DfT considering banning “floating bus stops”??

From grauniad:

https://www.theguardian.com/news/article/2024/may/10/uk-floating-bus-stops-cycle-lanes

I mean really?  Surely better to prosecute a couple of awful designs under CDM/H&S than throw the be y out with the bathwater?

Having dealt with one of the largest highways design consultants (Aecom) on multiple schemes for multiple authorities, they really don’t understand how to design for non motorised users.

Plus, there are tactile paving and surface colour guidance for these sorts of situations. They’re just rarely followed as they are only “guidance” and most highways stuff is in “standards”.

Or am.i overacting to a dying government casting about for anything to gain a few votes?

Tombe fair, many of them are awfully designed, but so is 99% of all cycling infrastructure so why focus on this?  Oh.. the votes, right…

I suspect its another case of Irritating Dick Syndrome otherwise known as the quiet itch.

I hate some or most of those things.  As the article says there are lots around London.  I cycle a road near Brixton called Loughborough Road as part of my commute (in to DfT funnily).  It was always fine to my mind,  wide,  straight,  traffic at a sensible speed able to pass easily.  Then a year or two back they started some works which I realised was going to be a segregated cycle lane both sides/directions.   Euck.  It now has awful and narrow floating bus stops with bus passengers disembarking almost into the cycle lane (and some horrible chicane type things at a few pedestrian crossings…. and the friendly school crossing man that I have said hello to for 15 years has gone)

Horribly designed infrastructure…. just horrible.

I think DfT would like to ban cyclists and pedestrians too.

Yeah, I don’t really like then either

Oh I’m not a fan of them in general, and have for decades been firmly of the belief that cycles are vehicles, and should be on the road.  But having kids that want to cycle to school, and a choice of very busy main road with too narrow cycle lanes, or a tortuous route through parks and back streets that’s twice as far, I’ve come to the conclusion that we need to build toads for people (on bikes, on foot, and lastly in Cars) and segregated cycle infrastructure does thet.

It’s just mostly poorly conceived, designed, constructed, lit and maintained…..

How we improve that I don’t know, and I’m aware that segregating cyclists leads to assumptions that cyclists should use it, and increases risks to those who choose not to.  Don’t have a solution tonight either!!

I mean really?  Surely better to prosecute a couple of awful designs under CDM/H&S than throw the be y out with the bathwater?

which laws do you think have been broken?  Is a “ban” not just formalising the guidance you are complaining is ignored?

Oh.. the votes, right…

I am not sure how many votes they would get. Perceived votes maybe.

It is tricky since a lot of them are truly crap but completely banning is equally crap. Maybe look around the country to find variants that work (zebra crossing perhaps?) . Once they find something which works get it enforced as a standard.

There are some amazingly half arsed attempts where someone has clearly been struggling how to handle a cycle path and a bus lane and decided to take a break for an hour or two. Then come back from the pub ten hours and even more pints later and in a fit of inspiration “solved” the problem.

Not really sure what the agenda is on this one, doesn’t quite fit with War on Drivers bullshit but it does make it harder to build safe cycling infra.

As the Ranty Highwayman has pointed out at length on SoMe, there is nothing wrong with floating bus stops when properly designed, and if there was a better solution someone else eg the Dutch or the Danes would’ve come up with it. They haven’t.

They are shit – some near me.  Just stupid and dangerous and unneeded.  Edinburgh bus drivers are well trained with regard to cyclists and don’t cause issues with cycleists.  Training bus drivers is the answer.  There are other better answers

There’s some just installed near me and while most of it is great I’ll get in line with others complaining about floating bu stops, passengers getting off buses directly into the path of oncoming cyclists, or trying to weave through and past passengers waiting for a bus is a bit stressy to say the least. Slow down and lots of smiles and excuses me has seen me through, but it does seem to be the case that: Cars, first thought in every situation, peds and cyclists a distant second with barely thought through half cocked-solutions.

Re: busses and cycles mixing.

I agree, bus drivers are on the whole well trained, patient and amenable. The issue is perception of danger, rather than the danger itself. Hence the drive for cyclist segregation.

Have I  just done a 180 on myself and made an argument for a public education campaign rather than (very expensive)! infrastructure?

I’m not sure of the solution, but banning a proven concept that has just been poorly designed and implemented, with inadequate design standards.

It’s more performative culture war shite from our useless Transport Secretary. Impressively, he’s managing to be worse than Failing Grayling.

There’s nothing wrong with floating bus stops – in fact it’s the only solution unless you want to send cyclists out onto the carriageway or have buses pulling in on them.

