Views

Just one day after the mayor of London unfolded his cycling vision earlier this month, I had to be in London for a meeting which had nothing to do with … Continue reading →

Summing it all Up:

If my analysis in these posts here seems more critical than that of some cycling bloggers and cycling groups, this may be because I have experience of the lack of positive effects of numerous talked-up cycling strategies, initiatives and “visions” from those in power over the past 25 years in the UK. Not a few of these were hailed at the time as “step-changes” or “sea-changes” in support for cycling. My justification for an in-depth analysis of this document   is that unless we understand what is being incorrectly assessed and proposed, we won’t get it right this time either. The key point is to understand what opportunities are now open (or need to be pushed for afresh) in the current climate. Hopefully this analysis will allow for campaigners and practitioners alike to prepare accordingly.

But first, there are still

Some more problems:  The Vision thing:

Discussing the Vision with colleagues, I’m struck by how many concentrate on the wording, tone, and what they claim is “the basic message” of the document. With not a little reading between the lines, those most impressed by the document detect a fundamental break with the past. This is, allegedly, the first time a commitment has been made towards a cycle-friendly environment.

But most of the admirable sentiments in the documents are ones that I have come across before. Reference to engineering the highway to make the environment for cyclists less hazardous and more welcoming, has been made – albeit in different ways – since “Ways to Safer Cycling”1984. The need to think about cycling right from the beginning, rather than as a bolted on afterthought, has similarly been echoed since at least the launch of the long-abandoned National Cycling Strategy.

I remember sitting on a working group producing guidelines on cycling for local government associations in the early 1990s where plenty of good stuff about getting all relevant Council departments involved was clearly stated. Did it get us anywhere?

There is a fundamental point here. I am quite happy to accept that Andrew Gilligan and others have an honest commitment towards cycling, and I share some (but not all) of their tactics and strategies to achieve this. The point is this: There is a big difference between a vision (stated in general, and often abstract, terms) and the specific objectives required in order to achieve it.

Here is an example:

“We will closely monitor all major new planning applications, schemes and developments…to promote meaningful pro-bike content and discourage anti-bike content.” (p.28)

Admirable sentiments, which if forcefully pursued for all developments, could have a fundamental effect. But let’s work through this:

 

More to come

 

I wrote a post some time ago on the design problem that seemed to be posing an unreasonable level of danger to cyclists - that of lorry cab designs.

red-lorry-yellow-lorry-dead-lorry

The point I was making that the cyclists are not to blame for the problem, even though safety campaigns are invariably aimed at them - a cut and dried case of the "victim blaming" typical in this kind of situation. I would go further and say that often the drivers of these vehicles are victims too, as they are put under extraordinary pressures as a direct consequence of the design of the vehicle they are often expected to manoeuvre quickly and safely through crowded urban streets.

If you applied basic health and safety thinking (of the kind that really has made a genuine difference to the way the construction industry operates in this country) to this problem, the design of the cabs themselves would be an obvious starting point for remedial action. It is sad that so many major construction companies are not extending their health and safety obligations resulting as a consequence of their operations beyond the gates of their site compounds, and insisting that lorries used in crowded urban areas are better designed.

I am therefore delighted to see that the London Cycling Campaign has come up with visuals that show exactly the kind of thing I had in mind, as reported in The Guardian:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2013/mar/19/cyclist-friendly-lorry-design-accidents

and as noted on the LCC website itself:

http://lcc.org.uk/pages/safer-lorries-safer-cycling

The biggest problem here for haulage companies and the extremely safety-aware major contractors that employ them is that these visuals look so entirely reasonable and sensible.

In a civilised world where people in cities come first, surely those in charge of governance would insist that the brutish and dangerous lorries were tamed before being allowed through the city gates? If you want to drive here, drive something safer.

Bicycle Malmö 2012 from Martin Lang on Vimeo.

A lovely little film about our neighbours in Malmö, across the bridge from Copenhagen.Copenhagenize the planet. And have a lovely day.

I’ll start with a confession. Eric Pickles is the reason I started writing this blog.

Back in the winter of 2011, he attended a conference organised by The Economist, on Urban Planning and Liveable Cities. After he had spoken, Mark Ames posed the following question -

As Secretary of State for Communities, and given the known effects that over-use of private cars has on local communities in terms of urban blight, noise pollution, obesity etc, how do you reconcile and balance these issues with your declaring the end to the so-called war on the motorist?

Pickles’ response was breathtakingly bone-headed -

Don’t be such a puritan. Not all of us can pedal up and down in rubber knickers you know; we need to find balance. Of course, let’s encourage cycling and walking, and we need to make cycling safer, but let us not treat people in cars like the enemy!

It’s hard to imagine a clearer illustration of this government’s total failure to engage with the bicycle as a serious mode of transport – one that can solve all the problems Mark alluded to – than this comment. Cycling is for those people, Pickles is saying, as he presents those who ride bikes as a weird, freakish minority. Yes, we can’t seriously expect everyone to wear rubber knickers! Of course, while we should ensure that the tiny minority of people who want to pedal up and down in their strange outfits aren’t seriously injured – or at least killed – we have to focus on the balance. And by balance we mean keeping things exactly the same as they were before; not imposing any restrictions on driving, and not doing anything to make riding a bike or walking an attractive prospect by comparison. Because that would be puritanical.

The logic is circular; because riding a bicycle is an unpleasant, stressful and inconvenient mode of transport for most people in Britain, it remains the preserve of a minority. And because only a minority are willing to ride bikes, so we must continue to accommodate the needs of mass motoring within our towns and cities, with deleterious effects for all, including those who drive.

The government are either unwilling to break out of this vicious cycle, or lack the awareness or understanding to contemplate how things could be very different – even with an example parked right on our doorstep. This is in marked contrast to Boris Johnson, who now seems to grasp the basic economic logic of designing for greater bicycle use, rather than waiting for more cyclists to appear and then accommodating their needs.

For central government, however, nothing is changing, and indeed we even seem to be going into reverse, if Pickles’ announcement at the Conservative Party Conference of yet more policies designed to make urban motoring easier (although whether they would have that effect is uncertain) is taken seriously.

This is the idea that motorists should be entitled to park for free while ‘popping into shops’, coupled with calls for more off-street parking. In an echo of his earlier remark about ‘puritanism’, Pickles spoke of

a rigid state orthodoxy of persecuting motorists out of their cars, with no concern about its effect in killing off small shops… I believe we need to give people the good grace to pop into a local corner shop for 10 minutes, to buy a newspaper or a loaf of bread without risking a £70 fine.

The absurdity of people should be driving to their local corner shop is not even considered.

The whole policy is predicated on a fallacy; namely, that to reverse the decline of the high street we must make it is as easy and cheap to drive to as it is to drive to an out of town shopping centre.

This is not possible. There is not the space in our towns and cities to accommodate unlimited motor traffic (something that has been appreciated for half a century). Motor traffic restraint is necessary not for ‘puritanical’ reasons, but for self-preservation. Free parking everywhere would create chaos, not just for people on foot and cycling, but for other motorists, and for the shops trying to receive deliveries. It is fundamentally impossible to level the playing field between towns and shopping centres built miles away on cheap land, and we should stop trying.

Making it cheap to park on streets devalues the quality of the urban environment, and so destroys the reason why people might choose to shop there, instead of driving past and heading off to an out of town centre. Once you are in your car, the hassle and stress of finding a parking space close by, in town, will obviously be trumped by the lure of unlimited and pain-free parking a little distance further away. As a blogger astutely observed yesterday, with respect to a street in a northern suburb of Bristol -

why is this high street so mediocre? Because its so painfully car centric that it only welcomes people in a car – and once you get in one, you may as well drive all the way on to the ring road instead of shopping in such a run down street. Encouraging people to park simply discourages people from walking to the shops – and once in a car, they can shop where they want.

Another blogger voiced similar thoughts -

Often I have to ‘fire up the Quattro’ just to nip to the shops.

When I get there it’s a flipping pain in the arse. Finding somewhere to park, often having to get change for the parking. And the Quattro is ruddy enormous, I often drive round and round trying to find a big enough space.

To be honest, once I am in the car, I may as well go somewhere that is free to park and has a big multi-storey carpark.

Does this sound like somewhere familiar? You see, the moment I utter the words ‘FIRE UP THE QUATTRO!’ you have lost me.

The money it will cost me in petrol, insurance, parking, etc etc I may as well go a bit further afield and get a few more things. Shopping that I know will probably go off and be thrown away before I eat it, but hey, I was there, it was on special offer……..

But I don’t want to do that.

I want to go to my local Butcher and buy tonight’s tea. Not £150 of over manufactured crap. I want a steak, or some sausages. I want to go to a proper Greengrocer for the veg. I would like to go on my bike, not have to worry about parking or change. I just want a nice trip to the local shops.

If you insist on making your high street attractive only to those who arrive by car, well, you’re going to kill it; car drivers will opt for the easier place to get to, the shopping centre that is actually designed for the motor vehicle, not the high street, which is fundamentally incompatible with mass motoring.

Across the country we now have countless examples of thriving streets, with higher footfalls and longer ‘dwell’ times, all places where the motor vehicle has recently been excluded or restricted.

These are street environments that would be fundamentally ruined as destinations – as places people might want to go to – if all motorists were at liberty to park for free on them. Their attractiveness would be lost.

Most worryingly of all, this lesson does not seem to have been learnt by retail expert Mary Portas, who was charged by the government with carrying out a review into the future of our high streets. She tweet yesterday

Councils with any sense and commitment to their local shops should listen to Eric Pickles 10 minute parking idea

This is fatuous, and wrong. Councils with any sense should concentrate instead on making their high streets attractive places, and give up on futile attempts to compete with out of town shopping centres on the latter’s terms. Several people pointed this out to Mary Portas on Twitter – that unrestricted motoring in towns and cities would ruin them.  Unfortunately her response was even more troubling -

Anything that allows shoppers to stop has to be a good thing.

I couldn’t disagree more. If all those shoppers are arriving directly on the high street by car, that is not ‘a good thing’, not for me, not for anyone, not for the high street itself. But unfortunately Portas, like Pickles, is fixated on the motor vehicle as a mode of urban transport. The Portas Review does not mention walking or cycling even once, yet mentions cars, and car parking, dozens of times. This is despite a mountain of evidence that those arriving on foot, or by bike, actually spend more over the long term, and invest more in their local neighbourhood – you know, the High Street - than those arriving by car, who are more likely to be passing through on their way to somewhere else.

If anything is killing the High Street, it’s the car. Stop pandering to it.

 Some more Problems: Cycle Training, Smarter Travel etc.

A key part of the funding (already announced before the publication of the Vision) goes to non-highway (or off-road) infrastructure. I’m absolutely in favour of moving beyond the usual highways and transportation planners fixation on the highway environment. But the spending has to obviously go in the right direction – and I’m not sure it does.

 Beyond infrastructure

There are a number of reasons why it is crucial to support cycling in ways apart from highways and off-road engineering. The loss of a cycling culture in the UK means that there are significant problems in the following areas:

• Inaccessibility of low cost user-friendly bicycles and cycling equipment. A key demographic feature of cyclists I their middle-class status. While a major reason for working class people being less likely to cycle is the cultural aspiration for car ownership and use, the fact remains that reliable quality bicycles and associated equipment is high. I find it scandalous that the differential between the cost to the user of car and cycle use is so low.
• Lack of confidence. The loss of a cycling culture has to be met with genuine support. Cycle training has to be empowering  – yet too often appears as an attempt to restrict errant potential cyclists.
• Absence of convenient and secure home parking. Half the households in London are flats which are mainly not on the ground floor, and many houses do not have the space for convenient and secure home cycle storage.

I can’t say exactly how many people don’t cycle because they can’t afford a reliable bike and accessories, put it somewhere convenient for everyday travel where it won’t get stolen, or were never shown how to ride a bike. But it is likely to be significant.

For example, we know that a third to half of all people cycling in the summer stop when the clocks go back. On top of this, even this winter hard-core are significantly less likely to cycle when it rains.is it too absurd to suggest that subsidising or allocating good quality wet/cold weather clothing to potential cyclists would help people cycle?

On top of this, there is a simple moral question. There is massive subsidy for people travelling by the les sustainable and healthy modes of public transport. (I’m not even going into the hidden subsidy for private car use). Why shouldn’t cyclists get assistance with equipment, including home parking, to help them cycle as well as necessary improvements to the environment they cycle in?

Yet there are precious few examples of initiatives to address these issues. I am lucky to work on LB Ealing’s Direct Support for Cycling programme (Disclaimer: my views are not necessarily the same as Ealing Council’s), winner of the 2012 National Transport Award for achievements in cycling   and previously LCC and CTC awards.

 What is “cycle training”… ?

A key element of successful encouragement and inspiring confidence is through the right kind of cycle training such as that described here  and here . Modern National Standards (now branded as “Bikeability”) cycle training as introduced by RDRF supporters in York and elsewhere in the late 1990s as an alternative to the defunct “Cycle Proficiency” in an attempt to get beyond “round the comes in the playground” and breed confidence among children and adults to cycle in real world conditions.

But how much that goes under the name of cycle training is actually carried out in this spirit? My impression is that plenty is still based on imparting a message that cycling is inherently hazardous, with a stress on helmets  and hi-viz  . In London there has been controversy over the terms of a pan-London procurement process for cycle training set up for boroughs that couldn’t define their own criteria. And naturally, supporters of Road danger reduction would ask why a lot (but not all) of the cycle training is managed by officers working under the “road safety” agenda, rather than cycling specialists.

