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For the March edition of Street Talks, the Movement for Liveable London are teaming up with Living Streets to host architect, planner and urbanist Sir Terry Farrell to discuss what can be done to make the City of Westminster a better place for pedestrians.

Westminster is well-known in cycling circles as somewhat of a bike-riding black hole; the cycle lanes and advanced stop lines dry up almost immediately as you cross the border from progressive Camden in to the city.  The horrors of cycling on Oxford Street or around Parliament Square barely need an introduction.

An unusually car-free Charing Cross Road in Central London (on the night of the 2012 Olympic Opening Ceremony.) Look at the life that's left over in the spaces in between and which could flourish.
But as the seat of our Government, our central shopping district, a major residential area and not to mention the heart of London's night-time economy, Westminster is not as happy a place to be a pedestrian as it should be, either.  It suffers from some of the country's worst air pollution and highest pedestrian casualty rates.  The number of people on foot struck by buses every year on Britain's most famous shopping boulevard - Oxford Street - is truly shocking.  The streets of Soho spill over with people but are designed for nearly non-existent cars, whilst beautiful and architecturally significant corners of Westminster like Berkeley Square are treated as gyratories instead of places to accommodate people.

Sir Terry Farrell is one of the world's foremost planners, and on Tuesday he'll be sharing his vision for a better Westminster for people.  With over 40 years in practice (MI6 headquarters, anyone?) in both designing buildings and the public realm, he's currently engaged in the planning of the Thames Gateway.  Come along to hear about successful schemes that have already changed the face of London, and what could be done to make Westminster a truly world-class urban environment.

The March Street Talks - with Living Streets and Sir Terry Farrell - takes place at Terry Farrell and Partners, 7 Hatton Street, NW8 8PL at 6.30PM for a 7PM talk (directions via this PDF) on Tuesday 12th March.

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It was at the end of November that I last blogged specifically about cycling policies from the Mayor of London.

I reflected there that I had
Stated quite clearly in April my belief that Boris Johnson's commitment to the London Cycling Campaign's Go Dutch principles was not sincere.and noted
It's now six months after the election, and there's still no real plan to put the Go Dutch commitment into action in any way, shape or form.and
[Johnson] has not made good his promise to appoint a cycling "czar" or commissioner, and we have no idea what powers or influence such a figure would have, when appointed. He has spoken of some sort of new cycle link across central London to join the dangling ends of the Superhighways, which appears, from a limited press report, as if it will use the Embankment. It's being called a "super-corridor".and
According to the Standard article, Boris is going to publish some sort of a "Cycling Vision" document this month, which will explain all.I remain very pessimistic. At every stage I have been proved right about Boris's lack of real commitment to Going Dutch.
Well the Standard got it wrong, because the "Cycling Vision" document did not come out then. It came out yesterday, 7 March 2013. We got the Cycling Commissioner in January: journalist (and cyclist) Andrew Gilligan was appointed to the post. Gilligan blogs through the Daily Telegraph site, and it soon became clear that he was aware of what the cycle blogging community was saying about him and his position. On Twitter I called his initial statement on taking up the post "short but promising", continuing that, while I could appreciate the argument that some had made for a technician or engineer to be given the job,
[I] have time for Gilligan and I'm willing to give him a chance. It's a highly political job and he might just be the right man.That's all I have said on the subject thus far. It looks, in retrospect, as if the delay in launching the "Cycling Vision" must have been due to negotiations between Johnson and Gilligan, and possibly others in City Hall or Transport for London, Gilligan getting bedded-down in the job and taking over the strategy, and further thought and development on it so it could be launched to his satisfaction, in a form that was not likely to raise a chorus of criticism or disappointment from bloggers, the London Cycling Campaign, and the Cycling Embassy of Great Britain.

Gilligan today succeeded in this. The details of "The Mayor's Vision for Cycling in London" were released at a meeting in City Hall at 11:30am yesterday to which I, and many others on the London cycling scene, were invited with less than 48 hours notice. (Actually the details were released slightly before this and were already appearing on websites and news reports earlier in the morning.) The document that we were given can be read here. It's already been well covered by Cyclists in the City, who has described the plan as "game-changing", ibikelondon, who has described it as "a bold and ambitious document", and LCC, who described it as "ground-breaking". I would not dissent from these descriptions at the present stage. It seems, from what we have seen now, that I was wrong to describe Boris' Johnson's commitment to the Go Dutch principles to which he signed up before the mayoral election as "insincere". He was sincere, he was just taking his time to develop the details, and I owe him an apology, which I will give to him in person if he invites me round (he was not present at the launch of his "Vision", it was launched by Deputy Mayor Isabel Dedring, along with Ben Plowden, Director of Intergrated Programme Delivery at TfL, and Gilligan, on whom the limelight mostly was.)

In case you haven't yet seen the headlines, they are that TfL intends to double cycling in London in the next 10 years, and the key measures they intend to deploy are:

1. A new network of cycle routes in central London This is the "Bike Grid" originally proposed by LCC, which will consist of "high volume, high-quality routes, using a combination of segregation and quiet shared streets."
2. A Crossrail for the bike This will be a segregated cycle highway east-west across London from the A40, which will get improved cycle tracks (back to something like they were in 1934?), to Canary Wharf and Barking.
3. Better Barclays Cycle Superhighways "Delivered to much higher standards, closer to international best practice"
4. New Quietways Routes created from low-traffic back streets, using filtered permeability techniques, and using other spaces, such as parks. "Unlike the old London Cycle Network, Quietways will be direct. They will be better-surfaced... They will not give up at the difficult places... We will build new cycling and pedestrian bridges across barriers [such as railways] to link up Quietway side-street routes"
5. "Mini-Hollands" in the suburbs "We will chose between one and three willing Outer London boroughs to make into mini-Hollands, with very high spending concentrated on these relatively small areas for the greatest possible impact"

 And here is the video for the "Crossrail" concept for the Embankment. This is by-now an obligatory part of any blogpost on this subject.



It looks great, and the bones of the "Vision" look great too. There is a lot to pick over in these bones, and I cannot do so now. That will be for future blogposts, to consider in more detail how the five headline initiatives might, or should, work, what the possible pitfalls will be, where we need more concrete details to understand and make up our minds, and to mention any ideas in the vision that I might take issue with or have reservations about. But I can say now that these reservations will not be fundamental. The Mayor and Transport for London have clearly moved on decisively in producing this plan, taking into account virtually everything that this blog, many other vocal blogs and commentators, the LCC, and other campaigners have been saying about the problems with the earlier stages of the Johnson administration's cycling policy. It's vital that we don't let them off any hooks, and keep pressing for the highest standards, and criticising and protesting, if necessary, about any backsliding or unsatisfactory compromises in the delivery of the vision.

This change has been born of criticism and public protest, I am certain of it. If we can trace it back to a point in recent history, within the lifetime of this blog, it would be to the first "flashmob" protest organised by LCC at Blackfriars Bridge on 20 May 2011, which was one of the first campaigning events I reported on this blog. We had never had a mass protest by cyclists of this type, on a specific issue, in London, before. These protests continued, culminating on the flashride on 22 February 2012 in Westminster to coincide with the parliamentary debate on cycle safety inspired by the Times's Cities fit for Cycling campaign. I wrote on 4 March 2012, slightly over one year ago,
A rubicon was passed on the night of 22 February 2012. The vast ship of public indifference to cycling safety and cycling conditions in the UK, that campaigners have been pushing and shoving at for decades, getting nowhere, had started moving. Almost imperceptibly, over the winter of 2011–12, it had started to slide down the slipway into the river. The Times campaign had given it a welcome shove, but their effort was dependent on those of many others who had toiled away long before.There was another absolutely critical element to the story, apart from protest, though. This was campaigning clarity and vision. The Cycling Embassy of Great Britain was formed almost contemporaneously with the start of this blog, and they started a campaign – initially without me, I only found out about them after their first meeting – with a crystal clarity of purpose, namely, to make known, and campaign for the import to the UK of, the world's best practice in engineering safe and attractive cycling environments, from wherever that best practice might be found. This changed the cycle campaigning landscape nationally, despite the fact the Embassy was, and remains, only as small group of activists, with a much larger group of supporters. And the London Cycling Campaign changed tack. It had had a lot of varied and complicated, sometimes even contradictory, campaigns in the past with no tremendously clear vision at its heart of what a "world-class cycling city", in one of the buzz-phrases, would actually look like. It had not had a sufficiently clear or consistent critique of where the Johnson administration (and the Livingstone one before that) were going wrong in their cycling policies. Its methods were highly diplomatic (despite not being an "Embassy"), and public statements and actions sometimes rather weak.

Change was initiated by a new, highly-focused CEO, Ashok Sinha, and other key campaigners such as Mustafa Arif, Campaigns Chair, who, in addition to being willing to confront TfL and the Mayor more directly with the mass cycling protests, openly organised by LCC, decided to run a huge campaign for the 2012 Mayoral election based on one campaigning headline, chosen by the whole membership in a vote, a thing the organisation had never done before, its methods and policies of old having been determined by a small coterie of committed activists. The vote, in July 2011, was on the following options:
1) Start Right: getting 100,000 children cycling regularly to school
2) Love Thy Neighbourhood: double the number of local journeys by bike
3) Go Dutch: clear space for cycling on main roads in every borough
4) Unwind: replace the 10 worst gyratories with cycle-friendly junctionI fronted the campaign to get the membership to choose Option 3, with a performance in this video, filmed at the Torrington Place segregated cycle track in Bloomsbury. Option 3 won by an overwhelming margin. Option 3 developed into the Love London, Go Dutch campaign that culminated in a petition which gathered 40,000 signatures, a ride in which 10,000 cyclists took part in, in pouring rain, to press the Go Dutch demands onto the mayoral candidates, and a public debate organised by The Times just before the election, at which Johnson acquitted himself none too well. As a result of that, most cyclists that I know were campaigning against him being returned to City Hall. But he did join Ken Livingstone, Brian Paddick, Jenny Jones and Siobhan Benita, mayoral candidates all, in endorsing the Go Dutch demands – much to my surprise, but not to the surprise of Mustafa Arif. So that was another occasion when I mistook Johnson.

