Commercial Culprits

Here are the names of the companies whose drivers I regularly see breaking the law, driving the Airfield Road.

• J. Kilborn & Sons (Longstanton)
  In fairness this isn't a commercial vehicle, it's just one of the employees going to work every day
  He gets a listing here because he's a complete loony who swears at me and makes gestures with his hands when he sees me - no idea why
• O'Dell Heating & Plumbing (Longstanton)
• The Royal Mail
• DHL (Bar Hill)
• Durman Stearn Civil Engineering
• Majestic Plumbing & Heating (AD04GVY, White Van, overtook me on a blind bend at considerable speed)
• R J Tryer
• Cambs Lock & Safe (MN56VJK, aggressively overtook me on the blind "S" bend) 
• The Highways Agency (not working on the road, just driving through it to work)

NoGuidedBus.com now provides RSS feed

I had a brief email chat with "J", the figure behind http://www.noguidedbus.com and subsequently J. has implemented an RSS feed of the web site headlines. :-)

Excellent news for those of us who prefer to be prodded, rather than poll a web site for it's updates.

The feed URL is: http://www.noguidedbus.com/feed.xml

CGB Won't Start Carrying Buses Until Q2 2011!

The Cambridge News reports (amongst other things) that Cllr Sir Peter Brown has said that he thinks the Cambridge Guided Bus won't start carrying buses until the second quarter of 2011.

Over at Keep Pushing Those Pedals, Jamie has a really great posting on the CGB, as he rode a loop route from Cambridge to St. Ives and back.

It is of national disgrace that both our County Council and this building contractor have failed to work together well enough to build this thing even remotely close to on time and I'm certain the rest of the country will regard it as a total white elephant.

I confess my vested interest in the CGB is it's cycle path. I'm certain that it won't be tarmac-ed over until close to when the buses go live.

CycleStreets.net Free iPhone Navigation App Gets Reviewed

The CycleStreets.net iPhone App is free and has been reviewed by the Guardian.

A Bike Wouldn't Have Done This

A 16th Century stone arch at Scone Palace in Perthshire, Scotland has been accidentally driven into by a van and completely destroyed.

Before and After:

Scone is where, during the middle-ages, the Kings of Scotland were crowned down to Alexander III.

I don't mean to down on cars arbitrarily but this bloody wall pre-dated cars themselves by about half a millennium for Christs sake!

Clarification on the Poll

I received an email asking me to add a choice to the poll along the lines of:

Leave the road alone but properly enforce the vehicles exclusion

Well I meant for the first choice - "Nothing - it's fine the way it is" - to embody that.
However since voting has taken place, I can't clarify that now.
Please vote, if you haven't, Longstanton District Councillor Alex Riley has taken an informal poll of the residents of Longstanton and I'd love to rebut his poll with one of my own. :-D

Longstanton says to Oakington: Get Stuffed!

On September 14th, Longstanton District Councillor Alex Riley asked his email list of Longstanton residents to vote on whether to fully open the road between Oakington and Longstanton or to keep it closed to normal traffic.

He asked that the vote take the form of the recipients relying with one of two words: "open" and "closed".
He didn't give any real argument either way, no facts, no resources, he just asked for people to express their opinion.

Well a follow-up email came out yesterday with the results. I'll quote the email at the end of this article, but I feel the headlines are:

• Longstanton is a village of some 2000 odd residences
• His list has 280 addresses
• 142 people replied
  122 voting to open the road
  20 to close it

It was only in this email that he gave any real information about the road, namely he linked to the Oakington & Westwick Parish Council (O&WPC) open letter on the matter. Ironically it's that letter that states:

1. Oakington residents were polled by their local news letter in 2008 and overwhelmingly voted to close the road
2. Longstanton Parish Council (LCP) have told O&WPC that they will be very unlikely to ever support (financially or otherwise) doing anything to help close the road.

As I understand it, Cllr Riley is a former Longstanton Parish Councillor. I do not know if he was a Councillor at the time LPC communicated this message to O&WPC.