Coincidentally, the TfL programme of work with children and young people is currently under consultation . It has been heavily lambasted here  for being:

“Pretty miserable stuff, not just because of a failure to address creating safer streets, but also because all this ‘education’ and ‘encouragement’ is only directed at children themselves. There is nothing in this strategy that talks about getting drivers to behave better, or ‘educating’ them to drive more carefully around children. Nothing. It’s victim-blaming of the worst kind…Of the ten ‘initiatives’ TfL are proposing to increase child safety, every single one involves training or educating children. There’s no mention of reducing environmental danger.”

This is perhaps a little unfair as reference to “environmental danger” – or what we would call the source of danger, namely the threats from motor vehicular traffic – is made (partly) in the “Vision” document where there is reference to a safer cycle route environment to schools (p.25). It is also the case that there will have to be some work by transport professionals with children and young people irrespective of highway layout and broader questions of road danger.

However, As Easy as Riding a Bike is basically right: the overall approach of TfL here and other “educational and training” approaches accepts the status quo of road danger. It continues all the dreary repetition of assessing safety in terms of aggregated reported casualties, as if the critique made of the “road safety” lobby in this respect had never happened. It does not empower or enable children as non-motorists now or fort he future. Cycling tends to be seen as sport, not as avaible normal form of everyday transport. There is little on the rights of children and non-motorised users. When we are going to see a real critique of the car-centric staus quo in a robust programme for children and young people?

In fact, a critical issue is the way that imbibing the “road safety” message will impact on these young people in a few years when they are quite likely to be motorists themselves. One of the reasons for a victim-blaming culture and acceptance of road danger is precisely the “road safety and education and training” that people have had when at school. Despite an admirable approach of not “dangerising” cycling –while recognising danger and the need for cycling to “feel safer” (the first four paragraphs on page18) in the Vision, I suspect the approach taken in many London boroughs will do the opposite.

…or “Smarter Travel”?

Along with the traditional domain of “road safety” , the last decade has been a stamping ground for “Travel Awareness” and “Smarter Travel” initiatives. Based on informing people about alternatives to car use, its advocates – generally the people who work in this area – claim that these are effective. My view is sceptical of these claims. Yet a large proportion of the new ringfenced funding for cycling – through the Boroughs – is in this area.

It is characterised by “talking up” alternatives to car use, rather than pointing out it’s adverse effects on public health and the local and global environment. It is generally referred to as a “soft” approach, and is essentially about marketing.

My view is that non-highway infrastructural approaches are desperately needed, not least to break out of the mind-set of Highway Authorities, however progressive they may appear to be. But it needs to feed into a new social and cultural infrastructure: its aims have to address the very hard issues raised above about the obstacles to cycling which are not just in the physical highway environment. The virtue of Ealing’s Direct Support for Cycling programme is that it is indeed hard in its approach to tackle some of the barriers to cycling that a Council can – if it wants to.

Regrettably, few Boroughs show an interest – although a significant coterie of practitioners have – in this kind of approach. Housing estates feature ample (and free) car parking, but little or none for bicycles. Recovered and second hand bike centres to allow social classes C,D and E to access affordable bikes and accessories are few and far between. Genuine support for actual or potential cyclists is not really on the radar of too many in the boroughs.

My view is that is part of the dominant car-centred transport culture which will need to be addressed to get any real vision off the ground: see the next post…

I was working in Portugal last week.

Initially I was reluctant to go – it felt too far for what was essentially a one-day workshop. But when João Bernardino, who’d invited me, offered use of a bike whilst I was there, and told me Lisbon’s community of cycling activists would like to meet me, it became much more attractive.

It was a fantastic experience, the hospitality of everyone I met truly exceptional.

Ana Pereira greeted me at the airport. Ana is one of the founders of Cenas a Pedal – which is not ‘just’ a bike store or workshop, but a more total project striving to sell everyday cycling in a place where such cycling is still rare. It’s the kind of pioneering place which every city needs, and which will multiply and prosper as cycling’s popularity grows.

Ana rode a pedelec –the sort of bike perhaps most likely to democratise cycling in a hilly, low-cycling city such as Lisbon. She guided me out of the airport and along some big and busy roads to the city’s 1998 Expo site, and from there into a fierce wind along the Tagus River to the ferry at Cais do Sodré where we met João.

A true gentleman, João rode his wife Filipa’s bike and gave me his own. From Cacilhas on the Tagus’s other side we rode south towards the remote monastery where the workshop was to take place. The roads were full of cars; the dedicated cycling infrastructure was sometimes good, but too discontinuous to be really useful.

The Arrábida Monastery sits high above the Atlantic Ocean on the wooded slopes of the Arrábida Natural Park to the south of Lisbon. It’s a stunning place which feels a world away from the capital.

With a free day to explore before the workshop’s opening dinner, I rode east along the coast to the port city of Setúbal. I set out in thick fog but the road was quiet, it was a lovely ride, and the air cleared as I dropped towards the sea. It was the first time since October I’ve ridden without gloves, and the warmth made me impatient for spring – alas my first ride back home saw me battling through a blizzard!

The workshop was part of a European project investigating the long-term future of transport. We were discussing and developing scenarios based on the ‘mega-trends’ considered likely to shape people’s mobile lives over the next half century.

One ‘expert’ amongst others from different fields and from around the world, I felt like ‘the cycling guy’. I suppose it’s important that cycling’s represented in these kinds of spaces if it’s to have hope of moving in from the margins, so it was good to be there and I was happy to play that role.

But the highlight of my trip was Friday night; the workshop over, I shed my suit and had some fun!

From my hotel Hercules, Ana Santos, João and I rode to Cenas a Pedal where we met more people and rode together – “a mini-Critical Mass!”, as Ana from Cenas a Pedal described it – to the book store, Ler Devagar, where I was to speak. This is a vast anarcho-dream of a place – evidence of its former life as a printworks is everywhere, bicycles dangle from above, books of course are piled high, and then there’s beer, wine, coffee, music, and abundant indications of the space’s centrality to alternative social and political networks; to me it felt like heaven!

Ana Pereira began the evening’s conversation by explaining the work of MUBi, the Portuguese association for urban cycling.

MUBi advocates urban cycling as an ordinary means of moving around. Car ownership and use has exploded across Portugal over the last generation, and whilst it is on the up, levels of utility cycling remain very low. Mário Alves of MUBi told me that the proportion of commuter trips made by cycle in the city is currently 0.6%.

There is some dedicated cycling infrastructure, and some of it looks pretty good, but it’s woefully disjointed and there’s too little actual cycling for that dedicated space to be consistently recognised and respected by pedestrians. On the roads cars dominate, and whilst I was frequently impressed by the patience of drivers, it felt a harsh and unforgiving environment through which to ride. As I rode through the city I thought how, like many places, to ride here you have to be either committed or desperate.

This is the context in which MUBi is working, and – with minimal resources – doing an extremely impressive job.

But besides MUBi’s various projects aimed at promoting cycling, MUBi campaigners themselves – some of whom I was privileged to meet on Friday night – are crucial to the struggle for cycling. Passionate about the bicycle and clearly recognising the difference more cycling would make, they are cycling’s keepers, continuing to shine a light through the darkest days of automobility, actors of the greatest importance to future life.

This bears on one topic of my talk at Ler Devagar. We need strong sub-cultures of cycling to sustain our favourite practice through the darkest times (though from a sub-cultural perspective these can also of course be the best of times too). And as cycling’s staunchest advocates we’re the ones who are best placed to speak and work for more cycling. From what I saw MUBi is clearly doing a magnificent job on both these counts.

But there may come a time – and probably Lisbon is still a long way from it, and in the UK we are much closer – when activists might do well to look at their strategies for popularising cycling, and ask whether those strategies result from the identities they’ve developed in order to sustain cycling through bleak times, and whether they might at some point come to stand in the way of –rather than facilitate – making cycling a more normal practice in which identity is a less central factor.

As I say, I think cycling’s current marginality in Lisbon society makes such questions remote. And MUBi is well equipped to deal with them when the time comes. I know some people disagreed with what I said at Ler Devagar, but their willingness to hear, and to respond so constructively and respectfully sent shivers up my spine.

Wherever I go, I’m really struck by how cycling’s in such safe hands.

I’m a lucky man to be made welcome in strange places. In particular I have to thank João Bernardino for inviting me to Portugal in the first place, and also Ana Pereira, Ana Santos and Mário Alves for their extraordinary hospitality whilst I was there. Ana Santos and Mário are organising this year’s International Cycling History Conference. It was an honour to be in their company for the evening, and to get a taste of Portugese social life. Such community is our strength, and power.

Hey! I returned home to the clearest news yet of the urgently needed paradigm shift away from the car and towards the bicycle as an urban mode of transport. As an unrepentantly critical sociologist I’ll always find problems, but the promised changes to London over the coming decade are good news indeed (and reassurance to many of us that perhaps we’ve not been so idealistically deluded after all!).

As my new friends in Lisbon might say, “Viva a velorution!”

While giving praise where it is due: I continue this in-depth analysis with some more Problems:

 The Boroughs

Permanently empty stands in a “Biking Borough”

Mayor Johnson: “I do not control the vast majority of London’s roads, so many of the improvements I seek will take time. They will depend on the cooperation of others, such as the boroughs…”.

Indeed. After all, 95% of the roads in London are owned by the boroughs. This not just an excuse – although I believe TfL could apply more pressure on the boroughs to carry out a pro-cycling programme.

Regrettably, the boroughs do have to come under this list of Problems in assessing the likely effects of Mayor Johnson’s “Vision for Cycling in London”

There is a long history of local authorities in the UK that are not interested in cycling, or don’t “get” cycling in any meaningful way. This generally does not involve any specific hostility. But it does involve an agenda of prioritising motor vehicle use – well before “smoothing the traffic” became TfL’s mantra – in a way which will disbenefit the prospects for cycling. They have a history of embracing “road safety” ideology, as opposed to the handful of Councils in London taking road danger reduction seriously instead, with all the associated problems for cyclists that flow from it.

And that’s just the specific departments concerned with transport policy. Officers concerned with “Regeneration” frequently have agendas based on accommodating or increasing motor traffic, as do housing departments. Even where some Councillors are committed to cycling, they have short terms of office in which to contend with others, even in their own political bloc who may oppose them. They then have to work through the labyrinthine complexities of a Council bureaucracy. Even where senior officers are committed, it is quite usual for others in the hierarchy to impede their efforts.

There are particular problems relating to Cycle Training, Smarter Travel initiatives, and of course, “road safety” education, which I address in the next post.

But here I will list just a few instances of the kind of issues which come up in the boroughs which relate only to the everyday problems of those officers trying to progress cycling. These are based on conversations with fellow officers with whom I have discussed the current situation in the last few weeks. They are all in Boroughs which claim to have a commitment towards supporting cycling – I haven’t even bothered with those with a reputation for being anti-cycling (like Barnet, Newham, and Westminster). Identity is withheld to protect the innocent.

 Borough A: There is no dedicated cycling officer because the official policy is “multi-modal” and cycling is supposedly included in it as a serious mode of transport. In principle this could be the right approach, but it does mean that the policy does have to be genuinely non-discriminatory when it comes to cycling – and this is not so. My colleague has installed some segregated cycle facilities and wishes to continue doing this – but his/her boss is making this conditional on there being no loss of car parking spaces. This rather puts the damper on his/her ideas: so much for an equitable “multi-modal” approach. 

Borough B: A “Biking Borough”, no less.

• Here is a row of cycle parking stands (see photo above) on which I have not seen one single bicycle since they were installed two years ago.  The idea was to have this investment as part of a programme of support for cycling which so far has not developed any significant support for cycling at all.
  

The bike attached to the steel Sheffield stand has been there for three years

• Some three years ago a set of Sheffield stands were replaced by some more intensive on-street facilities (above) . This is fine, but during the process one stand was retained as a bicycle had been locked to it. The bike and stand are still there three years later, despite a series of communications from me.
• Sometimes my complaints went to the much harassed Cycling Officer, trying to do the work which I have been able to do in a Borough which allocated at least three times as much staffing resource to cycling as s/he had. S/he has been made redundant.

 Borough C: The officer allocated with a cycling brief is subject to continuous dismissal by office colleagues of the idea of cycling as a form of everyday transport. Cycling is not considered viable because (a) Women can’t do it because they will be sexually assaulted when cycling, and not just at night; (b) Motoring is far more accessible and always will be – and it is the duty of the Council to provide as much car parking and road space for cars as desired in order to accommodate it; (c) Cyclists are always riding on the pavement and through red lights so deserve what they get.

Elsewhere there are regular tales of difficulties in removing car parking from obstructing safe cycling (in cycle lanes or otherwise), a general opposition to any notion of sustainable transport policy, and ignorance or confusion about highway design guidelines. The London Cycle Design Standards are disseminated in seminars which a handful of Borough officers have attended.  The fashion for extended footways with narrowed traffic lanes is hardly discussed in terms of its effects on cyclists.

I could go on. And on. I am not trying to be negative, but this is the background which colleagues will find recognisable, and which members of the public will not generally be aware of.