However this charity for the blind (not RNIB, it’s a more militant version) have got a bee in their bonnet about it, it’s been picked up by RW culture war shit stirrers like “social environmental justice” (basically just an anti-cycling, anti-LTN, anti-ULEZ group of crackpots) and magnified and it fits in with the Government’s “end the war on drivers” narrative.

It won’t happen – partly because there’s not enough parliamentary time to get it through and to rewrite all the current design standards, partly because there’s no actual issue with the concept anyway. I don’t doubt that there’s some which are badly implemented but that’s straightforward to fix it required at specific locations.

Have I just done a 180 on myself and made an argument for a public education campaign rather than (very expensive)! infrastructure?

Public education campaigns are a waste of time, effort and money. For decades we’ve had stuff like “share with care”, “respect other road users”, “give space to cyclists” and none of it works. If anything in these days of social media, it creates a storm of anti-cycling replies and the original message gets lost in the noise. The only thing that works to make cycling safer is infrastructure – that can be safe segregated cycle lanes or stuff like School Streets, LTNs etc which remove a lot of the traffic in the first place.

I live in Manchester and until I retired I used to commute daily along Oxford Road so have go quite a lot of experience of this sort of infastructure. The floating bus stops where at less busy stops work well as they aren’t flooded with twenty of thirty people where the bus stop and tend not to have bus shelters. In busy places where they have built bus shelters the cyclists view is partly obscured and you find large numbers of people filling the bike lane.

Add to this that a certain proportion of people riding bikes and walking are complete dicks and you have problems. One of these bike lanes was the only place I have been acccused of being Jesus as an elderly person wandering across the bike lane. (I did stop long before I got near her).

The floating bus stop with a zebra crossing is also a problem as lots of bike users completely ignore the crossing.

Other problems are that in Rusholme that where they have built bays to park cars the footpaths are quite narrow in busy areas, resulting in pedestrians ending up in the bike lane. It’s the same near the university where narrow pavements and large numbers of people cause some issues.

The problem is that for councils and groups like Cycling UK building bike lanes is great because you a something tangible to show what you have acheived. The rest of us have to live with the results.

I actually went to the consulataion about the bike lanes and basically unless you thought they were wonderful your concerns were ignored.

Given that roads we cycle on are unlikley to all have bike lanes, I would like drivers to be better trained, current highway code violations like close passes, speeding and reckless driving enforced and be punished.

Maybe we could also try banning cars from overtaking bikes where the road is less then 4m wide? Most newer 4x4s are more than 2 meters wide, allow 1.5meters for the bike, space for the bike and rider and clearance from the edges of the road and safe overtakes are unlikely.

I getting sick of entittled car drivers putting me in danger to save secounds on their journey.

The problem is crap, half arsed design, not infra itself – the Dutch and the Danes don’t seem to struggle with this.

A big difficulty is that without safe infra, cycling commuters are disproportionately young (bloody minded) men, and I think it’s fair to say that young men are a group with a high ‘behaving like a dick’ factor. If we want more diversity and more numbers switching out of cars (with all the health, air quality, economic and bus benefits fewer cars bring), we have to build safe infra; banning floating buses stops (which when well designed are the best solution) is an anti-cycling measure, as building adequate cycle lanes on bus routes without them is impossible.

As London and Paris demonstrate, if you build it, they will come – both cities have seen huge increases in cycling for transport as a result of building safe infra. Problem in most British towns and cities is a lack of political will for something that is largely popular, and a lack of joined up design – really what most places need is one or two spine routes connecting key points that are then built out from, rather than a mile here or a mile there that often peters out at major junctions just when you need it most.

In any case, it’s a basic human factors principle that safe design is better than enforcement of behaviour, and Mark ‘SoS for Drivers’ Harper’s DfT has put out a consultation (which I think closes today) which would make camera enforcement of crap driving harder, so that isn’t happening either.

As I’ve said before, if you care about this stuff, please get involved, however peripherally in your local active travel group, whether that’s LCC, Walk Ride GM or whoever.

/rant

@ratherbeintobago, spot on. I think bats what I’m trying to get to. Thanks for putting it so succinctly.

Not a rant, simply a clearly reasoned explanation!

I feed in to local consults on cycling Infrastructure through the CTC, but without that link I wouldn’t be able to be aware of the tosh that gets proposed!

More often than not, it’s a traffic enhancement with a poor cycle lane alongside that on reality serves no-one.

