Leeds Road - Curiouser and Curiouser

If your new to this campaign. This one is about North Yorkshire County Council's Highways department refusing to make sufficient provision for cyclists at the Leeds Road junction which is being updated as I write. This despite it would appear many local politicians and a few people who really know what they are talking about thinking they should. This is your local government doing the wrong thing for the wrong reasons, despite David Cameron saying they should do the opposite.

I have written about the background to all this here and here.

Sustrans got in touch today. They had shown Tim Coyne at NYCC's response to our concerns about the Leeds Road junction to somebody who works for Sustrans. Anyway let me quote from the email.

...is our Sustrans Transport Engineering Manager and his opinion should hold some weight due to his experience. He is a Chartered Engineer providing support on the traffic and highways aspects of Sustrans’ projects, including developing skills within both Sustrans and external organisations through professional training, direct support and Sustrans website. Over the past 16 years he has gained extensive experience of infrastructure design for cyclists and pedestrians in the UK and abroad and is regarded as one of the leading experts in this field. From 2005 to 2011 he coordinated a team of expert consultants providing technical support to local authorities on behalf of Cycling England, in particular the Cycling City and Towns programme for which he was also on the selection Panel and Programme Board. He has worked in the NGO, public and private sectors

Here is what Sustran's (rather well qualified) it would appear Engineer had to say. Remember NYCC's argument is that the junction is not wide enough for Advanced Stop Lanes, these give bike riders a head start at traffic lights.

1m is typically the dynamic width of a cyclist so it is reasonable to assume that cyclists would have difficulty getting through a narrower gap. However, even on approaches with very narrow lanes I am of the opinion that there are still benefits in having an ASL box as experience shows that cyclists still manage to get to the front of the queue and the ASL gives them a legal space to wait. Cars are appreciably narrower than lorries so where just light vehicles are queuing there will be more space to get through and on multilane approaches if traffic is queuing in only one lane then the cyclist can use the other lane to reach the ASL.

So we are left with one engineer who claims this can't be done and one engineer who has been making junctions better for cyclists for 16 years saying ASL's are a good idea. They appear to disagree about where we should be going. So the saga continues.

Update 19/12/2013  See Malcolm Margolis's comment below, but basically we could use your help. Here is what we need, Malcolm puts it better than I can:

...we say that's unacceptable and are asking people to write to their local councillor (preferably county as county run highways) and/or Tim Coyne at tim.coyne@northyorks.gov.uk Malcolm Margolis, Harrogate Cycle Action

Please email Tim or your councillor, remember they work for you. Say you want Advanced Stop Lanes on all four sides of the junction. We can stop this poor policy, if enough of use show we care. This should be making a splash in the Advertiser next week, victory by christmas would be good for Harrogate not just its bike riders.