Allowing cyclists to travel in both directions on one-way roads allows their journeys to be shorter than journeys by car. This is Thoday Street, one of the streets we studied.

One way streets are usually introduced to prevent conflict between motor vehicles or speed their flow and often mean cyclists have to cycle further than they need. Enabling cyclists to cycle against the flow of motor traffic shortens their journeys. Early contra-flow schemes involved traffic islands and marked lanes but since 2012 highway authorities have been able to put an Except cycles plate under a No Entry sign allowing cyclists to just travel to other way. Cambridgeshire wondered whether this was a dangerous practise, particularly on narrow streets, and commissioned Transport Initiatives to answer the question

Union Road, Cambridge. The carriageway here is 4.0m wide and the footway 1.06m

The work involved:

• Using conventional static cameras to film the junctions and representative parts of the links between them
• Counting the number of users and calculating their speeds from the films
• Using mobile cameras and following cyclists to get a much clearer view of interactions between them and other road users
• Scoring interactions and conflict using the severity of the avoidance manoeuvre as a measure

The main problems occur at junctions where vehicles cut across the path of cyclists

The moving observer follows a cyclist into a contra-flow section of street with the car coming the other way blocking their path

Making a full survey of the study lengths including the positions of parked vehicles

We recorded which party made any avoidance manoeuvres.

The key findings were:

• There are no real safety issues between cyclists and the vehicles approaching them. Both parties can see each other and there is plenty of time to make avoidance manoeuvres if required. Feared head on crashes just don’t happen.
• Problems occur at junctions particularly if the motor vehicle driver cuts the corner on their right.

The woman in the pink coats has given way to the vehicle coming the other way. She is using the parked car as cover. Clearly the road would be better with no parked cars at all.

• There is a relationship between the width of the road and the severity of interactions but there is no cut-off width that divides acceptable from unacceptable conflict. Wider is better, obviously
• Contra-flow cyclists give way to oncoming traffic more than with-flow motorists give way to cyclists
• Gaps between parked cars or a footway on the contra-flow cyclists’ side make a useful refuge
• Interactions with the highest severities occur when a pedestrian steps off a kerb or emerges from between parked cars into the path of a contra-flow cyclist. As we didn’t study interactions between pedestrians and with-flow cyclists and vehicles we can’t say whether this is a contra-flow problem or a general one.

In one sense, why worry about cyclists when the footways are so narrow and covered by parked cars that anyone with a pushchair has to walk in the carriageway.

The design of the junctions on Thoday Street were fiddly and complicated and although it’s difficult to see with rain on the lens, not all cyclists use the junctions as intended.

And there’s more…

Other interactions based studies in Cambridge included one to find out how well the Huntingdon Road parallel crossing was working and another to find out whether the Fendon Road ‘Dutch Style’ roundabout works well for cyclists and pedestrians.