Proportionality…

This one Range Rover driver injured more people at UK bus stops, more severely, in one go, than all cycling incidents at floating bus stops over 3 years.
A competent Transport Secretary would focus on these dangerous machines.https://t.co/MFIWF5TxdF

— Oxfordshire Cycling Network (@OxonCyclingNet) May 11, 2024

I can’t help feeling the focus on ‘dangerous cycling’ is a distraction from lack of efforts to address the actual problem?

Haha! Dame Sarah Storey has a role as a non executive director at DfT.

She’s also the Greater Manchester walking & cycling commissioner

You willnever convince me these thi gs should not be banned.  I have sen and used much better layouts.  They create a danger that did not exist..  i hop onto the road rather than use them

I respect your view on a lot of things, but on this one you’re wrong.

You cannot build adequate segregated cycle lanes without floating bus stops and banning floating bus stops effectively bans cycle lanes; the biggest barrier to people ditching the car for a bike is that they don’t feel safe. If there’s no floating bus stop, then cyclists are forced into traffic at bus stops, which is bad enough for those of us (the majority on here, I assume) who are confident cyclists.

Don’t forget that the test of infra is whether it’s safe for an unaccompanied 12yo, and above, if there was a better design someone else would have already come up with it; floating bus stops are widely used in the Netherlands and Denmark. The detail matters, however, and there’s a big difference between a properly designed one, and one some uninterested highways dept tossed off.

For me it’s the bus passengers not understanding that there’s a cycle lane between them and the bus. I guess once everyone’s used to it, it’ll calm down – let’s hope so.

It has been like this for years Manchester and pedestrians don’t get much better. Many have their eyes on phone screens and some appear to  be bewildered.

There are ways of improving them  barriers could be installed on busy stops to make people exit in a predictable place with good sight lines.

They also seem to work better when they are larger.

The great new cycle lanes in Chorlton in Manchester are used as a lorry unloading area and have special bike only traffic lights which make the cycle lane slower than  the road.

I think it’s time that people who design road schemes cycled to work.

then cyclists are forced into traffic at bus stops, which is bad enough for those of us (the majority on here, I assume) who are confident cyclists.

I have seen and used plenty of better designs.  Its also not in my experience the default in the low countries.

Best is a bus stop pull in 1.5 busses wide so the cyclist does not have to pullout into traffic at all.

Floating bus stops are an inherently dangerous thing

The thing is that GM has agreed standards… that the councils which agreed them ignore.

All councils in GM have approved the Streets for All design guide

This is what they've agreed to on our major radial and orbital bus routes

We're fresh out of elections showing an overwhelming mandate for active travel

CRSTS is not just for buses @AndyBurnhamGM @bevcraig79 pic.twitter.com/oGCe5RYkxI

— Walk Ride GM (@WalkRideGM) May 10, 2024

@tjagain Having buses cross the cycle lane is not safer than a floating bus stop – remember there’s an issue of perception too, and the people at whom cycle lanes are aimed are likely to be put off by having large vehicles crossing.

Best is a bus stop pull in 1.5 busses wide so the cyclist does not have to pullout into traffic at all.

While I understand that position, and used to be a proponent of that myself. The problem is that busses then have to cross the path of cyclists, and in heaven, slow traffic can lead to cyclists being cut up.  Or ot least the perception of that risk, which prevents cycling for transport being seen by the masses a viable option.

Things like segregated cycleways are not built for those of us who cycle despite the conditions. Its for people who don’t cycle because of the conditions. 

By building infrastructure a 12 year old can use, in can ingrain a habit for a Lifetime, and could change the world…

And don’t get me started on the “national cycling network” and what a.wasted opportunity that was, and how it set utility cycling back 25 years.

@keithb Have you read Laura Laker’s book on the NCN? It’s really good.

Floating bus stops are an inherently dangerous thing

Dangerous for who? Cyclists? Drivers? Pedestrians?

Its also not in my experience the default in the low countries.

It’s used extensively there but they also have a far better integrated system that in many cases simply removes the conflict altogether, it doesn’t just go “ooh what now?” at every junction, bus stop and set of lights…

You cannot build a safe cycle route on a main road without using FBS – otherwise you’re actively creating conflict between buses and cyclists.
Passing the cycle lane around the back is the only (safe, convenient) answer. It helps if the lame is wide (for good visibility) and there are designated crossing points clearly marked with tactile paving.

Plus everything that @keithb says a couple of posts up ^^ ✅

@keithb Have you read Laura Laker’s book on the NCN? It’s really good.

