Decided to take a slightly different route on yesterday’s commute and thought I’d do a quiet dead end road that goes into a cycle path.

Here’s the start in Streetview

And here’s the other end

Kwality bit of design there……… 🙄

I’d have probably bounced down the stairs had I have been on a MTB. However I was on a £3K road bike and whilst the ramp is about a foot wide it was steeper than it looks.

How much effort would it have taken to have built a wider, more shallow ramp?

Looks perfect for wheelchair users. 😯

Either ride up the ramp or get off, wheel your bike up the ramp as you walk up the steps, that’s what it’s there for

How much effort would it have taken to

mince down the steps with your “£3K road bike” on your shoulder? 🙄

Edit: Perhaps you have some of those roadie shoes that make you walk like a duck? I can see THAT would be difficult…

Maybe someone asked them to put in some trail features…

Sorry, I forgot to mention that I did ride down the ramp. No Look cleated road shoe mincing was required, and neither did I crash :lol:.

However my point was the design isn’t exactly bike friendly. The steps empty out on to a fast DC junction and less confident cyclists might be put off by such things.

As long as cars have priority, doesn’t matter what cyclists have to put up with eh?

Edit: Perhaps you have some of those roadie shoes that make you walk like a duck? I can see THAT would be difficult…

If you’re wearing roadie shoes you have no business going anywhere near a cycle path/route in the first place. The ones round my way would be suicide on skinny tyres!

Sorry, I forgot to mention that I did ride down the ramp. No Look cleated road shoe mincing was required, and neither did I crash :lol:.

The transpennine trail in Liverpool has a few sections like that. The steps are really steep and there’s this 4 inch wide smooth section next to them. Luckily we’re cycling gods, eh? 😉

Mr Woppit

Sorry, that’s too subtle for me. Care to explain?

We all know many cycle paths are a bureaucrats box ticking exercise and some of the painted paths in Crawley are truly sh1t.

While we’re on the subject have we had this one?:

(I think I can hear a few foreheads being slapped)

Brilliant. One for http://homepage.ntlworld.com/pete.meg/wcc/facility-of-the-month/ .

Plop

That’s brilliant in it’s stupidity 😆

Who honestly thought putting that type of sign in that location was anything other than a world class face palm fail?

We all know many cycle paths are a bureaucrats box ticking exercise ……

Yup, precisely. So presumably the bike unfriendly end to your “cycle path” came as no surprise to you ?

For a start, it’s not a ‘cycle path’, it’s a ‘cycle route’, using lightly trafficked roads, and, as such, uses whatever facilities are already in position. I can clearly see the Sustrans route sign, but there’s a big difference between a shared-use pedestrian/cycle path, and a route using regular roads which have light traffic, which may well involve using steps like these.
I’m sure locals have been negotiating these steps for years with prams and pushchairs for years, without issue, so I expect local cyclists have been too.
I just don’t see a problem.

In the first Streetview link, have you tried spinning around – how many chairs?

That’s a lot of chairs!

On hot days they’re all full of people watching cyclists trying to ride down the steps 😉

I think they’re plantpots? That’s a florists shop…

For a start, it’s not a ‘cycle path’, it’s a ‘cycle route’, using lightly trafficked roads, and, as such, uses whatever facilities are already in position.

Agree, plenty round here like that. Before the days of ‘sustrans standard’ paths. Perfect facilities where there is a significant height difference.

Surely that fact that it ends at a dual carriageway strengthens the case of retaining the steps…. Less chance of someone overshooting into/over the railings and into the road.

And on the how easy would it be to….. In order to provide a shallower ramp you’d need to regrade the whole embankment to ensure a maximum grade of 1in2 ( safe angle of repose). Also to achieve a shallower ramp you’d have to move the top of the ramp backwards….. Very quickly the cost increases and you get no cycle path at all rather than a compromised but reasonably sensible one…

Oh and it’s not an existing ramp it’s the edge of the steps retaining the bank….