Let me start off by saying that overall, the Strawberry Line has the potential to be phenomenally good, and the people behind it have achieved so much, with limited resources.
The Strawberry Line, in case you didn’t know, is a (mostly) traffic-free route linking Yatton with Cheddar. There are aspirations to link it up with the Colliers Way, and that in turn with the Two Tunnels Greenway. In addition, they would like to include a traffic-free link (pretty much touching the Bristol Channel) from Bristol to Yatton, to complete the vision of a large, totally traffic-free route, called the Somerset Circle.
As amazing as that would be, it’s also a long way off yet, so the nearest you can get to that vision currently is my interim Somerset Circle route, which incorporates the Strawberry Line.
Updates
The people behind the Strawberry Line are hard at work, and have added new sections to it, like the one that bypasses the previous on-road segment that before used to cut through the Thatcher’s Brewery yard. A huge amount of the work is down to amazing volunteers, who so freely donate their time, effort and sweat, to build something for all of us to enjoy. There are various other new parts too, as they slowly continue working towards completing the Somerset Circle as a traffic-free route.
The bad side
The Strawberry Line is NOT all good! The segment between Yatton and Congressbury is old, narrow, bumpy and in places full of potholes. That I can (to some extent) live with. After all, as I mentioned before, they have limited resources, and need to be careful where and how they spend their money.
Unfortunately, it seems someone very senior in the group running the Strawberry Line might just be a health and safety obsessive. As a result, those dreaded A-frame barriers absolutely litter the Strawberry Line. Such barriers so often exclude cyclists with disabilities, and those on non-standard bikes or trikes.
I have visions of some old man raising his hand at any meeting, to furiously exclaim that there aren’t enough A-frame barriers along the route, because he once sat on the bus next to someone, whose second-cousin’s best friend’s neighbour’s daughter was “almost killed” by a motorcycle on a traffic-free path.
Sustrans
Worse, many of those barriers are brand new! Sustrans, the charity behind the National Cycle Network (NCN), woke up a few years ago to how awful those barriers are, and have made good progress in removing them from the NCN network. Sustrans even stripped routes that don’t meet their newer, improved route standard of their NCN status.
Despite the Strawberry Line installing brand new A-frame barriers, it retains NCN status. That seems to contradict Sustrans’ claims of building a network for all, and it seems it’s but a matter of time before someone using a handcycle (or similar) starts legal action against The Strawberry Line, as those barriers breach disability discrimination laws.
But they stop motorcycles!
Do they? Do they really? Motorcycles on traffic-free paths is a policing failure, and you don’t go punishing people with disabilities for that, by installing barriers that don’t actually stop motorcycles, but do stop people with disabilities.
I recently had a discussion on Twitter about it, when one person also tried to claim that the A-frame barriers exist to stop motorcycles. At the same time, he openly stated that there are from time to time motorcycles on the Strawberry Line – clearly that’s an admission that the awful A-frames don’t stop motorcycles!
Those A-frame barriers are expensive to manufacture, and to install. For a charity with extremely limited resources, it seems backwards to waste resources on something that patently obviously doesn’t do what it’s claimed to do, yet they persist with it.
Equally, it’s frankly bizarre why Sustrans continues to permit the Strawberry Line to have NCN status, given how many A-frame barriers there are along the route, and how discriminatory those barriers are.