Glasgow is a terrible place to ride a bike.
We can bypass Glasgow’s stereotypical reference points of bad weather and violence as different menaces lurk threateningly for willing velocipedes in this fine city.
The city has become renowned for its superior collection of potholes, some of them large enough to engulf a small elephant. The quality of road surface in the city centre is an unwitting deterrent to skinny-wheeled enthusiasts, though there are many that grittily persist against the odds.
Glasgow – the city where the bypass carves right through the centre and of bridges that go nowhere. It seems the town planners have applied the same ethos to the cycling infrastructure. Cycle lanes are marked out, sometimes in green, sometimes in red, sometimes with only a white line. Unlike Magnus Magnusson, a lot of our cycle lanes have started but don’t finish. They do however end, not necessarily where they are supposed to but often without reason or sense, they just stop. Regularly our poor lanes are dug up and never reinstated, often adding to the pothole collection and image crisis.
Where the lanes live is as much of a mystery as anything else. Sometimes they go on the road then onto the pavement; sometimes cyclists have a traffic light sometimes a pedestrian one.
With such a blatant example of mis-planning by Glasgow City Council, is it any wonder that many motorists see our kind as a nuisance, showing blatant disregard for our well-being? This city is certainly not a place for the faint-hearted cyclist.
The dear green place is not terribly green when it comes to supporting our cyclists. We need a wide-view approach to the infrastructure in and around the city. We need education for cyclists and motorists alike. We need a horizon shift.
Sea change to see change.