In the "Vision" published today we see a serious attempt to incorporate the principles of Go Dutch into the planning and management of London over the next 10 years, backed up by credible political leadership and credible (but by no means over-generous) funding commitments (getting on for £1 billion over ten years so far promised). The Vision accepts the central premise of the Go Dutch campaign: that for cycling to develop into a mass phenomenon in London (and anywhere else) it must be made subjectively safe, pleasant and easy, with its own protected, dedicated spaces.

Of course, long before the Go Dutch campaign, David Hembrow was blogging from the Netherlands in his trenchant manner to explain exactly what a subjectively safe, attractive cycling environment that generated a mass cycling culture looked like. His blog was an enormous influence on most of the people who drove both the Cycling Embassy and the Go Dutch campaign. But long before he was blogging, Camden Cycling Campaign was campaigning, successfully, for Dutch-style, segregated cycle infrastructure in central London. And that started off, I recall, because a chap called Mick Hamer, who wrote for New Scientist and cycling publications,  and had experienced Dutch cycle infrastructure back in the 1970s, had an angry outburst in a meeting in Camden Town Hall that I attended, when I was very new to cycle campaigning, in the mid-1990s. The campaign for Dutch-style infrastructure in Camden was later driven forwards by Paul Gannon, Paul Gasson, and others in Camden Cycling Campaign, resulting in the tracks we have today that are soon going to start getting upgraded.

I've written about the Camden campaign, and the infrastructure that resulted, warts ands all, a few times. And one of my my central themes has been that to get it, we had to demand it, in an optimistic spirit of it being possible, not go around saying "It'll never happen in Britain, everything is wrong here, it's pointless, the culture is wrong, everybody is against us, it can't be done". Demanding top-quality cycling infrastructure does not, of course, guarantee getting it, but unless you demand it, you cannot get it. On a London-wide basis, we've now demanded it, and we've had, yesterday, the response.

I'm not complacent in any idea that we are inevitably on the way now to a cycling nirvana in London. London is currently, by and large, a pretty abysmal pace for cycling, with 98% of all journeys not by bike, for excellent reasons. It's going to take a true revolution, on any definition of the word, to turn that around. So far we only have promises. We've had plenty of those before. But the signs are very good. I believe that, if Johnson, TfL and Gilligan can carry through the policies they have now outlined, truly, without compromise, they will easily achieve far more than the stated objective of doubling cycling in London in a decade. They will revolutionise transport in the United Kingdom. Watch this space.

Boris Johnson is today announcing details of his new cycling strategy.  Outlining where an unprecedented £1billion of investment will be channeled over the next ten years, it is a bold and ambitious document.  As ever, cyclists will be welcoming developments cautiously - even optimistically - but with a very keen eye on the detail.

A comprehensive central London bike grid feature in the proposals, as does a "Cycling Crossrail" from West London all the way across the city to Canary Wharf in the east.  Removing a lane of traffic from the Westway - the ultimate symbol of planning for cars writ large - the largely separated cycle track will allow people on bikes to soar over western suburbs congestion, before taking in the finest views of London from a cycle track between Big Ben and Blackfriars along the Embankment, before connecting with CS3 to Canary Wharf.  


Embankment today, Embankment in the future!(photo via Parimal Kumar on Twitter with thanks)
A series of quieter routes mirroring existing Underground lines will allow cyclists to find their way in to central London more easily, where the use of filtered permeability, bike-only roads and separated cycle tracks will allow incoming cyclists to disperse safely, as well as make safe journeys in and around the centre of the city itself.

This being Boris Johnson's proposal, there's plenty on the table for the outer boroughs too.  Current "biking borough" funding will increase from a paltry £3M to more than £100M in a bid to create "mini-Hollands' in the suburbs, with high spending concentrated on one or two willing outer London boroughs for the greatest possible impact.  As cycling levels are so low in the outer boroughs and there is so much potential for short car journeys to be really converted in to cycle trips if the conditions are right this is perhaps one of the most exciting parts of BJ's plan.

Safety, of course, has not been left out.  There's a clear and considered approach to the consistent problems posed by lorries in London, and TfL are pledging to do more on this serious issue.  They'll be expanding the excellent work whereby safety features are fitted to lorries as a requirement specified within their procurement process (as pioneered by Crossrail where all scheme lorries have full crush guards, mirrors and sensors as a condition of being involved).  Most excitingly, the Mayor is pledging that all future TfL cycle funding for the boroughs will be conditional on ensuring that their own fleets and contracted services adhere to best practice - effectively delivering the London Cycling Campaign's Safer Lorries campaign in one fell swoop.

In a nutshell, the Mayor's plans cover the following:

• A Crossrail for bikes from way out west to the east London 
• A re-think of the Junction Review to focus on getting fewer junctions right, rather than lots of junctions half-right 
• A bike grid of safe routes in central London 
• A network of Quietways, to upgrade routes on borough roads
• A series of Mini-Hollands - big investments in cycling in some outer London boroughs, rather than lots of boroughs sharing small amounts of cash
• A slight re-think (in a good way) on the planned Cycle Super Highway 5 

A fly-over of the proposals for the Embankment - doesn't this look like a nice place to ride?
As ever, soft and squishy cyclists have the most to loose if poor designs are implemented, so cyclists, bike bloggers and campaigners will be keeping a very close eye on developments to ensure that Boris Johnson's cycling reality matches his colourful rhetoric.  He is pitching these proposals as London's genuine, lasting Olympic legacy after those Games showed us how we can move around the city much more dynamically and make better use of the space we have available.  However, the devil is in the detail  - people on bikes will be watching TfL and the Mayor's new cycling czar carefully to make sure today's proposals are delivered in a timely fashion and to the highest detail.

And a bold new spirit of co-operation will be needed if these plans are to succeed.  The money is there, the expertise at TfL are there, however much of these changes will take place on borough-controlled roads.  Without the co-operation of the Royal Parks and boroughs, the plans will go nowhere (who remembers how hard it was to get the LCN going the first time around?  Here's looking at you, Westminster Council!)

But all-in-all this is a victorious day for cycle campaigners - during his first term we put the Mayor and his office under enormous pressure, and rightfully so.  Against the unique background of cycling becoming more dangerous in London the more people who did it, the calls and cries for sweeping action were loud and united in their cohesion.  Many of you have taken part in flashrides, bike protests, letter writing campaigns, signed petitions and helped to spread the word, and that pressure is what has helped to lead to today.  Boris is "the cycling Mayor" and at times that entire relationship looked likely to turn sour and do him more harm than good.  His ambition for all things bicycle has never been under question, but his commitment to real change and to detail was.  To his credit, he's gone away and thought about his proposals, listened to all of your voices and come back with a proposal delivering exactly what cycle campaigners have been asking for: world class cycling infrastructure, world class streets, more and safer cycling and the opportunity for many more people to ride a bike safely.

Today, Boris sets out how he will deliver on his election promises that you all helped to bring about.
As my blogging partner in crime, Danny Williams from Cyclists In the City writes; "I have never seen a commitment to cycling as ambitious as this in this country. I’ve read countless plans by councils and by other cities and I’m familiar with the strategies adopted in other countries.
Boris isn’t promising to bring Copenhagen or Amsterdam to London. But he is promising to bring about a better London. And I think that’s the right thing to do.. ...And cycling is going to have to be part of that. A very significant part."

We persistently badgered Boris in the run up to his re-election and now he is delivering on those promises.  Whilst it remains to be seen how much can be delivered and to how high a quality, the commitment on show today makes it a hugely exciting one. 

There will be some within the cycling fraternity - a vocal minority - who will turn up their noses at such outright segregation of cyclists on main roads, sneering from the sidelines about their right to use the road without actually bothering to roll up their sleeves and get involved in the dirty work of making our cities safe for all.  Boris will today categorically state "nothing I do will affect cyclists' freedom to use any road they choose."  By all means, contribute to the undoubted volumes of work ahead in ensuring that all these proposals are delivered to the highest quality, but for those who have strange and dogmatic idealistic ideas about how cars and bicycles should always mix, at all times, and in all circumstances; please keep those thoughts to yourselves whilst we get on with making London a world-class cycling city, where an 8 to an 80 year old can ride safely.

There's a lot of work to do, and a lot of detail to be thrashed out, but for now cycle campaigners can allow themselves a pat on the back at a rare and significant victory, and begin to dare to dream again about what our future London might look like.   Well done to everyone who has campaigned for this, you should be proud.

For more in depth and excellent analysis of the Mayor's cycling strategy see Cyclists in the City and the always on-the-ball Road.CC

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Winter draws long this year, but there was a hint of change this week, with a bit of much needed sun and warmth! To refresh our memory, let’s see what summer was like. Imagine standing over the entrance of a tunnel under the railroad tracks in ‘s-Hertogenbosch aka Den Bosch in the Netherlands. It is [...]

Volvo have announced a cyclist and pedestrian detection system in their cars. When a cyclist heading in the same direction swerves in front of the car, the system brings the car to a full stop.

A step in the right direction placing the responsibility on the motorist instead of the pedestrians and the cyclists. Combined with the Dutch external airbags on cars, we might be getting somewhere.

How about a simple addition? A speed sensor. When the car enters a 30 km/h zone, the car is rendered incapable of exceeding 30 km/h. Or 50 km/h. Or whatever the speed limit may be.Copenhagenize the planet. And have a lovely day.

