Chichester cycle lane: ‘It’s about time we reviewed how we travel about’

I am quite sure if you publish this it will sit rather awkwardly among a plethora of letters from the worried car drivers of Chichester moaning about the new cycle infrastructure in the city.

Here we go, they tut, now we have a lycra lout defending ‘traffic chaos’. Well, breaking news, I am not a lycra lout – just someone who thinks it is about time we reviewed how we travel about. You are not in a traffic jam, you are the traffic jam.

Can I make an appeal through your pages to all those getting hot under the collar? Please, before you leap to any conclusions over the new system, go to Youtube and watch Mikael Colville-Anderson and his lecture on the ‘Arrogance of Space.’

He is a Danish/Canadian urban designer, a breath of fresh air, a truly inspiring speaker and thinker. I had the great privilege to meet him and hear him speak a few years ago, a charismatic and evangelical address on the issues of urban design.

Even better he followed a still wet-behind-the-ears junior from the Norman Foster Partnership, an organisation filled with fresh new ideas in building design but riddled with outdated 1970s infrastructure thinking entirely unsuited to modern urban life.

Watch any of his numerous online appearances and I can almost guarantee unless you have a very robust pair of blinkers or work for Norman Foster you will have a different perspective.