Vole O'Speed

Response to "Cities fit for cycling" from Barry Gardiner MP

2012-02-22T16:02:00.001Z

Our household has received a reply from Barry Gardiner, MP for Brent North (Labour), to our letters on The Times's Cities fit for cycling campaign. This is not actually a reply to my letter, but to one from my partner, which she sent after mine, but seems to have got a reply first.

It says:

Dear...

Thank you for your letter regarding cycling safety in London.

I agree that much needs to be done to make the UK's roads safer for cyclists. With public transport charges increasing and London's pollution problems continuing, cycling is both responsible and economical. The Government should look to support those who wish to cycle at every available opportunity, whether it be improving road layout and signage or educating drivers and cyclists themselves.

It is a real concern to me that the numbers of cyclists being killed or seriously injured is going up. It is not good enough for the Road Safety Minister to dismiss as 'rubbish' the concerns that his government's decisions have made our roads less safe for cyclists. It was reckless of the government to cut road safety budgets and funding for speed cameras while abolishing Cycling England, allowing longer HGVs on our roads and ending national targets to cut deaths and serious injuries on our roads.

I have recently written to the Secretary of State for Transport, the Rt Hon Justine Greening MP, about the issue of cyclist safety and the Times' cycle safer campaign in particular. I will, of course, forward any response as soon as I receive it.

In the meantime, if there are any other matters you wish to bring to my attention, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Yours sincerely,

Barry Gardiner
Member of Parliament for Brent North

I would say this is a good and substantial reply, though one senses that our Barry perceives an opportunity to make political capital from attacking the current government on this, when the situation we are now in is the result of a long-term historic failure by governments of all parties to treat cycling properly. He does seem to have a grasp of the issues, stating things in the correct order, giving "improving the road layout" as the first priority for supporting "those who wish to cycle" (who are not necessarily "cyclists"), before "signage or educating drivers and cyclists themselves" (though I am not sure what signage is supposed to have to do with it). But I note no commitment to signing EDM 2689, which he has still not done (67 MPs have, as of today), and no commitment to attend tomorrow's debate.

If you are in London, don't forget to come to the flashride outside Parliament today: 6:15 Duke of York Steps. A big turnout in the rain will be even more convincing.

Why is cycling party-political in the UK?

2012-02-22T00:18:00.001Z

The list of MPs who have signed Early Day Motion 2689 supporting The Times's Cities fit for cycling campaign (58 at time of writing), analysed by party, shows clearly the strange, and perhaps unique way, in which cycling is a party-political issue in the UK.

Here is the breakdown of signatories, as a proportion of party numbers in the Commons:

Lib Dem 17/57 = 30%
Labour 31/256 = 12%
Conservative 5/305 = 1.6%
DUP 2/8 = 25%
Plaid Cymru 1/3 = 33%
SNP 1/6 = 16%
SDLP 1/3 = 33%

Of course cycling is political, in general sense: it must be, since deciding what to do to facilitate it involves taking decisions over taxation and resource allocation that advantage or disadvantage different people. That's politics. But with a Labour MP 7.5 times more likely than a Conservative MP to sign this motion, and a Lib Dem 19 times more likely, it is clear that cycling must be a party-political issue in the UK.

This is very sad, as there is no reason that cycling should intrinsically be associated with the political left, and it does not appear to be so, generally, in other countries. In the Netherlands, so far as I can see, it appears to be agreed pretty much uniformly across the political spectrum that cyclists should be made as safe as possible. Why is this not the case here?

It was a surprise that a right-of centre, "establishment" newpaper, The Times, should come out with the highest-profile pro-cycling campaign yet seen in the British media. And yet it should not have been, because there is no obvious association between cycling and the "big state", or with philosophies of social democracy or socialism. There is, indeed, an intuitive converse association, the bicycle being a facilitator of personal independence, industry and individualism, every person on a bike being, in a sense, a single unit of free enterprise. And the rhetoric of Conservative politicians has often recognised this, most famously in Norman Tebbitt's "He [his unemployed father] got on his bike and looked for work", often misquoted as the motto "Get on your bike".

So what has happened here, and can it be changed? The Conservatives, in a sense, do support, must support, the individualism, the personal freedom of the "man on the bike". But they have got more involved, historically, with the freedom of the "man in the car". As the party most associated with the upper classes, as those classes graduated, in the early years of the 20th century, from the fashion of bikes to the fashion of cars, so the Conservatives moved with them, and the bike became more associated with the "working man", who was naturally represented by the Labour party. And yet this was not a simple, nor a uniform story. It was the Labour Government that removed speed limits in 1930, and a visionary conservative Minister of Transport, Leslie Hore-Belisha, who reintroduced them in 1934, together with the driving test and other road-safety measures, and promoted probably the best cycle facilities the UK ever had.

But, broadly, in the post-war period, the Conservatives came to regard the motor car ever more as a symbol of personal freedom and individual life-success, and while not anti-bike, probably thought of the bike, if at all, as something that had just been left behind in the technological march of history, like the horse-drawn plough. Conservative mentions of cycling came mostly in backward-looking idealisations of Britain, as in John Major's re-quoting of George Orwell's "Old maids bicycling to holy communion through the morning mist". When an "ecological left" arose at the radical edge of politics in the 70s and 80s to take up a space previously occupied by a state socialism widely regarded as discredited, it took up the bike and thus, by repulsion, pushed right-wingers further from it. In the new century, the appearance of prominent Conservatives, notably Boris Johnson and David Cameron, who, on the surface at least, seemed to espouse cycling, for a combination of traditional Conservative reasons and a desire to get in on the Green bandwagon, led some rashly to suggest that when these men took power, the roads status-quo would shift. They were sadly disappointed.

The practicalities of the accommodation of personal transport in the public space of our dense, old cities are clear to all. There is a certain amount of space, and to re-prioritise the bike means that space must be gained from somewhere, and the big area from which it can be taken is the space currently used for moving and parked motor vehicles. The extent to which this must reduce the space for cars is generally exaggerated, because space is typically used very inefficiently on our roads at the moment, and there is much wasted space in over-wide traffic lanes that could be reallocated, when combined with the complete redesign of streets from one side to the other, in a way that in fact does not reduce motor vehicle capacity very much. Likewise, there is no need to decimate car parking in redesigning cities to be cycle-friendly. The Dutch have not done this, and their car ownership rates remain high. It is the space at junctions that is at a premium. At junctions, cars generally spread out into multiple lanes to fill the space, and this squeezes cyclists out. It is the space and time at junctions that cyclists need that will always be the biggest source of contention.