This morning I read yet another comment from a member of the British cycle campaigning establishment which said "It’s taken the Netherlands 40 years to get from where they were in the 70s to what you see there now". This excuse is used often in Britain as a reason why British campaigners should be happy with less than the Dutch have. New Scientist magazine in 1981. Just eight years after Stop David Hembrowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14543024940730663645noreply@blogger.com0http://www.aviewfromthecyclepath.com/2013/03/what-do-we-want-gradual-change-when-do.html

Utrecht suddenly has little red men sitting on the traffic lights. They hold signs with texts like “red alert!”  or  “follow the red lights!” and a QR-code and the name of a website “itsredman.nl“. When you go to that site you see a video that starts with the texts “Somewhere on a junction in the [...]

Just a few short weeks ago Mayor of London and Chair of Transport for London Boris Johnson appointed our city's first ever cycling commissioner, Telegraph journalist Andrew Gilligan.  Despite some fairly predictable party-political accusations of 'jobs for the boys" from some corners, the creation of his post and the appointment of Gilligan has so far been met with a "good, let's suck it and see" approach by cycle campaigners.  Gilligan has accused campaigners of being "shrill" in the past, but on this occasion it would seem the expectation of action is being met with a cautious silence whilst we wait for the facts to become clear.  Tomorrow, Johnson and Gilligan will launch the Mayor's new Cycling Strategy for London, and they are promising big things.

 Plans for CS2 in Stratford - separated cycle lanes created by removing space for other traffic.
So, what can cyclists expect from Johnson and Gilligan's "Cycling Strategy 2.0".  Undoubtedly, there is much more cash earmarked for cycling (almost £1billion over the next ten years) which will mean there's enough in the pot to attempt bolder and more convincing cycling schemes - such as the plans for Cycle Superhighway 2 in Stratford.  This, coupled with Gilligan's clear understanding of cycling to be a suitable means of transport for a much wider demographic of London's population will hopefully steer cycling away from being solely the domain of the young, quick and the brave.  (No more "keeping our wits about us" at places like the Elephant and Castle, please.)  Gilligan has publicly criticised some of Johnson's cycling plans previously, and also has suitable political nuance to know how to wend his way around TfL's corridors of power; matched with the right-on and no-nonsense approach of Deputy Mayor Isobel Dedring, cycling has found itself a formidable set of friends at the power broker's table.

So will cyclists and cycle campaigners be happy with the contents of the new Cycle Strategy when it is launched tomorrow?  Not necessarily.  Rome wasn't built in a day, and as Gilligan is keen to point out on his new Cycling Commissioner's blog Amsterdam took even longer;
"Will it give cyclists absolutely everything they want? No. Will it turn London into Amsterdam any time soon? No. It took 40 years to turn even Amsterdam into Amsterdam, with the kind of cycle facilities it has now. But it will, I think, represent a real shift in our ambitions for the bike.
A lot of people have worked on this - the Mayor and Transport Commissioner, both of course keen cyclists themselves; Isabel Dedring, Deputy Mayor for Transport; me, also a cyclist; and a very large number of people at TfL who will be delivering it"  And I think Gilligan is right that before now cycling hasn't received this kind of top-level scrutiny - and expertise - before.  In an agenda-conflicted behemoth of an organisation like TfL, this in itself is no small achievement and where I think the importance of the Cycling Commissioner's role will come in to it's own.
 One of London's pilot Cycle Superhighways - launched just 2 years ago.
So what can we expect from the new cycling strategy?  There will be a renewed focus on making some key outer boroughs centres for cycling safety (let's hope this is done in a more co-ordinated fashion than the miserably miserly "Biking Borough" work done in the past), and more Cycle Superhighways, taking in to account the feedback from the creation of the initial pilot routes.  Some existing ideas will be 'upgraded'; expect bigger Advanced Stop Lines, and a wider roll out of trixie mirrors at dangerous junctions - as well as the significant remodeling of a number of dangerous junctions.
But what I'm hoping we will see on Thursday is not necessarily a revolutionary scheme that blows everyone's heads away, (we don't, after all, want to scare the motoring lobby!) but a quiet yet extremely significant acknowledgement that there needs to be a shift in the way in which we provide cycling infrastructure on the ground.  I'm hoping for more plans for bigger and better separated cycleways that a much wider proportion of the population will feel comfortable using, of course, but more importantly I'm hoping that these will be coupled with the understanding of how it is not only important - but actually feasible - to re-allocate existing road space to people on bikes without bringing London to a standstill.  Reflecting on all of the "smoothing the traffic flow" sillyness that we went through with this Mayor at the beginning of his first term, that would be nothing short of the foundation of a true cycle revolution in our city.  Considering the importance of the issue in terms of people's actual safety, (no more smoothing the flow when you're in receipt of reports that say it will endanger people at killer junctions like Bow, Kings Cross, Camden and Clapham please TfL!) I have to live in hope of a quiet but significant turning point being reached.
As always, it will be up to cyclists to stay tuned and to lead the way in helping to make any proposed new schemes a success.  As always, we'll have to "be the change we want to see" and get involved in the decision making processes leading to new infrastructure, and help to guide planning and design choices to ensure that those choices aren't made for us by well-meaning but little experienced transport planners.  London will not become a cycling utopia over night, but if we really are about to see a shift towards delivering much higher quality infrastructure then all those plans will be much easier for us to deliver.  Fingers crossed!

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We were in Winnipeg, Canada late last year, for The Kickstand Sessions. One evening before the Sessions began, we walked from our hotel to a restaurant (saw two other pedestrians!) along Pembina Highway. Our host with the most, Anders Swanson, asked if we wanted to see a cycle track solution by a bus stop.

Sorry, but when I'm in North American cities and someone wants to show me bicycle infrastructure, I've learned not to get too excited. Seen one crappy painted lane too narrow for a bicycle user to overtake another and mostly used for unenforced car parking and you've seen them all. If it's a painted on on the LEFT side of parked cars instead of along the curb, I'll politely decline and blame jetlag - that's not bicycle infrastructure, that's the work of a clown in engineer's clothing. If it's sharrows... I'd rather poke myself in the eye with a burned stick.


I was pleasantly surprised when we happened upon the cycle track in question. A decent width - not Best Practice but better than other stuff I've seen around the world. Running along the curb. And there was the bus stop. Who knew? Right there in Winnipeg, Manitoba was a cycle track that skirted around a bus stop island. I felt like I was at home in Copenhagen.

What is this place? This Winnipeg? What on earth possessed the planner responsible to be inspired by established best practice instead of the last-century, car-centric "guidelines" for bicycle "infrastructure" written by people who couldn't bicycle plan their way out of a wet paper bag? Is the Louis Riel spirit alive and well in the Manitoban capital?

When you see a lot of crap in cities around the world, something like this warms your heart on a frigid prairie night.

Hey, let's be realistic. Winnipeg is not Montreal or Minneapolis - the two premier bicycle cities in North America. They're starting out on their journey. But while the rest of the continent - not to mention cities in the same region - are still lacing up their booties and ordering feasibility studies about the possibilities of perhaps considering taking their first baby steps by contemplating a single cycle track to nowhere, Winnipeg is toddling onwards.

It's a cycle track with a sensible bus stop solution on a road south of the downtown. Sure. It's not part of a complete network. Nowhere near. Let me tell you though, that this little cycle track bus stop strip is a beacon of light in a world of nonsense.

The cycle track is new. And it's Winnipeg and they have winter. They call themselves Winterpeg. Winter cycling is "no longer weird in the city" but there is still a learning curve ahead. The cycle track wasn't totally snowploughed, but my god they had tried. Again, better than most cities.

If I can get excited about all of this, it's probably going to get better. Copenhagenize Design Co. recently won a bid - together with our partners - for Winnipeg's Pedestrian & Cycling Strategies. Working with a city that is ahead of game will be a pleasure.


On the way from one bar to the next one night, along the river, we ceremoniously tilted a garbage bin into a Copenhagenize cyclist-friendly garbage bin. They also have beer in Winnipeg.

The Kickstand Sessions are a master class for planners, engineers, health, transit, architects, etc. in bicycle planning for North American cities based on Dutch and Danish best practice.

At the end of the sessions - after two days of bicycle planning and infrastructure work - we wrap up with communications. How would the participants communicate their vision for the city? They're not in marketing, but they're professionals/citizens/consumers with a vision. Developing a common language is important, especially when you're in a room with people from so many different professions. It's a great way to round off the master classes.

The teams develop each their own slogan and everyone votes for the one they like the best. Then we whip up a quick and dirty poster with their text. Here's what the 40 participants ended up with:


Your bike looks better on the street. Winnipeg. Powered by People.


Indeed. Powered by, among others, these people. The Kickstand Sessions participants. Not everyone was from Winnipeg - some participants came in from Portage la Prairie and even Thompson - but people power they all surely possess.

Copenhagenize the planet. And have a lovely day.

You are probably aware that the Association of Chief Police Officers have now ‘clarified’ their position on the enforcement of 20 mph limits, following the appearance of the assistant chief constable of West Yorkshire police before the All Party Parliamentary Cycling Group inquiry yesterday.

In many ways the ‘clarification’ is more revealing than the initial statement by the assistant chief constable, Mark Milson, that

We are not enforcing 20mph speed limits at this moment in time

because it demonstrates an institutional attitude to motoring misbehaviour. The ACPO press release states

In most cases, 20 mph limits will follow Department of Transport guidance and include features such as speed bumps or traffic islands designed to slow traffic. ACPO guidelines include thresholds for enforcement across all speed limits to underpin a consistent policing approach. However it is for local police forces to apply a proportionate approach to enforcement of 20mph limits based on risk to individuals, property and the seriousness of any breach. Where drivers are exceeding the speed limit through wilful offending, we would expect that officers will enforce the limit and prosecute offenders.

The first part of this statement is simply wrong. The increasing profusion of blanket 20 mph zones in towns and cities across Britain quite obviously means that it is no longer true that ‘in most cases’ these zones will have design features to slow traffic. These are roads and streets that are physically unaltered; it’s depressing that even in a prepared statement the police can’t get this right.

