Nicer cities, liveable places

I often find myself in conversations about the comparative value of side-road zebra crossings and continuous footways.

I visited St Andrews in Scotland last weekend, and saw this.

This article does two things.

This is a description of what I think has changed in the current (2026) revision of the Transport Scotland document “Cycling by Design” (compared to the 2021 version).

This article’s header image is a scale drawing of a real and very typical UK junction.

This article is published in parallel with one from Mark Philpotts, which you can find on the City Infinity Blog here.

Introduction Can you imagine how much more dangerous it would have been working in a factory 200 years ago, in comparison to what it’s like now (in the UK at least)?

I’ve been watching the behaviour of people driving through a junction in Edinburgh.

I’m a firm believer in the idea that social change can be facilitated by good questions – that good questions can be very powerful.

This article presents a set of ‘measures’ – really just a small set of five very simple questions – which can be used to quickly provide a top level assessment of the quality of an environment for cycling.