Presentation: Designing for safe cycling and the Manchester Metrolink network.
On Wednesday 10th June, Love Your Bike were invited to speak at the “Cycling and Public Transport – Designing for safety and convenience” event organised by the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport in the UK (CILT) and Transport for Greater Manchester.
The event was attended by 100+ professionals from the fields of transport, logistics, planning, traffic control and local government.
The publicity for event outlined that “the challenges around designing public transport and cycling infrastructure in constrained urban environments are particularly acute. This event will enable participants to hear from experts about best practice tools, techniques and stakeholder engagement, and to discuss some of the practicalities and potential pitfalls of delivering high quality cycling environments in an integrated way with public transport provision.” and also that “there is still much to learn and share in terms of how to design effective cycle infrastructure in different urban settings to deliver a safer and more attractive environment for cyclists.”
The Love Your Bike presentation highlighted how the design of the on-road running Metrolink tram tracks particularly on the new routes to Ashton and Manchester Airport have introduced hazards for people cycling along these routes and in many locations have also made it near to impossible to use the National Standards road positioning that many people may well have been shown to use by the TfGM cycle training instructors!
The photo (left) illustrates the road position that National Standard Cycle Instructors would advise people to adopt when cycling past this type of junction or pinch point. The right hand photo shows how the tram line makes such a manouevre very difficult to achieve.
The Love Your Bike presentation also provided some initial results from the Metrolink and Cycling survey which was created to collect experiences of people who have cycled alongside, close to or across Metrolink tram tracks in the past three years.
Love Your Bike is concerned that there have been a number of incidences where cyclists have crashed or been injured when cycling close to/across Metrolink tracks. Our anecdotal evidence is that many of these incidents have not been reported – although a Freedom of Information Act reply from Transport for Greater Manchester has shown a threefold increase in reported cases between 2013 and 2014.
A PDF version of the Love Your Bike presentation (PDF) is available. See: Love Your Bike presentation to CILT event 10th June 2015 – final
We will be writing the report of the survey findings over the next few weeks and would welcome anyone who has not yet completed the survey to share their experiences of cycling close to/across Metrolink tracks.
