Vole O'Speed

As I mentioned last post, I was invited to go on a study tour of the cycling infrastructure of Copenhagen, representing the Cycling Embassy of Great Britain. The tour took place on 8–9 May, and was very well-organised by Phil Jones and our Danish partners, Henriette Lund of Transport for London, Niels Jensen of Copenhagen Municipality, consultant Niels Hoe, and Lene Hartman, of Furesø Commune. Their contributions made it a really informative trip, though of course, you learn most on a trip like this from not hearing what people say, but from trying and testing the infrastructure yourself, on a bike, and observing how everybody else uses the infrastructure, and how everything works. When you do this you gain a physical appreciation of how a system of traffic flows, of how all the environmental elements, the design and habits and practices of the users, interact.

There is really no substitute for this individual, personal experience. The same appreciation cannot be gained from looking at photos, reading statistics or graphs, or even watching videos. As I commented after the Dutch study tour with David Hembrow, cycling infrastructure, and how it creates the experience of cycling in a particular place, is not an "underrstood" thing, fundamentally, it is a thing that is felt. This is what Hembrow means when he talks so much about subjective safety. Subjective safety is difficult, if not impossible, to quantify, and therefore it is a problematic factor for engineers to incorporate into their designs. But the differences in the cycling experience in various environments very largely come down to this concept of subjective safety, and the quality of the experience determines how many people actually cycle.

Of course through writing a blog I can't allow you to feel how it feels to cycle in Copenhagen, Groningen or Münster, you have to go there yourself. I'm glad that such a good representative selection of transport professionals from the UK attended this trip and were able to experiencve what it feels like to cycle in Copenhagen, and were able to observe all the features that go together to make up the Danish cycling experience, and to draw their own conclusions. We had officers from TfL, from the Borough of Lambeth, from Bournemouth, and the cities of Cardiff and Birmingham, as well as independent consultants. One engineer from Birmingham told me he had not cycled for many years. but he gamely got on his hire bike, with all the rest, and cycled, in the end, maybe 40km around the Copenhagen area, over two days.

So I can't really explain cycling in Copenhagen fully to you in a blog, but I can show you my pictures and videos, and explain some of the features of the environment that appeared to me to be important, and relate other facts about the history, development and culture of cycling in Copenhagen, as they were related to us by our Danish guides.

There's certainly always been a strong cycling culture in Denmark (as long as there have been bikes), cycling certainly never became so marginalised as it did in the UK, and progress towards the current infrastructure situation in Copenhagen has been continuous over a very long period, for more than a century, in fact.
Km of cycle track over time in Copenhagen, courtesy Niels Jensen, Copenhagen MunicipalityBut this graph, showing a pretty linear trend in the mileage of cycle tracks provided in the city over time, does not represent the history very well, according to our Danish hosts. Up until the 1970s, Denmark suffered from the same history as other western nations, of trying to accommodate more and more cars on city streets, allowing cycling to be squeezed out, and providing an increasingly poor environment for cyclists, particularly on major roads. This triggered a protest movement, as it had slightly earlier in the Netherlands, with the Dutch Stop der Kindermord campaign, with huge demonstrations, such as this one, below, shown in this photo of Copenhagen City Hall, around 1980. These initially influencved politicians, and later engineers and planners. The extent to which cycling as a mode of transport is actually prioritised on the streets of Copenhagen today, with cycle tracks in all the places they are needed, traffic exclusion and reduction where it is appropriate, and all the surrounding measures, is directly attributable to this movement.

Cyclists' demo at Copenhagen Rathaus, about 1980So what we see today in Copenhagen and environs is a pretty comprehensive network of cycle tracks and paths that create a high degree of subjective safety. There tends to be quite a lot of national chauvinism around cycle facility provision, with some wishing to denigrate the progress made in other places. Without entering into that, I can still attempt to make an assessment of the quality of the Danish cycle infrastructure as objectively as I can. It is clearly more advanced than seen in any country outside the Netherlands. Its strength is its comprehensive character and consistency of design, whereby road users of all types know what to expect, and know what is expected of them (contrasting so strongly with the confusion and inconsistency that surrounds providing for cycling in the UK). It is more similar to the infrastructure I wrote about in Münster, Germany, than it is to the Dutch model, but it shares much with the Dutch model. Build and maintenance quality on average tend to be slightly lower than that seen in the Netherlands, the absolute proportion of space that has been allocated exclusively to cycling is lower, and the treatment of junctions, relying more on road users' respect for priority rules, and less on full separation of flows through signalling and segregation, is like the German model rather than the Dutch. But the sense of subjective safety, and, another important and related term I have found I have need for a lot in talking about Danish cycling, fun, is very high.

If I need to enumerate the main elements that go towards this achievement of the sense of cycling safety and fun on the streets of Copenhagen, they are:

1. Segregation on almost all busy roads (I estimate 90–95%)
2. Design of car parking to protect segregated cycle tracks
3. Simple junctions, nearly always simple signalised cross-roads, with consistent methods of working which are expected and understood
4. Roundabouts with cycle tracks on which cyclists are given priority, in the Dutch manner, with surfacing that supports correct behaviour
5. General separation of cyclists from buses (again at least 90% of the time)
6. Invariable provision for cyclists to protect them from the effects of road works (even if it means considerable space compromise for all categories of road-user).

The standard Copenhagen one-way cycle track: Tarmac, 1.5–2m wide, drop from pavement about 5cm, drop to road about 5cm, protected by car parking: the "roast beef" (or Danish bacon) of Copenhagen cycle provisionQuite a famous view, the crossroads leading on to Nørrobrogade bridge: simple, standard Danish junction design, the blue is only marked across junctions, not on the segregated cycle tracksRoadies enjoying the priority they are given on the cycle track on a roundabout in the suburban commune of Furesø. Note how the smooth surface for bikes and rough surface for cars, zebra, and sharp geometry all reinforce priority.Bus stop with cycle track running behind, Vesterbrogade, in the city centre. Note use of the track by a mobility scooter.Near the central station, works for construction of a metro line have restricted space, but cyclists still have a protected track, though it's not working perfectly, with pedestrians straying into it. But users seemed to get along with this kind of thing in a good-natured fashion.On top of these factors, there's a certain amount of "fluff", if I may disrespectfully put it like that, which tends to attract a lot of attention from foreigners, often abetted by the Danes themselves, with their love of novelty design, which I don't see as very significant. In this category may come the green wave: little lights installed in a few cycle tracks that are supposed to help you to ride at a speed where you will sail through all the junctions on a route on green signals; train carriages with huge bikes painted on them; and the famous counter on Nørrebrogade bridge that thanks you for being the 2541st cyclist (or whatever it is) on the bridge that day.

