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There are some who would like to see a cycle lane painted in the gutter of the A48 (and other main routes). However, I would not let my child (or want to see any child) use them, with vehicles speeding past at 60, 70, 80 mph just centimetres away! Cheap is not good, and often unusable. It is time that in the UK we did things well - cheap is often a waste of time and money! What should happen is that the road is narrowed, and the saved space (on one side) used to provide a segregated, two-way cycle path that *everyone*considers safe and attractive to use. Painted hard-shoulders are not acceptable or attractive to most, provide limited safety, and thus the most expensive form of cycling infrastructure. I also do not agree that it is just about educating the cyclist (perhaps 10 years old - or with a learning disability), and/or motorists. I strongly believe that we need to educate the politicians and the engineers - and I also believe that engineers should not be designing our streets - in the early days of the internet, IT engineers built websites, with pointless intro. pages that showed off their programming skills, but were useless and time consuming for users. Now it is marketeers who "design" websites, with IT engineers in support. We need a shift in responsibility for the design of our streets/roads - to a new profession and/or perhaps back to local communities? Ian On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 9:36 AM, Richard Mann < [log in to unmask]> wrote: > The A48 is the old east-west road in South Wales; now replaced by the > M4. It's probably grossly over-engineered for the traffic that ought > to be on it. Painting a hard shoulder/cycle lane and sweeping it > mechanically should be easy/cheap enough. > > The trick to prioritising is to keep your interventions cheap, and to > put them in a framework that people understand and agree to: the > framework is probably missing - the highway authority probably still > believes in motoring freedom, where possible. > > As Joe says, the solutions are there - narrowing the road, imposing a > speed limit, controlling it with cameras. What's lacking is the will. > > I think the route to cracking car culture is to build an alternative > culture in towns. The numbers eventually will shift the balance. >