The final section of the statement is most interesting, principally because of the use of the words ‘proportionate’ and ‘wilful’. The clear impression is that the police think 20 mph limits are unreasonably slow, and it is not ‘proportionate’ to enforce the speed limit universally. Likewise with the reference to ‘wilful offending’. Because a 20 mph limit is not something the police believe motorists can reasonably stick to, it is only those motorists who ‘wilfully’ drive over 20 mph who will be tackled by the police, not those motorists who ‘accidentally’ drive over 20 mph. Quite how the police are supposed to tell these two categories apart is not clarified.

The police attitude that 20 mph zones need design features in order to be self-reinforcing speaks further of this belief that motorists cannot be expected to obey signs; the police think that the only way in which motorists will stay below 20 mph is if they are forced to. Now, obviously, I think a physical environment which makes it largely impossible for motorists to speed is ultimately desirable, but the attitude of the police is worryingly revealing in its tolerance.

It’s not just 20 mph zones where police think motorists are not able to help themselves. I wrote last year about a 40 mph road in Horsham, frequently crossed by children to get to a school on the other side of it, where the police advised against lowering the limit to a mere 30 mph, because motorists couldn’t be expected to stick to this new slightly lower speed due to the ‘design nature’ of the road.

such a change [in speed limit] would fall outside of the speed limit criteria currently adopted by the County Council. The criteria have been developed in association with Sussex Police and takes into account local and national research which shows that drivers generally select their speed from the messages given by the surrounding roadside development and the prevalent traffic conditions.   It is considered that lowering the speed limit alone in this location would have minimal effect on the average speed of traffic. Sussex Police would not support such a lowering of the speed limit here.  

The idea that drivers – instead of just ‘selecting their speed’ from messages given by the surrounding roadside - could actually obey speed limits appears to be completely incomprehensible to the police, as is the notion that motorists breaking these speed limits (speed limits that are apparently ‘unnatural’ to them) should consistently be met with punishment.

Their attitude needs to change, and swiftly.

We got sent a link to a page from the Danish Consumer Council (Forbrugerrådet)about ski helmets. It was interesting reading because of a confusing mix of Culture of Fear (for profit) and the science of helmets. And much of it is a mirror of the rhetoric about bicycle helmets. Ski and bicycle helmets are even compared.

The article starts with the standard emotional propaganda in the first few lines:

Ski helmets can reduce the number of injuries by up to 60%, BUT roughly half of adults ski without head protection.
Would you ride 40 km/h on a scooter without a helmet? If you answer no, then why ski 60 km/h down a piste without a helmet?

Right there we can see the ideology shining bright. Go for the emotional juggler. Project fear and guilt onto the reader so that their perception is manipulated for the rest of the text.

Usually, the rest of the text continues in the same vein - you've all read this kind of stuff before. This article, however, embarrasses itself involuntarily.

According to statistics, head injuries are not the typical reason that a ski holiday ends up in a hospital. Concussions made up 9% of all reported injuries last season. This is a rise of 5-6% from the year before.

So... head injuries are not typical injuries. Um. Okay. But head injuries are up? From the season before last to last season, there was little dramatic increase in the number of helmet wearers, and yet head injuries are up? Boy, that sounds like Risk Compensation at play. Are people feeling protected so they go just a bit faster?

According to statistics from Denmark's Ski Union, the total number of injuries are two per 1000 ski days for skiiers. Head injuries make up about 15%. In other words, the risk of a head injury is one per 3000 ski days - or one head injury every 400 years if someone skiis for one week each year.

So I have to ski for 400 years? Personally, I've probably skied about 400-500 days in my life. While I love the thought of skiing for 400 years, I don't know many people who will.

The potentially dangerous brain injuries make up one injury for every 14,000 ski days and 94% of them are concussions.

Okay. This is rare information. Normally, the phrase "brain injury" is happily chucked around in the rhetoric without any differentiation in order to scare and confuse. Yes, a serious concussion can be life-threatening and dangerous. Most aren't. I've had several in my life. None whilst skiing or cycling, but hey, that's just me. This article that started out with a scary paragraph is turning out to be rather informative.

Snowboarders have a bit higher risk of head injury than alpine skiers and children under 18 have more than double the risk.

Does that mean kids have to ski for 200 years - before they're 18?

The Helmet protects partially
Ski helmets aren't built to withstand direct impacts in speeds over 20 km/h. Measurements at several destinations have shown that the average speed on the easier pistes is around 30 km/h - and much higher on the medium and difficult pistes. If a head hits a tree, rock, other skiers or chairlift poles at high speeds, the helmet offers no protection.

Hang on... rewind to the first paragraph. I thought they were fingerpointedly telling me that I needed a ski helmet at 60 km/h. Now they're telling me that it won't really do anything for me. I'm so confused. Interestingly, as I'm sure you all know, the same limitations apply to bicycle helmets. No direct impacts and keep it under 20 km/h.

The helmet's benefits are limited to minor head lesions like scratches and cuts on the scalp and minor concussions.

Sounds like a bicycle helmet again. Actually, it sounds like something everyone should wear in the home and certainly in the car. But hey... they were throwing around all manner of confusing stats on "brain injuries" and concussions, weren't they? Again... I'm confused.

In all collisions, the helmet protects in glancing collisions and protects against getting hit by ski edges and other loose objects, just like it protects when your head hits a hard snow surface and when you tumble off a t-bar lift.

Which, we assume, means it protects against hitting your head against the cupboard door or if you slip in the shower. Or if you're out gardening. Good to know.

The Ski Union recommends helmets
The International Ski Union - FIS - recommended a couple of years ago that all skiiers and snowboarders use a helmet. FIS based their recommendation on a Norwegian study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The study showed that using a helmet reduces head injuries by 60%.

But isn't the FIS a sports organisation? You know, professionals going super fast in order to win medals? A far cry from Citizen Skiers. Kind of like the forms you have to fill out in America to ride through a park at low speeds. Based on this logic, why doesn't the company behind Formula 1 car racing recommend motorist helmets? FIS based their recommendations on one study. Were there others? What was the collective result of the different studies? Why base it on just one? Here the information dries up.

FIS also deals with cross-country skiing. You'd think that these athletes would be better off wearing helmets if they protect against tumbling onto the ground and getting a glancing blow by a ski or other object.

Also, is the FIS sponsored by a helmet company? Duh. Of course they are.

The helmet's strength is a compromise between strength and comfort. If ski and bicycle helmets had the same strength as motorcycle helmets, nobody would bother wearing them.

So a motorcycle helmet is better since a ski or bicycle helmet is just a question of comfort more than protection?

Every second adult skis without a helmet
Here in Denmark, experts used to only recommend helmets for kids and other risk groups like young men with an aggressive skiing style.
Denmark's Ski Union recommends helmet use, especially by kids and youths and if you participate in high-risk snow sport competitions and training in the snowboard park and off-piste, but the Ski Union doesn't support a helmet law.
Yes, you said that bit about every second adult up at the top. Just slapping in another guilt trip for good measure, are we? Interestingly, the Danish Ski Union has an entire page telling people how safe skiing is. "It's dangerous!... Uh... no it isn't..."

No law yet...
A law can be a reality in the future. Both in Italy and Austria children under 15 have to wear them. In Northern Europe there is no law, but many places let children use the lifts free if they're wearing a helmet. Therefore, it's rare to see a child without a ski helmet in Norway or Sweden.
And yet the children are transported helmetless in automobiles on winter roads without helmets. Odd logic.

Dealers that the Consumer Council have spoken with think that half of all adult skiers ski with head protection and for children the number is close to 100%. The reasons include the fact that the pistes are groomed for high speeds, so that even weaker skiers can ski faster. And many people traverse the busy pistes. Conditions that increase the risk of collision.

Traversing a piste? Isn't that just called skiing? And the risk of collision... the article told us all about that farther up.

Ski with care
Collisions on the pistes cannot be avoided if everyone wears protective gear, but by showing responsibility for yourself and others. Respect your technical level, be aware, adjust your speed to the conditions and keep your distance from other skiers.

THAT took us by surprise. We were totally expecting the whole article to end where it started, not with this sensible, rational advice.

While the article DID start out with the usual verbal diarrhea from the safety slash profit crowd, we are left wishing that all "advice" about skiing - or cycling - provided the reader with rational facts and statistics so that the individual was able to make up their own mind instead of merely being subjected to fear rants.

It's a hard slog at this point in our society, we know that. The Culture of Fear has a firm grip. Sitting in the café at a small Swedish ski resort - with five or six measly, ten turn pistes - an hour and a half from Copenhagen, I was amazed to see so many people sitting there with their jackets off and their backs protected with Terminator-like back shields, like they were characters in a wintry Call of Duty-Black Ops 2 level. Having bought into the fabricated gear myth presented to them at every turn.

What you can mine from this article is the fact that if you put a helmet on your kids when skiing - to get those free lift tickets - you can just use their bicycle helmet if they have one of those. Save some money right there. Just don't let them use them at the ice rink, because bicycle helmets (and ski helmets we figure) aren't allowed at some ice rinks... Yes. We're confused, too.Copenhagenize the planet. And have a lovely day.

There’s a story in this week’s West Sussex County Times (not online, unfortunately) regarding the removal of bicycles chained to the railings outside the front of Horsham station. It seems one commuter returned to Horsham to find that his bicycle had been removed and put into storage.

It must be said that Southern trains (and West Sussex County Council) have done a pretty good job at vastly increasing the number of cycle parking spaces at the station; there are now getting on for 150 spaces in total, when just a few years ago there were only about 20 (and none at the rear of the station). I wrote about these improvements a year or so ago.

However, I think there’s a problem with where these parking spots are. There are 112 spots at the rear of the station, which is excellent. Last summer (when people are more likely to commute by bike) they were mostly full.