To me, the interesting point seems to be that the residents of Longstanton care so little for the well-being of the Oakington residents, their neighbours, that they're happy to break the law on a minute-by-minute basis, just to save a few minutes on their journey, all of this, against the overwhelming public opinion of the residents of Oakington against having their village remain a small speed-bump on a rat-run to / from Cambridge.

I can't help think there's a kind of NIMBYism here. You see, Longstanton has a by-pass. A shiny new no doubt multi-million pound by-pass that traffic from the villages to the West of Longstanton can use to get to the A14. Longstanton used to be a rat-run but isn't any more. But Oakington still is a rat-run, oh yes. But that doesn't matter, because Longstanton isn't and so I (says the Longstanton resident) don't care. Ya boo sucks to the residents of Oakington, I've got a by-pass and I'm all right!

Lastly I'll mention his second observation: namely that cyclists have "*vigorously* accosted" him and that cyclists complain about aggressive driving.

Cllr Riley: I am one of the cyclists in question and when I spoke to you on this matter I definitely feel I did not accost you. I did, however, beg you and beg you to help rescue me from the homicidal criminals that break the law every hour of every day in your constituency. Also, the driving is almost inconsequential in comparison to the violence of the scum-bags who get out of their cars and threaten me with death for having had the insane temerity to move rightwards on the road (to avoid a huge pot-hole) when they are (illegally) driving past me! I here-within accuse you of being an apologist for the violent. Shame on you.

As promised, here's the letter in full. Cllr Riley writes:

I was taken aback by the scale of response to my last email about the Airfield Road.  My village email list contains about 280 local residents and half of you have taken the trouble to respond.  The voting so far is:

Open the road: 122 votes

Close the road: 20 votes

This is only a straw poll, and not every person in the village was consulted.  But the conclusion is inevitable.  If you know others who might not yet have voted, by all means suggest that they do.  All it takes is the one word Open or Closed to be sent to myself.

I sifted out any who in error voted twice and I classed any who said “Yes” as wanting it open and those who said “No” as wanting it closed (there were actually 2 of each).

A number of you sent me reasoned arguments in favour of your position.  I haven’t replied to any of these, but I have read them all carefully.  Some made the point that the one word answer hardly sufficed.  I see what they mean, but the way our democracy works is via the sledgehammer approach of a simple vote one way or the other.

If you CTRL-click on the following, you will find quite a lot of interesting information:

http://www.oakingtonandwestwickparishcouncil.org.uk/archive/longstanton-road.html

From this it emerges that our own Parish Council undertook in late 2008 to distribute a questionnaire round the whole village.  I hope this will happen shortly.  I gather that the police have indicated that they do not intend to continue actively policing the road until the affected communities have been consulted.

I happen to live on St Michael’s and it was delightfully peaceful when the road was being resurfaced and there was no traffic at all.  But I see my responsibility as being to represent the views of the whole of the village.

I would like to list some of the points that have been made about this whole issue:

1.       Oakington residents (which probably means those living in Longstanton Road, Oakington) have historically been opposed to the road being open, whereas Longstanton residents have in general been more in favour.

2.       According to the police, the main complainants this time around were cyclists – and certainly I have been very “vigorously” accosted on this matter by a couple of cyclists.  They claim that drivers on the airfield drive aggressively so far as cyclists are concerned.  There is no excuse for aggressive driving but the fact that one is breaking the law just by being on the Airfield road might actually encourage recklessness.

3.       St Michael’s and Woodside contain a number of houses which are very close to the road and for them heavy and speeding traffic are a nuisance, a hazard, and even damaging to their properties.  One of the great ironies of the present restrictions is that fully-laden double-decker buses can quite legally use the airfield road.

4.       There is a lot of speeding takes place down St Michael’s / Woodside and this would potentially get much worse if the road were opened up to all traffic.  Some of you suggested traffic calming measures.  The kind of priority system we already have on entering the village via School Lane might help, but speed bumps are generally reckoned to cause much more damage to neighbouring properties than no speed bumps.  Maybe the tendency to speed would reduce if using the airfield road were not itself illegal.

