Where are the Missing Links in Dumfries?

The town centre stands to gain so much if it were more welcoming to cyclists and pedestrians. Although more people are cycling into the centre of town than before, it hasn’t seen the same boom as other parts of the town. When people don’t feel safe cycling to the town centre, this puts more pressure on parking and makes it harder to reprioritise streets away from moving traffic around, and towards creating places for people.

Better links between the railway station and the town centre could ultimately lead to a connection to the NCN 7 along the Whitesands helping to drive cycle tourism business into the centre of town and making it easier for business visitors and students to reach the DGRI, The Bridge and The Crichton.

A shared path connects the station to two key routes but without maintenance and improvements to sight lines, conflict between users is built in and year-round use is complicated.

Busy roads and hostile high-speed roundabouts are an immediate barrier to approaching the station, especially when accessing the platform two side. Although there are low-traffic options to the High School and the nearby industrial estate, they are severed from the station itself and not signposted.

A missing link may be a misnomer here as that implies there is some active travel infrastructure to connect to, while there is almost none in this direction. However, the potential is there for both Brooms Road and the Annan Road, yet accessing either of these from the station involves Cornwall Mount, which has busy, daunting roundabouts at either end.

Where transport options are fully integrated between rail, bus, bike and car, greater distances can be covered sustainably. What happens once you’ve got your bike to the railway station is almost as important as how easy it is to cycle there. Secure bike and trike parking, decent signage and cycle facilities on the trains themselves all play their part.

If you’ve cycled anywhere in Dumfries, the chances are that you’ve taken a route that avoids Brooms Road. It’s not a pleasant place to ride, especially around Morrisons and Lidl or at the St Michael’s junction. Brooms Road could be as important a route for bikes and pedestrians as it is for cars, if there was safe space to cycle on it.

Terregles village lies 2 miles from the edge of Dumfries (Barnhill) and 3 miles from the town centre, with no big hills or uncrossable main roads between the two settlements, making it an ideal candidate for utility cycling and commuting. However, the current speed limit on the Terregles road is 60mph with no provision for either cyclists or pedestrians making it a daunting prospect for many.

The one gap in the cycle network to Holywood should be a quick win as most of the infrastructure is already in place. The village is less than 3.5 miles from the town centre and a shared use path takes you as far as Newbridge but the final half mile is narrow and for pedestrians only. Further north, a short stretch of the A76 severs Burns's Ellisland Farm from a network of rural back roads that connects to Holywood.

Lochside has great potential for active travel for people of all ages both within the area and outside. However, at the moment, it can feel quite cut off from the rest of Dumfries by the A75 and A76. Planned regeneration will bring more houses and could create more traffic which would make cycling less attractive - but it also offers the opportunity to upgrade the roads and active travel routes within Lochside.

This missing link is a tale of two supermarkets – Aldi and Tesco, both of which are a stone’s throw from the Maxwelltown Path, the flagship part of our traffic-free network. Yet getting to one is a whole lot more straightforward than getting to the other.

Glasgow Street is a busy four-lane road, serving key destinations such as The Bridge, the Cuckoo Bridge retail park and Sandside, Lincluden and Lochside. Not only is it daunting to cycle on for those wishing to travel north-south, it creates a barrier to people travelling east-west on foot or bike, bisecting a number of key cycling routes. Making Glasgow Street pedestrian and cycling friendly would be a key step in completing the town’s active travel network.

Galloway Street severs a number of potential active travel routes because vehicle movements are prioritised over pedestrians and cyclists. The pedestrian-only crossings of Galloway Street and Glasgow Street take two cycles of the lights each, while no crossings are provided on the Buccleuch Street Bridge arm of the junction — indeed pedestrians are blocked from crossing at all by a lengthy set of railings. This means anyone wanting to access Market Square and the riverside routes beyond has to wait for up to four separate green lights, and dismount if cycling.

The entire area covering Georgetown, Calside and Larchfield sits within 1-2 miles of the High Street and is relatively easy to cycle around – but leaving the area to get to the rest of Dumfries is more difficult.