By contrast, there are just 24 spaces at the front of the station.

Demand for these spots is high, as you can see. Bikes are chained to the frame of the stand, as well as to nearby furniture.  Demand outstripping supply on this side of the station is not surprising, because the station is located pretty much bang in the middle of the town. You would consequently expect just as many people to arrive by bike at this main western entrance as you would on the eastern side, if not more, given that there are shops, cafes and more services in general at the main entrance.

Indeed, the more generous parking at the rear of the station is only about half full, on this cold and damp winter’s day.

Here’s Southern’s response to this situation, as reported in the County Times -

A Southern spokesman said: ‘There is no reason for people to chain their bike to railings at Horsham station. There is ample room for cycles at the rear of the station if the front is full. Access to the rear is by means of the subway and it takes just a couple of minutes to go from the front to the rear.

“We give plenty of warning to cyclists by means of posters and signage that cycles chained to the railings will be removed.

There is nowhere at the front of the station for additional cycle racks for safety reasons as this would compromise the station evacuation point.”

That’s not particularly helpful, I’m afraid.

As it happens, it’s more convenient for me to use the rear of the station, but if I did arrive at the front, it would be slightly annoying to have to budget at least five minutes more time in the expectation that I might not find a space, and have to make my way to the rear of the station. It’s not just a ‘couple of minutes’. You have to make your way to a subway some 100 metres down the road, then walk through it (because cycling isn’t allowed).

Then across the large car park.
Up another road.

Before finally arriving at the rear of the station.

Not the biggest problem in the world, certainly, but inconvenient to have to make this extra journey every day simply because the balance of parking at the station is wrong; it should be more evenly distributed between the front and the rear.

Southern are arguing that they simply can’t even up the distribution, because – as their spokesman has said -

there is nowhere at the front of the station for additional cycle racks.

No location that would not compromise the station evacuation point.

I quizzed Southern on Twitter about where this evacuation point is, and it turns out, according to Southern, that it is in this railway staff car park, to the north of the main entrance.

The existing racks (the ones in short supply) are on the other side of this main entrance.

So, given that the assembly point is nowhere near these racks, I don’t think it’s coherent to argue that putting more racks here would ‘compromise’ that evacuation point. Southern just need to put more racks here. It’s as simple as that. There is ample space; they can do it.

There’s even space for a parking bay on the newly-created plaza in front of the station; it could take the place of the large sign telling you not to park your bike here.

This issue isn’t going to go away, because come the summer the rear parking bays will be full, and people arriving at the front to find the racks full will go to the rear only to find those racks full too.

As Mark Strong points out, Southern have recently received funding from government for 200 spaces at Horsham. Perhaps they could use it to put cycle parking spaces where they’re actually wanted?

What kind of place is Morecambe prom?

And what does cycling on the prom say about cycling more generally?

Morecambe prom is somewhere between the local and the global, nature and culture; and cycling is a key actor.

Until 2006 you weren’t meant to cycle along the prom, though we did – a little defiantly (“how ridiculous! So much space!”) but uncomfortably too, with one ear listening out for disapproving remarks.

But now we can. I spoke to the City Council meeting which voted to change cycling’s status. I stressed the prom’s potential as a utility route – it lines the coastal edge of a linear town. But it was easier in this seaside place to insist on its relevance to tourism. Our prom, I said

“is a potentially very major tourist draw, and we should be able to sell it as such.

“Blackpool, Bournemouth, Brighton, Deal, Dover, Exmouth, Hartlepool, Hastings, Margate, Maryport, North Tyneside, Poole, Saltburn, South Shields, Sunderland, Swansea. All welcome cycling on their proms. All recognise cycling’s importance, not least to the local tourist economy.”

To ride the prom is to trace a boundary. Both the land on one side and bay on the other are constantly changing, but your place between them is constant; almost as though you the cyclist mark the point between nature and culture.

Along one stretch the low, constant rumble of traffic is occasionally broken by the high-pitched trilling of seaside birds feeding on the shore. The wind can be blowing you sideward within metres of buildings full of life oblivious to the weather. Shoreline smells of salt and seaweed combine with those of buses, chips and bacon butties. You look out towards hills, mud, water and sky, and in towards playgrounds, pubs and streets full of cars.

Morecambe’s placed between two identities.

Signs of the twin forces of dereliction and regeneration are everywhere.

Two of the town’s most distinctive features seem equally but contrastingly symbolic – the Polo Tower stands waiting for the return of excitable kids and candy-floss, The Midland Hotel brings in suited conference delegates by day, and well-heeled migrants from further afield for a night or two.

Resort towns must make something of themselves, persuade people they’re worth a visit. Morecambe developed from the railway. Among Yorkshire mill-workers it was ‘Bradford-on-Sea’. The town’s newspaper, The Visitor, was aimed not at locals but holiday-makers; initially it was published only in summer. Back then everybody wanted a sea view and the town stretched out accommodatingly around the bay.

But Britain’s urban industrial labour force has shrunk, and people now prefer planes to warmer climes more than trains to here. Those who can have abandoned Morecambe for exotic elsewheres, whilst some of those who can’t have moved in, and become trapped.

Morecambe is remarkably flat and poor. Shouldn’t cycling prosper here?

The town stretches around the flat bay. Bird life teems across the enormous tidal reach. The views are gorgeous, the sunsets sometimes spectacular. Its standing is a tourist town and regenerative efforts play heavily on Morecambe’s ‘USP’, its vantage point, its prom.

The unfolding panorama afforded by traversing such a long, smooth but otherwise marginal promenade makes the bicycle the obvious twenty-first century vehicle choice. The prom is made for cycling.

Nature and cycling are the regenerative forces for a middle-class culture. Though they’ll ride the line between the two, people come in their cars to ride their bikes around a bay full of birds, not a town full of problems. On the prom the cyclist can enjoy the coast oblivious to and immune from what lurks inland.

The prom belongs more to the cosmopolitans in whose hands the town’s hopes of regeneration mainly lie, rather than to locals.

So it remains easier to imagine and construct the prom as a leisure rather than utility cycling route. Cycling is understood as a practice which other people – people not from here – do. Cycling is not seen as something which local people do or might do, even though seeing it that way would contribute to a different, and better, stronger, more sustainable, kind of regeneration.

That the prom is global more than local makes its current lack of integration with the town easier to overlook.

But how likely is it that the prom could become an ‘ordinary route for ordinary people making ordinary journeys’?

Clearly, the problem is not simply infrastructural. In the back streets of Morecambe you see people cycling. Most ride cheap bikes; they jump from them at the last minute before disappearing into shops, the back wheel still spinning on the pavement outside.

But to ride a bike beyond necessity, you’ve got to:

• want to bike;
• get a bike;
• keep a bike;
• maintain a bike;

and if cycling’s not normal, all these things are hard.

Lack of interest in cycling is an inevitable consequence of a social, political, cultural and economic environment with neither cues nor props to cycle. In such an environment it will be mainly privileged people who choose to cycle, and perhaps partly to communicate their privilege.

The problem of mass non-cycling might not be simply infrastructural, but its solution needs to be infrastructure-led. People won’t cycle in any numbers if they can’t cycle easily. The smooth, wide prom is a super novice-friendly cycle route but without a car it’s impossible to reach without riding on roads over which cars rule. Along the prom sign-posts to other places are excellent, but road conditions in places from which people without cars must travel to the prom are dire.

Morecambe’s prom is a slim glimpse of the cycling facility people want, but like cycling itself it exists on the margin, lining a coast to which birds flock but people don’t; it’s entertained here because space existed and re-making it for cycling would draw in tourists, not because it could serve local journeys of local people.

Morecambe prom is effectively a cycling bypass, both of the town and of the lives of the majority of people who live there. Which is a pity.

So seven years on, it turns out that letting cycling onto the prom was only the start of the story. The next chapter involves getting local people cycling here.

Doing what’s required to make Morecambe prom for local cycling would be to follow a bolder, more distinctive path to regeneration; and one which could help the town thrive without depending so much on the tourist potential of its natural setting.

It involves re-making the town, and not just its prom, for cycling.

The enforcement of the bicycle parking restrictions in Zaandam was ridiculed on national TV this week. Zaanstad municipality issued a parking restriction of 4 hours for a street in the centre of Zaandam, the largest city in the municipality. The street is near the railway station and the city claims the bike parking space is [...]

We've got a thing for Dublin at Copenhagenize Design Co.. Not least because we're involved - together with local partners - in three bicycle infrastructure projects in the city. Now we're loving them just a little bit more.

Dublin has been doing traffic counts of people crossing the Cordon Canal towards the city's centre since the 1980s. The counts are done between 07:00 and 10:00 am and the Dublin Transportation Office has been collecting the data since 1997, releasing results on a yearly basis.

The whole starting point of this analysis was to predict the evolution of modal share and to then compare it to the expected population growth. Thus, I wanted to correlate the population numbers evolution with the growth or reduction of three different types of transportation: walking, cycling and by car.  First of all, this is the expected population growth for 2020 in Dublin.

Dublin's expected population growth 2002 - 2020.
In the upper right-hand corner we can see that the expected population in 2020 is almost 180,000 inhabitants, whereas the population for 2002 was close to 100,000. Thus, two particularly important dates are withdrawn from these data: 2002 and 2020.

If curiosity killed the cat, then data drove the analyst insane...ly happy. In other words, I needed more facts and had questions that needed answers. For instance, how will the modal share evolve considering the population is expected to grow as much as 80,000 in 18 years? Is increasing the number of roads towards cities' centres a future-oriented solution?

Dublin is extremely proficient in collecting data that helped with the answers. Perhaps, in some other cities in the world, if the population is expected to grow, more car infrastructure will be priortised. In this case, however, the city opted for the implementation of a great bicycle share programme - one of the most successful in the world - and a countless number of other pro-cycling policies.