No I’ve not seen that.  My experience of dealing with sustrans routes personally, and with the organisation professionally is that they don’t know what they’re doing, or what their user base wants/needs. If the focussed on specific traffic free continuous routes for leisure users, that would be fine. But their insistence that all new or upgraded paths be tarmac is both environmentally insensitive and unmaintainable by the landowners.  Needless to say it doesn’t encourage me to go looking for books about them!

@keithb :

https://singletrackworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/book-review-potholes-and-pavements/

TJ, have a read of this – from a well known and well respected Highways planner

I'm expecting some noise around floating bus stops again today, and rather than get into endless debates again, here's my view that hasn't changed much since I wrote this in 2021.https://t.co/d2uRxvFLgp

— The Ranty Highwayman (@RantyHighwayman) December 6, 2023

Best is a bus stop pull in 1.5 busses wide so the cyclist does not have to pullout into traffic at all.

Pulling in and out is a manoeuvre of a great big unwieldy bus its literally the most dangerous situation you can engineer in. I am genuinely quite surprised you have taken that blanket stance.

I very much doubt they’ll get banned. Updating standards and guidance might be necessary to avoid implementing them poorly, but banning would be a backwards step. And there’s no bus operators in my area at least that are up in arms about the risk to “their” passengers.

I’d much rather focus on enforcement of parking in cycle and bus lanes, and tackling the endemic pavement parking problem which pushes pedestrians in to the highway. Much more of a risk.

From Peter Walker:

An add: a newly-arrived DfT response says that in London, floating bus stops are a matter for TfL, and doesn’t mention the idea of overruling them. So maybe it will end up as nothing anyway.

— Peter Walker (@peterwalker99) May 10, 2024

I don’t know why it’s quoted two tweets there, it’s the second one that’s relevant. I doubt very much anything is going to happen this side of the GE if ever, but as always with this government it’s about persuading the base they’re doing something without actually achieving anything.

As’s been said, literally nothing they announce now is going to happen, we’re in the tail end of parliament and it’s just too late for the changes to happen, it’s like me declaring I’m going to walk to London and be there tomorrow. I <could> have walked to London by tomorrow, but they had to start in about 2022.

But that aside, I have no idea if this is an infrastructure thing or a behaviour thing because the two are so intertwined. We are absolutely used to terrible cycling infrastructure and car-focused towns and cities in this country, we’ve got the coping strategies in place, we’ve had to get really good at surviving on the leftovers of the car. What we are completely unused to, is good infrastructure done well that suits actual people, it completely mystifies us.

And I don’t think we can just say “oh well” and write it off and say we have to continue to be terrible at this forever and repeat all the mistakes that have lead us to being this institutionalised and dysfunctional, but at the same time, it’s not easy to change and maybe just doing the right thing isn’t going to work either, maybe it needs more work, more education, more awareness, more handholding.

(I could easily step out into a mid-pavement cyclepath or from a floating bus stop, despite having commuted by bike for years, and being bike-aware and able bodied and all that. And I bloody wouldn’t ride through a lot of them, that’s a fact, I stay out in the road with the threats I’ve been mastering for 30 years)

Our review found that just 4 collisions took place at bus-stops between cyclists and pedestrians from 2020-22 – none on the crossing.

For context, over 11,400 pedestrians and 15,000 cyclists were injured in collisions with motor vehicles in the same period.

— Will Norman (@willnorman) May 15, 2024

It doesn’t look like there’s any great danger to be removed by banning floating bus stops.

If crossing a cycle lane to get to a bus stop is an insurmountable danger, I do wonder how people ever catch a bus on the other side of a road.

Imagine if we expended this much effort on other aspects of road safety, like, say, the threat that cars pose to people waiting at bus stops. The Range Rover incident quoted above is not an isolated one off.

Someone for TfGM was being interviewed about this on the radio this morning. He pointed out that no-one is doing anything about bigger dangers, e.g. pavement parking, and as a ban on floating bus stops is effectively a ban on segregated cycle lanes, this means people will continue to ride their bikes on the pavement, which is a bigger danger to pedestrians.

Someone for TfGM was being interviewed about this on the radio this morning.

Yeah, Manchester Evening News picked up on the London thing and immediately ran out to find some local blind guy who railed against the floating bus stops along Oxford Road and also the new CYCLOPS junctions and he was quoted saying he now couldn’t go out at all, couldn’t catch a bus and so on.

Preformative nonsense and sadly no-one at the paper thought to ask how the hell he’d managed crossing roads all these years but they do love a good bit of anti-cycling. So TfGM are now forced into the same sort of damage limitation that TfL have had to do.

Except for the Tour of Britain, they loved posting about that. Pros good, normal cycling bad.