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I do get annoyed sometimes. Yes, just sometimes. Other times, I’m pleasantly surprised.

Take the other day. I was at a Milton Road workshop discussing the detailed design decisions on what the City Deal wants to do to Milton Road. And my annoyance? The “iterative” approach to the workshops appears to be just asking the same questions again and again and getting the same answers but not changing the inputs at all between the workshops. Now some of this is understandable. It takes some time to redesign a junction, but this updated design doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to represent the ideas from the room. I know, surprisingly, I designed one of the junctions that was used as input.

See, back in the long lost years of, ok, last year, there was the initial consultation on Bus Priority for Milton Road that had a terrible design for the Elizabeth Way roundabout. It placed people cycling in the way of cars turning left. This would have been a recipe for slowing down car traffic and removing a few people from cycling because they would have been run over by motorised vehicles. This was not the way to do things, so in a day, I had not only redesigned the junction but had made it safer. Oh, and my junction could move significantly more cars than their junction had. But the important thing here was that word “day”. The lengthy consultation process has so far resulted in only an approximate “current design”.

Frankly, it doesn’t take long to draw a new junction. It takes longer to draw a whole scheme, but when people spend hours of their free time to discuss issues and provide feedback on junction designs, I think it would be prudent to at least draw a few alternatives at the next workshop, or even the one after that.

There is one other thing that really annoys me. People talking about confident cyclists, and non-confident cyclists. Why are people who are riding cycles any different from people walking, or people driving? We don’t have “non-confident motor vehicle roads”, we just have roads. We don’t have separate infrastructure for runners and people walking very slowly. Yet, as soon as somebody gets on a cycle, they have to be classified into a confident or non-confident grouping.

To me there is only one type of person who cycles. Somebody who wants to get from A to B. Some will go faster, some will go slower. Some will wiggle around a bit more, some will be arrow-straight. Some will be alone, some will be with friends, some will be with their whole family. And if we really want to create space on the roads, we need to allow as many people as possible to ride a cycle, so that the buses are not held up in traffic. This means designing for everybody who could be cycling and not for the few who already do.

Currently, about one in three people cycle to work in Cambridge. What if we doubled that? What if we got that figure to two in three people? How many of them are confident or non-confident? Can we just remove these words from the lexicon and just have people who currently cycle and people who could be attracted to cycle?