But let's keep calm and geek on.

Considering those two important dates – 2002 and 2020 - I've assembled the numbers for walking, cycling and cars entering the city centre based on the existing data. Then, I created a trend line (also known as linear regression) to help understand where are the numbers going after 2012 (the last public data).

Dublin's modal share (sources 1 & 2) and trend lines.

The thick solid lines represent existing data and the dashed ones represent the trending lines. As you can see, the number of cars entering the city centre has been decreasing in the past few years. Thus, the dashed lined represents the future trend – increasingly lower throughout the years. However, the same is happening for pedestrians which could be read as a warning for future policies.

Cycling however, has been booming: according to the Report on trends in mode share of people crossing the Canal Cordon 2006-2011 the number of cyclists entering Dublin City increased 42% between 2006 and 2011. This report goes on to present this number as a result of the implementation of several cycling policies and the success of the city's own bike share scheme, Dublinbike. Indeed, a successful and worthy case study.

Generally, one of the most common actions taken to tackle population growth in city centres is a hopelessly old-fashioned one. Building more roads for cars, increasing the number of parking spaces and enhancing pro-car policies. The new city has no money for that, or the space or the time. Dublin is showing everyone how to be a future-oriented city by doing it as you read this – and even long before this article was written.


And then we have current Copenhagen case. The City of Copenhagen is also expecting a rapid population growth. 100,000 extra inhabitants by 2025. How has Copenhagen been planning to deal with this population growth? Cancelling a proposed congestion charge - despite hard evidence from many cities that it would work - and planning a monstrous and expensive new tunnel for motorised vehicles that will increase the number of cars entering the city centre. Furthermore, they continue to ignore the 6-8 lane expressway - Hans Christian Andersen's Boulevard - that slices through the city centre and the current Lord Mayor, Frank Jensen, is putting back in car parking spots after many years of removing them. And so on.

It's more than two steps back, considering this is the city of cyclists. But like we've said before... welcome to the New Copenhagen.

Which is why looking at a modern, visionary city like Dublin is refreshing and optimistic. Not to mention inspirational.

I've not yet had the chance to visit the city of Dublin but I love it already. As a data geek but also as a bicycle user and an urbanite.Copenhagenize the planet. And have a lovely day.

A report from the right-wing pressure group the Institute for Economic Affairs (in which the author at first seems to struggle to set out a case for abolishing fuel duty) has attracted some interest on Twitter, in part because of its rather ‘free-market’ attitude to the value of human life:

“While the discussion may seem callous, it is the case that some road fatalities save the government significant sums of money, for example in future health and pension expenditure.”

The report states that contributions from fuel duty and something which the report refers to as a ‘road tax’ (presumably the author is referring to the emissions-based Vehicle Excise Duty) outstrip the government’s current spending on road building and maintenance. Presumably the reader is supposed to infer from this that road building and maintenance are the only external costs arising from motoring where as the reality is that motoring costs the taxpayer at least £9 billion per year more than it produces in tax receipts. Surprisingly  for someone who has apparently managed to acquire a PhD in transport and environmental policy, Richard Wellings seemed to be unaware of this shortfall when writing the report:

“Motoring taxes were being used to fund general public expenditure, primarily on the welfare state. Spending on roads was only equivalent to about a fifth of the motoring tax take and a significant proportion was devoted to ‘anti-car’ schemes.”

However despite the IEA seemingly not doing their research on the wider costs of motoring, I was rather encouraged by this:

“The privatisation of the road network would facilitate the abolition of fuel duty. The flotation of motorways and trunk roads would raise approximately £150 billion, which would be used to make large cuts in fuel duty. Government spending on transport would then be phased out, saving about £20 billion p.a. Finally, general tax revenues would increase markedly due to substantial efficiency gains, including much lower levels of congestion.”

Note here that the term ‘transport’ is used here to refer to ‘car transport.’ For a right-wing pressure group the IEA seem oddly determined to remove individual’s choice when it comes to transport mode.

Presumably, the problems arising after the privatisation of the railway, electricity, gas, water and telecommunications infrastructure and services are supposed to be seen by the reader as the exception rather than the rule when it comes to privatisation. The report only specifically mentions motorways and trunk roads, suggesting the author, like Minister for Roads and moron Mike Penning, is labouring under the false assumption that trunk roads (like motorways) are for the exclusive use of motorised vehicles. However, when I thought more about it, I got the feeling that there might be more to this report than meets the eye.

The big question is, why only mention motorways and trunk roads? Surely the private sector would be more dynamic and innovative than local authorities when it comes to local roads and surely the IEA wouldn’t support funding these roads through council tax. So let’s suppose we privatise the whole road network, carriageways, footways and all. Setting aside the wider issues of selling basically the entire public realm off to private companies, what would privatised road transport without fuel tax and no VED look like?

Carving it up

Traditionally privatisation in the UK has taken the form of a handful of monopolies dominating a different regions, and there is no reason to expect that the privatisation of the road network to be much different. However, it may be the case that some companies specialise in roads formerly controlled by local authorities, whilst different companies specialise in trunk roads, motorways or rural roads. In order to be charged, expect to have your movements tracked like never before.

Externalities

Naturally with the contribution towards covering some of the wider costs of motoring coming from VED and fuel tax gone, it would fall to the road operating companies to cover the external costs arising from their operations. Costs such as the hospitalisation and ongoing care costs arising both directly from road traffic collisions and indirectly from factors like air pollution and obesogenic environments would no-longer have to be paid for by taxpayers, which should be reflected by a significant reduction in the individual’s tax burden.

An interesting knock-on effect from this would be that motorway-style road designs in towns and cities which encourage dangerous driving behaviour, require different modes of travel to mix, or which produce high-levels of emissions in densely populated areas through inappropriately high speed limits would likely be phased out by road operating companies in favour of designs which reduce their costs. New designs would enforce lower speed limits in populated areas and separate out different vehicle types in order to drive down costs.

Similarly, whilst the criminal justice system at present is reluctant to hand a lifetime ban even to those who have clearly demonstrated they should never, ever drive again, under a privatised road system, road operating companies would seek to minimise their liability by either banning such drivers from the roads they operate or else charge such individuals for access at such a rate that it acts as a de facto ban.

Costs for motor traffic users

Following on from the banning (or de facto banning) of dangerous drivers, high risk drivers such as those who have been previously involved in crashes, new drivers, young drivers or old drivers would likely be charged at a higher rate. Certain journeys would require using parts of the network owned and operated by different companies, the result of which being that whilst some journeys may be relatively easy or cheap, others could become quite costly and difficult with the difference between the two being down to largely arbitrary factors. With the effective monopolies road operating companies would likely be given over certain routes (as described above) and light-touch regulation from the state, it is likely that costs to motor-traffic users would increase above inflation year-on-year, as is currently seen on the privatised rail network.

Naturally, road operating companies would seek to maximise profits by charging a higher rate for peak-time use, in addition to increasing peak-time road capacity by reducing speed limits, whilst rural users would likely face higher standard-rate charges due to the lack of economies-of-scale on the roads servicing more remote, sparsely-populated communities, but people are free to move home if they so choose. Bus services using multiple road operating companies’ roads may be more expensive than routes along roads operated by a single company.

Another advantage of privatised roads would be that the current blight of local authorities providing free on-street car parking for people who don’t work hard enough to own a house with a driveway will end, in favour of parking charges at the market rate.

Impact on road freight

A knock-on effect from higher peak-time pricing would be that it would be more economical for businesses to schedule deliveries during off-peak times. Large and heavy goods vehicles would naturally face much higher charges than smaller motor vehicles due to their increased wear on the road, disruptive effect on other traffic and significantly increased costs arising from death or injury. However, the advantage of this would be in restoring the competitiveness of rail freight; rail freight hubs would be viable in most towns and cities, with the last mile delivered by smaller delivery vehicles.

Costs for non-motorised users

The issue of non-motorised traffic (pedestrians, cyclists and horse-riders) is not touched upon in the report itself, but it is easy to infer how these types of traffic should be dealt with. Naturally, like motor traffic these traffic types will require extensive tracking for the purposes of charging. However, as we have expected the road operating companies to pay for the negative externalities arising from motorised traffic, it is only fitting that we reward them for the positive externalities of non-motorised traffic.

Positive externalities such as productivity benefits and reduced instances of sick leave to employers whose employees travel to work on foot or by cycle, reduced healthcare expenditure and reduced emissions and benefits to local businesses along walking and cycling routes should be used to offset the costs of negative externalities to road operating companies. The knock-on effect of this is that road designs which maximise the uptake of walking and cycling would be a worthwhile investment for road operating companies, as would be removing road designs which create conflict between road users. As they produce almost exclusively positive externalities, the direct cost to pedestrians and bicyclists would be zero, although tracking and monitoring would still be required to calculate the offset to negative externalities a road operating company had earned from its pedestrian and bicyclist users.

In conclusion

At first glance Richard Wellings’ report, ‘Time To Excise Fuel Duty?’ might appear to be overly simplistic drivel which overlooks the existence and value of pedestrians, cyclists, public transport users, children and most startlingly the value of human life, bringing shame on the very institution of the PhD. Taken at face value, it certainly pushes all the classic right-wing buttons; motorists portrayed as unfairly-taxed victims whose travel choice is essential for economic prosperity and producing absolutely no significant negative outcomes for third parties, those living in rural areas are portrayed as victims and pedestrians, bicyclists, public transport users and children effectively do not exist. Even human life is given a market rate. However, on second glance what the report is proposing would actually be radical subversion of current right-wing thinking on driving. Reading between the lines, Richard Wellings is proposing a model in which motorists pay a fair price for their externalities and car use is restrained in favour of modes which produce positive externalities – an extremely logical, sensible proposal disguised between the lines in a report from the IEA.

