The Five Principles – The Ranty Highwayman
Earlier this week I gave a talk to Cyclox about what I thought made good cycle routes. The talk covered the five principles for cycling infrastructure with a round up on Low Traffic Neighbourhoods.
Now, I have covered LTNs many times in this blog and so this week I thought it might be interesting to talk about the five principles. I am a fan of the details, but a little step back to look at principles is always a good idea as it helps us understand how things fit together. This post is essentially the long-hand version of the slides I used in my talk.
The five principles crop up in all sorts of UK cycling planning and design policy and guidance - even in the most dire of the genre! It is no surprise that they pop up in the new English design guidance, LTN1/20 Cycle Infrastructure Design, and they are covered in some detail in Chapter 4. It's also worth stating that in fact they equally apply to planning and designing for walking. The reason for this is that these principles major on the human experience of self-propelled travel.