I think it's fairly important to disentangle what is the meat of Danish cycle provision from the Danish pastry, as not to do can lead to confusion abroad. It was indeed peculiar that the recent, highly marginal, innovation of the green wave was mentioned in some of Transport for London's early concept material relating to the Barclays Cycle Superhighways as being a possible intervention for London, when they were not proposing that the Superhighways were to be Danish-style segregated cycle tracks, but merely areas of bus lanes painted blue! This was really getting stuff crazily upside-down, as the green wave depends on the existence of the protected cycle tracks, as does every other aspect of the Copenhagen cycling experience, at bottom. This was like discussing what colour you are going to paint a house that you have no intention of building.
The green wave in operation: it's those tiny lights in the left of the trackYou win the raffle! The famous cycle counter on the Nørrebrogade bridge. In the photo above, the real thing to consider is not the much-discussed counter, but the width of the cycle tracks. The space on the bridge has recently been reconstructed, like that on London's Blackfriars Bridge. But of course the Danes have done things very differently to TfL. They had cycle tracks already, and they had two lanes of motor traffic in both directions. Recognising the modal shift that their policies had supported, they realised more pace was needed for bikes, and less for cars. They reduced the carriageway to one lane in each direction, and expanded the cycle tracks to 5m width each. Both are mono-directional (as is the Danish norm, except for cycle paths disconnected from roads), and the small chevrons are supposed to indicate a two-lane arrangement, to allow faster cyclists to overtake slower ones.
I've not mentioned filtered permeability in the list above. This is because, though there is quite a bit of filtered permeability in the centre of Copenhagen, particularly in the mediaeval street layout between the Tivoli gardens and the castle, we, the UK group, did not feel this was particularly critical to the operation of the cycle network, though it does make some contribution. Most of the time, the shortest and most convenient routes to places one needs to get to one finds are on main roads with cycle tracks on them. This seems to me to give us a very powerful clue as to what we will need in London if we are to ever reproduce anything like the Danish cycling system here. As I say, at least 90% of the roads with significant traffic on had cycle tracks. The tracks could sometimes have been wider, ideally, but they were nearly always there, as expected, where they were needed. And the city is planning on installing them on the few main roads where they do not currently exist.

The motor traffic restriction measures that were in place in the densest, oldest areas of the municipality seemed to be more opportunist than part of strategic cycle network planning, and more to do with civilising the place generally, and making space for pedestrians. I did cycle through these streets, and I did find that they were generally not the most efficient routes on which to navigate the city.

Vestergade by the City Hall is pedestrianised 4am–11pm, and that means no cycling, for obvious reasons – it's too busy. There are good parallel cycle routes however.Street off Vester Volgarde, with a form of filtered permeability: no-entry to motors from this direction, but two-way for cyclists, with painted lanesNice expensive shared-space treatment in Landemærket, by the famous Round Tower, part of a one-way arrangement that eliminates through motor traffic. But this isn't so much for the benefit of cyclists. The area is full of pedestrians, and fast cycle journeys are best made on the tracks on the bigger roads.The Danish planners, as is pretty well-known, have had a policy since the 1980s of quite consistently putting in cycle facilities on the routes that the discovered cyclists were actually already using. This means they put them on the main, direct routes. Experiments with trying to direct cyclists on to the back-strteet network, using filtered permeability solutions, failed to work, for the same reason they would fail to work in London, or in most other old cities: those are not the direct, efficient routes to the places that people actually need to go, in the majority of cases. Following this discovery, the modern, successful policy continued, which is still underway.

Comparison with Dutch cycling is inevitable. Perhaps the most obvious difference in the infrastructure concerns junctions. Typically, at junctions where all movements are allowed, the semi-raised Danish cycle tracks drop to carriageway level shortly before a junction and merge with the right-turn lane for motor vehicles. This means that if you get to the junction when traffic is flowing, you will be interacting with moving motor vehicles potentially crossing your path. The rule is that all turning traffic must give way to all non-turning traffic, and this includes pedestrians. So if there are pedestrains crossing on a green phase which is simultaneous with the green for bikes and cars going forwards, turning bikes and cars must give way. Turning cars must also give way to bikes going straight across. Left-turning bikes (doing the equivalent of a UK right turn) do not pull out of the cycle track/lane and do not change lane. The proceed as if going straight across the junction, and at the far corner they come to a standstill ahead of the crosswise traffic being held at a red signal, and do a sort of turn on the spot (sometimes known as the "jug-handle" move, though it is often not executed in a jug-handle shape), so as to face the red signal in the direction in which they need to go. They then wait for the green, whereupon they move off in front of the motor traffic going in that direction, and join the cycle track on the road into which they have turned. This is known as doing the "Copenhagen right" ("Copenhagen left" in UK terms).

The merging of the cycle track with the right-turn lane in H C Andersens Boulevard in the city centre.If cyclists arrive at the junction when their direction of traffic is held at red, and there are cars in the combined lane waiting to turn right, the cyclists will probably position themselves to the left of those cars, to make it easier to go straight on, or do the two-stage left turn. If they cannot get to the left of the cars, and must stay behind them, then they may get obstructed by the cars being unable to turn, because of pedestrians crossing. Right-turning cyclists can generally go at any stage of the lights, provided they give way to pedestrians, as they just continue on the tracks round the corner.