But contention for space on the roads there is, and a major factor here is that the political right has convinced itself that motor traffic is inextricably associated with economic growth, and hence prosperity, and hence quality of life. The negative influences of motor traffic on that quality of life may be apparent to them as well, in terms of pollution, ill-health, noise, ugliness and alienation, but these are weighed-up as being less important in the end. These downsides are, in their minds, associated with the complaints of those hair-shirt prophets of doom who have always been, in the past, proven to be wrong, and the best interests of the majority do seem to them to be tied up with continuing to prioritise motor traffic.

There is also the geo-political aspect: British Conservatives are heavily influenced by the American social paradigm, which the policies of Eisenhower, after the Second World War, inextricably linked to personal motorised independence and economic dependence on the roads, though the urban sprawl and despoilage of the countryside that this entailed in a small country like the UK certainly upset a traditional shire Conservative faction. On the other hand, as the main examples of advanced industrialised countries that have re-habilitated the bike are on the continent of Europe, in countries that have espoused more left-leaning social market systems than the UK, and in some, though not all, cases, are closely associated with the European integration project, this also makes Conservatives mistrustful of the idea of the state siding more with the cyclist.

Can things change? The statistics on EDM 2689 suggest they are not changing very much. One change has been apparent for a number of years, which has been the increasing number of middle-class commuting cyclists in London, associated mostly with the financial, legal and media industries. This, indirectly, has given rise to The Times's campaign, as one of them, their journalist Mary Bowers, was nearly killed by a lorry. Danny, the Cyclists in the City blogger, is always pointing out how big cycling has become now amongst employees and bosses of the City's financial institutions, and how this is clearly having an effect, at least on the local roads policies of that staunchly conservative (with a small c) body, the Corporation of London.

But Cameron, strikingly, never took the cycling thing forward after he became PM, indeed he seemed to have ditched it much earlier, and he put the primitively pro-car and pro-big-lorry Philip Hammond in charge of transport, replacing him, for extraneous reasons, with the possibly marginally more enlightened Justine Greening late last year. And Greening still has to work with a Road Safety Minister, Mike Penning, who hasn't the slightest clue about either cycling or road safety.

The cycling portfolio is held by Lib Dem Under-Secretary of State Norman Baker, whose achievements cannot be said to have been conspicuous. Yes, he has made it easier for local authorities to change by-laws forbidding cycling in parks, and there has been a change of policy on the (entirely common-sense) idea of allowing cyclists to contraflow on one way streets where signs are put up to allow this. But this government's sustainable transport initiatives have failed to target cycling, mixing it up, in the funding competition, with bus and tram schemes. Because facilitating cycling always involves taking difficult political decisions, if you don't give it its own pot of cash, but make it compete with other so-called "sustainable" modes, it will always loose. Boris Johnson did exactly the same in London, abolishing specific cycling funding to the boroughs, replacing the category with obtuse "corridors" and "neighbourhoods" labels for pots of money that allowed councils to back away entirely from the difficult choices around cycling, going for spending the money instead on general street-prettifying schemes, labelled "public realm improvements", that have no effect on modal split. And Boris Johnson's personal association with cycling comes across as rather more a manifestation of a traditional English eccentric type than as part of any real political shift of the right towards cycling.

And yet cycling should not be "of the left". Cycling is free enterprise. It needs facilitating by infrastructure the state must provide, it is true, it always has needed this, it is dependent on proper roads or cycle paths, but motor transport is similarly dependent, and, of course, far more cash-hungry. Facilitated, cycling becomes a prominent component of transport in economically successful and advanced societies, as wealthy cities across the world, from Geneva to Copenhagen to Tokyo, testify. The associations between cycling, freedom, efficiency and free enterprise can never be entirely submerged by the Anglophone right's concept of "roads for cars". The right is opposed to a "nanny state": but creating the conditions where children could again realise the transport independence through cycling they once had in the UK would be a massive de-nannying liberation for our kids, and their parents. Then there are the purely economic arguments, that building cycle infrastructure is cheaper than not building it. And of course, Conservatives are supposed to want a strong, independent state. The state is less independent if it dependent on imported oil.

The best way into the cycling agenda from a Conservative perspective would seem to be an emphasis on allowing people more transport choice. The status-quo makes people feel they have no choice but to use their cars for many inappropriate journeys. Allowing people more choice over all aspects of their lives is supposed to be a Conservative principle. Choice is not a simple matter, however. The investment choices that the state makes affects the choices people can make on a daily basis. The state has no choice whether to invest in transport, it has to. But it has a choice in how it divvies up the cash. At the simplest level, that's all The Times campaign is pointing out.

It is easy to argue for investment in cycling from a Conservative perspective, indeed, The Times is doing just that, but the list of signatories to EDM 2689 show that few of our current crop of Conservative politicians have grasped this point, preferring to remain, if one notes capitalisation, more conservative than Conservative. A political opportunity if ever there was one?

And the next cycle protest...

2012-02-21T00:34:00.001Z

The next protest, for your diaries, should be a major one. This Wednesday, 22 February, a "flashride" will take place in Westminster, to hopefully increase awareness amongst our MPs, the evening before their debate on The Times's Cities fit for cycling manifesto, of the strength of feeling on the subject of cycle safety. We hope to show MPs how many people are highly dissatisfied with the past performance of parliament and successive governments on the issue.

Meet at the bottom of Duke of York Steps (between Waterloo Place and The Mall) at 6:15pm for a 6:30pm departure. The ride will go via Trafalgar Square, Whitehall, Parliament square, Lambeth Bridge, Westminster Bridge and Birdcage Walk before returning to Duke of York Steps. It is being supported and promoted by London Cycling Campaign, the Cycling Embassy of Great Britain, and all the major London bike blogs. It will be an orderly ride and protest, with the collaboration of the police, and will be safe, non-confrontational, and fully-marshalled. The media should be there. Do try and come. The more people we have, the bigger the impact. Particularly if you don't cycle regularly, if you would like to cycle in London but are too worried by the conditions, come and add your presence. We want people of all types, ages, and walks of life, to send a message to our MPs that we want cycling to be normal. And if it is to be made normal, it has to be made safe.

Come, preferably, in ordinary clothes. Don't let non-cycling MPs get the impression it just them again: a separate breed, other people, in funny clothes and plastic hats. I reckon cycling protest will make more impact the more ordinary the cyclists look. But that's just my idea. Come however you like; just come. Help keep up the momentum generated by The Times campaign. Even if you think they haven't got their campaign exactly right (few cyclists would agree they have, though probably few of those same cyclists would be able to agree on what an "exactly right" campaign would be), support the protest (and write to your MP as well if you have not already done so) as the best chance for many years of getting some change for the better for UK cycling. The symbolic media and photogenic impact of a Parliament Square filled with cyclists should not be underestimated.

