It is truly unsafe to take a bicycle in the U.K.?
However if you get a mountain bike and stick to the dirt roads along the rivers and hills, it is a great place to enjoy cycling through the countryside. One of the best bike trips I've done is cycling for 30 miles along the Thames river.
So the UK is great for scenic cycling, terrible for a cycling commute. And yes, any Dutch expat you meet is silently judging your country on the safety of its cycling infrastructure.
And so you should. The UK's cycling infrastructure is embarrassingly bad.
An example. Local to me, recently, the government spent over £100m on a new road junction, to replace an old one. One of the main reasons that they had to build a new junction was that they claimed they could not remove traffic lights from the roundabout to improve traffic because pedestrians and cyclists both crossed the junction at 'street level'. A local cycle organization submitted a proposal with modelling (I can't find the link atm.), that showed that the desired increase in capacity could be achieved by adding bridges for pedestrians and cyclists, removing traffic lights, and altering the road layout.
And save about £90m.
Needlessly to say, the junction was built. I have no idea whether their proposal was considered, or not, unless I submit a freedom of information request to the UK government.
Regardless, the bridges should have been built anyway, because the junction is between two suburbs.
The new junction did get a new cyclist/pedestrian bridge to replace the old one. Except it's about 1km further away from the suburbs that the previous junction, so adding 2km to bike journeys.
So roads are as narrow as possible and congested, which in itself is not great for bikes but also makes bike lanes near impossible. And when a bike lane is built (i.e. painted on the road or pavement) it is usually also very narrow and interferes with traffic.
Obviously this is difficult to change for existing roads, but we could at least make sure that new roads are wide enough, but this is not the case.
I'm not talking about very central roads that can be mostly restricted to pedestrians, or city areas with narrow streets but also little to no traffic. I'm talking about roads in general. Amsterdam has many roads that look hugely wide for British standards.
Example: hhttps://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.7524584,-1.2749531,3a,75y,...
This is one of the main roads into Oxford. Note the "cycle lane"... Still, that road is not too bad because it has an exceptionally wide pavement on one side.
It's usually more like this: (Henley on Thames, where Boris Johnson used to be MP, again one of the main accesses to the town) https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.5375008,-0.8998416,3a,75y,...
> So roads are as narrow as possible and congested, which in itself is not great for bikes but also makes bike lanes near impossible.
They replied:
> Do you think the centre of Amsterdam has wide roads? It does not.
That is the relationship with your comment. The centre of Amsterdam does not tend to have wide roads (with a handful of exceptions) and yet has bikes. Indeed, it is possible to drive down most of those roads, however the city has put a lot of effort into discouraging it which reduces the congestion and makes biking nicer.
Now, newly built areas tend to have wider streets, but there are plenty of old city centres in the Netherlands that are bike friendly, despite their being as narrow as possible. Congestion can be dealt with much more easily.
2. Henley Bridge - Overall, Henley could be ideal for cycling around. OK, one of the main routes into the town crosses a river. Yet, if this was in the Netherlands, they would simply have built a parallel cycle bridge at some point in the last 20 years. Or, if there still wasn't one, they'd build one now.
Here you go, Rijswijk swingbrug, opened 2014 (watch the video for relevant commentary): https://www.oozo.nl/video/rijswijk/84608/rijswijk-cycle-brid...
Or Delft's Gelatinebrug, scheduled to open in 2023: https://www.delft.nl/wonen/bouwen/bouwprojecten-de-stad/schi...
There are plenty of other examples.
Amsterdam's narrow roads have little to no traffic only because of political decisions that cars are not the only form of transport that need to be considered. You can see in archive footage that this wasn't always the case.
I'm stating facts here: UK roads tend to be very narrow to the point that it is difficult/impossible to just add cycle lanes, and even new roads or development do not include space for cycle lanes (when they should).
You show me examples in the Netherlands where they have built or are building new infrastructures where cycle lanes are accounted for. Well, yes exactly what I'm saying is not the case in the UK and often it is not even doable (it's not only a matter of building a new bridge if the access roads don't have the space, either...)
No, I'm showing you extremely old infrastructure (Delft: founded 1246, Rijswijk: pre-historic) that have invested in modern solutions for cycling.
The towns I have picked that are almost exact equivalents for Henley here, except that Henley has not bothered.
[For what it's worth, I agree there is no point in starting out by constructing a cycle lane from the middle of nowhere into a town with no cycle provision - but the UK is 5 decades behind in this aspect, and continuing to fall further behind]
> I picked towns that are almost exact equivalents for Henley, except that Henley has not bothered.
Well, that's my point, isn't it? Glad we agree... The thing is that it is difficult to resolve when that has been the case for decades, if not centuries because it's like that everywhere and you cannot decide to re-do half the country's road network and to raze everything that's in the way, especially in the UK.
19th century Paris: They did raze a large part of the city to make way for new avenues. 17th century London: After the Great Fire they rebuilt following exactly the previous narrow roads because no-one wanted to lose an inch or pay for an inch, and it's still the way any new projects are welcomed...
My point is only that this is exactly what the Netherlands has already done, which shows that it is perfectly possible to resolve (and, in general, without any razing - the Dutch are at least as proud of their history as the British)
The fact that the Netherlands looks good now is because these exact same problems have been solved over time. The UK could even benefit from an easier time, since it gets to just copy the best-working solutions.
19th century London: they razed whole neighbourhoods to construct the Underground.
21st century London: they propose to raze the St Pancras estate (with compulsory purchase orders) to build the HS2 railway.
But cycling doesn't require razing: the solutions I have given to your suggested problems don't raze a single thing.
Sadly in many other places cycling only really works for confident riders. Lots of drivers are either unaware of cyclists or downright aggressive. I would have near misses on a weekly basis. Things are getting better but very slowly.
There are car parks literally 200m from the centre of Birmingham where you can park all day for less than 10 pounds, and cheaper still nearby.
Things are starting to change (oddly during COVID) by addition of bus gates, but they're making very slow progress. We've already delayed and diluted our congestion charge multiple times.
Stay away from the cities, and it's generally safer, but at the same time you'll find cars doing 60 mph on single carriageway roads (the national speed limit), which can also be marked as a national cycle route. If you cycle somewhere where cars don't normally encounter cyclists, it can be "fun" as the motorists don't know how to behave.
The trouble with the UK is that even so-called cycle paths are shared with footpaths, so pedestrians are all over the place, and cycle paths that are getting built as 'joint' footpaths, mean as a cyclist you also stop at every road junction. Compare that to Europe, where the cycle path is an additional lane next to the road/main carriageway and is usually physically separated in some way for safety. In the UK this has the unfortunate effect of making a large percentage of cyclist just us the road (which they are legally entitled to do), because the cycle path next to the road "stops" every 100 yards because there's a road joining the main carriageway that you have to cross.
Town planners/local planning departments are under so much pressure that they literally just end up ticking boxes, and rarely push back on house builders to change their site plans. The 'desire path' is a straight line, for both pedestrians and cyclists, yet new housing estates are allowed to put in bendy cyclepath/footpaths next to otherwise straight roads. It is ridiculous.
Anything 'new' to car drivers in the UK is a problem. We definitely should try and change UK roads to be more bike friendly, but that's the reality. The new bike roundabout in Cambridge, unique in the UK, but common in Europe, and.... accidents: https://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/news/cambridge-news/cambrid...
With respect to roundabouts, I'm not sure there is a way to do it right.