This Way
by Les
Woodland
You won't know this but every so often we at Cycling Plus have great parties where we divvy up all that wonderful test gear we get for nothing. The editors get themselves up in togas and hand out free drink, and golden-skinned and cooperative girls recruited from the streets around Bath railway station hand out sausages on sticks. It's a great event and it's just such a shame that you never get to be there.
Anyway, I was riding back home on this new titanium road bike that a lovely girl called Mandy gave me in return for a kiss when I began to wonder just how much of my world was dream and how much reality. Because all the way down the A4 -- now a ridable road thanks to the nearby M4 -- the signs at junctions just pointed off down side roads.
I mean, normally, signs say where they're going. Take this road, they say, and you will get to see Stoke-on-Trent, or maybe Colchester or Paisley, and sometimes we're tempted and sometimes we're not. Now and then the signs are more prosaic, like Council Tip or, more likely these days, Environmental Centre.
What I'd never noticed before was that all the signs on the A4, all the way from Bath to where I turned off near Reading, said no more than 'This way'. Not 'This way to see posh people's houses in the Thames Valley' or even 'This way to Oxford'. Just 'This way'. And more often still, just '2'. Or '31'. Or for all I know, '78'.
Now, at this stage, you are beginning not to believe me. You are an educated and sensible person and, while you don't have a free titanium road bike and I do, the wool is pulled no more easily over your eyes than mine. So I'll convince you that such silliness is possible.
Just take a ride through the countryside and see how many cycling signs you see that point to nowhere in particular. I mean, they all go somewhere, but because we're never allowed to know where, the signs are of strictly limited use.
You'll have your own examples, I'm sure, but round here we have what I think must be Sustrans signs. They're quite small, about the size of a rolled up newspaper, and they're painted blue and they have a little white bicycle and then a number. We have signs marked '1' round here, and a fair number marked '30.' You'll have numbers of your own.
But that's all they've got: just a number. They don't say where they go to nor where they've come from. In other words, the only people who know where the route goes are, er... people who know where the route goes. And even I can see that they are the ones who need them least.
Now, I've said Sustrans but they're not alone. Just lately we have acquired some khaki signs as well, and they don't say where they're going either, and a few miles away are some signs with what I think is a church on them but no indication why. I guess the church ones are a circular route of some sort but I'm not tempted to try one for fear they include St Peter's in Rome and I'd end up riding further than I'd choose. Just a distance would be handy.
I mentioned this to a friend who's some sort of Sustrans ranger. What, I asked, was the sense in a sign that didn't say where it pointed? And he said that people would know, and that they could look it up on the web site to decide, as it turned out, whether they wanted to ride from Hull to Harwich.
(If you join me inside these brackets for a moment, we can talk quietly among ourselves just how great was the demand for cycling traffic between Hull and Harwich that led to its becoming route number 1...)
If that's the way they wanted to go, he said, they would find no finer route. To which I said that that was all very well except that the sign didn't make any of this clear, to the point of not saying who had put the thing up. It was just there, lashed to a lamp post, pointing down a country lane pretty much like any other.
Probably in Hull you would know, or even in Harwich, but anywhere between the two you didn't stand a chance. Whose web site would you look at? And how likely would you be to do it? More to the point, if you had the wit to consult the internet, wouldn't you be organised enough to have a map or maybe just ask the way?
No, what we need are signs that say 'To Hull 212 miles' and then 'via Much Boggling 3m, Piddling-in-the-Haystack 5m, Colchester 8m'. People could make their own minds up about Colchester but at least they'd be offered the serendipity. He said he'd never looked at it that way and that he'd mention it to someone. Maybe he was too close to it all for it to be obvious, he said.
I didn't get cross with him. I hope I didn't even seem superior. I just wanted to be helpful, constructive, to make this a better world for cyclists. After all, I am a happy sort of person. But then so would you be if you'd got a free titanium road bike from a girl called Mandy. It's just such a shame they're aren't enough of them to go around.
Good luck with the signs.
© Les Woodland
Cycling Plus,
May 2002