Of course, some Boroughs have a genuinely positive attitude which can win through – but even in these cases it will be a struggle. It all means that, if the enthusiasm evident from many commentators on the Vision is to be rewarded, that change needs to occur within the Boroughs.

 

A moderate suggestion

How could this change happen? There is rather more to the relationship between TfL and the boroughs than the fact that TfL does not control the roads in them.  TfL give some £100 – £150 million every year to the boroughs in Local Implementation Plan settlement. While this money is for the boroughs to spend, TfL can, in principle, have an effect on the kind of spend which happens.

Indeed, a notable feature is how TfL has so far been likely to oppose measures which are seen as possibly reducing motor traffic capacity, even when a borough (for reasons such as increasing pedestrian signalled crossing time) has wanted to do so. And we see in the Vision that:

“We will not be asking boroughs to remove traffic or, in the vast majority of cases, change parking on the two-way cycle streets, unless they want to”.(p.11).

How about changing that to encouraging steps necessary to support cycling – which may well include reducing road space for motor traffic and car parking?

My suggestion is that, apart from assistance to a small proportion of Outer London boroughs (the “mini-Hollands”), which will only affect at best 15% of the part of London which is least attractive to cycling, that TfL actually restrict support to those boroughs that are not sufficiently supportive of cycling. It should be quite possible to reduce LIP settlements and other supporting programmes for boroughs if they don’t have a properly audited programme of support fro cycling. After all, support for cycling has been part of the Mayor’s Transport Strategy  (MTS) since the Livingstone mayoralty, with the aim of 5% modal share by 2026 continued in mayor Johnson’s MTS 2.

In my view, if there is any chance of putting a positive vision for cycling into practice throughout London, this kind of change is going to have to happen.

 

 

 

 

 

I said in my introductory words on The Mayor's Vision for Cycling in London (subtitled, importantly,  An Olympic Legacy for all Londoners – we were all criticising the lack of any legacy plan in the immediate aftermath of the games) that my reservations about the Vision were not going to be fundamental. This is the overwhelmingly dominant point in all that follows. This marks the Vision out as a radical break with the past. This has never happened before. For as soon as the Cycle Superhighways project was announced, it was totally obvious to me it could not work, and I said so (this was before I started this blog) to those at the top of London Cycling Campaign, as I wrote to the the then CEO of LCC in August 2009:
I think we should not be co-operating with this project as the information with we have been supplied, particularly the presentation from last week's meeting at LCC, indicates that both the funding and the conception behind these routes is so calamitously inadequate to the task that they will be a total waste of time and money, and, worse, will attract inexperienced cyclists onto main road routes that have not been made any safer than they are now, with junctions that are still highly dangerous and unsuitable for all but the most skilled with-traffic cyclists.So there I am, four years ago, predicting that the Superhighways, in the form that they were proposed then, would lead to more cyclists on the roads, and more deaths. This was at a time when everybody else was saying that having more cyclists on the roads always lead to safer cycling. Of course, I was right.

The original Superhighways concept was clearly "calamitously inadequate" because it failed to give cyclists their own space. The routes were envisaged as being superimposed, by and large, on bus lanes, and bus lanes that were mostly part-time, at that. So the cycle routes were full of buses to start with, at the best of times, and most of the time they were parked over. So this was clearly all just spin and blue paint: it was no real change to the conditions that cyclists endured already. And worst of all, of course, cyclists were being encouraged to cycle on routes with a number of particularly dangerous junctions that were hardly altered, or altered badly, for the Superhighway implementations. So we had the all too predictable tragedies at Bow.

The pattern for the consultations on the Superhighways became clear shortly after I wrote that in August 2009. Long-winded CRISP (Cycle Route Implementations Study Plan) documents were put together by private consultants, often duplicating exactly work that had earlier been done on the LCN (pre-GLA establishment London Cycle Network) and LCN+ (Ken Livingstone's mayoralty) routes. LCC borough groups often dutifully co-operated with the compilation of these, attending CRIMs (Cycle Route Inspection Meetings) with the consultants, making their demands, which were in virtually all cases rejected in the CRISP reports as "conflicting with the maintenance of [motor traffic] capacity" or the "physical constraints of the roads". In other words, the consultation process with cyclists (or stakeholders as they were always called) was a farce and an insult.

And even when the consultants did recommend significant change to junctions, their recommendations seemed to get ignored or watered-down in the actual implementation, most notoriously in the case of Bow roundabout, where what TfL built was not the signalised, off-cariageway route recommended by their consultants, Jacobs Babtie, but something fatally superficial that claimed two lives in quick succession in almost identical incidents. In north-west London, the A5 (Edgware Road) was originally proposed as a Cycle Superhighway, and I, with the local LCC groups, lobbied to get the Superhighway taken off that route, because (for one reason) we could see no way in which the Staples Corner West intersection (very similar to Bow roundabout) could be made safe using the methods TfL were wedded to at that time.

Delving still further into the past, the LCN and LCN+ schemes were mostly conceived of as being on minor roads. But there were no answers to the simple observation that the minor roads are minor because, in general, they are not the most useful through-routes to anywhere that people need to go. Cycle route planning does need to start from the recognition that cyclists, or, should I say, people on bikes, are normal human beings who need to do the same things that everybody else needs to do: go to the same shops, schools, offices, stations, that are all linked, most usably and efficiently, by the main roads. Forcing an invariable, inevitable compromise between directness (and priority) and safety was never going to be a route to success. As I have said before, fundamentally, cyclists no more belong on the minor roads than do motor vehicles or pedestrains, and successflu route planning in both the Netherlands and Denmark, to my knowledge, has been based on the procedure of looking first at where cyclists go already, and then providing saffe infrastructure for them in those places: quite the reverse of the LCN approach.

The general failure of the LCN and LCN+ was compounded by the fact that the minor roads chosen were in general not made much nicer to cycle on than they had been before, because in few cases was much through motor traffic actually removed (rare exceptions to this, such as the route on King Henry's Road and Gloucester Avenue in Camden, and the route on Northchurch Road and Middleton Road in Islington and Hackney, did actually become quite successful), and by the fact that all the difficult junctions (Swiss Cottage being a classic case) into which the minor road routes inevitably discharged at some point, because they were minor road routes which do not fully run through, were left unsolved when the schemes were finally abandoned after Boris Johnson became mayor.

I've drifted into ancient history (history BG:  before Gilligan) because I needed to make sharply plain, to those who might not know all this already, the profound transformation of approach represented by the Mayor's new Vision announced last Thursday. Essentially, both the rhetoric and the substance is now right. Read the introduction, penned by Boris himself, and after some characteristic whimsicality:
Hundreds of thoudands of people have discovered that heir transport future is lying in their garage under a pile of disused barbecue equipment.He says what we all want to hear:
Cycling will be treated not as niche, marginal, or an afterthought, but as what it is: an integral part of the transport network, with the capital spending, road space and traffic planners’ attention befitting that role.before like a latter-day Roman Emperor declaring:
I today announce that the main cross-London physical legacy of the 2012 Olympic Games will be a proper network of cycle routes throughout the city, a substantial increase in cycling, and all the benefits – fitness, enjoyment and easy travel for millions, cleaner air and less traffic for all – that will follow.And as it goes on, there's already a fundamental departure from all previous British "cycling plans" from time immemorial, but you are not going to notice it unless you are thinking about this, thinking about what's not there, about the dog that did not bark in the night: it's not about cycle "promotion", it's all about enabling cycling, about changing the city to make it easy to choose the option of cycling. We've never, ever had this before. Even the Cycle Superhighways and Biking Borough schemes from Johnson's first attempt at cycling policy actually involved spending a high percentage of the total budget on so-called Soft Measures:  promotion and training, in other words. In all British cycling policy from the 1930s onwards the emphasis has been on promotion and the training of cyclists, not on changing the environment. But in this document, we are no longer in that world. This is a shift that should not be overlooked. It's almost as if Boris had been reading the list of blogs in the right-hand side panel of this site:
I want cycling to be normal, a part of everyday life. I want it to be something you feel comfortable doing in your ordinary clothes, something you hardly think about. I want more women cycling, more older people cycling, more black and minority ethnic Londoners cycling, more cyclists of all social backgrounds – without which truly mass participation can never come.Yes, he has definitely been reading that list of blogs. And it seems that Peter Hendy, head of TfL, has been doing likewise. In his foreword that follows Boris's:
In urban transport, cycling is now at the cutting edge. Across the western world, from Paris to New York, from Edinburgh to Dublin, forward-thinking cities are investing hundreds of millions of pounds in the bicycle, knowing that well-designed schemes can deliver benefits far greater than their relatively modest costs. Because transport is not just how you get around. It is part of what shapes a city, for good and for ill. Cycling shapes a city – for all its people, cyclists or not – in ways that are almost always good.Pretty amazing to read. It's the new pragmatism around cycling, which Andrew Gilligan, the Mayor's Cycling Commissioner, was keen to emphasis at the launch of the strategy, pointing out that the case for an east-west cycle link (the "Crossrail for the Bike") was economic: it could take the equivalent of three extra trains per hour on the Central Line, at vastly less cost than any kind of tube upgrade. That's the point of view that it's always been my impression the Dutch principally had in developing their cycle networks; it wasn't about "being green", or doing anything for pollution or health, it was just sensible and economic: a very effective way of increasing mobility while reducing congestion and using available city space better, at low cost. It seems TfL have at last "got it". Hooray.

But enough of the warm words: is the money enough to achieve the transformation Boris proposes? In round numbers, it's going to average £90m a year for 10 years, on current proposals. A future Mayor, of course, if Boris is not re-elected, or does not stand for election in 2016, could increase or decrease the allocation, or the London Assembly could change it with a two-thirds majority (as it tried to do last week). I've stated before that for the whole country, just to start getting cycle infrastructure up to a sensible standard, we need to be spending a billion a year. London has around 15% of the population of the UK, so we should be spending £150m a year just in London, which is about what the opposition parties in the Assembly tried to obtain last week. So this funding is not enough to cover what's needed for the whole of London. But, judiciously applied, it could make a big difference over much of the capital. And it does make sense to work from the centre outwards, from the areas currently that have the highest cycling levels, to build political momentum and minimise the objections. The funding is greatest in the first four years, then tapers off. Gilligan, one got the impression at the launch, was very much hoping that this would not be the final settlement, and that once the projects started to be seen to work, there would be public pressure for more, and it would become possible for a future mayor to increase the funding beyond current plans after the initial phase. We've got to start campaigning on this now, if the whole of London is to see a cycling revolution, that could spread to other parts of the UK.

The funding looks un-generous for Outer London. Page 16 of the Vision:

Cycling in Outer London is mostly low, with great potential for improvement. We will increase cycle spending specifically dedicated to Outer London from £3m to more than £100m.It's low all right. Around 0.5% of journeys to work in some wards of North Brent are by bike. And of school journeys across the whole of Brent, only 0.3% are by bike – shockingly few. And cycling has been flatlining, or on an actually downward trajectory in much of Outer London over the past decade, as census figures show. So there is a mountain to climb.

It seems that the £100m is to be spent on three "Mini-Hollands" in Outer London, but also,
All suburban boroughs will benefit from the increased investment in our Quietway and Superhighway programmes, both of which will extend far into Outer London.So I take it that that part, as it applies to Outer London, is extra to the £100m, which will be about £33m per chosen borough. Suppose in those chosen boroughs there are some really major infrastructural barriers, as we have in Brent, that will require major engineering to get high-quality cycle routes across them: like new bridges or underpasses for the North Circular Road, the West Coast Main Line, or the Metropolitan Line corridor. I can see those structures, and associated changes needed to the roads, easily coming to £5–10m each. Say you have three or four of them, as we would need in the Wembley to Neasden area of Brent to even start to create a satisfactory network there, that's going to eat up perhaps £20m of your £33m to start with. Then if you are creating fully segregated routes on main roads, that's easily going to cost £500,000 per mile, in complicated cases, which most will be, including the junction and signal changes needed. So you are not going to get many miles of cycle route within these budgets.

I'm not trying to be pessimistic, I'm trying my best to estimate the real problems here. It is possible that with the larger scale of planning and procurement that the new investment will bring about, costs for the individual infrastructure elements will be reduced to lower levels that they have been at in the past, when things were all done as a one-off (as when it cost Camden £1 million for 1 km of the Royal Colllege Street segregated track in 2000). Cycle bridges could be made to a standard pattern, for instance, reproduced in several locations. Bureaucratic costs, such as those associated with Traffic Orders, are also reduced when bigger projects are carried out. But the costs of solving the problems of the existing layouts in Outer London are not to be underestimated by any means.


Here (above) is a rough-and-ready attempt to illustrate these barrier problems in the Wembley to Neasden area of Brent. Wembley Stadium is the white oval slightly left of  centre. For scale, the stadium is 300m wide. I've put red lines on all the railways which have no minor road crossings: that is, they are only crossed by busy A and B roads with only one lane in either direction on the bridges, making them all nasty, hostile pinch points for cycling. There's only one exception to this rule I can see in this area, the tiny Taylor's Lane going under the North London freight line in Harleseden, marked with a T. This does not create a particularly useful route, because that road soon hits the North Circular, the A406.