As others have pointed out, the last time MPs debated cycling properly was 1996, when there was supposed to have been established a National Cycling Strategy which would get 10% of journeys by bike by 2012 – this year. The strategy totally failed, of course, as cycling is currently at about 1% modal share nationwide – slightly lower than it was in 1996. The reasons for that failure have been extensively analysed on this blog before. We may see failure again, of course, but somehow things look more promising to me this time round. There is a much wider understanding now of exactly what the problem is (it's subjective safety), and what the solutions are: thanks to better availability of information, better campaigning, by the organisations mentioned above, and just experience. And there is greater imperative from the high cost of fuel, the high human and economic cost of casualties, and the costs of an obesity epidemic. There also seem to be more influential people cycling than there were in 1996, though this is largely an inner-London phenomenon.

Meanwhile, it is reported that

David Cameron will hear radical ideas for making Britain’s cities safer for cyclists at a Downing Street conference tomorrow.

Architects, planners and designers from around the world will suggest ways to improve overall city design.

Sounds good. But the report continues:

The urban design conference will serve to underline the appreciation inside Downing Street for Scandinavian policymaking in general and Danish popular culture in particular.

Speakers include Bjarke Ingels, a Danish architect whose innovative designs include the “8 House” development in the Danish capital, built in a figure eight, with a cycle path and pedestrian walkway that winds up to the 10th floor.

Carlo Ratti, an Italian architect and engineer and senior Fulbright scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will talk about the “Copenhagen wheel”. The device, fitted to the back wheel of a bicycle, stores electricity when the cyclist brakes and releases it to help to climb hills. Connected to a smartphone, it can also tell the rider about traffic and pollution.

Oh dear. A lot of geewhizzery. OK, there may be some value in these ideas, but they remind me of a phrase (to change subjects totally) near the beginning of Gordon Jacob's classic textbook for composers Orchestral Technique: "We are more concerned here with what might be called the roast beef of scoring rather than the confectionary". Unfortunately it sounds like this urban design conference will be about the "confectionary" of its subject rather than its "roast beef". It sounds like it may not be sufficiently concerned with the basic, mundane, established urban design principals that have allowed cities across Europe, led by those in the Netherlands, to open up a huge gap with those in Britain over the last 40 years in terms of their cycle and pedestrian-friendliness.

What the conference should be about is the kind of straightforward stuff that As Easy As Riding A Bike covers today, in an excellent explanation of how the Dutch signalise segregated cycle tracks at junctions to completely separate cycle and motor traffic flows. They've been doing this for decades, but almost nobody in the UK seems to understand it. Even "the UK's National Cyclists' Organisation", to judge from this page on their site, is thoroughly clueless in this area. I don't think we particularly need the futurism of some fashionable Danish architects if we are to get Cities fit for cycling, we need the boring, basic Dutch past first.

Dutch "simultaneous green" junction for bikes and pedestrians, Assen

Today's Bikes Alive protest

2012-02-20T14:13:00.001Z

I merely quote their press release, putting in links:

TRANSPORT FOR LONDON RESPONDS TO KINGS CROSS JUNCTION BIKE SAFETY CONCERNS - BY MAKING IT WORSE

Bikes Alive, the recently-formed network of cyclists who are taking non-violent direct action to defend themselves against traffic violence, returns to the lethal road junction outside Kings Cross station at 6.30pm on Monday evening, 20 February ... as Transport for London (TfL) starts work to change the junction for the worse. Cyclists and pedestrians will enforce another one-hour go-slow at the junction outside Kings Cross station.

Work to re-align some kerb lines and remove a traffic island will increase the flow of motor vehicles through a key part of the junction, introducing new dangers for cyclists. (For more detailed information on this, see the discussions on these two web pages.)

Bikes Alive - which works with other vulnerable, non-motorised road users - is pledged to continue to take action until the balance of power on London's roads is changed. Current policies of Transport for London (TfL) prioritise the speed and volume of motor traffic over all else, even though many of the cars on London's roads are there for no reason other than the selfishness of the driver.

Councillors from both boroughs which cover Kings Cross (Camden and Islington), and well as local cycling campaigns and community groups, have been calling for safety improvements at Kings Cross for years. The London Assembly has repeatedly called on mayor Boris Johnson - who is in charge of TfL - to act. But all to no avail. Hence the need for cyclists to take direct action to defend ourselves.

Letter to my MP

2012-02-19T00:43:00.002Z

There is still just about time for you to write to your MP to encourage them to support The Times's Cities Safe for Cycling campaign by asking them to sign Early Day Motion 2689 and attend the debate on 23 February. MPs do tend to take notice if they receive more than a few letters from different constituents on the same topic, particularly if they are individually-composed. The easiest way to write to your MP is to use this form.

Here is my letter to Barry Gardiner, MP for Brent North, making some points specific to his constituency. I'll tell you if I receive a response.

Dear Barry Gardiner,

I would like to strongly encourage you to sign EDM 2689 supporting The Times's "Cities fit for cycling" campaign. I would also be very grateful if would would be able to find the time to attend the debate on cycle safety in Westminster Hall scheduled for 23 February.

I feel this is an incredibly important subject for the people and economy of Brent. Cycling could and should be an obvious method of making short journeys in Brent for a wide spectrum of people. It is cheap, efficient, and non-polluting. More cycling would reduce congestion, noise, pollution, and pressure on public transport, and help local shops and local economies, as well as improving public health, through giving people an easy way to exercise, and increasing the independence of children, and others who cannot drive.

Yet cycling in North Brent is seriously held back by the state of our road network and a general lack of safe cycle infrastructure. To most people, cycling feels far too dangerous for them to contemplate in North Brent. Our major through-roads are hostile to cycling, with virtually no cycle lanes, or very badly-designed ones. They pass through unavoidable junctions (such as the particularly bad examples at Staples corner, on the A5, and Neasden, on the A4140), designed purely for speed and throughput of motor traffic, that present a level of danger that puts off all but the most determined cyclists. Where alternative routes for cyclists have been provided, as at Neasden town centre (the shared cycling-pedestrian underpass), they are poor adaptations of unsuitable existing 1960s-70s infrastructure that give cyclists inefficient (and still dangerous) journeys, and introduce unnecessary conflict with pedestrians.

Brent Council is aware of many of these problems, but, like other local authorities, simply does not have the funds, nor the necessary guidance from central government, to make the scale of changes that would be required to make our roads attractive for cycling. This is why the parliamentary debate on The Times “Cities safe for cycling” manifesto is so important. That manifesto calls for a serious level of funding for cycling infrastructure (2% of the Highways Agency budget), redesign of dangerous junctions, and other necessary measures to make urban areas like Brent into attractive cycling environments for all types of people.