This junction system has considerable merit in terms of simplicity and comprehensibility. I did not see any close-calls at junctions (except at one junction which clearly had not been designed to acommodate the moves that cyclists wished to make), and I saw total compliance by cyclists with the two-stage left procedure. On the other hand, these junctions are not so subjectively safe as typical Dutch junctions. Dutch junctions use the two-stage left as well, but they build-in a protected waiting area. The standard Dutch junction resembles more a signalised roundabout for cyclists superimposed on a crossroads for cars, whereas the Danish junction just has the crossroads, usually marked in blue paint on the road like a big hopscotch grid. There is no formal waiting area and no protection for left-turning cyclists, they just accumulate on the corner, as the video below shows. The mixing of straight-on cyclists with right-turning motors reduces the sense of subjective safety, a situation which the Dutch avoid with separate signal phases. On the other hand, the relative lack of HGVs moving about during the daytime, compared to British cities, mean that dangerous interactions on corners with vehicles with poor driver visibility are unlikely.


Large Copenhagen junction with many cyclists from the right doing a two-stage left. Most junctions have cycle lanes marked across them in blue, but this one does not.

Dutch junction design is explained in this excellent video by BicycleDutch, which you may well have seen before.



It is seen the the Dutch employ an absolutely consistent principle of keeping cycling to the right of the motor flow, whereas the Danes do not. That being said, there are less potential conflicts at Danish junctions than you might expect. One reason must be the generally much lower level of motor traffic, in comparable urban circumstances, as compared with a British city, as so many people are on bikes, and so many goods are moved around by cargo bike. Another reason is that many turns across cycle routes are banned to motor vehicles, increasingly so. Another is that the Danes, at very busy junctions, are now increasingly adopting the Dutch principle, and providing a green cycle signal phase (using small, eye-level traffic lights), separate from the motor green phase. One thing the Danes do not do is to use UK/US-style advanced stop boxes. They do not aim to put cyclists gratuitously in the way of motor vehicles, and the observance of the two-stage left turn is part of this culture.

This suburban junction, though still lacking Dutch-style protecting islands, does not merge cyclists with right-turning motors. I am not sure if the cycle phase is separated or not (there are small cycle signals).Another difference between Copenhagen and certainly the better Dutch cities, I would say, is that overall, the amount of space allocated to cyclists is rather lower. Since the provision is still very comprehensive, this manifests itself mainly as cycle tracks that are on the narrow side: often only 1.5m wide. Whereas cycling in the UK you are put constantly on-edge by close passes on your right by motor vehicles, in Copenhagen, if you are cycling slowly, you are rather put on-edge by the constant passes of faster cyclists on your left. They are experts at overtaking right on the edge of the narrow raised tracks, leaving literally millimeters to spare. Having said that, I prefer the Danish problem to the British. Not all the tracks are too narrow, some are fantastically generous, but it is an issue. It arises from the fact that the municipality has fitted the tracks in even in quite narrow two-way motor streets, combining them also with bus routes (the cycle track always on the inside of the bus route, with no crossing over), where the Dutch would certainly have adopted a different solution: either removing one direction of motor traffic entirely, or creating an autolowe or nearly car-free street, and giving the whole carriageway, effectively, to bikes. In other words, the Danes seem to practice separation of cycle and car traffic at a route level (as opposed to at a street level) much less than the Dutch. This reflects in turn some unwillingness, I would assert, on the part of Copenhagen Municipality to really tackle the volume of cars allowed into the city centre. The city centre certainly felt moderately polluted to me, though nothing like London.

One feature of the narrow cycle tracks is that they can get congested when a cyclist wishes to turn left (the equivalent of our right) into a minor road. If this is at an unsignalised junction with the minor road, the latter having no cycle tracks, the two-stage left does not really apply. Instead, there will be a bit of tarmac at the edge of the raised cycle track, opposite the turning, to create a ramp down to the carriageway, and the truning cyclist must wait in this area for a gap in both directions of motor traffic in order to make the turn. They could move onto the carriageway to wait, but this might cause problems on a narrow road with a cargo bike. On the other hand, if the cargo bike remains on the track, it will be in the way of cyclists behind. However, it seemed that a deal of good-natured give-and-take typically smoothed out such situations.

The standard half pavement height cycle track is not the only type seen in Copenhagen. I quite liked this street in Fredericksberg, below, where both the edge of the track, and the meridian strip of the road (which prevents some potential turns across the track), have been executed using lines of low, rough bricks.

Gamel Kongevj in Fredericksberg: track at carriageway level with minimal segregationIn this case, when it passes a minor road entrance (across which the pavement is continuous, emphasising pedestrian priority), the track does not change level, but becomes a cycle lane marked with a dotted white line.

The same route passing a minor road junctionBus disembarkation on this road was not on to an island in front of the cycle track, as there was no space for that, but onto the cycle track itself. I show this example mainly because it strikes me as a good parallel to the sort of not too-wide main road in London that we are often faced with, where people say there is no room for cycle tracks, and certainly no room for floating bus stops. The Danes really do put protected space for bikes first. If there is a major flow of bikes on a road, they give them their own space. There's no such thing for them as a motor through-road that is "too narrow for cycle tracks". There's a lesson there, if we really wish to prioritise cycling as the Danes do. As some representative from Denmark (I forget who) once said, in response British politicians', or planners', claims that our roads were "too narrow for cycle tracks", "The lack of space is in your heads". Of course, some roads really are too narrow for cycle tracks. The solution in these cases is simple: remove the motor traffic, except for essential access.

Bus disembarkation/embarcation on Gamel KongevjA consequence of this prioritisation of bike space is that the pavements are often quite narrow, narrower than we might expect on comparable British streets. But this works because the kind of distances that are done as longish walks, or as very short car or bus journeys, by people in the UK, journeys of the order of 0.5–1.0 km, that most UK cyclists probably wouldn't bother unlocking and re-locking their bikes for, tend to be done by bike in Copenhagen. There's actually less need for pavement space, and transport for children and the disabled is well catered-for on the cycle tracks one way or another, either utilising electric, or human-powered, or hybrid vehicles.

I've not mentioned speed limits. The limit mostly seems to be 40km/h (25mph) on roads having segregated cycle tracks in the city centre. As on Dutch roads, what the limit actually is may be said to be less important to subjective safety than aspects of street design which both tame traffic and also keep motor traffic and bikes separated. Features to physically calm the traffic do exist, such as this pedestrian island road narrowing, with centre hatching, below. This could be a British design  – except for the critical detail of the omnipresent one-way cycle tracks. In the UK, such islands, designed to help pedestrians, allow motorists to squeeze, endanger and intimidate cyclists on the carriageway. In Denmark, cycling is separate, in its own space. The island is irrelevant to cyclists.