Dutch towns and cities have been built in such a way that cycling pretty much everywhere, including to school, is safe not just for secondary-school age kids, but those in primary school as well. By contrast, although Dumfries High School is now linked by a cycle path from the Summerpark estate and from there to the Caledonian Cycleway, cycling to school from other directions is still pretty challenging, and not what you’d want your 11-year-old having to tackle on their way to school.

The Lockerbie and Annan Roads are two of Dumfries’s toughest nuts to crack. Anyone living to the east of the town faces two main routes with absolutely no provision for bikes at all and which are busy, hostile environments for any form of active travel. The only alternative involves an inutitive long detour and requires a good sense of direction, and is only readily accessible from the north side of Lockerbie Road.

The Caledonian Cycleway provides a safe, direct traffic-free route from Locharbriggs and Heathhall into Dumfries and is well used. However, in contrast to Heathhall and the new housing at Summerpark, Locharbriggs has very few step-free and accessible accesses onto the path. In some places, there are steps because the path is high above the road, but that’s not always the case.

Heathhall doesn’t have poor cycling connections to town; thanks to the Caledonian Cycleway it has an excellent and well-used off-road path that connects it almost to the town centre. However, the older parts of the suburb don’t have as good connections internally, making the primary school less accessible to pupils who might otherwise be able to cycle there. Meanwhile, planned new developments won't be as well served with poor connections to the wider network.

Amisfield and Tinwald lie tantalisingly close to the end of the Caledonian Cycleway, but the most direct route to Amisfield involves a stretch along the A701, and even if you detour via Tinwald, there is still a short length of the A701 and a right turn off it to negotiate. Avoiding the A701 entirely requires a long loop to the north.

Collin is always the first place to come up when we ask about missing links in the region: just 4 miles from the town centre by car along the A75, the only realistic option for most cyclists is more than twice as long, and still involves a stretch of the A709, which is in itself not a road for the faint hearted.

Lockerbie is an important town in its own right and also has the nearest railway station offering direct access to Edinburgh. Only 12 miles from Dumfries by the most direct road, it should be easily accessible by bike, but this involves riding up the A709, which is a fast and dangerous road with no space for walking or cycling. Connecting Torthorwald, Lochmaben and Lockerbie to Dumfries would not only benefit local residents but open up the region for cycling to visitors too, whether arriving by rail or via NCN 74 which goes from Carlisle to Glasgow.

Dock Park is a vital green space for Dumfries and a key commuting route, and the gateway to the town for touring cyclists using the NCN 7. Yet, traffic flow through the Dockhead junction has been prioritised over pedestrians and cylists, meaning the only crossing from the park to the Whitesands gives you just seconds to cross after waiting up to 90 seconds for the green man.

Dumfries to Glencaple might seem like an odd candidate for a missing link – after all, the two places are joined by the National Cycle Network (NCN 7). But the route down to Glencaple illustrates the difference between catering for (existing) cyclists and creating new cyclists – providing a route where cycling is not just possible for someone who is willing to mix with traffic, but one which positively invites cycling.

New Abbey Road now has Dumfries’s best stretch of cycle track – but it only extends along a short urban stretch of this key road. For the rest of its length, the A710 to New Abbey is a trip avoided by many cyclists and it’s definitely not an option for other modes of sustainable travel except bus. Two much longer routes, used by those “in the know”, aren’t intuitive and certainly not something very apparent to visitors.

Cargenbridge sits only 2 miles from Dumfries High Street or 3 miles via the Maxwelltown Path. It could even be quicker to cycle to Cargenbridge than to drive there, depending on the time of day and the traffic. It’s also the point where three cycle routes meet: the NCN 7 out to Castle Douglas and points west, the off-road route to Mabie, and the Park Road path which heads towards (but crucially doesn’t quite reach) New Abbey Road, Maxwelltown and Troqueer. However, what should be a place that’s accessible by bike by all and sundry, rather than just experienced and confident adults, is hampered by a couple of key gaps.

This is one missing link that affects the whole region: getting to and from the ferry terminals at Cairnryan for the Northern Ireland crossings. This is on the face of it a simple missing link – just under 2 miles of missing shared-use path along the A77. But in fact it opens up a much larger can of worms about how we travel into and around our region, and how we could encourage more sustainable tourism across Dumfries and Galloway without risking destroying the qualities visitors come here to enjoy.