When it comes to cycleways and talk of how we fit them into the urban landscape when we have busy multi-functional roads, it’s common for people not to be able to imagine how it can be done. And it’s not for want of trying but for the simple fact that we’re not very good at doing it in the UK due to being too single minded and not looking at the bigger picture so we don’t have much practical knowledge to draw upon.

Cycleways are often looked on as either an afterthought to be squeezed into a design as a box ticking exercise or as an individual addition to an existing streetscape. This always leads to a poor implementation as the cycleway conflicts with the other requirements of the space.

Instead, cycle provision needs to be an integral part of the design, but not just for the sake of cyclists, but as a benefit for all users of the space. Let’s look at how.

Above is a typical (if highly stylised) urban road layout. We have a main through route running north/south on the left hand side and a local residential street on the right. Running east/west, again we have a residential street at the top and a main through route to the south.

We might assume that since this is an urban environment, the through routes act out a multitude of purposes; as a busy through road, a bus route, a shopping street. Since the first rule of Sustainable Safety is to have non-functional roads, we’re obviously in for a tough time of things. There’s a number of options depending on the lay of the land and budget.

Ideally we’d move the through traffic to somewhere else via a by-pass. By-passes have a bit of a bad name for themselves, but being pragmatic, if we have traffic that isn’t going to magically go away, moving it away from people into it’s own dedicated space is a good idea. The key is to not add the by-pass to increase capacity, it must just move the through traffic out of the way, so traffic reduction techniques must also be used on the old street we are trying to free up.

If a by-pass is not an option, then we can try to move the other uses of the street, for example by encouraging shopping on a parallel street by improving it’s environment.

Realistically, in dense urban areas at least, these options will not be realistic, so we’ll have to deal with the multi-functional nature of the street as it is the best way we can which will mean some compromises. The best compromise would be to remove any on-street parking so as to free up space for pedestrians and cycles and provide convenient off-street parking.

Let’s presume we’ve found a way to fix (or at least compromise on) those problems.

So here we have added cycleways to our main routes, pretty simple standard things, at least for the Dutch.

Where the two main roads meet, we introduce a standard traffic controlled junction with separated cycle and pedestrian provision.

Moving away from the main junction, the introduction of the cycleways introduce the need for a treatment where they cross side roads. The CROW manual gives us two options, depending on the volume of traffic and the space available.

We either move the cycleway away from the roadway at the junction so as to create a buffer space for turning motor vehicles and to add give way road markings. Or we move the cycleway closer to the roadway so that sight-lines are improved and the cycleway in effect becomes a curb separated cycle lane.

So far we’ve just looked purely at adding cycleways to the main through routes, but we can do better. If we think beyond this, we can improve the local area for all users.

First off, we’ve adjusted the residential access junctions to improve its gateway function. Gateways are borders between road types that act as an indicator that the user is moving from one road type to another, they should slow traffic right down via calming measures such as steep gradient changes and surface texture and colour.

This example above is common in the Netherlands, it continues the pavement across the gateway, giving a zero radii to the junction as well as a steep vertical deflection and a stark visual impression that pedestrians have priority and that motor vehicles are entering a different type of road. The Ranty Highwayman recently looked at such set-ups and whether they could be implemented in the UK (spoiler alert - the answer is yes).

Here’s another example courtesy of Schrödinger’s Cat, this time including a cycleway in the mix rather than a cycle lane, if you haven’t already please check out The Alternative DFT for more info.

Secondly, we’ve also closed off our second residential area entrance on our east/west through road.

A problem with the original street layout is that as soon as the main north/south road gets busy and congested, the residential road will be used as a rat-run to relieve the through route. Something which will be a detriment to all other users of these streets, something which the streets were not designed for, and something which we should try to stop.

The best way to do this is to simply close off the area to the possibility of through traffic either by closing off roads completely or by clever use of one-way streets (in either case pedestrians and bicycles should be able to continue to use the road).

This also has secondary advantage. Conflicts on our roads occur not on the straight bits but at the bits in between, the junctions. So junctions should be where we concentrate on safety, Sustainable Safety says a good way is to ensure that when when vehicles of differing masses meet, the difference in momentum is kept to a minimum by keeping speeds low, by separating vehicles in time or space (traffic lights vs bridges and tunnels), or by removing the junction all together.

So the less junctions we have, or at least, the less junctions on roads with high speeds (anything over 20mph is considered high speed when talking about pedestrians and cycles), the safer our overall system will be. By removing a junction that is replicated elsewhere, we not only stop rat-running between these two junctions, but also make the road that contains the junction safer for all while encouraging walking and cycling by making those modes more attractive with shorter distances.

In conclusion, what I guess I’m trying to say is that it’s not just a case of chucking in some cycleways and hoping they work (and giving up when they get complicated), the whole local area needs to be looked at as a complete network as simple network changes can have big positive impacts on how people can use the available space.

Most of us international Copenhagenizers end up spending a chunk of our evenings learning to pronounce Danish words and names like "Oehlenschlagersgade" and "rødspættefiletter." Not so much for getting around, but more as a way of showing gratitude for the very-accommodating-English-speaking-Copenhageners, and an appreciation of Danish culture. Enter a monotonous list of books for adults learning Danish as a second language.

One quickly learned point with these books, is that not many have a good ending. Or a good beginning, for that matter. So much for encouraging us newcomers' love affair with Denmark.

But that's beside the point.

The point is that many of these books feature bicycles. A normal part of culture in Copenhagen, why wouldn't the simple bicycle be mentioned in 90% of the books I've picked up over two years of Danish lessons? The most recent however, had a fantastic addition to the bicycle's many uses. One we hadn't yet considered.

The protagonist of the book, Camilla, is caught in a bit of a situation with a suitor one evening after he's taken her out for dinner. He's sweet, definitely handsome, a police officer, and yet she doesn't like him enough for him to take her home. Jump to (roughly translated) stream of conscious writing as Camilla talks herself through the minutes following their exit from the restaurant...

This is why I'm a bicycle girl. All I do is hop on my bike and go. No awkward goodbye, no uncomfortable 'who's going home with who'. Crisis averted. Deep breath. I'll just hop on my bike, wave, and say thank you for dinner. Suddenly, I'm gone. Cruising home alone. Thank goodness I'm a bicycle girl.

Thank goodness for bicycle culture - preventing awkward encounters one bicycle at a time. Copenhagenize the planet. And have a lovely day.

This post is related to a marvellous post on As Easy As Riding A Bike, which discusses the traditions of cycle campaigning in the UK, and, in particular, the "No Surrender" (of the right to use the highway) attitude which originated in the 1930s and continues to be a major force in determining attitudes of British cycling organisations today towards cycling provision, good and bad. I urge you to read it, if you haven't already done so. It's long, and if you have even more stamina, you can read the comments as well. The second most popular post on the present blog, 1934: The moment it all went wrong for cycling on the UK from 2011, was on a similar theme.

What concerns me in this post is the argument, related to the "No Surrender" one, that we should not be aiming to "get cyclists out of the way" of motor vehicles. This has gone down the ages. As Easy As Riding quotes The Times from 1934 reporting a conference on road safety:
The Cyclists’ Touring Club stated that the provision of cycle paths at the side of any of the main roads would not be with the object of giving cyclists a good path on which to ride, but to remove them from the road in the interests of motorists. So we have the from this stage association of "the interest of motorists" with the convenience, safety and relaxation of traffic-free cycle paths, as if the former were an undesirability so huge that it necessarily trumps the latter. The sentiment is effectively: "A cycle path might be lovely for cyclists, but it might also help motorists to go faster, so we can't possibly have that".

Taking this theme up to date, see, for example, CTC's recent campaigners' briefing on Cycle Friendly Planning & Design (that I have quoted before). On Page 3, under "What cyclists want", it says that, according to the results of CTC's survey, one of the things they they want is:
To feel valued, not "kept out of the way of the traffic"So again there is this opposition being set up between benefiting cyclists and benefiting motorists. If cyclists are valued, then they will not be "out of the way". And when I have heard Roger Geffen, the author of this document, talking about the results of this survey, this has been a point he has always emphasised: "yes" to segregated cycle facilities, in the right places, if they are good enough, but "no" to  just "getting cyclists out of the way" of motorists.

The trouble is that the one effect of constructing segregated tracks on main roads, where segregated paths are most needed, must be to "get cyclists out of the way" of the motor traffic flow. But why is this seen as such a big deal? Why is it seen as wrong?

It's partly a matter of language, of course, of phrasing, the way the situation is expressed. Deliberately negative language is being employed by the cycle advocates quoted here. One, more constructive, way of thinking about the segregation of modes is to say that we are "segregating cars away from people". And there is always a pro-safety argument to segregation, for any of the modes segregated, foot, bike or car. If you make each flow uniform in terms of speed and momentum, as nearly as you can, which can never be achieved when mixing modes, then you reduce the change of serious damage occurring as a resault of accidents. This is one of the principles of Dutch philosophy of sustainable safety. 

If motorists do not have the worry of how to negociate around bikes, vehicles with very different characteristis to their own, it takes one stress away from them and one source of unpredictability in their enviornment, a thing that they might well welcome, and a thing that might actually be beneficial even to their safety. But does that make it wrong? Are cycle advocates supposed to be so opposed to motor culture in all its forms that anything that is done that might make life easier or safer for motorists must be opposed whatever possible benefits it might also have for cyclists? And yes, if we get cyclists "out of the way" of cars, then, on some roads, in some circumstances, that might cause cars to go faster. It might result in smoother journeys, and these might be more fuel-efficient. Lesss pollution might be generated by a road traffic composition which allows drivers to cruise rather than have to break behind cyclists and then accellerate to overtake them. Is all this wrong?