5.       Several responders made the point that even if those in other parts of the village wish to use the road, those in Woodside and St Michael’s would be resolutely opposed.  Well, based on the poll results so far, that’s not the case.  There actually seems to be a slender majority of those living on these two roads in favour of the airfield road being opened.

6.       It would not solve the problem to close the road and to back this up with either a gate (to which all local farmers, taxi drivers and emergency services had keys) or rising bollards (ditto).  This would be very expensive (how would you power the bollards?) and regrettably very open to vandalism (e.g. gates welded shut) owing to its remote location.  Vandalism could have fatal consequences if an emergency vehicle were prevented from driving across.

7.       Last, but not least, I have always taken a fairly relaxed view about all this because when (no, not if) Northstowe actually happens, the plans are for the road to be totally closed because the main access road to Northstowe, a dual carriageway, will cut straight across the airfield road.  Pedestrian and cycle access will be maintained, but it is hard to see that a flyover across the dual carriageway, capable of taking all road traffic, could be afforded.

If anyone feels I have failed to make significant points, please let me know and I’ll make them another time.  In the mean time, please vote if you wish to and have not yet done so.

Regards

Alex

Twitter

So I've set up twitter to get fed my blogger posts.
My twitter ID (is that the right terminology?) is @cambcyclist.
My tweets are unprotected and I'll start twitpic-ing (?!?) soon.
A couple of weeks ago I bought a (very cheap) clip-on MicroSD camcorder.
I'll start uploading videos of my ride when I get the chance too.

The Oakington & Westwick Perspective

Back in November 2008 Oakington & Westwick Parish Council had something very interesting to say on the issue of the Airfield Road.

So here's my reading of this.

The residents of Oakington were petitioned by their local newsletter for their opinion. This was, in the opinion of the Parish Council, not done with the proper amount of explanation of the pros and cons. This notwithstanding the village residents appear to have overwhelmingly voted to close the road. It seems common knowledge and / or opinion that only the village shop and the pub object. That's not really a surprise. The businesses get passing trade, the residents get lots of traffic.

Here's an interesting thing: any changes to the road would almost certainly need the full cooperation and participation (read: funding) of Oakington and Westwick Parish Council (OWPC) with Longstanton Parish Council (LPC). LPC know full well that their residents so enjoy the access into Cambridge through this road that they have explicitly stated (according to the article linked about) that they are very unlikely to agree to fund or contribute to any measure that closes the road - even including any consultation about said.

With OWPC and LPC diametrically opposed in opinion, the status quo has persisted and always will.

We are all doomed. :-(

The Guided Bus Rail, Sheep & Concrete

This morning I was riding on the Cambridge Guided Bus rail, between Histon and Oakington and I met this fella on the wrong side of the fence.

I did wonder how I might discover who owned the field from which the sheep had come so I could contact them and let them know about the escape. :-)

The other thing I'd noticed before was that the concrete that stops vehicles from entering the Guided Bus road was missing in Histon on both sides of Station Road. Interesting.

An Open Letter to Alex Riley

Yesterday Alex Riley, District Councillor to and resident of Longstanton sent out an email asking the people of Longstanton to vote (with one single word, "open" or "closed") to indicate whether the Airfield Road should be physically closed to all traffic (including Cyclists I assume) or have the No Vehicles restriction entirely removed.

I am writing this open letter to Councillor Riley to explain why I think the answer isn't quite as simple as one word.

An open Airfield Road that isn't completely re-surfaced and doesn't have a cycle path will be astonishingly worse than a closed one.

As I understand it, the reason Cyclists would like the road the stay closed is because there are just so many pot-holes that it's impossible to ride a bike along it without moving about the road some.
The cars that drive illegally along the road usually do so at great speed and when they find a bike cycling around a pot hole they try and deliberately run them down, beeping their horns as they go, all at 60mph.
To get attacked for being a few feet "too far to the right" by a car being driven illegally on a No Vehicles road at hugely inappropriate speed is galling to say the least.

