So I was riding home in the bitter evening coldness from this months excellent Street Talks yesterday and as I was cruising (stop/starting at every sideroad) along the A316 bi-directional bikeway this idea lept into my head.

The UK hierarchy of provision for cycle infrastructure is well known within cycle advocacy circles, it outlines the type of provision that should be put in place based on a simple list of “do this, if you can’t then do this” etc. It goes something like this:

• Inconvenience the main electorate (aka car drivers and businesses deliveries) by slowing traffic speeds. No? Can’t do that, then what about…
• Spend all of the tax payers hard earned cash on building specific separate cycling infrastructure. Political suicide? Then…
• Annoy both pedestrians and cyclists by cheaply sticking in some shared use signs.

What this means is that since the beginning of the century, up and down the country, councils have been putting in miles and miles of shared use pavement, spending money on small blue signs while not really solving the problem and introducing many more.

The profile of a typical road looks something like this:

You have a pavement, followed by a gutter, followed by the gentle camber of the road. So you see the problem right? Where does the cyclist go? Oh yes, either on the pavement scaring old ladies and putting the wind up Daily Mail readers, or in the gutter along with the death holes they call drain covers.

So here’s the idea.

If we’re going to put cyclists somewhere between the pedestrians and the gutter, why not build out the gutter into a curb to hide the drain opening and put a cycle track along the edge of the pavement (so the drain entrance is built into the curb and open to both the road and the bikeway), like this:

Now I’m no road engineer, so I’m making a whole load of assumptions here, but if you were to ask me, this should be pretty easy to implement.

The hard thing, I would imagine, about adding a separate bikeway is the moving of the drainage around on the existing road. Curbing is easy to reposition, but moving all that stuff that’s underground is gonna cost a pretty penny, so if we can leave it where it already is, all the better.

Now the problem has of course raised it’s head, what about the pedestrians? We can’t just steal space from them, can we? Well obviously this solution isn’t for every piece of road or existing shared use pavement, but if we’re already expecting pedestrians to share with bikes, why not, if there’s room, give up some pavement space for a bikeway that can share the existing roadway drainage? Many of these streets have street furniture or trees using the curbside space, so pavement space wouldn’t be hugely impacted anyway.

Food for thought maybe.