Traffic island to help pedestrians: irrelevant to cyclingAt the recent Cycle City Expo conference in Birmingham (I may seem to be going off at a tangent now, but bear with me), there was a very interesting session chaired by John Dales of Urban Movement, in which Johan Diepens of the Dutch Cycling Embassy gave a talk. More or less the last thing he said was, I felt, a particularly significant statement, that I tweeted at the time. He showed some maps of the cycle and road networks in Dutch cities, said that in planning for cycling, the critical thing is to design your network correctly. Everything else, he said, was trivial. I think this is quite a stunning statement, from the point of view of both engineers and campaigners in the UK, who spend so much time agonising over design solutions for individual roads and junctions. I think the point is this, and it's strongly reflected in the success of the Copenhagen model: once you decide on your basic repertoire of designs, your units of the network, your standardised way of treating main roads and junctions, all you have to think about is an optimised network. You don't have to keep reinventing design for every location, you use the standards, as a bricklayer building a house from a plan works with standard bricks and blocks. The Danes do sometimes do special designs for special places, as in this new, nicely-paved cycle track at the side of City Hall, below (which actually has not met with universal approval), but the basic pattern of the tracks is pretty utilitarian and standard. It's continuity, and a basic level of quality and protection, which is key (as it is in the Netherlands), and it works because the network is big enough, and the routes are sensible and direct enough.

Refurbished cycle track (on the right hand side of the studs) in Vester Volgarde, by the RathausHere's Copenhagen's cycle track plan, below. This covers only the central municipality, not the other parts of the greater Copenhagen urban area. Those outer areas are shown in grey, including Fredericksberg, which is the "island" within Copenhagen Municipality. It will be seen that those areas have cycle tracks as well, and that the network links up.

Copenhagen Municipality's plan of priority cycle tracks, courtesy Copenhagen MunicipalityThis is not all there is to it. These are the priority routes in and out, on main roads, but there is also a "green route" network under development. The green routes tend to be more orbital, more involved with parks and waterfronts and less connected to the main roads, and they tend to consist of wide two-way tracks, with a pavement along one side. The routes chosen are such that the two-way nature of the tracks does not cause conflicts at junctions; for example, when putting a route along a waterfront, all the junctions are on one side. There are also major new cycle/pedestrian bridges involved in this network, over motorways, railways and waterways.

The green route plan, courtesy Copenhagen MunicipalityCycling on a typical green route: not shared space; the yellow path is for pedestriansJunction where the green route crosses a main roadNew bridge on another green route, over the railway tracks at Osterport StationNot part of the green network, but this track on Havenegade by the waterfront is an example of a two-way track by a road.Then, additional to all this, is the "superhighway" network, the routes for longer-distance commuting, out to about 25 km from the city centre. These superhighways can be alongside motorways, where they are necessarily two-way on both sides of the road.

On cycle superhighway 2 from the northern suburbs to the cityThe demographic that you see cycling in Copenhagen and surrounds is incredibly mixed. It is somewhere inbetween the UK cycling demographic and the Dutch, though much closer to the latter. This, of course, reflects the infrastructure that is provided. We didn't see many primary-age children cycling on their own, as I had done in the Netherlands, but this may have been because we were in the wrong places at the wrong times. Parents carrying such children using child seats, trailers and Christiana-type machines seemed far more common. Apart from than that, we saw a total mixture, of fit, sporty cyclists, workers on cheap mountain bikes, women and men of all ages on reliable, fully-equipped roadsters, and people of all ages, up to the very elderly, using cargo bike to transport goods and shopping. About 75% of the bikes in use seemed to be fully-equipped roadsters, of the type normal in the Netherlands, often of very high quality, with baskets, chain cases, integral locks, hub gears, coaster brakes, and hub dynamo lighting.

Just some cyclists on a track in central CopenhagenJust some moreI think you'll have got the picture by now. Some of my tweets and pictures from the trip were collected by Ely Cycling Campaign and made into this Storify page. Yet more photos taken by me and other people on the trip can be found in this collection on Flickr. I came back tweeting the following, which sequence of tweets should be read from the bottom up (and sorry for the typo in the first one):

1. UK politicians, don't waste time, don't bother with cycling at all if you are not interested in doing this. Over and out. #cphbiketrip11 DAYS AGO
   REPLYRETWEETFAVORITE
2. 
   David Arditti@VoleOSpeed..Cause the solution is segregated cycle tracks on *all* main roads. That's the only thing that gives you fun cycling for all. #cphbiketrip11 DAYS AGO
   REPLYRETWEETFAVORITE
3. 
   David Arditti@VoleOSpeedGot to understand this: you need all to stick your Hierarchies of Provision, Quietways, Graeenways, 20mph etc in the bin...#cphbiketrip

Now these tweets attracted some criticism, getting labeled kerb nerd zealotry by Bill Chidley, writer of Buffalo Bill's Bicycle Blog. Now, I can take the insults. I've been advocating networks of segregated cycle tracks on main roads as the principal solution to raising cycling levels in the UK for 20 years, and insults have always been directed at me, and those who think like me, by others in the UK cycling community, because of this. The popular slogan used to be "cycle tracks are designed by idiots for idiots", and now we're "kerb nerds" and "zealots".

But, despite the limitations of subtlety and completeness inherent in Twitter as a medium, I have to say I meant what I said in those tweets exactly, and stand by their message. It's what I have thought for a long time; every visit to a high-cycling city in Europe rams the truth home to me again, and visiting Copenhagen did, again. I say as I find it, I am certain of what I say, and I think someone has to say this very clearly. David Hembrow's message from the Netherlands I think is much the same.

