Let me start by saying that overall, the Strawberry Line has the potential to be phenomenally good, and that the people behind it have accomplished a lot, with limited resources.
The Strawberry Line, in case you didn’t know, is a (mostly) traffic-free route from Yatton to Cheddar. There are aspirations to link it to the Colliers Way, and that in turn to the Two Tunnels Greenway. Additionally, they would like to include a traffic-free link (virtually touching the Bristol Channel) from Bristol to Yatton, to complete the vision of a completely traffic-free major route, called the Somerset Circle.
Amazing as that is, it’s that far, so the closest you can get to that vision right now is my tentative Somerset Circle route, which incorporates the Strawberry Line.
Updates
The people behind the Strawberry Line are working hard and have added new sections to it, such as the one that bypasses the old road segment that previously passed through the Thatcher Brewery building site. Much of the work is down to extraordinary volunteers, who give their time, effort and sweat, to build something that we can all benefit from. There are various other new parts as well, as they slowly continue to work towards completing the Somerset Circle as a traffic-free route.
The bad side
The Strawberry line is NOT all good! The section between Yatton and Congressbury is old, narrow, bumpy and in places full of potholes. Which 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 that someone very high up in the group that runs the Strawberry Line might just be obsessed with health and safety. As a result, these dreaded A-frame barriers are absolutely sufferedr the Strawberry Line. Such barriers very often exclude disabled cyclists and those riding non-standard bicycles or tricycles.
I have visions of an old man raising his hand at any meeting, furiously declaring that there is no enough A-shaped barriers along the route because he once sat on the bus next to someone whose first cousin’s best friend’s neighbor’s daughter was “almost killed” by a motorcycle on a path without traffic.
Sustrans
Worse still, many of these obstacles are brand new! Sustrans, the charity behind the National Cycle Network (NCN), realized the horror of these barriers a few years ago and made good progress in removing them from the NCN network. Sustrans has even removed routes that do not meet their new improved route standard from their NCN status.
Although the Strawberry Line has installed completely new A-frame barriers, it retains NCN status. This appears to contradict Sustrans’ claims that it is about creating a network for all, and it seems like it is only a matter of time before someone using a handcycle (or similar) begins legal action against The Strawberry Line because these barriers violate disability discrimination laws.
But they stop the motorcycles!
Do they do it? Do they really do it? Motorcycles on no-traffic trails are a police failure, and we don’t punish disabled people for it by installing barriers that don’t actually stop motorcycles, but stop disabled people.
I recently had a discussion about this on Twitter, when someone also tried to claim that A-frame barriers exist to stop motorcycles. At the same time, he openly stated that there were motorcycles on the Strawberry Line from time to time – this is clearly an admission that the horrible A-frames don’t do it stop the motorbikes!
These A-frame barriers are expensive to manufacture and install. For a charity with extremely limited resources, it seems retrograde to waste resources on something that clearly doesn’t do what it claims to do, and yet it persists in doing so.
Likewise, it is frankly bizarre that Sustrans continues to allow the Strawberry Line to have NCN status, given the number of A-frame barriers along the route and the discriminatory nature of these barriers.