The challenges of applying cycling design guidance

Abstract

Cycle infrastructure provides a means for everyday travel by a mode which is efficient, benign to the environment and confers health benefits on the user. The UK Department for Transport has a funding stream dedicated to providing grants to English highway authorities to construct cycle infrastructure in accordance with guidance in Local Transport Note 1/20 Cycle Infrastructure Design. The guidance was published in 2020 and is beginning to be used widely. This paper investigates the challenges of applying the guidance. Thirteen semi-structured interviews were undertaken with politicians, managers, engineers, and cycle users. While there is ambition to deliver appropriate schemes, and there is an inspectorate, Active Travel England, to assist in ensuring the schemes comply with the guidance, there are constraints revealed by the participants. These include the limitations of short-term and medium scale funding preventing larger scale outcomes, lack of understanding of the extent to which a designer can adopt relaxations from the guidance, and skills shortages. It is encouraging to find that participants were aware of the fundamental need to separate cycle traffic both from motor traffic, and from pedestrians.