The railway crossing points in the map above all (with the exception of the six-lane North Circular) look pretty much like this: East Lane at North Wembley Station.Note how long some of the distances are between crossing points of the railways. Along the Metropolitan line corridor (marked M), it's about 1.5km from the A406 (not really a cycleable crossing for those without a death wish) to Bridge road at Wembley Park; along the Chiltern Line (marked C) it's a similar distance between Great Central Way (another nasty narrow uphill road full of lorries heading for the Wembley Park industrial estate) and the A479 Wembley Hill Road; it's a very slightly shorter distance along the West Coast Main Line (W) between the A406 at Stonebridge (where there is a kind of a cycle road) and the A404 Wembley High Road.

You'll note how Wembley is multiply cut-off from all directions by these railways, with only very infrequent and hostile main road crossing points, particularly from the point of view of commuting towards central London, towards the lower right of the map. This is compounded by the massive barrier of the A406 North Circular Road, which I have also put red lines on. This only has five legal crossing points for bikes on the area of this map (which work as routes in both directions), numbered from right to left. These are:

1. The Neasden motorway-style intersection (AKA "The Valley of Death, show above, the only legal crossing of the North Circular that works in both direction in the east centre of the borough)
2. Brentfield Road and Drury Way, which leads into the aforementioned lorry-plagued Great Central Way and the Wembley Park industrial estate with its hostile one-way race track roads
3. Harrow Road, a relatively good crossing for skilled vehicular cyclists
4. A proper cycle bridge between Stonebridge Station and Abbey road, well-built, but unfortunately rather hard to access from most points of origin
5. The Grand Union Canal aqueduct, by far the nicest crossing, and a lovely piece of engineering, where the canal passes over the A406.

Could be Holland with left-had driving: the Stonebridge cycle bridge across the A406. Unfortunately, it doesn't connect to a viable cycle network.The last red line on the map is the River Brent (B). I've included this tiny stream as a barrier because, strangely, it is, in the stretch between the reservoir and the A406 and West Coast Main Line nexus. It is crossed only at the very hostile Neaden Lane North (NNN), at an obscure and tiny path at Bridge Close (BC) which takes a lot of negotiating on a bike, at the aforementioned, horrible, Great Central Way (GCW), and then on a couple of bridges in the linear Brent River Park, which, to their credit, the borough has improved in recent years.
So the important point about the geography of Wembley and Neasden that I am pointing out is that there are no possible minor road routes to anywhere of any use. The Quietways concept expounded in the Mayor's Vision is not going to work here without some real new building. The only places routes could go at the moment would be the main roads, where full segregation would be needed to make the cycling experience attractive, and there is actually not even much space for that at many of the pinch-points. There is no grid of streets here that can be converted, say in the way that the street grids in Bloomsbury and Hackney can, and in many places, have been, converted, so that cyclists have a defined route through side-streets with mode-filters (road closures allowing cyclists through), while other roads in the grid are left open to take the through motor traffic. The pattern of development in Brent and many other places in Outer London is the "broccoli" style. The railways were built before the suburbs were built-up, and only allowed crossings at infrequently-spaced main roads. Infill development in the broccoli style later occurred, closing up the gaps and making it mostly impossible to build new crossings because the housing or industrial development became continuous. 
It was all rather badly-planned, and now we're stuck with it. The only real solution is to take every opportunity where redevelopment occurs (as it will in Wembley Park) to build new connections, and, in many places, public land acquisition will be necessary, and extensive rebuilding. This will be expensive, hence my calulations above for what facilities the Mayor's new money is likely to be able to buy in this sort of area. I'm labouring this point, even to the extent of drawing a scrappy map, because it's my experience that these problems in Outer London are often not understood, not only by policy-makers, but also by campaigners in less problematic areas, who've got hold of some over-simple ideas as to what measures might be necessary to create a quality cycle network in an old urban environment. Such problems are not unique to Brent; one can find areas of East and South London where they apply similarly, though I am not convinced that there is any other case quite so bad, from the severance point of view, as mid-Brent, though someone could try to convince me otherwise.
The old LCN and LCN+ concepts of the back-street routes, and even the newer Sustrans Greenway concepts, could not address these problems, and made no headway in areas like this. (A recently-proposed Sustrans-surveyed route across Brent north to south proposed going under the Metropolitan line at a tunnel for pedestrians accessing Northwick Park Station that is 1.2m wide: hopeless!) The new strategy does better because it is far more ambitious, and recognises that things really might need changing in a significant way – that it's not just a matter, as was often naively imagined before, of putting up signposts on residential roads:We will use judicious capital investment to overcome barriers (such as railway lines) which are often currently only crossed by extremely busy main roads. Subject to funding, land and planning issues, we will build new cycling and pedestrian bridges across such barriers to link up Quietway side-street routes. (Vision, p. 14)Clearly, the money on offer currently for Outer London isn't going to go far in doing this, which is why there is the sensible idea in the Vision of concentrating investment in only three demonstration areas (though how large these areas will be is not made clear). It would seem sensible, even so, for the chosen boroughs to try to augment this new money with funds from other sources, such as the Community Infrastructure Levy on new developments (a partial replacement for the old Section 106 funding schemes), and the public health budgets for which they are now responsible, if they wish to make the most of this "Little Hollands" concept.

And that brings me to another big question mark hanging over the Mayor's Vision: the attitude of the boroughs. There was a lot of good mood-music about this at the launch of the Vision, Gilligan telling the audience that he had spoken to all the boroughs, except for Greenwich (who had never got back to him), and that they were all going to be behind the plan. He specifically mentioned that Westminster, so long a bête noire to cycling campaigners, were now prepared to allow two-way cycling on one-way streets (though one suspects they still are not prepared to allow parking to be removed, or relocated, in order to build cycle tracks, so the Camden tracks in Howland Street and Maple Street will still come to a dead stop at Cleveland Street, at the Westminster border). The Vision says:
With the boroughs’ agreement, we will seek to open up a number of central one-way streets for two-way cycling, creating direct, easy, lower-traffic routes through the City and West End. Experience from the City and Kensington and Chelsea, who have brilliantly led this process, shows that it can be accomplished without traffic or safety impacts.

We will not be asking boroughs to remove traffic or, in the vast majority of cases, change parking on the two-way cycle streets, unless they want to. (p11)I feel this is a pragmatic formulation to avoid "frightening the horses" of Westminster Council and the City Corporation. It would be a step forward from what we have, but on some busy routes it may become apparent that it is not enough, that contraflow cycling simply proves to be unsafe when squeezed between double rows of parked cars and a heavy traffic flow, and I'm not sure what will happen then. It's a reasonable enough formulation for truly quiet streets, of which there are some in the West End and City.

The fact remains, and this fact has been somewhat pushed into the background with all the good mood-music, that the boroughs control almost all the roads in London, and they can stop anything they don't want, coming out of the Cycling Vision, on their roads. They may be attracted to co-operate by the large sums on offer, even if they are not very convinced of the cycling agenda, for the purpose of achieving the objectives well-set out at the end of the Key Outcomes:
Our policies will help all Londoners, whether or not they have any intention of getting on a bicycle. Our new bike routes are a step towards the Mayor’s vision of a ‘village in the city’, creating green corridors, even linear parks, with more tree-planting, more space for pedestrians and less traffic.But what will actually happen in less enlightened (mostly Outer London) boroughs when push comes to shove on the Quietway programme, when, to create these quiet routes, rat-run roads actually need closing to motor traffic? I am reminded, by a recent post about rat-running by The Alternative Department for Transport, of conversations I have had with officers in Brent (not one of the most anti-cycling boroughs), relating to roads in the south of the borough (the easier part to make cycle-friendly), who still really do feel that it is a legitimate function of minor residential streets to be taking some of the motor traffic pressure off the main roads, and that closing rat-runs is neither politically nor practically possible. There's going to have to be a sea-change in attitudes here, amongst councillors and officers, to make the Quietways work. Overall, the Quietways are the aspect of the Vision I am least sanguine about. I feel this project could easily run into the same political quicksand that the LCN and putative Sustrans networks did, without very determined leadership from the Mayor and the Cycling Commissioner.

It may be thought that the only "little local difficulties" for the Vision may come from stick-in-the-mud Conservative-run outer Boroughs like Barnet, but I do wonder who will actually be getting in the way of it most. It seems that influential elements in vocally pro-cycling Hackney do not like the sound of much of it. Councillor Vincent Stops is the Chair of Hackney's Planning Committee, and shortly after the Vision launch, he put out some extraordinary tweets apparently criticising the whole approach:
Boris cycling plan. 9 out of 10 for vision. 5 of 10 content. Best bit-the quietways. Worst-lack of commitment to sorting one-way systems.and
Boris cycling plan. Reasonable grasp of Hackney philosophy. Segregation generally not practicable, will go same way as LCN -into sand.and most bizarre of all:
How many miles of trip hazards is Boris going to install. I'm sure Hackney will continue to focus on what's important for cycling and peds.Councillor Stops has now written a blogpost to explain his views on Cycling and Walking in Hackney further:
Hackney has also reinvented its public realm, its streets and public places. At least ten years of consistent and high levels of investment from the local authority has built on congestion charging and has changed the borough's streets out of all recognition. There have been numerous complementary, 'soft' measures, to promote cycling and walking. There has been major and very subtle changes to street design and there has been a supportive town planning regime - most new housing development in Hackney is car free or car capped.

Hackney's approach is essentially simple and takes much from the work of Danish urbanist Jan Gehl. Hackney has seen an incremental change on its streets to: create a better balance between pedestrians, cyclists and motor vehicles. There has been an equality of esteem for both movement and, crucially, urban design. Almost every intervention on Hackney's streets has improved its public realm and benefitted both cyclists and pedestrians. In Hackney we think about cycle journeys, not cycle routes.This is all great, but I'm sorry to say, Hackney ain't the Netherlands. Or even Copenhagen. There are some good cycle routes and good spaces for cycling in Hackney (particularly Victoria Park), and some limited pleasant cycling experiences are possible in Hackney, but Hackney's main roads, that of course you cannot avoid for most practical journeys, are hell to cycle on, they are no better than Brent's, and they cripple cycling in the borough and will continue to limit it to a very small subset of the population until continental segregation methods are adopted on them. It is a telling fact that, in Hackney, only 3% of children cycle to school, whereas 33% want to. That's ten times better than Brent's 0.3%, but it's twenty times worse than Amsterdam's school cycling rate, and that's only half the Dutch average of 89%. By those standards it's pathetic, and represents a total failure to make the borough truly cycle-friendly, as children (along with old people) must be regarded as the "canaries in the mine" for a really breathable cycling atmosphere, not the hipsters on their fixie bikes around Broadway Market. So I think Cllr Stops should stop lecturing us, in other boroughs, about what cycle-friendly policies actually look like, and engage with the new agenda for truly inclusive cycling being propounded in the Mayor's Vision.

The essence of this Vision is around the recognition that cyclists need segregation on main roads. The kind of thing that Cllr. Stops seems to think everyone will trip over. I've been on about segregation for years, decades indeed, of course, boring people to death about it. Because (not to go over all the old stuff again), though I am fully aware that the successful continental cycling policy approaches include many other elements, including filtered permeability, 20mph (and slower) zones, bicycle streets, quality universal cycle training, and all the rest of it, I have constantly held the segregation on main roads to be the keystone of the arch, without which all other measures intended to create mass cycling will always fail, and that the substantive absence of this measure in the British environment was the essential explanation of the failure of all past political attempts to revive cycling in this country.

This demand for segregation on main roads, that the membership of LCC voted overwhelmingly for, was the origin of the LCC's Go Dutch campaign, and though the campaign became wider, was always at its heart. When the London Assembly Transport Committee held its enquiry into cycling safety, all the "expert" organisations asked to contribute, from the cycling side, the LCC, CTC, Cycling Embassy of Great Britain, and British Cycling, all were unanimous that cyclists need segregating from fast and heavy traffic on the roads. The point was emphatically made in the committee's report, as it had to be, with the observation that the efforts of Transport for London thus far to engineer a "cycling revolution" in London had missed out this critical detail. This criticism I believe had an effect on the Mayor and TfL, and in the Vision we see the result. The Vision mentions "segregation" 12 times and "segregated" 23 times, and those words were constantly mentioned by those presenting the strategy at its launch. A segregated "Crossrail for the Bike", segregated Superhighways and other segregated sections, as parts of the Central London Grid of routes and of the Quietways, are all now promised. The cover of the Vision document portrays the projected segregated route along the Embankment, and Camden's segregated Royal College Street (which was independent of the Mayor's plans), and the segregated proposed CS2 extension, form the first infrastructure illustrations in the body of the document.

For decades it was almost impossible to mention segregation in the world of UK cycle campaigning. It was "too controversial". It stirred people up too much. The word had to be avoided, on pain of ostracism. People searched for other ways to same the same thing: they talked of "separated", or "dedicated" infrastructure. They had to tiptoe around the linguistics. LCC's Campaigns Committee came up with the strange, fudged wording of "clear space for cycling on main roads" to cover the concept, without specifying it properly, when the options for the policy vote, that eventually led to the Go Dutch campaign, were decided upon.

