Metrolink and cycling – the saga continues
On Thursday 4th December 2014, Manchester Cycle Forum members were invited to a briefing meeting to look at the proposed signage for the ‘cycling provision’ at the Southmoor Road / Altrincham Road junction in Wythenshawe which had already been built as part of the Metrolink route to the Airport. Love Your Bike was dismayed at the designs and is seriously concerned that Metrolink have made the road junction less safe for cycling and have also installed a so-called ‘safe alternative’ that is not easy, convenient or intuitive to use. See the ‘Concerns with Metrolink tram routes: Statement to Manchester Cycle Forum‘ post for more details.
A Freedom of Information Act request to Transport for Greater Manchester (TfGM) on 8th December 2014 finally received a response on 5th February 2015. See the ‘Bicycle crashes and Metrolink : A Freedom of Information Act request and response‘ post. Basically, there was a three-fold increase in both the number of incidents reported and the number of claims submitted for injuries and/or damages between 2013 and 2014.
Three months after the statement of concern to Manchester Cycle Forum, TfGM / Metrolink issued the following statement to the Manchester Cycle Forum on 10th March 2015:
“Following the submission to the Manchester Cycle Forum in December 2014, MPT has been working to revise the design. The revised design will be reviewed with MCC Highways and presented to interested members of the Cycle Forum at the next available opportunity. We hope to convene a specific meeting on this prior to the next full meeting of the Cycle Forum.”
Love Your Bike is concerned at the slow progress on this issue and also that many of the issues (and more besides) that we highlighted in December 2014, had already been documented in the Interim Safety Audit (dated September 2014) which we obtained via another Freedom of Information request to Transport for Greater Manchester.
Anecdotal conversations have illustrated that there have been a number of cases where people have crashed or been injured when cycling close to/across Metrolink tracks and that many of these incidents had not been reported because people tended to blame themselves for their lack of cycling experience or skill. Love Your Bike believes that many of these incidents may be caused by poor designs and if the design of Metrolink tracks, particularly at road intersections, puts people cycling at risk, we want to highlight this problem and work for improvements.
On 12th March, Love Your Bike launched a survey to collect experiences of people who have cycled alongside, close to or across Metrolink tram tracks in the past three years.
Please send the survey link to any of your friends, family or cycling organisations that may have experienced issues when cycling on/around Metrolink routes. Any information you provide will remain confidential (unless you tell us otherwise). We will publish a summary of the survey findings.
