Confederacy of a Dunce - Avoiding traffic signals

Thursday, April 19, 2007

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Red light jumping is probably the most hotly debated issue on the cycling forums I read, and it's no wonder with the huge number of traffic signals in most British cities. My own commute is just a little bit over six miles, and includes a massive number of traffic lights.

Going to work in the morning I face exactly 50, and my usual route home includes 25. No, I don't use time warping technology, it's just that my commuting demands are different and different times of day. In the morning my aim is to get to work as quickly as I can, possibly with some decent exercise along the way. I'm not so interested in scenery or anything nice, just blitzing down the road to work. From our new house the quickest route by far is on the main roads, which have a lot more traffic signals.

On the way home I'm much more inclined to take quieter back streets at the expense of speed. And also to avoid three very nasty traffic-snarly areas (turn at Camden Town, Nags Head area just after Holloway Road, bus stops at Finsbury Park station and just thereafter), areas that are not bad at all in the other direction in the morning. But 25 traffic signals are still quite a few. And there are any number of them that I'm tempted to jump now and again.

The only solution, really, is to devise a cycling route that avoids all traffic signals. Then it would not even be possible for me to jump a red light. Of course this would be a trivial exercise if there were a canal route or converted rail line between work and home. But there isn't. It would also be trivially easy if I permitted myself to break other traffic laws in order to avoid red lights. For example, every time I approached a traffic signal, then mount the pavement ("sidewalk" in US English), go around the corner and cross the street away from the signal. No, this cycling route needs to be a legitimate cycling route (thus ruling out pavement riding and off-road riding).

I've looked carefully at maps and I think it's possible. London isn't exactly conducive to planning convenient alternative routes, at least anything remotely direct, but it appears that I can take advantage of numerous back streets in a winding homeward journey. The real difficulties are all related to crossing major streets (especially when there are major intersections involved). I see quite a lot of occasions where I will have to enter a main road from a small side street, then divert quickly down another side street before reaching a traffic signal.

Finally, I shouldn't be riding with my nose in a map, so there's every chance this will fail on the first attempt even if the route itself is workable. Just for sanity's sake (if sanity can be said to relate at all to this challenge) I'll also forbid direct backtracking. Chances of success? Not great.

bike

Thursday, April 19, 2007 4:35:34 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)