LIFE CYCLE BRIDGE PARTNERS
The new breed of pedestrian-bike bridges can make us happier, says Rob Ainsley
On 30 August, Britain gets a spanking new bridge. The old Forth Bridge – a Scottish icon like shortbread, but also as crumbly – gets replaced as the new Queensferry Crossing opens.
Sadly, like all global big bridge projects now, the Queensferry is motors-only. (No coincidence this trend started as the Brompton appeared: architects ride them, and assume everyone can fold up, get a taxi across and put it on expenses, like them.)
The old bridge will continue to creak along, exclusively for public transport, cyclists and pedestrians. Biking across the Forth will continue to be a great twowheeled experience: good news for Endto-Enders overnighting in Edinburgh.
The last bike-friendly big bridge in the world was the Humber. The Dartford Crossing at least offers a free minibus that shuttles you and bike across the Queen Elizabeth II bridge over the Thames. Another is the Second Severn Crossing, which superseded the Severn Bridge. Like the Humber, the old one’s still rideable and free for bikes. Not cars. They’re currently charged £6.70 to enter Wales, but nothing to leave, like it was some sort of visitor attraction.
As cyclists we can often use tiny old bridges that heavy traffic, sometimes any traffic, can’t. My favourites include Barmouth’s wooden rail-ped-bike crossing: riding its clanky Victorian planks is like playing a 700m-long marimba. And the 400-yearold red sandstone gem over the Tweed at Berwick; more quaint bridges are upstream, at Coldstream and Dryburgh. And Iron Bridge, the world’s first iron bridge, at the village of Ironbridge (the industrial revolution was great on technology, but unpoetic at naming things). And Clifton, Menai, Horkstow, Monnow, Penmaenpool, Aldwark... Like crossing the Humber in a rainy headwind, the list seems endless.
Good bike infrastructure doesn’t only get us to work faster, it ups everyone’s quality of life
Through the 2000s we’ve gained a bunch of modern bike-ped bridges, and they point to something interesting. I mean those elegant cable-stayed starchitect creations like giant alien harps: Gateshead, Rhyl, Newport, Lancaster, Derry and so on.
My favourite, at York, is more than a simple A to B crossing. The Millennium Bridge across the Ouse, a short walk south of the centre’s historic gifte shoppes and chaine restaurantes, isn’t just a busy link between the South Bank and university areas. It’s also – like Gateshead’s winking showpiece – a leisure destination in its own right. The designers smartly included a bench the length of the bridge, to sit awhile and watch the world go by.
And much of that world is on bikes: from tatty old unknown-brand mountain bikes to £3000 carbon-frame objects of desire, plus shoppers, folders, tandems, handcycles, child trailers, cargo bikes and everything else. It’s a lovely place to hang out, a social focus as well as a lively trafficfree transport corridor.
London take note. Right now there are consultations about two new ped-cycle bridges plugging gaps in the Thames – Nine Elms, between Chelsea and Vauxhall, and Rotherhithe over to Canary Wharf. Not vanity projects, like the thankfully spiked Garden Bridge, but hard-headed economic necessities. London needs more commuter flow at these points, but the roads are full and the pollution can’t be ignored. The only viable way forward, impartial experts agree, is to enable walking and cycling – which, as a pleasing side effect, will save a few quid for the NHS too.
Great, but these bridges can be more. Their benefits to society are not only lower insulin bills. There’s mental wellbeing too. They’ll quickly become places to spend a few minutes, have a sandwich and coffee en route to work, take hire-bike tourist selfies, make that quick phone call home to say all is fine. People-centred places to meet, to chat, to muse. Big cities get neurotic without them.
If London gets its new pedbike bridges right, they’ll be multi-purpose – social as well as transport, fun as well as useful, good for your head as well as your heart. Like bikes themselves. Unlike the Queensferry Crossing and its kind.
Good bike infrastructure doesn’t only get us to work faster, it ups everyone’s quality of life. London’s harassed commuters – all of us – could do with that.