Now, in the early stages, the period of the 1930s in Britain discussed above, I think part of the driver for the "don't get cyclist out of the way of cars" attitude was the frequently poor quality of the cycle path alternative that was on offer: though whether there was or was not generally a more fundamental philosophical objection behind this, such that no quality of cycle path would have been good enough for the leaders of cycling, it was the "principle of the thing", is open to debate. And of course the quality of cycle facilities continues to be the big issue in the UK, as this blog has continually pointed out from the first. But we do see the same objection raised, weirdly, even when the quality of the provision for bikes is world-class, and the results massively successful in transport policy terms.

Here's the example which actually prompted this post. Mark Wagenbuur posted on his blog Bicycledutch a piece about a new flyover for bikes that has been constructed at Enschede. It looks rather good. It allows them to cross a main road without interaction with the motor traffic at all, replacing what used to be a signalised crossing. It allows more capacity for bikes, because they don't stack up at the lights, and it takes away a delay (replacing it with a slightly longer journey as cyclists have to cycle a curved ramp to get up to the flyover). Of course, there are equivalent benefits to motorists. Because the crossing is eliminated, the capacity of the road is increased, motorists' journeys are speeded-up, and their journeys are likely to be more fuel efficient, because they do not have to stop here anymore.

So basically here you have major infrastructure dedicated to cycling, constructed at great expense, to totally separate cycling form the motor flow. Something you get a lot in the Netherlands, the word's most cycle-friendly nation: there are other good examples on the same blog. So, to quote Anna Soubry, Health Minister, giving evidence to the all Party Parliamentary Cycling Group Enquiry yesterday, "What's not to like?"

Well, something, aprrently, for some cycle capmaigners in the UK. It's the old "we don't want to be got out of the way of traffic" thing again, isn't it? Richard Mann, cycle campaigner from Oxford, advertised the post about the brige in Enschede on his Twitter feed in this way:
Cyclists given a long looping ramp in Enschede so they don't hold up traffic http://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2013/02/28/cycle-bridge-enschede/ … >HmmAnd in the three letters of that "Hmm" lie a distillation of a century of "attitude" in the relationship between cycling activists, motorists, and infrastructure in the UK.

The Dutch model, make no mistake, has been the most fantastic success in achieving very high cycling levels, around 20% of all journeys, in a country where most people can afford cars. It's a success that is not totally dependent on the technology of bridges, underpasses, roundabouts, signals and tracks, but that is a very large part of it, as anyone who has experienced it, or read the blogs  Bicycledutch and A View From The Cycle Path will know. But here we have a strand of opinion that wants to reject this technology for other reasons. We see it also very strongly in the writings of Bob Davis, founder of the Road Danger Reduction Forum. Much of what Bob says on that site I actually heartily endorse, and many of his writings have been very influential on my thinking in the past. But Bob's interventions on  the As Easy As Riding A Bike blogpost are classic of this "Not out of the way" strand of thinking.

It's like there is another agenda going on behind this cycling thing. You may have thought that when you get on your bike, you are just using it as a cheap, efficient and fun way of getting from A to B with minimal invasion on the pleasure and convenience of anybody else. But no, in a fundamentalist "pro-integration of all forms of traffic" world-view, what you are doing is serving a higher function. You and your bicycle are helping to control the motor traffic. You are making it go slower and you are "civilising the street". No matter that you didn't ask for this job, it is your job, as a sort of Holy Responsibility, to sort the whole world of transport and the urban environment out, and "civilise the street" by getting on your bike. You are just the instrument of this method of civilisation of the city. You are The Martyr.

The thing is, most people just want to ride their bikes, and not have to interact with motor traffic, and they don't think it's their job, when on two wheels, to "get in the way" of cars and slow the traffic. Many traffic planners seem to think it is, witness the rash of road narrowing schemes in London, where a stated objective is often deliberately to allow insufficient space for cars to overtake cyclists in the narrowed lanes, so cyclists regulate the speed of traffic. I am one with many other cycle bloggers who think this is a terrible policy that will do nothing for the attractiveness of cycling.

Now, don't get this wrong, I do believe we should have slower, more civilised city streets. I do believe we should have more genuine "sharing" of space on streets between drivers, cyclists and pedestrians. But doing that, I think all the successful European models conclusively show, involves reducing motor traffic to a bare minimum on streets (as opposed to roads for movement, of which the road in Enschede that was bridged by the cycle flyover is an example), and enforcing very low speeds through both policing and design. So achieving that "sharing" and that "civilisation" is mostly about actually removing motor traffic, in practice, and what that means is the deployment of the technology of segregation in its various forms, providing routes round urban centres that are specialised to take the heavy through-traffic from one place to another, with suitable alternatives for pedestrians and bikes, and unravelling modes so that the streets you want to be civilised in town centres are actually dominated by human traffic. To get that dominance, you have to allow safe and pleasant mass cycling, cycling for all, regardless of determination or willingness to act as "human traffic calming" or "street civilising material". For that you need all the apparatus of segregation, of low speed limits, of preferential treatment and priority for cycle traffic. You need quite a lot of engineering. All the experience of cycling systems the world over shows this.

The trouble is in part that people have different agendas, and campaigns for more or safer cycling can get wrapped up in all kinds of other political objectives. I take the view that the car is here, with us, to stay, for a long time yet. We can't abolish it, but we can get people to make smarter travel choices, and only use it when it really is the most sensible mode for the purpose, and walk, cycle and take trains at other times, for the vast majority of their journeys. We need to employ the best methods we can to do this, and we need to do the things that have been actually shown to work to get people on bikes in societies similar to our own. We can't solve all the problems of the world and of the environment in this one step, and we can't get rid of private motorised transport. We can engineer its environment so that it is less intrusive on our cities and countryside and less obstructive and less discouraging to the sustainable modes.

It may well be, indeed it is the case, that sometimes, in the history of debate on these things, the most rabidly petrol-headed of commentators or law-makers has been in favour of the construction of cycle paths ands tracks principally in order that cyclists should be got out of the way of their motorised activities. But that is not an adequate reason to to on opposing proven solutions which demonstrably can create a better transport environment for all, more inclusivity of mobility, and innumerable health and social benefits. That is a simplistic politics of reaction – "My enemy thinks it is good, so I must oppose it" – not reason, that we need to move beyond.

For ultimately the "not out of the way" mentality is a motor-centric one. We don't think it unreasonable to keep bikes and pedestrians "out of the way" of trains or aircraft. Why not? It's that this "not out of the way of cars" concept depends on the thinking that "in the way" is necessarily "where the cars are at". In other words, the contention is that the roads that cars are presently occupying are the basic, central social territory that other transport modes must not cede to them. But it doesn't have to be regarded this way. Cars can be pushed out of our towns, and out of the residential and social areas of our cities, if we wish it, to a considerable extent, and their principal arteries can be made irrelevant to cycling and walking by parallel provision (this in a way was what motorway-building was all about, though that didn't solve many problems in the British context because of other policy failures). The argument about getting bikes "out the way of cars" can be made irrelevant, because "where the cars are" is no longer critical territory for everyday non-motorised living, any more than the railway lines or canals or docks are. There's a paradigm shift in thinking that I'm alluding to here. But if cycle campaigning continues to obsess about "not getting us out of the way" of the cars, we'll continue to be be stuck in the same old loop.

I am interested in the prevalence of speeding amongst motorists, particularly in the light of statistics and common sense relating to potential harm and the dangers inherent in this activity. Many people, including myself, have previously highlighted the role played by the design of the highway environment itself. I am a firm believer that arbitrarily low speed limits applied to urban motorway-style highways rely almost exclusively on motorists internal "moral compass" for compliance. Obeying the law is one thing, but doing it in the face of constant temptation is quite another. Others have discussed a cultural desire for speed and the power of marketing to create and then reinforce this.

I seem to be test driving a considerable variety of cars at the moment. Not because I have a cool Top Gear type of job (that is cool, right?) but rather because I have a building on site at present and I need to lug a large amount of drawings and PPE around with me when I visit. It is also a 500 mile round trip. I get a different hire car each time, and so I am able to compare and contrast in some detail.

This ad-hoc experiment of dubious scientific quality has clearly demonstrated another conclusion we need to add to the motorist's woes when it comes to controlling the need for speed. The design of the car cockpit itself is quite terribly poor when it comes to communicating to the driver basic information about how fast they are going.

Our everyday family car is a Honda Civic. Actually, "everyday" is a misnomer, as it mostly spends its days quietly depreciating outside the house, stationary. But no matter - the key point here is that it has a "heads-up" type digital speedometer that sits in a binnacle (see, I've got the terminology sorted too) above the steering wheel. This is not why we got this car, but is turns out to be a brilliant feature - knowing how fast you are actually going. This is important, as modern cars seems to go nicely just above 35mph in 4th gear. You can hardly hear the engine at 40mph. The road you are on in the centre of town is barely discernible from the 70mph M25, but has a 30mph limit. In other words, the sensory information and feedback from the car and the environment is providing a false reading which makes the speedo a useful point of reference, bearing in mind the damage a speeding car can do.

Interesting therefore that the vast majority of hire cars I drive have the standard rotating needle-type speedo. Unchanged probably since Herr Benz thought it would be amusing to see how fast he could go, and stuck an adapted pressure gauge next to the steering wheel. They truly are appalling. They are inaccurate, illegible and mostly stuck BEHIND the steering wheel - which themselves have become bloated with paraphernalia, making it even harder to see through them to the vital information beyond. Looking frequently down behind the steering wheel isn't much of a safety feature either. A final ignominy is that the speedo is often the same size as the rev counter, despite most normal people having no use for this information whatsoever.

It is almost as if car designers would prefer not to remind their eager customers that they are actually just crawling along in a massive traffic jam at a snails pace, rather than bowling along in the manner beloved by car advertisements worldwide.

I am intrigued why this issue has not been more consistently addressed, as a vital safety feature. Maybe fewer drivers would then zoom past me in an unholy rush as I pedal serenely onwards.

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