People in North Brent want to cycle, I am certain, but most do not feel they have that choice, because of the perceived and actual danger of our roads. I am not very old, yet I can recall a time when British children commonly cycled to school. Only 0.5% of journeys to Brent schools are now made by bicycle, a shocking statistic. I would like to see government policies that start to turn this situation around, so I would like you to support The Times campaign.

Yours sincerely,

Dr David Arditti

Neasden crossing of the North Circular Road: poor adaptation of unsuitable existing 1960s-70s infrastructure that gives cyclists inefficient (and still dangerous) journeys, and introduces unnecessary conflict with pedestrians. But this is all cyclists get in Brent

Inverted snobbery, "dangerising", and change at the CTC

2012-02-07T01:27:00.006Z

The Times Cities fit for Cycling Campaign grows more impressive. You can still read all the stories relating to the campaign, without paying, via this link. I think it is absolutely admirable that The Times has removed their paywall for so much material, to conduct this campaign, and I hope they get some more subscriptions out of it. And do pledge your support, if you have not already done so.

There was some disapproval by cycling campaigners on Sunday of a graphic about "dressing to be seen" in specialised cycling clothes in bright colours. I think it is easy to get too worked up about this kind of thing. There have always been specialised cycling clothes, more or less since the invention of the bike. Making cycling practical in ordinary clothes is a great idea, and must be an objective, part of the Dutch-style mass culture of everyday cycling to be worked towards, and the article accompanying the graphic does make this point, but there is a danger of an "inverted snobbery" which says that you can't be part of a transport cycling revolution and still wear lycra. This would be silly. We have to face the fact that, as the UK environment is configured, many commuting cycling distances are going to be quite long, and some rides a bit hilly, and dressing for a 10 mile ride in such a way that you do not get overheated, and remain comfortable and unencumbered, is quite sensible, and there is nothing wrong with The Times featuring and advertising this garb.

The focus of The Times campaign remains bang-on, in my view, firmly on the subjects of lower speeds, safer road infrastructure, and how it should be paid for. Though some of the infrastructure they have suggested is on the whacky side, with futuristic cycle highways in tubes, how about their interactive graphic of suggested infrastructure at a roundabout? Here is thinking far ahead of that of Transport for London or other UK highway authorities, demonstrating continuity of networks, segregation on busy roads, cycle paths away from roads, and a cycle flyover – most of what you could want to "Go Dutch", in fact. The same graphic also shows the hazards resulting from the typical unsafe arrangement we have at the moment. Brilliant!

And they do keep banging on about the need for a dedicated fund to pay for cycling infrastructure. They have hit the nail totally on the head here, in my view.

Last year, funding for infrastructure in 12 Cycling City and Towns members was also stopped. Withdrawal of the £43 million came before final analysis could be made on whether the scheme was encouraging more cycling.

Critics argue that there is no central fund to build cycle schemes. Local authorities have access to a £560 million Local Sustainable Transport Fund until 2015, but early schemes appear to have prioritised improvements to bus and railway stations, smart-card ticketing and park-and-ride schemes, as much as cycling.

Mike Penning, the Roads Minister, said that 38 of 39 successful bids to the fund contain a cycling element. He was wary of calls for a new funding mechanism harnessing the Highways Agency budget. “Most cycling will be on local government roads so you are taking the budget out of national infrastructure into local government roads,” he said. “But like anything, if anybody has ideas they can be looked at.”

Penning isn't getting it yet. Until recently he seemed to think that cyclists were not allowed on the national roads infrastructure (trunk roads) at all. He is still not understanding the problem that there are not direct, efficient, and safe cycling alternatives, in general, to the big roads, and that this is a problem with the national infrastructure, which is his responsibility.

So The Times is plugging away at the real, core issues, and they have even got the AA to support almost blanket 20 mph in towns. Nobody seems to want to argue with this campaign! Nobody half sensible, anyway.

There has been the usual complaint from a few old-style cycling campaigners about The Times "dangerising" cycling. This is idiotic. The Times campaign is overwhelmingly a force for achieving the changes cyclists want. The Times did not dangerise cycling, just as I did not dangerise cycling when I wrote my piece Cycling is dangerous. The policies of successive governments dangerised cycling. A lot of people involved with cycling on a day to day basis seem to loose a basic grip on this danger issue, and I can see why. If you spend an hour or more a day in the saddle, on the streets of a major British city, and you (hopefully) do not come to any harm, you may easily start to believe that cycling in this environment is not dangerous.

This is an illusion borne of use, and there are a few ways to get back to reality. One is to spend some time cycling in an environment which is much safer. The best option is to go an a study tour with David Hembrow. If you do not have the time or money to do this, you can look at at some videos on YouTube. One of the best is this one from David's Hembrow's collaborator, Mark Wagenbuur: What defines Dutch cycling?

The point here is absolutely clear. This is a video of people doing daft things on bikes: things that they could only do in a really safe environment. You don't see British cyclists going along with umbrellas open, or cycling with dogs in tow, or people leaping on and off the back of their friend's bike, or people having conversations while riding side by side on city streets. Not often anyway. As Mark says, these are habits that only become normal in an environment which is really safe, where the constant anxiety arising from the need to share the road space with potentially lethal motor traffic is gone. Seeing how far were, generally, in the UK from the environment that allows these habits, gives you the measuring stick for how much underlying danger we are really coping with, despite the truth that UK cyclists are not being killed left, right, and centre.

The CTC, largest cycling organisation in the UK, have traditionally been prone to the "Don't dangerise cycling" tack, disliking ghost bikes and anything else of a publicity or campaigning nature that they feel might frighten people (as if they haven't noticed that what really frightens people is being passed with inches to spare by huge lorries). Blogger Cycalogical recently labelled this practice danger denial.

This brings me on to the fact that CTC have a new Chief Executive. This is a big change in the UK cycling world, as the last Chief Executive, Kevin Mayne, was in post for 14 years. Kevin Mayne was without doubt a hard worker for the interests of UK cycling, as he saw them, and without doubt a significant influence on the policies of CTC over a long period. In 2003 he told me that he didn't think that segregated cycle tracks on roads were a good idea. His argument was that you could never have them everywhere, and, because of that, if you introduced them anywhere, you would put cyclists elsewhere, on the normal roads, more at risk. He thought that creating tracks would attract cyclists to them (which I agree with), and that this would lessen the density of cyclists on other roads, which would make those roads more dangerous for the cyclists who chose not to use the tracks, in part, because they would get more harried and disrespected by motorists who thought they should not be on the roads.

