the London cycling design standards. These were changed to 4.2 metres at the detailed design stage"

The consultation also states that the road was 11.8m wide before the narrowing, so instead of designing an 8.4m wide carriageway to accommodate cyclists on the road the vehicle lanes could have been 3m wide in order to create a 6m wide carriageway (the same width as Old Shoreham Road in Brighton). This would have left nearly 6m to create cycle tracks on both sides of the road, with a buffer or even some added greenery between the cycle tracks and the roadway



Hackney Council also claim that:

"an overall cycling level of service for Queensbridge Road would achieve a high level of service of 70+ if the proposed Central London Cycle Grid scheme is implemented"

Which is a different scheme entirely, for a much larger area, and hasn't been consulted on yet. The kerb build out was raised as an issue by members of the public in the consultation who were concerned about the future implementation of segregated cycle lanes here, and the council responded that

 "this section will be traffic calmed and this rules out future segregated cycle lanes"

Which I'm pleased to hear the Mayor of Hackney disagrees with, but it does seem an odd decision to implement a narrower carriageway with these kerb build outs if they are only going to be demolished at a later stage to build protected cycle tracks. Surely the sensible option would be to build the cycle tracks here and then extend them the entire length of Queensbridge Road at a later date?

In their 2014-2024 ten year cycling plan Hackney Council stated that they want it to be second nature for anyone to cycle, no matter what their age, with a target of 5% of all school children cycling to school by 2024. We're now halfway through that plan and I don't see how Hackney will get anywhere close to that target with terrible schemes like this, directly outside a school, or how this fits in with creating "clear safe space for cyclists"

On Queensbridge Road Hackney Council have deliberately created poor road design in an attempt to force people cycling into a position very few people want to cycle in (also known as "primary position"). Children will not and should not be expected to cycle on narrow roads with thousands of drivers per day

As for the Quietway 2 crossing, it is now much safer and more comfortable to have a dedicated crossing over Queensbridge Road. However it was fantastic for several weeks last year, when these changes were being put in place, as Middleton Road was closed both sides of Queensbridge Road, resulting in a very quiet quietway

Since Middleton Road has reopened and the traffic lights have become operational I've been a regular user of this route and the main downside is just how busy Middleton Road is. Usually several motor vehicles will overtake you, only for you to overtake them at the Queensbridge Road traffic lights to get to the ASL (which are heavily favoured towards the busier Queensbridge Road meaning if you're on a bike you almost always seem to get a red light). Only for the same pattern to repeat itself over the second half of Middleton Road until you then have to overtake all the same vehicles again once you get to the lights at Kingsland Road. In an ideal world Middleton Road would have remained closed to motor traffic to allow a tiger crossing to be built over Queensbridge Road, giving cyclists priority

A cycle route I used in Zoetermeer, the Netherlands, which has priority over the main road, with a cycle track on the main road as well. 
On the whole though, this is a much improved crossing on Quietway 2 and probably the best that could have been achieved at this location at the present time. It's encouraging to see Hackney Council continue to make improvements to Quietway 2 and they should be applauded for this. However the changes on Queensbridge Road are baffling and a real step backwards if you use this road on a bike

This was an opportunity to enable more children in Hackney to be able to safely cycle to school and improve a small section of Queensbridge Road. I look forward to future proposals to create this along the rest of the road but this is an opportunity missed to create safe space for cyclists.
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)