Barely a week goes by when we don’t see a piece in the Echo about congestion, LTNs or cycle lanes.

In discussions with people, I have been labelled “anti-car”. Sure, I used to ride a bike but gave up simply due to how dangerous it is. I am a car driver so am I “anti-me”?!

The truth is that BCP suffers immensely from congestion, and a complete cycle network is one way of fixing it; each cyclist is one less car on the road, one less car in the queue in front of you.

It’s been repeatedly shown how building more roads only pushes the issue further down the road, pun definitely intended as more cars arrive before long to occupy the space gained. Moreover, without knocking down swathes of housing and cutting through our green spaces we simply do not have the space in BCP for more roads.

The cycle lane network across BCP is incomplete – so its use by cyclists is understandably fitful. Let’s take Wallisdown Road as an example. Currently it has a few hundred metres of lovely cycle lane, followed by the hell of central Wallisdown, then a shared path towards the university. To give you an idea of what that’s like for a cyclist, if a motorway consisted of five miles of beautifully smooth tarmac followed by five miles of dirt track, would you use that or the nearby A-road?

Some of the design decisions for cycle lanes meanwhile leave me scratching my head in bafflement. The proposed plans for Wimborne Road (between Bear Cross and Northbourne) are insane, a mixture of shared path swapping to single way down either side of the road with parking space being lost for flats and houses without driveways. The centre of Kinson is meanwhile being ignored despite the congestion in the remodelled section of that road since Tesco’s construction. With design decisions like that, is it any wonder that more confident cyclists ignore the cycle lanes and take to the roads?

Some of the older cycle infrastructure is terrible too. For instance, the shared path at the junction of Castle Lane West and Muscliffe Road: if you follow the lights it takes a complete rotation of the lights to cross.

I would like to touch on driving standards, especially during rush hours. We all need to chill out. Give each other space – speeding gets you nowhere, you just hit the next queue a little earlier. Even if you do jump a queue, how much time has it realistically saved you? A few seconds? A minute? What difference does that actually make in real terms?

The next time you’re following a cyclist and considering an overtake, ask yourself, is it really worth doing it now? Would it be safer to wait 10 to 15 seconds? Is it going to lose you any time or are you just going to catch the back of the queue at the next junction? Just yesterday I saw somebody overtake a cyclist with centimetres’ clearance only to have to stop a few car lengths down the road to join the back of the queue, at which point the cyclist filtered past safely, overtaking that particular car and many others in the process.

Unfortunately we only have ourselves to blame for these cycle lanes; if we all drove more considerately of other road users, we wouldn’t need half the infrastructure we have on our roads today.

The current Conservative administration have a lot to answer for; many Conservative councillors are grossly anti-active travel and are making BCP’s congestion worse. I really cannot wait for the local elections next May when we can vote this lot out and start to properly tackle the massive congestion issue we have.

Adrian Chapmanlaw

Wimborne Road, Bournemouth