Like many of the CTC's policy positions down the decades, unfortunately, this was just an argument for "no change". If you can never start to build a segregated cycle network, for fear of those consequences, then you are just stuck with the road network as we have it, possibly with the addition of a few bits of different-coloured paint, Boris-style. You remain in the situation of having only a tiny minority of people cycling, and with cycling in a politically very weak position. The very persecution of cyclists on the roads of the UK that Mayne worried about happened already, as things were, because of that political weakness. Inaction on the infrastructure issue was a prescription to keep that weakness permanent.
Andreas Rohl, the bike chief of Copenhagen, drums the point home, in perhaps the most important words in all The Times's coverage:

From A to B there has to be quality before you can expect people to get on a bike. If you want to make cycling mainstream you have to separate bikes from cars and buses. It’s essential.

Ironically, Kevin is going on to a job with the European Cyclists' Federation, based in Brussels. I wonder if daily experience of that city, which does have a developing segregated cycle network, will cause him to modify his opinions. Anyway, I wish him well there. I wonder if the new CTC Chief Executive, Gordon Seabright, will be able to take advantage of the fair wind of The Times campaign to re-position his organisation as a more positive participant in debate about good cycling infrastructure and how to achieve it. My feeling is that if he did, a great many of his membership would back him.

Some more comments on The Times manifesto

2012-02-05T14:52:00.000Z

In an earlier post post I welcomed The Times's campaign for Cities fit for Cycling. I also gave their 8-point manifesto, which I believe strongly is worth supporting. Here it is again:

Trucks entering a city centre should be required by law to fit sensors, audible truck-turning alarms, extra mirrors and safety bars to stop cyclists being thrown under the wheels.
The 500 most dangerous road junctions must be identified, redesigned or fitted with priority traffic lights for cyclists and Trixi mirrors that allow lorry drivers to see cyclists on their near-side.
A national audit of cycling to find out how many people cycle in Britain and how cyclists are killed or injured should be held to underpin effective cycle safety.
Two per cent of the Highways Agency budget should be earmarked for next generation cycle routes, providing £100 million a year towards world-class cycling infrastructure. Each year cities should be graded on the quality of cycling provision.
The training of cyclists and drivers must improve and cycle safety should become a core part of the driving test.
20mph should become the default speed limit in residential areas where there are no cycle lanes.
Businesses should be invited to sponsor cycleways and cycling super-highways, mirroring the Barclays-backed bicycle hire scheme in London.
Every city, even those without an elected mayor, should appoint a cycling commissioner to push home reforms.

I am sure (in fact I know) the journalists considered and consulted upon this manifesto for some time, realising that specifying precise measures to be called for to make cycling safer is a controversial area. My list would not be precisely the same as theirs, of course, but I think they have got a lot right here. Here are my points of difference.

I would not have ordered the list this way. They don't seem to have the most important things first. They have put first the measures that occur most obviously in connection with the lorry danger problem, and this is understandable, bearing in mind that the spur for this campaign was the crash with a lorry that left their colleague Mary Bowers fighting for life (and still in a coma). But the important demands are 4 and 6, referring to the creation of quality cycling infrastructure, and 20 mph on all roads where cyclists are not segregated from motor traffic. These are the really big demands.

No. 4 shows that they have understood that the critical difference between UK roads and those in the Netherlands and Denmark is that money has been spent there on properly safe cycling infrastructure. The demand for 2% of the highways budget is on the low side (but this is a right-wing newspaper which is loathe to advocate big state spending). This would raise around £100 million a year, £2 for every person in the UK, which is less than a tenth of what the Netherlands spends on cycling infrastructure. However, they do also suggest that this money should be augmented from the private sector, in their point no. 7.

No. 6 is hugely ambitious, as it is not politically likely that highway authorities will agree to many main roads being made 20 mph. This implies that all such roads would get cycle lanes – and they mean "segregated cycle lanes" – they do say this explicitly on one page, but not in the listing of the 8 points. Because this point is so important, but not clear in the list, I have screen-grabbed it to show its presence on this page, in case it disappears:

This of course is in perfect agreement with the policies of the London Cycling Campaign, who are calling for "clear space for cyclists on London's main roads", and those of the Cycling Embassy of Great Britain, which believes in the "principles of separation and sustainable safety". But I've never heard the UK's largest cyclists' organisation, CTC, calling for anything like this. It's time they caught up, in my view.

To have mentioned "cycle lanes" or "segregated cycle lanes" first in the list in the sixth point down, and then as a negative, is infelicitous. They should have laid out what they were talking about at first, by making an early, or the first, demand for "Segregated cycle lanes on all roads with speeds over 20 mph, and all busy 20 mph roads as well". The second part of the prescription is necessary because, even on road with slow speeds, traffic above a certain level makes them hostile to cyclists, or blocks cyclists' progress because of congestion, particularly near junctions, forcing or encouraging cyclists into less safe road positions or manoeuvres.

To expand on this: I do quite a lot of cycling on 20 mph roads, in a 20 mph zone that the Borough of Brent, to their credit, have introduced round some schools. But few others do the same, and virtually no school children, because merely being a 20 mph zone does not make it feel very safe. This is essentially because the rat-runs on these residential streets are still in place, and in the narrow, parked-up spaces, substantial volumes of 20 pmh traffic (assuming they obey the speed limit) trying to overtake and negotiate around cyclists, and blocking junctions up, will be enough to prevent most people attempting to cycling on these roads. In the Netherlands and Denmark, they either separate cyclists from motor vehicles, or they remove most of the motor vehicles from the street. Low speeds are not enough.

This is demonstrated in the Danish separation criteria diagram, showing speed against vehicles per day. We see that at 19 mph they recommend cycle lanes at flows over 5,000 per day (3 per minute) and cycle tracks (segregated lanes) at flows over 10,000 per day (6 per minute). Note that these flows are rather low compared with the sort of motor volumes cyclists are used to mixing with in UK cities, even in residential areas.

This concept of separation criteria is not alien to the UK. There is a similar diagram in the London Cycle Design Standards (Chapter 4) published by TfL in 2005.

There are two problems with this TfL version, unfortunately. The first is that it sets the transitions to protected infrastructure at much higher speeds and volumes than the Danish diagram. At 20 mph it only recommends cycle lanes, not tracks, definitely, above 10,000 vehicles per day, the volume at which the Danes are certain tracks must be used. For segregated tracks at 10,000 vehicles per day, the TfL criterion is that the 85 percentile speed should be above about 38 mph. The second, more important problem, is that TfL have never attempted to apply even their weaker separation criteria on any of their roads. OK, the road network in London is big, and I don't expect them to be able to bring it up to these standards overnight. But it is seven years since they published this diagram, and I would have expected them to have started, by now, to apply the principles enshrined in it, to at least the most dangerous roads. They have not. Something to do with Boris Johnson perhaps?