There's a more moderate, nuanced critique of (I think) my point of view than Chidley's given by Mr Happy Cyclist in his piece Extreme straw men and reductionist thinking (though not mentioning me), where he points out that
A lot of the arguments [between cycle campaigners] seem to centre around a question of what is the single intervention that would get more people on to their bikes. The problem is that there is not a single intervention that is likely to succeed in achieving such an end.....The message that seems to come across is that all you need to do is to create a completely separate infrastructure for cyclists in which there is absolutely no contact between cyclists and motor vehicles, and cyclists will come flocking. Now I'll accept that no single type of intervention is in itself sufficient. The trouble with saying this, and pointing out the range of interventions that are used in Denmark and the Netherlands, is that UK policy-makers get hold of the wrong things, implement measures in the wrong order, do only the easiest things, fail to tackle the real problems, and, in short, just fail again to mainstream cycling. They concentrate on trying to train cyclists to cycle on hostile roads, or on providing cycle parking where there are no cyclists who want to use it, or on trying to route cyclists away from "difficult" junctions to places nobody wants to go, or on creating 20 mph limits on roads which are unsuitable as cycling through-routes, or on installing air pumps on the pavement, or creating incomprehensible "cycle hubs", or some such stuff. Transport for London getting hold of the Copenhagen green wave idea but ignoring that fact that everything there depends on the existence of the segregated cycle tracks is a classic example of this.

What I am doing is pointing out what is important, what is key, what needs to be done first. Cycle tracks with a high degree of efficiency and subjective safety, that are direct and on the main roads that cyclists already predominantly use, are the keystone of the arch, without which the cathedral of mass cycling, with all its other components, cannot stand. That's what I'm pointing out most of the time in this blog.

A pump installed on Copenhagen's cycle superhighway 2: nice to have, but it's in the category of "fluff" again. The important thing is the thorough separation from the motor traffic on a direct arterial route.Cycling just works in Copenhagen, because the cycle tracks give adequate subjective safety, and are there in nearly all the places they are needed, and form a coherent network that is practical and direct, because the space has been taken out of the main roads. The reliable, predictable sense of subjective safety takes the stress out of cycling and makes it fun, as well as convenient. This is why the people cycle in such large numbers, I am certain of it. Yes, as Bill Chidley commented, "fun" is a subjective quantity, and you can have fun cycling on UK roads – of course you can. But though fun is subjective, you can measure some related things. For instance, I did not see one helmet camera on an cyclist in Denmark (there were plenty of helmets, following promotion campaigns, that have caused a fall in cycling according to  Mikael Colville-Andersen, but no cameras). This is an indication of the lack of stress and worry in the environment. The actual statistical safety levels are very good as well – Lene Hartman of Furesø Commune told the group that, in her patch, with a population of 30,000, there was an average one one cycling casualty reported per year: a fact which stunned some of the British local authority officers. But I feel this is a slightly separate issue.

I saw a contribution yesterday on the ever-excellent As Easy As Riding A Bike blog which I thought put this extremely well:
The biggest drawbacks to cycling [in the UK] at present, I find, is the exhaustion of having to be constantly in ‘defensive’ mode, looking out for idiot motorists – plus the damaging effect on one’s faith in human nature when continuously presented with the reality that when no outside force forces good behaviour, most human beings unthinkingly obey the rule of ‘might is right’ and ‘its fine if I can get away with it’.It's the lack of this sense of "the exhaustion of constantly having to be in defensive mode" that marks a huge difference between the feel of cycling in the UK, and cycling in a place like Copenhagen. For most people, being in this perpetual defensive state will always be antithetical to having "fun". That's why the UK style of vehicular cycling on the roads can never develop into mass cycling, Netherlands or Denmark-style. Put simply, most people are not prepared to cycle on roads with cars.

My worry is that British politicians and other opinion-formers, those who are favourable to cycling, still don't "get" the scale of the change that is required. I worry when I hear talk of single, big, high-profile projects, such as the Crossrail for the Bike or the Barclays Cycle Superhighways, as a few isolated routes, as if these can make a much difference on their own; I worry that there's still a tremendous under-estimating going on here of what we are actually need. I felt this very strongly after seeing the highly-developed system in Copenhagen. Of course, we have to start somwhere, and a complete network cannot be built in a year or two, but I also worry about Andrew Gilligan's emphasis on the "Quietways", which sound like they might repeat the failures of the past by putting the emphasis on trying to cater for cyclists on indirect, impractical routes, rather than by putting cycling centre-stage, on the main routes, as they have shown works so well in Copenhagen. David Hembrow expresses the same thought, I think, with his "Dutch Infrastructure is now xx ahead" widget, pointing to the way that neither politicians nor most campaigners in the UK seem to have grasped the scale of the infrastructural change that is required to achieve mass cycling.
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I'll leave you with a strange picture. This hangs in the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen. It's by Lucas Cranach the Elder (I think). It shows some children trying to get a ball through a hoop that is probably just not quite big enough for it to go through. Is this an allegory for cycling in the UK, that there's just "something slightly wrong" which we'll never fix, despite our best intentions? In more pessimistic moments I think it might be. I leave you to ponder.

I've left this blog for some time, and quite a bit has been going on. There's been the publication of the Get Britain Cycling report from the all Party Parliamentary Cycling Group, quite a decent document written by Prof. Phil Goodwin, on the basis of which which The Times (who paid for the enquiry) is urging everybody to sign a petition urging the government to act. I recommend signing it, though if you read this blog, you will probably already have done so. It currently stands at 52,000 signatures, only half of what it needs to potentially trigger a debate in the Commons.

I attended the impressive Cycle City Expo conference in Birmingham, at which Goodwin launched his report, to an audience of 500 transport professionals and cyclists. At this event there was much interesting discussion, with real signs of quality Dutch and Danish approaches to cycling infrastructure gaining ground amongst those who run transport in the UK beyond London. On the other hand, there is still absolutely no sign of meaningful action from central government. David Cameron's response to a question put by Julian Huppert, MP for Cambridge, on Get Britain Cycling, was weak, merely pushing the issue back to (under-resourced and under-coordinated) local authorities, and has raised justified anger.