The word segregation, for so long a dirty one in British cycling, has now been decontaminated. This is an essential breakthrough that comes with the Mayor's Vision. Nobody in British cycling ever will be afraid of talking of segregation again. Nobody will ever be ridiculed or ostracised for supporting segregation again. Those battles are fought and are now over. There could be a lot of things wrong with the Vision, and I would forgive them all for this. Now there are some things wrong with it. Some of it is too vague, and some of it already seems too compromising. Here's a problem passage:
Where it is not possible to segregate without substantially interfering with buses, we will install semi-segregation: shared bus and bike lanes, better separated from the rest of the traffic with means such as French-style ridges, cats’ eyes, rumble strips or traffic wands in the road. The lanes will also be wider, where space allows. (p13)This is baffling. Shared cycle and bus lanes are possible, if they are wide enough for buses to overtake bikes with good clearance, but if they are not wide enough, separating them off by the means stated would be a disaster, as cyclists and buses would not be able to get past one another, and the result would be frustration for bus passengers and intimidation for cyclists. The real point about the interaction of buses and cyclists is they must not cross over at the stops; the bikes must always be able to undertake at the stops, whatever the arrangement on the links.  This is the only way to prevent conflict and furstration in the relationsahip between buses and bikes, because the two go at about the same average speed, but cyclists need to keep their momentum up to be efficient, while buses need to keep stopping. We must keep a consistent principle of cyclists being to the left of buses, as they do in the Netherlands (where it is to the right, obviously), whether the lanes are shared or separated. We have examples of the undertaking at stops arrangement already in London, for example at Royal College Street, and even at obscure places (but known to me) in the suburbs, like Kingsbury Road, Brent, and Imperial Drive, Harrow. The idea has not proved problematic wherever it has been tried, and TfL are now proposing it (in places) on Superhighway 2 in Stratford. This trend must spread, and it must become the default procedure.

The Waterloo Bridge bus and cycle lane is wide enough for both, and there would be no advantage, and considerable disadvantages, to segregating it off. But it fails at the stops, where cyclists have to pull out into a fast lane of traffic.Another passage in the Vision document that I really worry about is this one:


[On the Quietways] Barriers and ‘Cyclists Dismount’ signs will be removed as far as possible. Quietways will be particularly suited to new cyclists (p. 14)Barriers will be removed "as far as possible"? What good on earth is that? We don't have through-roads and motorways where the barriers to the passage of cars are "removed as far as possible". This is idiotic. But the "particularly suited to new cyclists" phrase is the strangest part. It implies that other elements of the vision, the Superhighways and Grid routes, perhaps, will be less suited to new cyclists. This suggests those routes will still, in places, have poor standards of subjective safety. It suggests a compromised vision from the start, and the whole of that sentence, with the "so far as possible", and the "new cyclists" (for "new", maybe read "nervous", or "slow", or "child") suggests, nastily, a reversion to the two-track thinking about cycling provision that has been such a disaster since it became a common idea amongst UK street designers a couple of decades ago, formalised in later Department for Transport guidance, in Local Transport Note 2/08 and Local Transport Note 1/12. Such a reversion to two-track, or multi-track, thinking is also suggested by:
We will grade routes so people know what to expect (p 16)Two-track, or multi-track, planning for cycling leads to indirect, obstructed, impractical routes for "beginners" that will put them off cycling, and, on the other side, unsafe provision for "confident cyclists". It simply has no role in the Dutch approach to cycle provision. The Dutch build everything up to a common standard, a standard equally suited to use by a 7-year old child and by a 60-year old veteran racing cyclist. There are no routes for "beginners" (though there are extra fast routes, as Bicycledutch tell us).

I don't wish to harp on too much about this, as other phrases in the Vision suggest that the lessons of the compromised route planning of cycle networks in London of the past have been learned. But I think we will have to be very vigilant about the whole Quietways concept implementation. Whereas Cllr Stops thinks the Quietways are the best part of the vision, I think they are the most dubious, having most potential to go wrong again, and to me the talk of "routes suited to beginners" and "grading" is the most worrying part of the whole Vision. But I may be over-analysing a few words here.

What seems to have least potential to go wrong is the headline project, the "Crossrail for the Bike", on the north bank of the Thames. This is very largely under the control of TfL, and I see no reason why they can't get on with it rapidly, and finish it in under two years to a high standard. Certainly Boris stands to benefit enormously from seeing such a high-profile facility built quickly and efficiently. The Superhighway programme, currently limping along painfully slowly, needs to be accelerated, along with having its standards radically raised, as the Vision promises, otherwise it continues to have the potential to embarrass Boris. With the co-operation of Camden and Islington (very likely), and Westminster and the City (more dubious), good progress should also be possible on the Central London Bike Grid in a couple of years.

I am worried, with As Easy As Riding a Bike, about the lack of detail in the Vision as to how junctions on the various networks will be managed. This is one area on which campaigners will need to keep the closest eye. But this essay has gone on far too long already, so I'll not get into junctions now. I also wonder whether putting part of the "Crossrail" route on the elevated Westway can actually work. I have my doubts; it's politically daring, but it doesn't sound like it will make for an attractive cycling experience. But I'll have to leave that for now as well.

When I first saw the headlines in the Vision I was 95% optimistic about it. Now, having read and thought about the detail, and having seen everybody else's thoughts, I am about 75% optimistic. Yes, we know that paths of the standard of what is proposed on the Embankment already go everywhere in the Netherlands. So, David Hembrow implies, what's so great to make a song and dance about here?  But they don't in the UK. That's the point. We have to start. A start in the very heart of London is quite momentous. I welcome the start, and I welcome the transformed language, and apparently transformed ambition, of the Mayor's Vision. I'll be the first, or one of the first, for there are many eagle, critical eyes in the London cycling community, to find fault with the implementation of the Vision, to criticise any backsliding in the ambition, and to attack any attempt to conceal, mislead, or pull the wool over our  eyes over funding, or push hype over substance and claim as adequate standards when better should have been achieved. It could all go wrong, and we could be back much were we are now in ten years' time. But I don't think so, not this time. In the past, as I said at the start, the vision was fundamentally, obviously flawed from the first. This time it is not. It could just work this time. It's now down to everybody, everybody in the entire city of Greater London, to make it work. The people of this city deserve it.

If you say the word ‘gyratory’ to anyone who cycles regularly around cities or large towns in Britain, they’ll probably shiver involuntarily and start to sweat a little. In their mind, they will almost certainly be picturing  scenes like this -

Wide, fast, sweeping roads, with nerves of steel required to move across lanes to make turns; unpleasant places to ride a bicycle.

Gyratory removal is unsurprisingly very popular with cyclists, and is starting to happen across London. The one-way system around Piccadilly was restored to two-way working recently (with, in my opinion, mixed results for cycling), and there are plans afoot to remove the Aldgate gyratory [pdf], among others.

The Mayor’s promising new Vision for Cycling also talks of

making bike journeys easier and more direct by removing one-way streets, gyratories and complicated crossings of big roads.

and argues that

Removing one-way streets and gyratories will cut the incidence of cyclists travelling the ‘wrong’ way or on pavements

Well, I’m not quite so sure gryatories are such a bad thing (bear with me). I think that in many places we actually need them, and that they can be highly beneficial for cycling, and for public transport.

The reason why is hinted at in this sentence from the same Vision document -

We will put Dutch-style segregated lanes on several one-way streets where the bus stops are only on one side of the road, such as part of Harleyford Road in Vauxhall.

The broader point, hinted at here, is that segregrated tracks, running in both directions, are more possible on one-way roads.  Keeping roads one-way for motor vehicles only allows space to be allocated specifically for cycling. By contrast, restoring current one-way gyratory systems to two-way movement for motor vehicles would clearly impinge on the amount of space that can be given over to bus lanes and cycle tracks.

So – if we are serious about prioritising bicycle use in London and other cities across Britain, I think gyratories (of a particular form) should be here to stay, and indeed should actually be introduced in places where they don’t currently exist. According to the Vision for Cycling document, Transport for London are sacrificing their commitment to a comfortable cycling experience where bus lanes currently exist. There is not the space between buildings for cycle tracks, and for keeping bus lanes, and for keeping two-way motor vehicle flow.

The answer in some places would be create gyratories, for motor vehicles only; to reallocate the space used for two-way running to bicycle tracks, while keeping bus lanes. I’ll come to some Dutch examples of this kind of design in a moment, but first we can take a look at Piccadilly, which is an interesting example of how this might have worked. Here’s the old arrangement, looking west from close to the Royal Academy.

A bus lane in each direction, with three motor vehicle lanes heading east. If you were driving on this street, and you wanted to get to Hyde Park Corner, you would actually be substantially disadvantaged, having to progress all the way around a giant rectangle formed by Haymarket and Pall Mall.

And now the current arrangement at the same spot, courtesy of Streetview -

Now you can drive west (heading away from us). The bus lane going west has disappeared, as have a good number of the eastbound vehicle lanes, to make way for a westbound carriageway. Instead of three lanes heading east, we now have one or two in each direction. Eastbound capacity for private motor vehicles has been sacrificed.

My point is that, ideally, this eastbound capacity reduction should have occurred without the introduction of a westbound carriageway; that space instead could have been allocated to cycle tracks running in both directions. In so doing you would have made driving in central London as difficult as it was before (and not slightly easier), and you would also have made cycling along this road a more comfortable and pleasant experience (instead of having to fight your way through motor traffic, particularly heading east).

In short, the gyratory for motor vehicles should have been kept, and the space used to create two-way motor vehicle movements should instead have been allocated to cycling. Precisely the same is true at other horrible gyratories across London. I don’t want to see two-way roads for motor vehicles all around King’s Cross, because that would use up valuable space, and valuable signal time, that could be allocated instead to cycling and public transport. Keep the gyratory for motor vehicles; make them continue to go around the houses, so that their journeys are inconvenient. This can be achieved while making bicycle journeys comfortable, direct and straightforward (indeed, keeping one-way running for cars makes this even easier).

Gyratories are a significant feature of Dutch towns and cities, and they go a long way towards explaining why they are so pleasant to cycle around. They make driving inconvenient by comparison with cycling, and they also allow space between buildings to be used for public transport, walking and cycling instead, in ways that would not be possible with two-way flow for motor vehicles.

A simple example to start with. This street is part of a complex one-way system in a residential area just to the north-east of Utrecht city centre.

One-way for cars (towards us) but, as you can see, two-way for bicycles. This street would be substantially worse for cycling if it was two-way for motor vehicles. The one-way system has the additional advantage of discouraging driving through this area, and you can see that it works. Not much driving. It even seems to have made the Google Streetview drivers quit in disgust, as this area is barely mapped at all.

Elsewhere in Utrecht, there exist ‘virtual’ gyratories; gyratories that only exist for motor vehicles, but not for bicycles or public transport. Try driving into the centre from the east – you will be forced to take a ludicrous detour around your own gryatory.

 This is because a section of this route, Nobelstraat, is part of a ‘gyratory’; a one-way road for cars, but in the opposite direction.

Looking west. A two-way bus lane in the middle, and a cycle track on the right. No way through for motor vehicles; only a one-way road towards us on the left.

This is what gyratories in London could begin to look like if we decided not to dismantle them entirely, but to keep one-way running for motor vehicles, and use the space we might have allocated to two-way flow specifically for public transport, walking and cycling. Conversely, it’s often very hard to allocate space in this way if you are intent on unwinding a gyratory for all modes.

Believe it or not, this is another gyratory, in the centre of Amsterdam.

Motor vehicles can only travel around the one-way system, away from us (indicated by the small blue arrow towards the right of the photograph). The rest of the space is for pedestrians, a two-way tram route, and two-way cycling. Would you want to dismantle this gyratory and install two-way running for motor vehicles? I hope not.

A similar example, further out into the suburbs of Amsterdam.

The van is driving around a gyratory, while bicycles can travel in both directions, on cycle tracks. The grassy area is a two-way tram route. Again, this allocation of space would not be possible with two-way flow for motor vehicles.

Finally, here’s a video of a gyratory in Groningen.

The cars are flowing on a one-way system all of their own, while bicycles can travel in all directions. These are private gyratories for motor vehicles, created to allow safe, comfortable bicycle travel in all directions.

Before we start dismantling our own gyratories and restoring them to two-way running, perhaps we should think more creatively about how we can use the space that they occupy.

Why would you restore a road like this in King’s Cross to two-way running for motor vehicles when you could use the space for more effectively for public transport and cycling?

The emerging competition for space between bus lanes and cycle tracks in London can be greatly reduced if we keep one-way running for motor vehicles, and indeed if we introduce gyratories of this kind in other places across the city.

Let’s not consign gyratories to the dustbin just yet.

F35 is the name of the longest high-speed cycle route that is currently in planning and under construction in the Netherlands. The almost 60 kilometres (37 miles) long cycle route … Continue reading →

I blogged recently (as did several others) about the Mayor of London’s new Vision for Cycling document, which, while short on detail, appears to represent a new approach towards cycling in London; responding to the concerns and needs of the vast majority of Londoners who do not consider riding a bicycle to be an attractive or appealing prospect.

The Vision recognises that cycling in motor traffic is not something that most people want to do, and proposes policies that should make cycling a comfortable and pleasant experience in London – separation from traffic on major routes, and the removal of through traffic on quieter residential streets, to form ‘Quietways’.

One of the groups who stand to benefit most from this new strategy, if successfully implemented, are children and young people; a child on a bicycle is, in my experience, an extraordinarily rare sight in London, certainly away from the pavement. Even in London’s best-performing borough, Hackney, just 3% of children cycle to school, while 33% want to. I expect a similar, if not worse, picture across the rest of London; a massive amount of suppressed demand for cycling amongst the young.