It is clearly the case that on most 20 mph roads, which will be residential, there is not going to be enough width for segregated cycle tracks. There is not in the Netherlands either. The Dutch approach is to remove the through-traffic from those roads, by making them non-through roads for motors, so that only access traffic is present, moving the road to near the bottom of the separation diagram: a "shared quiet road".

I've strayed away from my topic, which is The Times manifesto, into a tangential explanation. To go back: they start their list with the familiar litany of lorry safety measures, sensors, mirrors, and the rest. Some of these, or all of them, could do some good, but they are not the real solution to the lorry danger problem. There is the danger of overloading lorry drivers with too much information, too many mirrors that they have to check. Audible sensors do seem a very good idea. But basically we do need lorries to be able to get around and make deliveries, often on the same roads that cyclists need to use. The real answer is to separate cyclists and lorries (and other large vehicles: the latest London fatality was due to a coach) in space and time through junction design – something the Dutch have been working on for a long time. Unsurprisingly, the Dutch road safety institute, SWOV, agrees with me on this:

In SWOV’s opinion, the ultimate solution for the blind spot problem is a structural separation of trucks and cyclists. How this must be organised and what the economic consequences will be, requires further study. For the time being, the solution can be found in separating cyclists and trucks at intersection, both in time and position. Furthermore, it is important to make both the truck driver and the cyclist more aware of the hazards. For drivers this means that it should be an automatism to carry out an “after check” to see if the road is clear when they pull up. This is a task for the driver training. The front view system is important here and SWOV recommends to make this also compulsory for trucks manufactured before 2007. Although several warning systems are being developed to warn drivers that cyclists are present, it is not yet clear whether these systems will be sufficiently reliable.

The traffic mirror, also known as black spot mirror {or Trixi mirror], is mounted on the pole carrying the traffic lights to provide truck drivers with a better view of cyclists at the right-hand [UK: left] side and front of their vehicle. This mirror has been found to barely influence truck driver behaviour and is only effective while the truck is stopped in front of the mirror. Therefore, the mirror is not effective at the location where the driver has to carry out the after check.

So The Times's Point 2 is rather more relevant than their Point 1: redesign of junctions and changes to signals are more important for solving the lorry problem than the provision of mirrors and sensors.

In point 4, the grading of local authorities on their cycling provision is an excellent idea. But this has been done before. Kind of. Cycling England did it some years ago. I do not have an exact reference to this episode because it was shrouded in some secrecy. Cycling England decided not to publish a national league-table of the results, because they did not want to embarrass the bad councils! Their idea was that the gradings would be used internally by local authorities to improve their performance. They were for "information only". Fine. Except not, because this approach missed the fact that the worst councils were positively opposed to cycling, and did not want to do anything to encourage it. So those councils (and it is rumoured that the Bikeless Borough of Barnet was at the bottom of the table) did not care less how Cycling England graded them. And the fact that the grades were secret meant that campaigners could not use them to name and shame their local authorities. So the grading exercise was useless, undermined by Cycling England's timidity. (Not that this timidity did it any good in the longer term, as it was abolished by the coalition government in 2010.) So, yes, Times, grade councils on their cycling performance, but make it public, and have sticks ready to punish the bad boys.

I suppose my biggest difficulties with The Times's list come in their Point 6: "training of cyclists and drivers must improve and cycle safety should become a core part of the driving test". This is all very well to say, but exactly what training are we talking about?

To treat the driving test first, it seems to me a far-fetched idea that any major improvement in cyclist safety is going to come about through changing that. The driving test teaches drivers to do all sorts of things, like stick to speed limits, and stop at amber lights (if safe to do so), and give way to pedestrians crossing a minor road into which they are turning, that they all go out and immediately stop doing the moment they have passed the test. I don't see how concentrating more on cycle safety in the test will be any more effective. What could be effective is more (or even some) police enforcement of the Highway Code, but The Times manifesto doesn't go down this road. My experience of Dutch drivers is that they are not really that much better behaved towards cyclists on the roads than their UK counterparts. The much higher profile and uptake of cycling in the Netherlands hasn't reformed the basic instincts of people behind a wheel. It is the Dutch infrastructure that makes cyclists there so much safer.

The issue of cyclists' training is even more problematic, because as soon as you talk about that, Road Safety Minister Mike Penning's cherubic face will light up and tell you that the Government is paying for lots of cycle training, so that's all right then, isn't it? Training for cyclists is what government wants to pay for when it doesn't wish to challenge the basic hierarchy on the roads, with cyclists at the bottom of the pile: it becomes the responsibility of the "better-trained" cyclists to sort the situation out for themselves, to deal with the unacceptable risks single-handed. It put all the responsibility on the weakest road-users.

Moreover, the cycle training that we use in this country, Bikeablity, concentrates on the development of an assertive riding style designed to minimise risks to the cyclist in a car-dominated cycling environment, that is quite irrelevant to cycling as it is practised in the bike-dominated cycling environments of the Netherlands and Denmark. It cannot be part of the long term solution to cycling, as the majority of the population will never have any interest in riding assertively (which really implies "fast" as well), in the way that Bikeablity seeks to teach them. The other problem with Bikeability is that it can be regarded by its proponents (such as some of those working in the largely state-funded industry that delivers it) as the correct way to cycle, rather than as what it is, a stop-gap mitigating measure for an incorrectly designed environment. In this sense, Bikeability-style, Government-approved, training and bad cycling conditions become a self-perpetuating, symbiotic ecosystem. This ecosystem is one that needs to be broken out from if we are ever to achieve mass cycling on the European model.

We do need cycle training. Every child in the Netherlands gets cycle training (and a practical test at the end of it). But their training is more about cycling in the allowed places, and obeying all the rules of the road, than it is about assertiveness. Dutch cyclists do not need to assert themselves in front of streams of hostile traffic. The cycle training that we have in the UK at the moment is problematic in the same way that cycle helmets are: both provide safety benefits sometimes for some people, but both are really symptoms of the problems with the environment that neeed addressing for us to move on from these temporary "solutions", and achieve the mass cycling culture where they will be redundant. My cycling manifesto would not call for more cycle training, but I can see why many other people's would.

The Times's final manifesto item, cycling commissioners for every city, "even those without an elected Mayor", is again sensible. I don't quite follow the "even those without an elected mayor" bit, as it implies that cities without elected mayors have less need of cycling commissioners than those with. I suppose if all elected mayors were as regressive as Sir Robin Wales, Mayor of Newham, this would be the case. These commissioners would have to have far more power, and be far higher up in the council hierarchy, than the current generation of council cycling officers, who are, of course, well-intentioned, but lack authority, budgets, and political support.

