cycling | Centre for Transport and Society blog

by Jonathan Flower, Senior Research Fellow

Many of us will soon be taking a hopefully well-earned rest over the festive period. At some point, you may put on a paper crown and break into a smile (or not) as someone reads a cracker joke. Well, here are a few, left over from a Christmas party for nerdy Transport Planners, Highway Engineers and others with a niche interest in pedestrian and cycle crossings:

Two hedgehogs are standing on the kerbside, one asks the other: “So, shall we cross? “The other bristles: “No way, look at what happened to the zebra.”

Transport planner: “Have you heard that they’ve updated the Highway Code?”

Friend (stifling a yawn): “Will it work?”

Transport planner: “Well, today I saw a driver stop before turning into a side road to let someone cross… but then I realised they had just run out of fuel!”

It’s like a zoo crossing the road these days. As if toucans, puffins, pelicans and zebras weren’t enough, in the Forest of Waltham I hear that there are elephants too!

We all cross them but spare a thought for the humble side road as you encounter one this Christmas. This blog explores whether changing side road junction designs can enhance priority for pedestrians and cyclists when they cross. It is based on recently published research findings.

In many villages, towns and cities there seems to be an increasing desire to get more people walking, cycling and wheeling. So, when they do, enhancing their priority at junctions where they come into conflict with others, makes sense, but can changes to junction design help?

I have previously considered how we could move away from the ‘traffic in towns’ that has increasingly become the norm since the 1960s to a new normal where our focus becomes ‘people in streets’. The answer may lie in the relationships between regulations, design and behaviour, and how they interact.

Back in January 2022, changes to the Highway Code enhanced priority for people crossing side roads by simplifying the rules on turning. In two recent studies funded by the Road Safety Trust and Transport Scotland (administered by Sustrans) we compared different junction designs and used video to observe how people behaved when using them. We can innovate and change regulations to promote active travel and change designs to do the same, but how will people react? The behaviour of people in these environments is the interesting part and where our innovations succeed or fail.

The studies found that enhanced junctions greatly improve priority for people crossing compared to conventional side roads, without compromising on safety. From the 13,500 observations of drivers turning in and out of side roads at the same time as someone was crossing on foot or cycle, motorists failed to give way to people crossing most of the time at conventional junctions. However, where junctions were enhanced through design or road markings the story was very different and here crossing pedestrians and cyclists were only forced to stop occasionally. Design Priority junctions and Marked Priority junctions with zebras work best. Using road markings other than a zebra is less effective at creating priority for people crossing and appears to be more hazardous for them, despite being the approach most commonly used.

Junction in London with design priority / Photo credit: still from study video, UWE Bristol

The position of the crossing is important. Those nearer the main road like the one shown above offer greater priority for people crossing and are no riskier than ones set further back from the main road. Taking all of this into consideration you might ask yourself whether it would be a good idea to paint zebra markings across side road junctions to make walking easier and safer in local streets. We asked ourselves the same question. Unfortunately, although such zebras (without zig zags, flashing orange lights and 24-hour overhead lighting) are allowed and well understood on private land like hospitals, universities and supermarkets, they are not currently permitted on public roads in the UK. Temporary trials were permitted in Manchester and Cardiff and the results were encouraging. However, in Melbourne simple zebra crossings like these have been permanently installed at prioritised locations to encourage and enable walking and improve safety (permitted under Victoria State law).

A ‘simple’ zebra in Victoria, Australia / Photo credit: Geoff Browne

There is a catch to this solution, even where it is permitted, as there is a risk that enhancing crossing points at some side roads but not others, can lead people to believe that at sites where they are not installed, drivers do not have to give way to a pedestrian who is crossing the street into which the driver is turning. To investigate this, I collaborated with the University of Melbourne and our research found that the risk of this unintended consequence is very real and is something that demands more research.

If at some point during your break you want to discover more, pour yourself a port (other festive drinks and non-alcoholic versions are available) and follow one of the links below, which will take you to the papers that explain the studies and their findings in more detail. Alternatively, when you need to walk off one of those celebratory Christmas meals, watch careful at the side roads and see how people are behaving in the streets around you. Happy Christmas and may we have improved priority for people crossing side roads in the New Year!

Links to the full journal articles:

The blog was written by Dr Jonathan Flower, Senior research Fellow at the Centre for Transport and Society (UWE Bristol).

Dr Jonathan Flower MTPS is a Transport Planner and Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Transport and Society. He has a nerdy interest in street design, especially side road crossing points, but he has good intentions, driven by a desire to make streets safer and more attractive places to move around on foot, cycle, or other forms of human-scale, less then cycle-speed mobility. His interest in road safety and his former work in international development has led to two current research projects in Nepal. You can contact him at: jonathan.flower@uwe.ac.uk.

