"wafflycat" <w*a*ff€y€cat*@€btco*nn€ect.com>
Quoted message said:[...] IMO, Sustrans promotes and
endorses, by allowing its name to be used, sub-standard cycle farcilities,
which promote the erroneous idea that what was a footpath yesterday is
somehow an entirely suitable 'facility' by the simple application of an
outline bike in white pain to the surface of the footpath.
I acknowledge that my experience of this is different to yours. No more than
a few metres of the NCN route 1 between Saddlebow and West Newton is simply
paint on a footpath AFAICT. Sometimes they reopen a closed road, sometimes
they rebuilt a path as a wider track and sometimes it's a new build.
Some of the local routes linking to it are just paint on footpath and look
very poor relatives. They're useful for people who aren't good with cars,
but that's a poor substitute for the training which would give them confidence.
Yet I'm told a great feature of CTC is the training... seems absent here.
[...]
Quoted message said:It also makes life difficult for non-local cyclists as the signage of 'cycle
routes' is often less than adequate, so unless you are a local knowing
exactly where the farcility goes to, you can end up getting lost remarkably
easily, or end up cycling illegally on a footpath which a second ago was a
'shared use facility' and all of a sudden isn't any more.
As I understand it, Sustrans routes should be checked at least monthly and any
missing signs replaced with the rectangular temporary 'ranger' sticker signs.
The permanent signs are the responsibility of the highways agency and you
probably know that Norfolk CC budgets only 10k for cycle signs *and barriers*
for the whole county for the whole year. For comparison, one cycling marketing
campaign has a 17k budget. Oops.
There's also no consistent approach to signing local routes by NCC, as far as
I can tell. I know routes which have signs at either end, but not in the
middle, and routes which have "End of Route" two miles or so before the end.
The Sustrans routes here are obvious and the only farcility I've single out
so far is too many signs in a couple of places, not too few.
Quoted message said:On the other hand, the CTC is run by its members, for its members, and the
members vote on who is on the board of the CTC, so the CTC is directly run
by cyclists for cyclists.
So why does it seem so opaque, unrepresentative and bad at communicating?
--
MJR/slef