As it happens, at precisely the same time the Mayor’s Vision is being launched, Transport for London are also consulting on a document entitled School and Young Person Delivery Plan: Setting our future direction which has the intention of, amongst other things, ensuring that Transport for London meet the needs of young people.

The foreword acknowledges that

Young people are significant users of the capital’s transport network; whether it is for their journey to school or college, meeting friends or family or going to work…. Using the transport network is incredibly important to young people and to enable them to get the most of London we have an important role to ensure travelling in London is a happy, healthy and safe experience.

This is very important because TfL estimate that there will be over 3 million people aged under 25 in London by the year 2031. TfL aim to promote, in their words, active, safe and responsible travel for these millions of youngsters. Cycling clearly should represent a solution here, given that

TfL faces a number of challenges on the transport network as the population of London grows, impacting on existing levels of congestion and air quality. Coupled with this, obesity levels are rising and so TfL has a role to play in encouraging Londoners to be physically active when travelling around the city…. TfL wants to encourage young people to choose active travel modes, such as walking and cycling, and ensure that they can travel in a safe and responsible way

So how does this consultation document fare on the matter of cycling for young people in London?

There are a variety of sections that tangentially relate to cycling, and unfortunately all are very disappointing. The section on ‘Community and Personal Safety’ is entirely about safety from crime. This is obviously important, but not the only way in which children can be put into danger.

The section on ‘Casualty Reduction’ is even worse. While stating that reducing child casualties are an essential part of TfL’s aim to reduce all casualties by 40% by 2020 (compared to 2005-9 average), and that

TfL wants to ensure that young people travel safely on London’s roads, whether they are young drivers, cyclists, motorcyclists or pedestrians

the strategy aimed at keeping these young pedestrians and cyclists safe seems to revolve entirely around education and training, and has nothing to say about making London’s road environment safer. Here are the ‘Objectives’ -

‘Educate young people’ to behave properly on the roads, give them the ‘life-skills’ to identify hazards, and ‘encourage’ young people to understand the consequences of their actions.

And that’s it. Pretty miserable stuff, not just because of a failure to address creating safer streets, but also because all this ‘education’ and ‘encouragement’ is only directed at children themselves. There is nothing in this strategy that talks about getting drivers to behave better, or ‘educating’ them to drive more carefully around children. Nothing. It’s victim-blaming of the worst kind.

How many of those 1,181 children were completely blameless, or were hit by speeding motorists, or motorists who ‘lost control’? The assumption on the part of TfL seems to be that, because children under 16 form 22% of all pedestrian casualties, this must be due to something that children themselves are doing; the strategy is focused on improving their behaviour, through campaigns like this -

But a disproportionate number of pedestrians will be children in the first place; they can’t drive, so will be walking to school, or walking to catch the bus, unlike adults, many of whom will be driving instead. TfL don’t seem to have taken this into account, and have simply assumed that children forming a high percentage of pedestrian casualties is because they are ‘behaving badly’, rather than because they a relatively large percentage of pedestrians will be children. It’s quite blinkered.

Later in the document, this thinking is again in evidence, in TfL’s ‘engagement’ with young people. Here’s one of the strategies -

The response to some boroughs having high numbers of teenage casualties is to ‘raise awareness of road safety and encourage responsible behaviour’ amongst teenagers in these places – no assessment of how and why these teenagers are being killed, whether driving standards might be lax in these boroughs, whether the streets are dangerous to cross or walk along, or whether there might simply be more teenagers out on the streets here.

TfL might, of course, be doing these things elsewhere, but why is this kind of rational approach completely absent from this document? Why shouldn’t higher driving standards, safer street design, or lower vehicle speeds be put forward as policies to reduce child casualties? Amazingly, it’s not in this strategy document. There is nothing about making junctions safer, or providing safe cycling routes separated from motor traffic. Nothing. Of the ten ‘initiatives’ TfL are proposing to increase child safety, every single one involves training or educating children. There’s no mention of reducing environmental danger.

The same ‘educating’ and ‘training’ strategy is employed by TfL in ‘encouraging’ young people to walk and cycle, in the section of the document specifically on ‘Active and Independent Travel’. There’s a nice picture of some children engaged in cycle sport, strapped onto brakeless track bikes on a velodrome – obviously completely irrelevant for any child attempting to cycle to school or around their neighbourhood, not even useful training.

This is not transport!

The focus of the strategy in this section is almost entirely on ‘workshops’, ‘education’ and ‘training’, and encouraging schools to get more of their pupils to walk and cycle through accreditation schemes. Again, there’s nothing on making the roads and streets themselves attractive or inviting for walking and cycling.

I’m assuming this document was drafted in isolation of the Mayor’s new Vision for Cycling – it certainly reads like it. It might be wise if TfL ditched this consultation and came back with a new one that incorporated the eminently sensible strategy advice outlined in that new document, because it’s simply not up to scratch, certainly as regards cycling. We need safer, more pleasant streets for our children to walk and cycle one, and for a document about encouraging walking and cycling in these age groups to fail to even mention improving the streets themselves is quite scandalous.

The consultation runs until 27th March. Do have your say.

The neverending story of car dependency:

(c) Todd Litman, 2013. "Smart Congestion Relief - Comprehensive Analysis of Traffic Congestion Costs and Congestion Reduction Benefits". Victoria Transport Policy Institute.FUD - Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. This is the general feeling when drivers know that the street they usually drive on, may soon be closed to vehicular traffic. This feeling has, to some degree, been used by those who decide to build new roads. In other words, we still live according to Henry Ford's motto, “With mobility comes freedom and progress”. As someone who works with urban planning this can be viewed as when the ends actually justify the means – cities scratched by black tar marks, roads planned and built with eyes closed.

Now, the results of unconsidered planning are here - we feel these impacts on a daily basis.

Currently, that paradigm is slowly shifting to a new one. In a rather considerable number of cities, city centres, as well as many other streets, are being closed to cars.

Nevertheless, there remains constant misconception about closing streets to cars: chaos and congestion are imminent. All those cars will just end up somewhere else. On other streets, in other neighbourhoods.  Although considering that some cities have already implemented car-free streets for quite a while now, it's possible to observe the impacts.

The Braess's Paradox is a statistical theorem that determines that when a road network is already jammed with vehicles, adding new streets can make traffic flow even worse. Overall, it encompasses the (wrong) idea that more roads will improve traffic. According to this paradox, extending a road network may result in even longer commuting times.

“Ok, but that's on paper. Usually it doesn't happen in real life.” You might say.

In New York, when the City's Transportation Commissioner decided to close 42nd Street during the Earth Day celebration, a “doomsday” was predicted due to the expected generated traffic chaos. We're not talking about any street – it's the same 42nd street that intersects Time Square and runs past Grand Central Station. This anticipated doomsday couldn't be further from what really happened: traffic flow actually improved. A real world example of the Braess's paradox.

Calming Times Square.This paradox also came up in an article citing a research paper titled “The Price of Anarchy in Transportation Networks: Efficiency and Optimality Control”. In this article, one of the interesting conclusions was, "...simply blocking certain streets can partially improve the traffic conditions." Dietrich Braess must be proud.

But let's look at a few other examples. In Kajani, Finland, a proposal to close traffic through the main square was brought to the table when the daily traffic was 13,000 vehicles per day. After the authorities closed it to car traffic, the streets nearby had a slight increase right after the closing and, after that, the overall traffic had decreased with hints of “evaporation”.

Post-pedestrianisation in Copenhagen's City Centre.Another common concern when closing streets to traffic is commercial activity. In the same city, a survey of retailers found that 52% felt that the decision to close the streets down to cars had improved local commerce or will improve it in the future.

In Wolverhampton, UK, the “evaporation” of traffic also happened - after closing down the city centre to cars, 14% of the overall traffic was reduced in the nearby streets. Also in the UK, in Vauxhall Cross, a simulation predicted an increase of 267% in traffic queueing. The results, of course, were quite different: traffic queues were shorter than before and there was an overall reduction of 2-8% of traffic. Ugh, talk about cities ruled by computers instead of people.

In Strasbourg, right before the decision to close down streets to cars in the city centre, the daily traffic was 240,000 vehicles/day. Ten years later, instead of having the same amount of traffic in nearby streets, the volume fell by 16%. Predictions were that if this implementation was not considered, there would have been a traffic increase of 25% in the city centre by the year 2000. You can check more of these facts here.

Nørrebrogade at rush hour.There's a great example in Copenhagen as well. In 2008, Nørrebrogade was closed to cars. In 2009, a study was performed to assess the overall impacts of closing that street to cars - which had immediate interesting results. The latest results (2012) show that Nørrebrogade had a:

• 20% increase in cyclists,
• decrease of 45% in accidents,
• 60% increase in pedestrians,

when compared to 2008's levels. Although a part of the traffic has been redirected to nearby streets, just one year after closing down Nørrebrogade to car traffic, the overall traffic was reduced by 10.7%, which means 19,000 fewer cars/day.

San Francisco Streets.In San Francisco, the parking space is restricted to a maximum of seven percent of a building's square footage. Despite the fact that employment has increased in the area, traffic congestion is in decline – people are looking for alternatives, like cycling and walking.

Ok, now that we demystified the expected chaos of closing streets to cars, let's see what happens when the opposite occurs, i.e. creating more traffic lanes (or more infrastructure) to deal with congestion problems.

For decades, roadways have been expanded with the idea that it could solve problems. This is also a common misconception. Rather than in writing, Todd Litman explains this in a beautiful way:

(c) Todd Litman, 2009. "Generated Traffic and Induced Traffic". Victoria Transport Policy Institute.In a few words, the more lanes you create, the more traffic volume you will get. It's also interesting to note the difference from the projected traffic growth and the actual generated traffic.

Traditional Traffic Planning in Tokyo.There are also more than a few issues attached to traditional traffic planning (which includes creating more lanes). According to a 2013 study called “Smart Congestion Relief – Comprehensive Analysis of Traffic Congestion Costs and Congestion Reduction Benefits”, there's a whole set of ignored impacts when analysing traffic congestion. For instance, congestion intensity is often assessed instead of its costs, thus ignoring the savings created by commuters who shifted mode or reduced car usage. Moreover, several other factors like downstream congestion, traffic accidents, energy consumption, pollution emissions among others, are often ignored. Cost values of generated traffic congestion, traffic accidents, energy consumption, and pollution emissions to name a few have been underestimated and ignored.

Additional benefits can come from closing streets to cars. For instance, street life. Every summer, for three straight days, approximately 11 km of New York's city streets are closed to cars and open for everything else. In 2012, 250,000+ people enjoyed car-free streets under that initiative.

Thus it's possible to conclude that immediately after closing the streets to cars, there is a slight increase of traffic in the nearby streets. I guess that's expected. But traffic adapts and the overall number of cars decreases. After a few years, people just choose public transportation and/or non-motorised vehicles. The number of non-essential trips also declines – yes, it may even reduce drivers' laziness.

Overall, two main points can be extracted from this article: 1) building more roads doesn't mean alleviating traffic flow but instead could even make congestion worse; 2) closing a street down to cars improves pedestrian and cycling share and the overall number of cars will be reduced, thus less congestion throughout the city.

Mathematicians first said that it's alright to close streets. Reality proved they were right.Copenhagenize the planet. And have a lovely day.

Chris Huhne and Vicky pryce: Photo AOL

The letter below was published in the Guardian

• Some of your correspondents (9 March) appear to regard such antisocial behaviour as trivial, deserving of “a fine and a wigging from the beaks”. Hardly an effective deterrent when Mr Huhne’s previous driving conviction and three-month ban didn’t appear to have much of an effect. Perhaps this case will encourage drivers to be more careful, and to avoid wriggling out of their obligation to accept minor penalties on the rare occasions they are caught.
Dr Robert Davis
Chair, Road Danger Reduction Forum

In fact it was quite heavily truncated: the main points I was trying to make were:

If you are a motorist and want to avoid this kind of Huhne/Pryce scenario:

1. Try driving properly. It won’t hurt you to check up on the Highway Code from time to time.
2. If you can’t do that, try to obey the law: breaking speed limits is against the law.
3. If you can’t do that, with speeding at least watch out for the obviously placed warning signs and brightly painted speed cameras. They are, after all, only in a few places which are chosen because the right threshold of reported casualties has been breached there. Their locations are also on SatNavs and websites: it really shouldn’t be too difficult.
4. Once you have some points – you normally need to get caught more than once to get banned – then make an extra effort. Look at the speedometer from time to time, or get one of the devices which reminds you when you are breaking the speed limit.
5. If, after all that, you still can’t stop speeding, then when you finally get enough points to get banned, man up and admit it. Chris Huhne is a rich guy who can afford taxis and chauffeurs, there are often alternatives even in the kind of car-centred society we live in nowadays. (Although “needing  car for your job” shouldn’t be an excuse for law-breaking anyway)

Nearly two years ago I quoted the Mayor of London stating that

In many places, the existing layout of roads and buildings means that there is simply not enough space to provide segregated cycle lanes without adversely impacting other users.

One of my biggest problems with the attitude towards cycling in London is that it is all too frequently seen as something ‘extra’ that has to be accommodated alongside motor traffic and pedestrians; the reference to ‘other users’ in this statement from the Mayor suggested that ‘cyclists’ are another group of road users that have to somehow be fitted in to the existing streetscape.