Localism is all very well, but the UK is a totally centralised state, in terms of how public money is collected and distributed, and the manner in which the spending priorities for that money are decided upon. Local authorities have little freedom to differ from what Whitehall expects. So any cycling revolution in the UK as a whole is going to have to start in Whitehall, with the ministers and civil servants there. Local authorities need the powers and the cash and the incentives to change their city streets for the better, but Parliament also needs to change many laws (for cyclists are not even properly recognised as a category of road-user under English law, being still treated as "carriages" under the Highways Act 1835), and the Department for Transport needs gain a whole new mindset, if The Times campaign is going to lead to real change anywhere in England (Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have more freedom).

One example of what needs to change concerns the land needed for inter-city cycle routes. So far, where these have been constructed, they have been on old railway courses, the most famous example being the Bristol to Bath cycleway. We have more or less run out of these disused railways. If we are to go further, county councils will need to be able to compulsorily purchase wide strips of land at the side of existing main roads to build well-separated cycle tracks. This is what happens in the Netherlands, routinely, and has been happening for decades, which is how they have acquired their splendid inter-urban cycle route network. It is not controversial there, it's a thing that needs to be done. But I have never heard of a local authority compulsory purchase of land on which to build a cycle track or path in the UK. This has to change.

Even in the centres of cities, the continuity of cycle routes is often frustrated by problems of land ownership. A prime example is the south bank of the Thames in central London, where, despite years of effort by many parties, a decent, continuous route along the river embankment still has not been bought about, because of the swathes of private land it needs to cut through. This would be a difficult area for The Times, traditionally a supporting organ of the land-owning classes, to broach. But it needs to be tackled somehow.

I have used The Times's campaign as a peg here on which to hand my own discussion of a number of issues they raise. But, make no mistake, basically I think theirs is a splendid campaign that has got the approach very largely right, and I urge everybody to support it by signing up. They have researched the subject, and not come up with the easy, obvious, but wrong demands. It would have been easy for them to come up with a campaign based around pushing helmets for cyclists, and bright clothing, and fines for cycling through red lights, and number plates for cyclists, and licenses for them, and all the usual rubbish. Mike Penning still believes all that old rubbish. But, hopefully, less people will do so now as a result of The Times campaign. They have correctly identified the design of the roads infrastructure as the critical issue for cyclist safety. Cities fit for Cycling, not Cyclists fit for Cities. It has taken a long, long time for this realisation to become mainstream in the UK. A watershed has been passed.

Livingstone on cycling

2012-02-04T15:01:00.003Z

Cyclists in London wondering how to vote in the mayoral election this year will have been waiting for Ken Livingstone to make some clear statement of his policies with regard to cycling. As the Londoners on Bikes website put it, transport is the one thing the Mayor of London really controls. One of the few things that is really in the power of the Mayor to deliver is better conditions for cyclists, particularly on the main roads directly controlled by Transport for London, of which the Mayor is Chair.

The closest Ken has come so far to a comprehensive statement of his policies on cycling appeared in the Guardian last Monday. So this preceded the new political momentum for safer cycling generated by The Times Cities fit for Cycling campaign, a fact which should be borne in mind. I cut-and-paste here the whole text, by reporter Andrew Sparrow, relating to cycling:

Cycling in London

Q: We got a lot of questions about cycling. This [from babybat] is typical: "I'd like to know how you plan to make cycling safer - specifically, will you be investing in proper Dutch-style segregated bike lanes as proposed by the London Cycling Campaign?

A: We had a plan which we were about two-thirds of the way through, the London Cycling Strategy, which was putting in, in some places, separation. In some places you can put in separation. Most of our roads are wide enough to do that. And we got a long way with all the boroughs that were sympathetic towards this. Johnson scrapped that and went for this "paint a bit of blue down the road" [the cycle superhighways].

Q: Would you keep the blue down the road?

A: At the moment it is most probably more dangerous than safe, because people come into the blue lane and they assume there's some sort of safety. The regulations on it vary from here to there. Suddenly it stops and starts on the other side of the road. Two cyclists who were killed at the Bow roundabout junction – there's a classic example of what's wrong. Transport for London spent ages negotiating with local cycling groups to put in cycling safety measures. Those went up to the mayor's office. TfL specifically said this will not be safe for cyclists without these measures. The reply was: "The mayor's priority is traffic flow." Now they are in a great panic because of the police investigation.There could be a charge of corporate manslaughter. That's the worst example.

Q: Someone [benbro] raised this on the blog. He wants to know if you think there's a strong case for a corporate manslaughter charge.

A: I think there is. It's more obvious with the captain of the Italian cruise ship, but here Transport for London officials told the mayor's office cyclists would be at risk if they didn't put these measures in. They were turned down in order to prioritise – when Johnson says traffic flow, he means more speed for cars.

What we'll do, we'll get Jenny Jones, who was my cycling adviser and Green assembly member and she's a candidate for mayor, she'll be on this. She'll be in charge of driving forward the cycling agenda. The TfL board is going to be chaired by deputy mayor, Val Shawcross. And we will prioritise putting in the safety measures that Johnson has put out.

Q: Would you keep the "Boris bikes"?

A: When I started this in July 2007, my instruction to TfL was simply go to Paris, take the Vélib' scheme and bring it to London. For some reason, they did not take the Vélib' scheme and they've gone for this much more expensive one that Boris has brought in. I would like to see the bike scheme London-wide. But the cost per bike and docking frame is £12,000. So any major extension starts running into hundreds of millions of pounds. You've got to get it cheaper. The manufacturer may back off and cut the price if they're told if they don't do this, we will bring in another operator to do it.

Here are my comments:

It's nice to know they got a lot of questions about cycling. Cyclists are a small minority, but, by and large, an intelligent, vocal and politicised one. Well done, cyclists, on the lobbying. Also it's good to see that LCC's Go Dutch campaign is having an impact on the debate, even before it is officially launched.

It seems that Livingstone, despite not being a cyclist, has done his homework, and knows what cyclists (and the press, and GLA) have been talking about, with regard particularly to unsafe junctions.

Now I will criticise Ken's attempt to rewrite the cycling history of his last administration. I don't particularly remember this "London Cycling Strategy" of which he speaks, and I was closely involved with cycling when Ken was mayor. What I do remember is the network scheme that was ongoing at that time, the "London Cycle Network Plus". This made very little progress, having little political backing, and being mainly on borough roads where the Mayor had no direct control. It embodied a confused strategy, with some of the routes being convoluted, up-and-down backstreet affairs inherited from the original LCN (such as the slalom-like route just east of Finchley Road in Hampstead) that no commuter would use, and other routes being entirely theoretical ones on main roads with dangerous junctions, like the A5, which TfL was unable to get cycle-hostile councils like Barnet to do anything about.