Above image: TRAIL Cycling Autumn School participants © TRAIL

As a second-year PhD student researching nature and cycling here in the West of England, I was delighted to attend a Cycling Autumn School in the Netherlands this November, organised by the Netherlands Research School on Transport, Infrastructure and Logistics (TRAIL). The event saw 24 cycling PhD students from around the world gather at The Hague, hosted by Dr. Kees Maat and Professor Vincent Marchau, for lectures and group work on a range of cycling topics.

The programme opened with a series of lectures from some of the Netherlands’ leading cycling researchers. Professor Bert van Wee began with a helpful and practical session on why and how conceptual models can be useful tools for cycling research, which left us all frantically scribbling. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one to have a ‘conceptual epiphany’ as a result.

In the afternoon, two sessions from Dr. Kees Maat and Professor Ralph Buehler presented an overview of historical trends and geographical perspectives on cycling and the aspects of the built environment, policy, planning and culture that have influenced cycling practices and mode share in Europe, the United States and other countries. They highlighted some of the key conditions for improving cycling facilities and rates in urban areas, such as the default accounting for bicycles in planning decisions and gradual changes that build support for more ambitious ones.

The following day, Dr. Maarten Kroesen built a compelling argument for the importance of assessing causality when considering relationships between active travel and health, through the example of relationships between walking for travel and Body Mass Index (BMI). Many cross-sectional studies had found relationships between these variables and surmised that walking helps to reduce BMI, but Dr. Kroesen’s work to assess causality shows that it is more likely that having a higher BMI reduces the likelihood of walking for transport, than the other way around. He also demonstrated the usefulness of applying appropriate modelling techniques to secondary panel data to answer such questions of causality. None of us were aware of any similar research regarding cycling for transport, which would be great to see.

Next, Dr. Paul van de Coevering presented a whistlestop tour of behaviour change theories and models, including heuristics and nudging, as well as sharing examples of interventions that put these theories into practice. It was interesting to reflect on the ways in which various successful interventions had considered the role of habits, beliefs and identities, in addition to providing appropriate infrastructure for cycling.

After much discussion of how to address cycling challenges in different global contexts, we reconvened for the afternoon session. Professor Henk Meurs highlighted the important role of governance in achieving cycling goals, as exemplified by the approach to cycling at various levels of governance in the Netherlands. Finally, Dr. Jan Anne Annema introduced us to two innovation theory frameworks to help us consider what effective levers for cycling might be, in the context of wider programmes of urban innovation.

The content of these two days provided a wonderful overview of cycling from multiple disciplinary and theoretical perspectives. Some of the content was very familiar, but the value was in the way it led to such fruitful discussions arising from the varied disciplinary and theoretical perspectives each student was bringing with them too, as well as the different geographical contexts in which each students’ research was situated.

On the final day, the students joined a Bicycle Streets workshop and cycle tour as part of the International Conference on Cycle Safety. This gave us a great opportunity to understand the challenges and aspirations of cycle planning in many countries – and particularly in The Hague thanks to the bike tour led by Emma Stubbe from the Dutch Cycling Embassy and Nana Slof from the Safety Team at the Municipality of The Hague. It was a delight to hear their insights and get first hand experience of the travel environment in a city where active and public transport have been prioritised in recent years.

From a UK perspective, it’s tempting to think of the Netherlands as a cycling heaven, but some challenges are similar. Firstly, there is still a need for improvements to cycling infrastructure that vastly outweighs the available budget. Nana explained that the Safety Team have a list of over 250 streets in the Hague that need improvement works but they have to prioritise the most dangerous and get creative to fund them – for example by piggybacking on things like sewerage works where the road will be dug up anyway from another budget.

Secondly, the role of community engagement and incremental change is just as important where road space for drivers is being reduced. As Emma and Nana emphasised, there was a point at which The Hague also had infrastructure that was mostly tailored to motor vehicles and it has taken time to change this. A former six-lane highway is now a beautiful historic canal area, for example, but many of the most successful projects initially faced resistance – such as from shopkeepers concerned about losing trade from drivers. Emma says the Dutch Cycling Embassy is here to help: “Come here and learn from our mistakes as well as our successes!”, she said.

While returning to the less optimal transport infrastructure of Bristol, and leaving behind all the wonderful new cycling researchers I had met, was a little sad, it was inspiring to remember that every city has to start somewhere. Bristol cycling has come a long way in terms of infrastructure and culture in recent years, and I hope our planners and policymakers will take up the Dutch Cycling Embassy’s offer.

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Should you look before you cross this Christmas?

Representing Centre for Transport and Society at a global gathering of cycling PhD students

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