There did not seem to be the recognition that creating safe, comfortable and direct space for bicycle use was an effective way of reducing the demand on the road network. Make the bicycle a suitable alternative, for all, for those short car trips – to school, to shops or to work – and you massively improve the capacity of London’s roads for all users, as well as making them substantially better places. A car user could become a bicycle user, rather than a bicycle user being fitted in at the margins alongside car users.

It was barely a year ago that Transport for London were suggesting that installing a cycle lane at a location where someone had just died would lead to ‘considerable queues’; the implication being that reallocating road space not just to prioritise cycling but merely to keep cyclists safe from harm was a lower priority than the length of queues of motor vehicles. Around the same time Boris Johnson was also making statements like

It is not possible to put in dedicated cycling infrastructure without disrupting the flow of traffic

and in doing so apparently forgetting that bicycles are a mode of traffic, and one that can improve the flow of traffic for all users.

So, while I think we should wait for more detail about last week’s announcement actually entails before passing serious comment (about which more below), I am very pleased to say that, if the Vision for Cycling in London [pdf] accurately reflects the opinions of the Mayor and those with responsibility at Transport for London, then, if nothing else, the language and the attitude has changed. I have been critical of both Boris Johnson and Transport for London for their failure to come out with the right language and attitude, so it is only fair to acknowledge when they say the right things, even if they haven’t started to deliver yet.

The most exciting thing for me about the Vision document is the recognition that the bicycle is a solution to London’s transport problems; instead of having to ‘accommodate’ cycling on main roads with half measures like blue paint, the Vision recognises that, done properly, with a continental-style approach, cycling infrastructure makes life better for everyone. Instead of claiming that putting in bicycle infrastructure will ‘impede the flow of traffic’, the Mayor and TfL are now suggesting precisely the opposite, that proper bicycle provision will help the flow of traffic.

Even right before last year’s election – in what was fairly universally accepted as a disastrous performance on the subject of cycling – Boris was pitting ‘cyclists’ against ‘motorists’, presenting the former group as slightly weird environmentalists who ‘want to ban cars’, and who think they are ‘morally superior’. All this in front of an audience composed mostly of serious journalists wearing suits, who happen to ride bikes in London. On the basis of that performance and what it implied, I said that Boris would probably be a ‘disaster’ for cycling in London.

Of course, nothing has been delivered yet, but if we consider merely the attitude exhibited in the Mayor’s new Vision document, I have to say that I misjudged Boris. He and his advisors have listened, and responded in a serious manner, and taken on board the criticism.

Naturally, we have heard words before; this, for instance, is from the Mayor’s 2o1o Cycling Revolution document [pdf] -

I’m determined to turn London into a cyclised city – a civilised city where people can ride their bikes safely and easily in a pleasant environment.

But that document was very short on detail of how that ‘pleasant environment’ might be achieved, talking mostly about ‘encouragement’ and getting people to obey the rules of the road.

I think it is correct to describe the new Vision document as a ‘step change’ from that approach, because it engages much more seriously with the Dutch and Danish method of catering for cycling, something that London Cycling Campaign have very successfully been demanding, along with the Cycling Embassy of Great Britain, and other campaigners and bloggers.

The focus, throughout the document, is on making cycling a pleasant thing to do; while the Vision is not especially clear about how this might be achieved in practice, the shift in approach, particularly from the initial Superhighways (which were about ‘routefinding’ and making drivers ‘more aware’ that they might encounter cyclists), is remarkable.

As I have already said, the Vision recognises that cycling is a solution to London’s transport problems, not something that needs to be fitted in alongside existing modes. My impression is that TfL have known this themselves for a long time; Peter Hendy writes in his foreword about the pressure of population growth and their inability to build new roads, or to widen existing ones, to deal with that growth. They have reached the limit of accommodating private motor traffic on the existing road network, and something had to change.

What was required was the political impetus to start to tip things in the right direction, and I think the Go Dutch demands supplied that. This is why Isabel Dedring, Ben Plowden and Andrew Gilligan were so seek to praise the people who had been criticising them, often angrily, at the Stakeholder launch of the Vision, because it gave them the political room to adjust TfL’s strategy (Dedring has been saying this for some time). Whether Boris grasped this already while making motor-centric noises before the election, or whether TfL and campaigners have managed to persuade him to see the light, I don’t know, but the message in the Vision is clear – more cycling can help the motorist. According to Boris

at the very heart of this strategy is my belief that helping cycling will not just help cyclists. It will create better places for everyone. It means less traffic, more trees, more places to sit and eat a sandwich. It means new life, new vitality and lower crime on underused streets. It means more seats on the Tube, less competition for a parking place and fewer cars in front of yours at the lights.

Everybody wins.

Just as importantly, the document recognises that this fundamental shift away from motor traffic, necessary to relieve demand on the network and to make life better for all users, will not happen in significant numbers without a change of approach. Namely, the Going Dutch that London Cycling Campaign and others have been demanding, focusing on the needs and requirements of that vast majority of the population who do not feel comfortable cycling with motor traffic.

So it was very pleasing to read, on the very first page of the document, Boris writing

we must now greatly increase our provision for cyclists – and, above all, for the huge numbers of Londoners who would like to cycle, but presently feel unable to.

before going on to state

I want [cycling] to be something you feel comfortable doing in your ordinary clothes… I want more of the kind of cyclists you see in Holland, going at a leisurely pace on often clunky steeds.

As many have commented, this is something that could be lifted straight of the Cycling Embassy’s manifesto, or from the London Cycling Campaign’s Go Dutch agenda.

The Vision states that

There will be more Dutch-style, fully-segregated lanes and junctions; more mandatory cycle lanes, semi-segregated from general traffic; and a network of direct back-street Quietways, with segregation and junction improvements over the hard parts.

This is addressing, head on, the central issue that prevents most people from cycling; perception of safety, and fear of motor traffic.

Where there is conflict between modes (which there often isn’t) we will try to make a clear choice, not an unsatisfactory compromise. We will segregate where possible, though elsewhere we will seek other ways to deliver safe and attractive cycle routes. Timid, half-hearted improvements are out – we will do things at least adequately, or not at all.

Separating cyclists from motor traffic is now the stated priority of Transport for London; whether this actually happens or not, the language is remarkable. Even where ‘full’ segregation might not be possible, the Vision suggests ‘semi-segregation’, using mandatory lanes where cyclists are kept separate from traffic by rumble strips or ‘ridges’.

The issue, of course, is whether this will actually happen, and whether the fine words about reclaiming space and not fitting in cycling around the margins will amount to anything once actual conflict for space emerges. I am cynical, but I’m prepared to withhold judgement until these issues actually arise. The scheme to separate cyclists from motor traffic along Stratford High Street is a promising early signal that the willingness is there. So we should wait and see.

My principal concern is actually junctions. The junction review currently being undertaken by TfL is – with the exception of the decision to test something ‘Dutch’ for possible approval at Lambeth Bridge north – very half-hearted and weak. The current TfL strategy of ASLs and ‘early start lights’ (as currently in operation at Bow roundabout), while well-meaning, is not good enough, certainly not as good enough as full separation of modes, and the full removal of turning conflicts. Yet this seems to be the only intervention in their toolbox at present, and there is no detail in the Vision about any other potential designs.

This is something that is going to have to be addressed. The cover of the Vision shows cycle tracks approaching the Houses of Parliament, and Westminster Bridge.

But how are these cyclists going to be steered safely through Parliament Square? I don’t think ‘early start lights’ are going to cut it. We will need routes across big junctions that look like this -

Not timid ASLs that you are not permitted to enter while motor traffic is flowing, and that merely let you depart a few seconds earlier.

So I hope that Transport for London are willing to adapt, and to learn how these Dutch junction designs work. Rather than going to Paris (which with the best will in the world is not brilliant for cycling, and certainly does not cater anywhere near as well for cyclists at junctions as Dutch cities do) why not book a trip to the Netherlands? Take a look around for yourself, and then let David Hembrow fill you in.

The language of the new strategy is very welcome, but the approach has to match it.

Yesterday was Mother's Day here in the UK, and it got me to thinking about Mums who cycle, and Mums who don't.  There's something about societal pressures which, I think, mean that women who do cycle with their children are still seen as something of a conundrum.  Most people would agree that cycling - and more of it - are a good thing, but there's an association with taking your kid for a ride on the roads; an accusation (in some circles at least) that you are willfully putting your children in danger.  A friend of mine experienced this recently when she was shouted at by a total stranger at traffic lights on a quiet road in Hackney.  As her baby slumbered in the bike seat mounted on her bicycle handlebars, the stranger (a pedestrian) compelled her to literally "think of her children".  Of course, knowing you're in the right and that you're not the source of danger could help to compel you to strike out by bicycle with your children more, but the instant a vehicle comes just a little too close - either through malice or a momentary lapse of attention - all notions of "being in the right" go out the window and you'd be left only with concern for your most precious of cargoes.






Needless to say I'm not a Mum so I wouldn't want to put words in to the mouths of women everywhere, but I imagine if - as a male cyclist - I sometimes feel a bit like a hard-done-by minority on our roads, then it's even harder for women, and Mums in particular.  Indeed, men make up some 79% of the UK's trips by bicycle and one of the first posts on ibikelondon, back on International Women's Day in 2010, asked "What's stopping women from cycling?"

Here in East London we are starting to see more Mums, children and older women on bicycles as bike use grows from being the sole domain of early adopters to a wider proportion of the population.  But Hackney is just one borough in the whole of London (about which all sorts of exotic ideas abound as to why it is a so-called "cycling paradise") - what about the rest of the city, and what about the rest of the UK?  Within the traditional family unit, men are still more likely to be the primary users of cars and stay-at-home Mums are more likely to be car-free during the day.  By rights (and as in the Netherlands and parts of Denmark) our streets should abound with Mums a-wheel - cycling to school, cycling to the shops, or cycling to meet with friends; but the converse is in fact true.  After the rush of morning commuter cyclists have passed, I imagine being a cycling Mum can be a somewhat solitary experience.





We know that road danger and fear of danger is a primary obstacle to more cycling, and when you've got your children (or other people's children!) with you it must certainly be the biggest obstacle.  But not wanting to be the first to be seen to be riding with kids, or on "funny" bicycles (cargo bikes), and not having somewhere to store said bikes, and cost of said bikes must also play a role, and about which much more could be done.




H.G Wells can rest easy; cycle tracks will abound in Utopia if the Mayor and TfL deliver on their bold and exciting ten year cycling strategy.  But it won't be enough to just build cycle tracks on the busiest of roads and make minor roads more accommodating of sharing with cyclists, to stand back when they're finished and hope for the best.  We're going to have to actively encourage people to consider bicycles, and show them that riding a bike can be a viable transport option for them; even if they have two, or three, or more children in tow.  Cargo bike culture will, I think, take even more encouragement.  But encourage we must; an architect friend of mine pointed out the imperative of getting more parents on bikes to me over coffee one day.  He said; "Pity the poor Soccer Mom - she is the ultimate victim of bad design.  Because in suburbia the spaces between A and B are so wide, and the roads between each are so big and fast and full of motorcars, there's no way she'll let her children ride a bike.  Thus, in order to preserve her offspring she is chained to Mum's taxi in order to give her kids the wholesome suburban life she had always dreamed of for them.  Soccer practice, ballet class, after-school club, even play dates at other houses - all must be done by car, with the kids in the back, as the roads grow ever busier, her personal time ever smaller, and all their waistlines wider."

Over the next ten years here in London I think the focus of the boroughs must be not just encouraging commuter cycling and helping TfL to deliver their routes across London, but also thinking about who is moving around their borough during the day, how they are going about these journeys, and how these journeys could be transferred to the bicycle.  It's going to be a lot of work, and will not be an easy task, but the reward for Mums and for families everywhere will be substantial. 

I've met Cycling Super Mums in Taiwan, the Netherlands, France and Denmark - there's nothing about the culture in these countries that make their mothers any less fearless or full of concern for their children than here in the UK.  But where conditions for safe cycling have prevailed, the mothers have followed...






With recent announcements and cycling news we've started, finally, to move in the right direction, but more perseverance than even before is going to be needed to get to a stage where Mums jump on bikes without a second thought (much in the same way that they might jump in to a car, or on a train, or on a bus today).  The pay-off for families would be huge, of course, but the pay-off for the country as a whole would be even bigger.  With all the changes that are going to be needed at borough level, there's going to have to be an investment  not just by TfL and local authorities, but also by local communities.  If you're a mother who baulks at the idea of taking your kids on a bike in the city, or if you're a father who'd never allow your young family to navigate London atop a bicycle then you're going to have to get involved to help bring about this change yourself - the city that I think we'd probably all like to see just won't happen without the involvement and investment of families.  It may be an uphill ride at first, but it really is time to liberate Mums.  And change, just like charity, begins at home.

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I’ve come across a strange collation that is probably more conjecture than science, but that I think is interesting anyway.

Countries that have low levels of cycling have traffic signals with repeater lights, and those with more cycling do not have repeater lights.

Really? As I said, there’s no scientific data behind this bold claim, just the observations of a transport geek, but maybe there’s something in it. 

So what is a repeater light?

In the UK, traffic lights appear next to a stop line. This stop line is a thick solid white line that stretches across the carriageway and that can only be legally crossed when a green light is shown at one end of the line. In some countries the lights themselves are the marker to stop at (I’m looking at you France), but here we make it nice and simple and have a big white line to show exactly where you have to stop.

This the best picture I have of UK traffic lights, as you can see the repeater lights opposite the junction allow vehicles to encroach into the junction.