Transport for London has continued to set the pace of development, getting a Dutch-style roundabout build experimentally and also testing low-level bike signals and designing into junctions the continental method for cyclists to turn left (their right). It's nice to see ideas that until recently were the exclusive domain of frustrated blogs, such as this one, at last seemingly being taken seriously by UK transport professionals. On the downside (there's always a downside), the City of Westminster has produced a deeply disappointing draft Cycling Strategy, that touches the comical with its talk of "Westminster Chimes": I kid you not: their idea is to alleviate safety problems on the city's roads by issuing cyclists with free bells. And last week, Brent got a visit from the Cycling Commissioner at which he restated the principles and anticipated practice of the Mayor's Vision for Cycling (which now appears to be in conflict with Westminster's strategy).

But I've left on hold the follow-up to the Cambridge infrastructure safari, which has not been good of me. And now I'm off to Copenhagen imminently, with a large group of designers, consultants and transport people from various parts of the UK. This will be a tour of the cycling infrastructure of that fabled city, which I have never visited before, on bikes, led by Danish guides, one guide coming from the Municipality of Copenhagen, one from a Danish consultancy firm, and one Dane who now works for TfL. I'm going on behalf of the Cycling Embassy of Great Britain, and I'll be the only participant not professionally involved with transport. I'll be the representative blogger. So I will have all manner of wonders to report on soon, and so I had better get Cambridge out of the way.

I must admit that I was pretty harsh on Cambridge, and by implication on Cambridge Cycling Campaign, in my previous blogpost. Well I'll to a certain extent make amends now. The city's cycling environment has changed in the 22 years since I lived there. It has changed a lot, and the cycling culture has changed with it. No longer is cycling solely the preserve of students, but a broader culture is starting to emerge, with parents with children, cargo bikes, and older people starting to be a significant part of the mix.

This is clearly linked to infrastructure changes. When I lived there, you couldn't get from the city to the village of Milton, to the north, on any route except the main road, which crossed the ring road at an appallingly dangerous roundabout. The river always flowed in that direction, of course, but there was no way through on its banks. It was just fenland. Now all that has changed. There are new ways through. There is a cycle path all along the river (to Ely indeed). There is a new route through the science park on the Milton Road, allowing you to avoid the latter, and there is a magnificent bridge for cyclists over the ring road so you don't have to use that roundabout any more. It's just like Holland. Well, very locally it is.


In the city, you used to have to get across the barrier of the railway either on busy, hostile Hills Road, or on narrow, congested Mill Road (always home to many bike shops). Since 1989 you have been able to cross on the Tony Carter Bridge – at time of its construction, the longest covered cycle bridge in the world. It even has heating in the ramps leading up to it.


A third new bridge of note links from Midsummer Common to the north side of the river, facilitating a good many vital cycle connections that were simply not possible 22 years ago. The city has now exploited the tremendous asset of the chain of parklands and commons along the river, through the city centre, to considerable effect, in enabling cyclists to avoid main roads. All this, I repeat, was quite impossible when I lived there.


Around and leading up to the Midsummer Common bridge there is quite a network of connecting cycle paths...


...and some excellent filtered permeability: quiet roads giving residential motor access then turning into bike paths.


That view actually quite reminded me of this, from Assen, in the Netherlands.


There's the guided busway path, which provides a link to Huntingdon and St Ives over 16 miles (we didn't actually try this out on the infrastructure safari, we wouldn't have had time on a freezing biizzardy March day)...


...and quite an impressive route between the Cavendish Laboratory and the city centre on access-only roads and cycle paths, easily as wide as good Dutch cycle paths, surfaced rather similarly, and with automatic cycle priority signals where the route crosses the road.


Routes across the parks which you used to have to kind of squirm into, and cycle on apologetically, have now been linked properly with the road network.


And there are huge underground bike parks.


Of course, it's not the Netherlands. It's nothing like the Netherlands really. There's not the comprehensiveness of provision. It's totemic of the cycle provision in the Netherlands that you don't need to know where you are going, you don't need to know the town, you just point your bike in the direction you want, and you find beautiful, safe infrastructure that takes you along. It's all obvious, self-explanatory, and self-finding. You can't get into nasty places, where you think "what the heck am I supposed to do here?"as you will do constantly in the British environment.

Cambridge is still very much Britain. You have to know where the cycle routes are. You have to find them, and they only work for some possible journeys. Practically nothing has been done to the arterial roads to make them cycle-friendly, and this massively limits choices. There's a route on quiet roads signposted to take you from the station towards the city. I've marked this for you to see, in purple, on the official Cambridge cycle map.


It's the classic problem. It's subjectively safe, but it's a zig-zag route with low priority. And it just leads back on to the main road again where there's no decent provision, after all that faffing about. It's not what we need to make cycling efficient, obvious and mainstream. We need the main road, the route that I criticised in a series of pictures last time. It's a recipe for permanent failure to mainstream cycling in the UK to always be trading off subjective safety against directness, priority and convenience. We need the direct routes to be easy, efficient and safe. That's the whole problem of UK cycle provision in a nutshell. Cambridge exemplifies it very well. Despite the significant progress that has been made, that fundamental barrier has not been got through. We can't have zig-zag backstreet routes for "unconfident" or "beginner" cyclists only. That sends the message we are not serious about cycling. Cycling is still fundamentally second-class, even in this city of cycling.

I'm grateful to Sustrans and the city for implementing the path along the Cam, but, really, why couldn't they have surfaced it properly, with tarmac? This hoggin material that Sustrans seems to love is not the stuff of serious transport infrastructure. It turns into a red mudbath when it rains (or, as on this occasion, snows).  Nobody wants to do a commute where they have to clean their bike every time, and launder their trousers. Again, this just isn't serious in the way that Dutch cycling infrastructure is serious.


I don't wish to be overly critical of Cambridge Cycling Campaign. They have achieved much. There has been controversy over the issue of Gilbert Road, and the design that they accepted for it, after a long campaign. They ended up with advisory cycle lanes on a fairly busy road with the speed limit reduced to 20mph: actually very good conditions for the UK, but far short of Dutch. But I can see the reasons for the compromise, and I agree with their campaigning decision, having had the background explained in detail. They could have lost the scheme entirely and ended up with the road completely unimproved for many years. They recognise that it isn't perfect, but it is a step in the right direction.


