taken before the

Oral evidence, 28 July 2020.

MR ROGER GREEN

Okay, fine. If I may just make one reference to some supporting evidence for a point that I made earlier, this is again in our exhibit 9. You have reference A8 (66). So it’s a few pages earlier than what I was mentioning just before the break. Again from the Welsh active travel design guidance and it bears out the point I was making about the need to avoid carriageway widths of 7.3 metres. It describes that effectively a carriageway lane that cyclists are expected to share should either be below 3.2 – I’m looking at paragraph 4.18.3, if everyone’s with me, lane width should either be below 3.2 metres on a fairly low speed road with reasonably light traffic so that drivers stay behind the cyclists or more than 3.9 metres so that there’s plenty of space for them to overtake safely. Lane widths in the range 3.2 to 3.9 should be avoided because that creates conditions – where drivers on any road that drivers can’t pull out into the opposite lane to overtake a cyclist it creates the conditions which tempts drivers to close pass cyclists. And the reason I mentioned the Highway Code earlier is because one of the rules in the new Highway Code that’s just going out for consultation is all about rule for drivers to leave at least 1.2 metres of space when overtaking cyclists at speeds less than 30 mph and 2 metres at greater speeds. The trouble with the 7.3-metre carriageway, it makes it incredibly difficult for drivers to do that on any road where there is a steady stream of oncoming traffic. On a lightly traffic road it’s okay because the drivers can still pull out into the opposite lane reasonably quickly; but if the road is even moderately busy and it is difficult to pull out into the opposite lane, then drivers will be tempted to close pass to cyclists, and that creates very, very unpleasant cycling conditions, and yet the 7.3 metre road has been a UK standard for a very long time.