Because of this line and the fact it is the stopping point, we can have something that other countries can not, extra traffic lights that are not where you have to stop but are just there to make sure you see the lights. These are repeater lights. They repeat the intention of a light at a stop line to add more impact and make sure we notice that stop light when we’re busy looking the other way.

The UK has repeater lights, so to does Ireland, Australia and New Zealand, the countries in North America (although sometimes they just hang a single light in the middle of the junction, but it’s still beyond the stop line), whereas the other countries of Europe (you know the ones, the ones with more than 2% cycle modal share) all have traffic lights only on the entrance to traffic controlled junctions.

And this the best picture I have of Dutch traffic lights. The lights are positioned a cars length in front of the stop line meaning you have to stop behind the line to be able to still see the lights.

So why could this correlation be? Who knows? It’s probably just a coincidence, however that’s not to say that there’s not something in repeater lights being a bad thing. Let’s look at the facts…

Repeater lights allow you to still see the lights even once you’re beyond the stop line. Whether you are motorist or cyclist, the repeater light allows you to happily stop within the pedestrian crossing (or ASL, although the less we talk about them the better) and still know when the lights have changed. My experience of driving in countries without repeater lights is that everyone (yes everyone without fail) stops behind the stop line, simply because if they run past it they then can’t see when to go, get beeped by the car behind and feel like a bit of a prat.

So perhaps my point is that it’s not the drivers/cyclists fault that they sometimes progress over the stop line, perhaps it’s the design of the lights themselves.

The 1960’s overzealous requirement to think for the motorist by filling their entire vision with red lights to such an extent that many don’t see the stop line at all, we’ve all seen the poor chap whose somehow managed to get confused and stopped at the repeater light on the exit of the junction much to the mirth and anger of his fellow travellers stuck behind him.

So perhaps it’s time for a change in rules. Now we have LED light technology which removes the possibility of bulb failure, we could do away with the confusing, ugly, cluttering repeater lights and make our traffic controller junctions just that little bit safer for everyone?

This is the biggest current story for anybody interested in sustainable transport policy.  As the ever sensible Chris Boardman correctly commented: “This is the most ambitious cycling development and promotion plan in the UK in living memory, perhaps ever.” However, you don’t have to be a cynic for the excitement of first part of that sentence to be somewhat cooled by the “in the UK” part of it.

As a London cyclist of 35 years standing, campaigner for most of those years and transport professional in London for 25, here is my assessment of what the “Vision for Cycling”  may – or may – not mean for London.

 Reactions

Reactions are as may be expected: praise from campaigners CTC “breathtakingly ambitious”  , the London Cycling Campaign “ground breaking”  , and the Guardian: “bold thinking”.  Even the response from opposition politicians in the Green and Liberal Democrat parties is mainly along the lines that the Vision – specifically with regard to the increase in funding and programmes for Outer London Boroughs – is good, but just not good enough.

The Good News

To start off with, here (in no particular order) is what looks good:

Normalising cycling: “I want cycling to be normal, a part of everyday life. I want it to be something you feel comfortable doing in your ordinary clothes, something you hardly think about”. This is part of the third outcome devoted to increasing cycling: “We will ‘normalise’ cycling, making it something anyone feels comfortable doing”. Elsewhere this is described as “De-Lycraification”. The cycling commissioner Andrew Gilligan, has specifically talked  about cycling being something that doesn’t require helmets and hi-viz. At the launch Chris Boardman went helmetless, as has the Mayor on so many of his cycling appearances.

                                                                     Photo:Guardian

I think this is crucial, and indeed a critical part of Mayor Johnson’s legacy is his own habit of everyday cycling wearing normal office clothes.

Andrew Gilligan: Obviously Gilligan is not just a “Johnson crony”: he is plainly committed to supporting cycling as significant form of transport.

More money: Although previously announced, this funding is ringfenced for cycling and stands at a level higher than ever before.

The right kind of vision: the following kinds of phrase are welcome: “Cycling will transform more of our city into a place dominated by people, not motor traffic” .(Better places for everyone). And in the Mayor’s introduction: “Cycling will be treated not as niche, marginal, or an afterthought, but as what it is: an integral part of the transport network, with the capital spending, road space and traffic planners’ attention befitting that role.” Nobody supporting cycling can complain about this kind of statement being made so clearly.

 Outer London: After the (to put it very kindly) minimal success so far of the Biking Boroughs project, we have a promise of £100 million targeting the least favoured part of London ”… very high spending concentrated on these relatively small areas for the greatest possible impact. In many ways, this will be the most transformative of all our policies.”

Replacing car use? : There is a definite suggestion that cycling will replace car use. The illustration of the Victoria Embankment flagship scheme – on the cover of the document – shows a road currently with five lanes of general traffic reduced to three for motor traffic. Cycling is stated to be the desirable alternative for car journeys of short distances to town centres in Outer London.

All of this is undoubtedly good news. As a practitioner, I have been excitedly preparing for the bidding process for the extra funding since it was first flagged up some weeks ago. I am not denying the potential benefits of the Vision. But that does not stop me having to analyse exactly what it might – and might not – mean for actual and potential cyclists in London, and the possibilities of a sustainable transport system. We have, after all, had supposed “step changes” and “sea changes” before – older readers will remember the Star Routes, London Cycle Network, London Cycle Network Plus, CRISP studies, Biking Boroughs …The problem with visions is that they really need to become good quality realities.

So we need to have a critical analysis of what is on offer

The problems The role of infrastructure

Most discussion of cycling has revolved around highway infrastructure types. I have my doubts about exactly beneficial constant reference to continental types of highway layout actually is – even if the best are somehow imported wholesale into the UK context. (Take a look at the interventions by myself and Carlton Reid here ). Let’s see what is on offer:

• The Victoria Embankment scheme. This looks like a massive improvement on what is there now.
• Promised upgrades in the quality of the “Cycle Super Highways” (CSHs). At their inception their design has met with derision from both integrationist and segregationist schools of cycle planning, so this is welcome. The LCC has questioned the ambiguity of the wording about the design standards of the new CSHs, but let’s not be too critical.
• The Bike Crossrail – partly running dramatically on the Westway – across London. The LCC has questioned the issue of exits and entrances to and from it , but let’s not carp.

These are interesting, but lets’ not forget that they will cover no more than some 2% of London’s roads when completed in 10 years’ time, with what appears to be a facility primarily for the already dominant demographic of middle class commuters.

• The back street “Quietways”. I’m pleased to see an interest in dealing with the all-important potential junction problems here, but we have no detail – will this network be an improvement on the LCN+ which TfL abandoned? Will they be longer than the 8% of London’s roads supposedly covered by this “London Cycle Network Plus”?
• The “mini-Hollands”. This is “the most transformative” part of the Vision. So it is noteworthy that it will happen in just one Borough or lesser versions in three – out of seventeen Boroughs.

What this means is that a small minority of the highways that cyclists have to use will be on one of these programmes. This is a classic problem with looking at the problems for cycling in terms of highway design – most of the highway network inevitably gets missed out.  But , as both the Green and Liberal Democrat parties have pointed out, particularly with the “most transformative” mini-Hollands, the vast majority of actual or potential London cyclists in Outer London will miss out. And that’s if the design standards employed actually meet the requirements of cyclists.

This is particularly obvious with the case of some of the junctions crossing the trunk roads in London, particularly the North Circular. These have been commented on as major barriers to cycling for some time – but they are not specifically addressed in the “Vision”, not even in the one to three “mini-Holland” Boroughs. There are also, of course, problems with gyratories in Inner London – such as Hackney – which continue to be unaddressed.

Finally, a big change – following the deaths of two cyclists in quick succession at Bow roundabout – has been the TfL Junctions Reviews. These have raised various alternative options (with varying degrees of complaint) at some key junctions on TfL controlled roads. The Vision intends to continue this process – but at fewer junctions. Quality is to be emphasised over quantity. But why not both?

All of this suggests that the schemes with their various brand names will be addressing only a minority of the places people cycle in, and with yet to be determined quality.

Money, money, money

                                                                Photo: Cyclists in the City

As ever, the amount of funding has been questioned, by the Greens, Liberal Democrats and LCC  . An increase in funding would certainly allow for more junctions in the Junctions Review, and more Outer London and gyratory schemes to be financed.

As with many TfL funding arrangements, considering the amounts to be spent can become somewhat complex. I’ll just raise some issues: How much is Barclays to put into the Cycle Hire and CSH schemes which give it a substantial advertising impact? How much will back up LIP (Local Implementation Plan) funding to Boroughs which should already be supporting cycling?

Without being greedy, the amount allocated really does need to be seen in the context of TfL’s budget of £5 billion per annu. Cycling is at some 2.5 – 3% modal share with a 5% target over ten years – some £150 million per annum rather than £90 million would seem appropriate. Of course, s mentioned, LIP funding is supposed to benefit cycling. But this is questionable and the relative benefits of cycling compared to public transport in terms of health and sustainability are higher. And this is without raising the issues of “external costs” which could be paid by drivers through road pricing.

I’d also raise a question which few consider: why should “cycling money” be used to treat junctions designed in ways which endanger and/or inconvenience them? Why shouldn’t that money come from general highways budgets like LIPs? All in all, even given the mantras about austerity, there is a case for substantial increase in the funding.

But of course, it would have to be spent properly. And here we are looking at a whole new lot of issues.

 

In amongst all the fuss about Mayor’s Vision for Cycling in London, the Get Britain Cycling Inquiry  , the pressure from motorists’ organisations  to cut fuel duty (well, there should be a fuss about this) one important item has slipped under the radar – apart from for those genuinely interested in the safety of all road users.

This is the 30th anniversary of a move successfully lobbied for by the “road safety” lobby, which –although it took them 26 years to admit it – led to “a clear reduction in death and injury to car occupants, appreciably offset by extra deaths among pedestrians and cyclists (my emphasis)   So, how many cyclists and pedestrians is it alright to kill in order to protect car occupants from bad driving? Other issues apart from the moral one are revealed by this episode, so do read on:

Now that you are, all you have to read is here:  although to get a more through grounding download “Risk and Freedom: The record of road safety regulation” and “Risk” here  .

When I have raised this, many colleagues simply don’t want to discuss the matter. It’s all over, forget about it. Now, I have to admit to wearing a seat belt on those infrequent occasions when I travel by car. And I don’t seriously advocate banning seat belts and replacing the steering column with a sharp spike – although it would dramatically improve the care taken by drivers.

So here are some reasons why it’s important:

1. It is good to not lie or cover up evidence (as in the concealing of the Isles report which predicted increased pedestrian and other deaths in the seat belt law was passed). If you are going to claim to be scientific and evidence-based, then be so.
2. At the risk of contradicting the ideology of utilitarianism and cost-benefit analysis, I have to say – please bear with me here – something that I’m not happy about. I don’t want my life being threatened – even more than it already is – because other people can’t or won’t obey the law and necessary regulations required of them, and that officialdom sees fit to collude and connive with that rule and law breaking. That may seem extreme, but I have to agree with Professor Adams that the justifications for the “offset by extra deaths among cyclists and pedestrians” is sophistry.

Just in case anybody thinks this means that RDRF does not care about the safety of car occupants – nonsense! As we have made clear from the start, we believe in safety for all road users, which is why it is on our mast head. As we said at the time of seat belt legislation there were (and of course still are) numerous ways in which car occupants can be protected. These measures are based on reducing danger at source – from the inappropriate use of motor vehicles – which would protect all road users. Sadly, the idiot-proofing of the car and highway environment, of which seat belt use is a key part, has impeded the prospects of achieving this.

Finally, I re-iterate comments made before:

“The seat belt law experience is highly relevant today in respect to matters other than cycle helmets: however much eyes may roll at the prospect of statistical analysis of a law passed decades ago, this matter is highly pertinent.

• The obvious truth of adaptive behaviour or risk compensation indicates that the relentless idiot-proofing of the driver environment – whether of the vehicle or highway – has produced idiots in such a way that the “road safety” lobby is hardly well qualified to pontificate on matters of cyclist or pedestrian safety – of which cycle helmets is just one. No doubt this is a main reason for the denial of such effects from the “road safety” establishment.
• The obvious truth of adaptive behaviour or risk compensation is central to contemporary discussions of some very positive episodes: the good experience of safety with “shared streets” and the decline in casualty rates among London cyclists as just one example of “safety in numbers” with numbers of cyclists approaching “critical mass”.
•  The obvious truth of adaptive behaviour or risk compensation indicates that supposed progress in declining RTA fatalities and other casualties may have resulted from adaptive behaviour by the most benign and vulnerable road users, as opposed to “road safety” interventions, including migration from the road environment entirely. Again, this might explain some denial from practitioners of “road safety”.
•  The obvious truth of adaptive behaviour or risk compensation indicates that some changes in fatalities are due to changes described by the Smeed and Adams curves, and are independent of interventions claimed by “road safety” professionals.”

London's Evening Standard and other sources added 10% to make headlines more impressive. Like everyone I was surprised at the sudden announcement in London about investment in cycling. In typical London style, the press release quoted lots of baffling but impressive sounding numbers, and as so frequently happens, people didn't stop at reporting the actual figures, and didn't bother to analyse David Hembrowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14543024940730663645noreply@blogger.com0http://www.aviewfromthecyclepath.com/2013/03/londons-new-plans-serious-campaigning.html