Plus, the road is part of Sustrans National Cycle Route 51, why should Cyclists give way to illegally driven cars on what is seen in some quarters as a wide Cycle path?

Personally I would only accept the road becoming unrestricted and open to all traffic if the speed limit were reduced to 40mph, the road were completely re-surfaced to remove all the pot-holes and for a cycle path to be painted in so that cars are explicitly reminded that they have a duty of care to cyclists.

This, and only this, kind of Airfield Road would then service the needs of all it's users, not just the short-cut taking, A14 avoiding, criminals that currently treat it as their own private race track.

Finally, although I applaud you for opening a discussion on this issue, you have done so without giving any background or explanation (balanced, of course) whatsoever about the pros and cons. You have, in effect, simply asked for a gut reaction. This isn't debate, it's an opinion poll. I would have preferred the former.

Yours,

-C.C.

I hope that this new discussion, very welcome though it is, takes into account more opinion that those who currently aggressively break the law.

FixMyStreet

If you ride along the Airfield Road and think it should be re-surfaced, why not register your opinion on FixMyStreet.

The report specific to the above is: http://www.fixmystreet.com/report/120562

I'm going to add some photos soon, but all votes would count, I'm sure.

The Safety Of Cycling

This is a very interesting read on the relative risks of cycling as compared to other road users including pedestrians.

The big points that stood out for me were:

1. Cycling being perceived as a high risk use of the road is a myth.
2. As cycling use increases (both en mass and by the individual), fatality rates decrease.
3. Point 2 for the crowd comes likely from a 'safety in numbers' thing.
4. For the individual, the more you cycle the better at it you are and the better at reducing your risk you become.
5. The best way to reduce the risk even further is to encourage more cycling, mostly through improving cycling infrastructure (like wider roads / less pinch points)
6. Other countries in the EU have drivers that respect cyclist quite a bit more than the UK drivers do (how embarrassing to be out-done on courtesy by the Europeans!)

One thing that always astonishes me about point 6 is that British car drivers completely fail to realise that on my bike I represent one less car in front of them, one less ingredient in a traffic jam, a few less seconds between them and their destination and that collectively we cyclist are a bloody good thing for the length and ease of their journey.

However, despite that we're treated like the enemy. Shocking.

Nice Photo

Here's a nice shot of three vehicles all violating the No Vehicles sign at the Oakington entrance to the Airfield Road. (It comes via Cyclestreets)

I did once challenge a commercial vehicle driver if he'd seen the sign and his response was that he had and was using the road as access to Longstanton. :-D I did laugh. I pointed out that that did not count as access to which all I got was shoulder shrugging.

I'm going to make a rogues gallery of companies that have staff breaking the law with commercial vehicles. Since I don't need the assistance of either the Police or the DVLA to get their attention.

Get Cycling Sorted

I just submitted this to www.cyclingsorted.com.

Marking a spot on the Airfield Road I wrote:

"This is the No Vehicles road in between Oakington and Longstanton.
It is locally referred to as "The Airfield" road.
I ride along this road twice a weekday.
Traffic is legally and explicitly excluded, except for taxis & mopeds & tractors going to the farm.
However 1000 cars a day use it as a rat run.
(I'm assuming) Since cars are explicitly excluded, it isn't maintained and it is utterly covered in pot holes.
Because it's covered in pot holes I have to cycle quite a distance from the 1m zone that bikes usually occupy and I also have to move about the road a bit.
This should be fine if there were no cars, but in the 3 minutes I take to cross this 1 mile stretch of road I'll usually be passed by 20 cars (10 in each direction) - many of them exceeding the 60 mph National Speed Limit in place, some doing so overtaking both me and another car that's overtaking me at the same time.
I have been repeatedly beeped at, threatened with violence and actually rammed off the road once by criminal and completely insane car drivers who think I'm in the wrong for riding around a pot hole.

Please, please, please get this road re-surfaced and have a non-exclusive cycle lane painted in."

and was given reference 24936.