They showed us the cycle lanes on the Hills Road bridge, which allow cyclists to go straight on while motor traffic is turning left by placing the cyclists in a lane to the right of left-turning traffic. This is a fundamentally un-Dutch solution which I am not at all happy with, but certain members of CCC seemed rather enthusiastic about. It's demonsatrated in this video, taken on the safari, by Shaun McDonald.



As you see from the pictures, it wasn't the nicest of weathers in March when we did the safari. It was only about 11 miles, but it took six hours! It needed this time for all the explanations from CCC, which were very valuable and enlightening. But my fingers and toes were in agony most of the time. The background and the local politics are important. And, having lived in Cambridge in less happy times, I appreciated how far they had come, while observing the very significant problems that remain in allowing cycling to achieve its true potential in the UK's leading cycling city.

I'll be in Denmark from today, Tuesday 7 May, until Saturday, filming, photographing and riding in Europe's second most successful cycling nation. I'll report on what I learn there when I return.

The Cycling Embassy of Great Britain, in collaboration with Cambridge Cycling Campaign, will be going on an Infrastructure Safari ride in Cambridge tomorrow, Saturday 23 March. Full details here. Everybody is welcome; bikes can be hired at Cambridge Station, or you can bring your own. It promises to be an interesting (but cold) day out. Thanks to CCC members for offering to show us around their city.

I know Cambridge pretty well, as I lived and cycled there for a year 26 years ago. I've been there for the odd day on more recent occasions, the last one two years ago, but not re-expolored extensive. It will be interesting to see if this ride can show me that much has changed in the last 26 years. My impression, from my more recent visits, is that is has not, unfortunately. As with other British towns, in stark contrast to Dutch and German ones, the infrastructure changes only extremely slowly. There seems to be a general problem we have in the UK in changing our environment for the modern world, and, it seems to me, it does not bode well for either our environmental or our economic future. The level of investment in our infrastructure and environment is just too low to keep it up both working efficiently and up to date. This manifests itself at the level of the obvious crumbling of our road surfaces, that everyone can see, the poor performance of our rail network, as well as the London Underground, as well as at the strategic, policy level that means, to a Dutch or German person, our cities look just like theirs, but 50 years in the past, in terms of the way that the roads and public spaces are used.

David Hembrow has written about Cambridge, and I agree with his conclusions. While the Cambridge cycling infrastructure is probably slightly better than the average for a similar-sized town in the UK, compared to towns in the Netherlands and Germany, it is non-existent. The high rate of cycling in Cambridge, probably the highest in the English-speaking world, which seems to amount to about 18% of all journeys, is clearly dependent on special factors, which as Hembrow emphasises, cannot be replicated anywhere else. The main one of these is that the University and City of Cambridge, by an agreement between them, actually prevent students from keeping cars in the city. I also agree with Hembrow, from my experience of living in Cambridge, about cycling there being very much a gown-versus-town thing. It's intimately connected with the university, and the motoring townspeople remain as hostile to cycling and cyclists as those anywhere in the UK (or at least they did 26 years ago, and reports on blogs suggest not much has changed recently). In fact, I'd say that 26 years ago they were more  hostile than Londoners to cycling, as the usual British "war on the roads"was overlaid with the Cambridge-specific permanent "war on the students". I worked at government offices in Cambridge, and few employees there cycled to work. They mostly lived in the suburbs of Cambridge and outlying villages, and they all drove, and wouldn't have conceived of doing anything else, as Cambridge people. Cycling, along with many other activities of students, was regarded as pestilential, something the city should do its best to stamp out. It certainly seemed to be trying at that time.

I had the good fortune to visit, in 2008, the city of Münster, in the North Rhine-Westphalia region of Germany. Münster makes a good comparison to Cambridge. I was struck by how close the similarities are, in fact, in atmosphere, and architecturally. (Münster was in fact very badly damaged by bombing in 1944, but has extensively rebuilt its old buildings, such as the cathedral, university, and the Rathaus, or City Hall, in which the Peace of Westphalia was signed in 1648). Münster has the third-largest university in Germany, with 50,000 students. It is much larger than Cambridge, and less isolated, having itself a population of 270,000, and being the centre of the Münsterland semi-urban area, with a population of over two million. However, it has a tight, dense historic centre very reminiscent of Cambridge, with a large market square, surrounded by small streets which are encircled by the ring defences of the mediaeval city. The mostly post-war suburbs are arranged around straight arterial roads heading out of town. It is flat, it is full churches, pubs and restaurants, and it is full of cyclists.

Over the past two or three decades Münster's leaders have made a deliberate, explicit effort to make it the greenest city in Germany, and the most liveable city in the world (an accolade they received in 2004). Contributors to this status are the beautiful and well-maintained public spaces and facilities, including the many parks, and the excellent public transport, but the most obvious part is the cycling. Cycling accounts for about half of all journeys made in Münster, up to the levels in the highest-cycling Dutch towns. You see all kinds of people cycling in Münster, for all kinds of purposes, in specialised clothes and in ordinary clothes, on all kinds of human-powered vehicles: parents transporting young children, children cycling to and from school on their own, people moving goods with cargo bikes, bikes used as tourist taxis, people racing around on recumbents, elderly people out for a social ride. It looks quite different to the Cambridge cycling profile, which is still mostly, well, to my observation, just the students.

Münster rush hour; schoolchildren cycling home in the backgroundOld gentleman with bike and child trailer in a Münster parkThe reasons for this massive cycling culture and side demographic are not hard to see. Münster has a well-developed network of segregated cycling infrastructure on main roads, supplemented by home zones, where motor speeds are kept down and most motor traffic is kept out, Fahrradstrasse or bicycle streets, where cyclists have priority and may not be overtaken, bike exceptions on the many one-way streets in the old city, shared spaces (with pedestrians and buses) in the city centre, where motor traffic has been eliminated apart from essential deliveries, and wide paths through the parks, separated from the pedestrian paths.

