And exactly how big is this advanced stop line?
Before you can make any meaningful active travel interventions you need to know what your town is like from an active travel viewpoint. There are all sorts of audits that can help from simple asset audits to more complicated techniques that usually go by acronyms such as CERS, WRAT or CSNA and range from super detailed surveys to area wide overviews.
A simplified CSNA of Hackney.
Transport Initiatives devised the Cycle Skills Network Audit (CSNA) recommended in the DfT’s LCWIP guidance. This gives a quick overview of the suitability of roads for cycling and crossings for both walking and cycling over a large area. It is a good first stage in a permeability analysis as it can identify areas of quiet streets and barriers to active movement as in East Oxford. It can be used for developing isochrones showing accessibility of schools (or anything else) and is the essential tool if you want to develop an area based (as opposed to route based) set of proposals to improve conditions for active travel. Examples of projects using CSNA include Seaford & Hackney.
Plotting the safety of each turn at A38/Priory Road, Birmingham for the Junction Assessment Tool
Audit methods are often presented as Tools that can be used by everybody from local authority staff to community activists to help all parties understand each other and arrive at common answers. A problem is that there is a trade off between rigourousness and speed and another between comprehensiveness and gameability. In our Active Travel course given for the IHE we demonstrate that how you define an example junction can alter the LTN1/20 Junction Assessment Tool score from 17% to 50%. They should not be used to give “answers” just understanding. Different people would have different weightings which no audit method yet considers.
What happens if we try to plot all the route options on one spider diagram…
Local Transport Note 1/20 Cycle Infrastructure Design contains a Route Selection Tool to help choose between competing schemes. This works best on very similar schemes helping to highlight minor differences. Where there are choices between very different types of scheme then it can’t cope so well. In our Stansted to Harlow work for Hertfordshire County Council for instance, we were attempting to choose between a route along the A1184 or a very different route along the Stort Navigation. A route choice that the RST couldn’t cope with.
A555 “Team Flightpath” get distracted by yet another plane arriving at Manchester Airport
Safety audits are part of our repertoire too. Normally we’d expect to be part of a safety audit team concentrating on pedestrian, cycling and accessibility aspects of a scheme. We were involved with the A555 (A6 to M56 Airport Spur) from its gestation to post opening audit offering insights at many steps during its implementation.
Ken gets his computer out to do some auditing…
We can also undertake asset audits such as for cycle parking, for signing, for modal filters, in fact anything you need to know about but failed to record it when you built it. Or maybe standards have moved on and you need things reassessed.
(Posted 22/02/24)