Shared space in Münster's Domplaz: inessential motor traffic has been eliminated from the city centreOne-way cycle track with junction treatment on the main road northwards out of the centre of Münster. There is a cycle phase to the signals which is simultaneous with the straight-ahead phase for motor traffic on the parallel road, so there is no loss of priority compared to cycling on the road, but traffic crossing the track must give way (and it does).Amazing scale of (rather insecure by UK standards) bike parking at the stationGeneral character of the cycle tracks on the arterial roads in Münster, showing bus stop treatment. They are not typically as wide as Dutch tracks, and are often at pavement level, but separated from the pavement by different surfacing and a line of street furniture or trees. They are, however, fairly continuous, and form a coherent network.Another style of segregation, where the road is narrow, getting out into the Münsterland countrysideExcellent signposting on the parkland cycle routes, showing also the general separation from pedestriansProbably the most important of Münster's cycle facilities is the ring route round the old moat surrounding the ancient city. Where this crosses roads it has priority. Here you see the width of the path, and the Dutch-style utility bikes which are common here.Here, by the beautiful lake, the Münstersee, a Fahrradstrasse, a cycle path, and a path for pedestrains only all run in parallelIt is important to note that Münster lacked a significant cycling culture until recent times. It was developed newly, in a pre-existing urban environment, from the 1980s, through good infrastructure and planning, which owes quite a bit to the Dutch model, the Dutch border being less than 100km distant. However, the cycling infrastructure in Münster is not up to Dutch standards of convenience and capaciousness, it is not as continuous, and sometimes it shows design flaws and problems of enforcement that you would not see in the Netherlands.

This short section of cycle track, introduced only at a major junction, cannot legally be reached by the cyclist because entry is blocked by queueing traffic, so he has to ride on the pavementCars have been parked on the cycle trackHowever, Münster's cycle infrastructure it is far beyond the quality of that which you see in Cambridge.

The first thing you see, arriving in Cambridge by train, is the mess of bikes outside the station. I believe this is soon to be improved with Dutch-style multi-level parking, and it will not be before time.The second thing you see is the pathetic semi-provision on Station Road: the usual UK illogicality, with an advisory cycle lane just running out at a totally arbitrary pointHeading into town, on Hills Road, the half-hearted provision continues, with an advisory lane shared with busesOn Downing Street we find this absurdly narrow bike contraflow entranceIn the centre, at St John's Street, cyclists are not excepted from a no-entry that they need to use. There is therefore law-breaking and general ill-feeling.On Madingley Road we see the confused, ineffective philosophy of different levels of cycle provision operating side by side, with a shared pavement next to an appallingly narrow on-road cycle lane. What is needed here is is a proper rebuild, replacing both of these with a pavement plus a quality cycle track.Elsewhere on Madingley Road we find this insulting less than 1m wide track, that regularly floods, doing dutry as both cycle and foot path.And yet elsewhere on Madingley Road, where the driving can be terrifyingly fast,  an advisory cycle lane gradually emerges, parts of it being little wider than the double yellow lines and the drain cover








Madingley Road provides access to major departments of the University at the Cavendish Laboratory and Institute of Astronomy. Here is the terribly-planned entrace to the former, where heavy traffic is encouraged to cut across a cycle lane at a shallow angleMore design confusion reigns at the entrance to the Intitute of Astronomy opposite, where everybody seems to need to give wayThese photos of Cambridge were taken a couple of years ago, and there may have been some changes since. I have also shown some bad things, that I just happened to come across, and which seemed typical, and not gone out of my way to find good facilities. It did seem that very, very little had changed since I lived there in 1987. It will be interesting to see what the Embassy tour is shown by the Cambridge cyclists, and I will report on that in due course. My overall message, however, which I think is unlikely to be disproved by what we are shown tomorrow,  is that cycling provision in the highest-cycling city in the UK is pretty dismal when compared to highly comparable cities on the continent, and that this accounts for the narrow demographic of Cambridge cycling, the failure of the city to create a mass cycling culture of "everybody doing it", that you see in places like Münster, and the resulting "them and us" situation with continuing local political and media hostility to cycling in Cambridge and bad PR.

Münster, and the cycling achievements of other German cities, remain surprisingly little-known and little-understood in the UK. Cyclists in the City covered Berlin's aspirations for 20% cycling in the next decade yesterday, but nobody has even bothered to translate the Münster Wikipedia article into English.

The Vole hopes to see some readers on Safari tomorrow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Since soon after the automobile was invented, a constant, influential refrain in public policy debate has been that whining, wheedling voice of special pleading emanating from the motor lobby, insinuating that motoring is somehow uniquely linked to economic prosperity and national wellbeing – be it a case of lobbying for employment subsidies, or more motor infrastructure, or less taxation, or no more increases in taxation, or other subsidies for motoring. In modern times this voice has been run a close second by the equally whining voice of the air transport industry, but air transport is still a small part of the economy compared to King Car.

So it is that:
The Automobile Association (AA) is warning that rising petrol prices are forcing drivers off the road. The group is calling on the chancellor to cancel a planned rise on duty in September.Paul Watters of the AA is the genuine whining, wheedling voice of the motor lobby. He tells us in this video, broadcast across all BBC's news outlets yesterday, as if it were a bad thing that:
Up to 70% of our members are cutting back on driving, or cutting back on spending, or doing both.We know fuel prices are high, and this is linked to recession. If people are driving less, this is either linked to them having to drive less, for one reason or another (e.g. less work around), or them making smarter, more environmentally-friendly travel choices (including travelling less, or finding ways to do the same work with less travelling). The latter is a good effect that is being achieved by higher fuel prices.

But what is this "cutting back on spending" Mr Watters talks about? This is unclear. Does he mean cutting back on spending on fuel? That doesn't make sense, as he's also telling us that fuel is more expensive. He seems to be insinuating that high fuel prices cause less spending in the rest of the economy, and therefore lowering prices, or lessening the burden of tax, will benefit the economy: the classic plea to politicians from the cohort of the petrol-addicted.

Of course there is less spending in general, but this is because of the recession. A shift of taxation away from fuel would effectively be a subsidy towards imports, as most fuel is imported, requiring heavier taxation elsewhere in the domestic economy to balance it up, which would be more damaging to economic recovery. Lowering the tax burden on motorists will also imply raising it on non-motorists, people who are trying to do "the right thing" by environment (or just doing it accidentally or through force of circumstance), and be a perverse incentive.

Since in the UK however, the "motorist" is perceived to be the average person, this whining, wheedling plea is one that politicians traditionally find it almost impossible to resist.