Money was spent on signposting the incredibly convoluted and hilly "Finchley Road alternative route", seen here at Netherhall Way NW3, part of the LCN+ project, a legacy of Ken's last time as Mayor, and the avoidance of the issue of cycle safety on the main roads then.

Since the LCN+ strategy was basically not about segregation, or even road-space reallocation, there was no coherent picture to put to councils, be they pro or anti-cycling, of what was supposed to be put in place on proposed main road routes like LCN+5 on the A5, and in the end it became a strategy just to spend the money somehow. The money for the A5 route just got spent on a few blue signs, cycle logos on the road, and speed tables on side-roads in Brent – none of which did anything to make cycling no the A5 any better.

Not a cyclist himself, and not having really absorbed the importance of cycling, Livingstone took a hands-off approach (like his successor) and allowed the LCN+project to drift into a mire of inaction well before he was defeated at the polls. He was not "about two-thirds of the way through it" as he claims now: it was years behind schedule, only the easy (back-street) bits had been done (badly), the difficult (but critical) stuff on the main roads and junctions and bridges and pinch-points in the network had all been left till later because nobody knew if Ken genuinely backed prioritising cycling, or if he was prepared to take on recalcitrant boroughs, and the project had essentially run into the ground by the time Boris took over. I am not sure that any segregated (or separated, as Ken put it) routes were created as part of LCN+. The only one that might have been is the Cable Street route. This suffered from many design flaws. The better-designed segregated tracks in Camden were not part of LCN+, their construction preceded Ken's mayoral term.

Having set that part of the record straight, I think we can see that Ken is responding here to a changed mood and greater determination amongst more people in London to get cycling provision taken seriously now. He is not talking about the "cheap back-street routes" any more, which used to be his main cycling theme. He is directly contradicting Boris in claiming that "most roads are wide enough for separation [segregation]". He must be talking about main roads here, otherwise the statement would not make sense. So he seems to be accepting the Go Dutch principle: "Clear space for cycling on London's main roads". When he was last mayor there was no such concrete model of a cycle-friendly cityscape being campaigned for by LCC, only ill-defined rhetoric about wanting a "Word-class cycling city". Campaiginng has changed, and that has influenced him. That's good.

He is talking about putting Jenny Jones and Val Shawcross in charge of his cycling programme, two politicians who definitely do know something about cycling, even if he doesn't.

One can't guarantee, on the basis of past performance, that Ken would make a better fist of cycling policy than Boris. We have to make a judgement on the information we have. I'll be keeping my eye out for any further statements Ken, Boris, and the other candidates make, particularly now The Times has greatly raised the profile of cycling issues. Cyclists need to keep the pressure up to secure clearer commitments from the candidates. The best ways to do this are to keep asking the questions of candidates at every opportunity, to support the LCC's Go Dutch campaign, the Cities fit for Cycling campaign, and Londoners on Bikes, to attend protests such as Bikes Alive, and particularly to turn up at the huge protest ride planned by LCC for 28 April. Details for this are not available yet, but set the date aside.

Hundredth post: support The Times Cities Fit for Cycling campaign

2012-02-02T16:11:00.002Z

This is the one hundredth post to be published on this blog. It has had about 64,000 page views since September 2010, but it only started concentrating on cycling issues in May 2011. In that time, less than a year, the cycle campaigning landscape in the UK has transformed. I'll refer below to a few of my earlier posts which now seem prescient.

Today sees one of the most important events to have occurred for UK cycling in that time. The Times, the UK's "establishment" newspaper, if there can be said to be such a thing, has launched a major campaign on cycle safety. This is called Cities Fit for Cycling, and I urge everyone to support it. (On Twitter, use the hashtag #cyclesafe). It comes directly out of the critical injuring of Times journalist Mary Bowers in a cycle-lorry crash on 4 November. But it has also been boiling up for a long time. It has become hard for anyone living or working in London to ignore the jump in cyclist deaths in London to 16 last year, so many of them under the wheels of lorries.

The Times does a huge splash on this campaign today, and they have made all the relevant pages free to view through the link above – an extraordinary move which shows the personal commitment of the staff involved. Their coverage of the issue is, for a generally Conservative-supporting newspaper, striking critical of the Government, and also of the Mayor of London. Some choice quotes:

As a point of comparison: since 2001, 576 British soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan and Iraq; 1,275 cyclists died on British streets. The latest data shows there were 1,850 deaths or serious injuries in the first half of 2011, a 12 per cent rise on the year before. Britain leads the world in competitive cycling; it is time that we did the same for the cyclists on our streets.

......

“As a trauma surgeon — and as a cyclist — I can see that asking cyclists to share the Embankment with heavy goods vehicles on a cold, rainy night is going to end in horrible mistakes. London is a city where one tiny mistake as a cyclist can cost you your life because cyclists are given so little room.”

......

A cyclist in Britain is three times more likely to be killed than one in the Netherlands and twice as likely as a cyclist in Denmark or Germany.

.....

Jenny Jones, the Green Party’s mayoral candidate, said: “The truth is uncomfortable for all of us who want London to be a cycling-friendly city. The mayor has failed to make roads safer for vulnerable road users and he is fast becoming the big barrier to the future expansion of cycling in London.”

.....

As one Whitehall source put it: “One of the reasons we have had quite good results on cycle safety is because people are too scared to get on their bikes.”

.....

Critics argue that coalition policies including cuts to road safety budgets, an end to casualty reduction targets, reduced funds for speed cameras and hints of a rise in motorway speed limits have created an environment that is hostile to road safety. The Government abolished Cycling England, the body charged with enticing millions of motorists to take up cycling, along with its £60 million annual funding for cycle schemes. Cuts to police and highways maintenance budgets are putting lives at risk, campaigners say.

I think it is great that The Times has come out saying these things, and I really hope the Government sharply takes notice. These are all points that have been made amongst campaigners, and in the left-wing press, many times, but here we have a real shift of these issue to the centre-ground of British politics. Here is The Times's 8-point manifesto for cities to be made fit for cycling:

Trucks entering a city centre should be required by law to fit sensors, audible truck-turning alarms, extra mirrors and safety bars to stop cyclists being thrown under the wheels.
The 500 most dangerous road junctions must be identified, redesigned or fitted with priority traffic lights for cyclists and Trixi mirrors that allow lorry drivers to see cyclists on their near-side.
A national audit of cycling to find out how many people cycle in Britain and how cyclists are killed or injured should be held to underpin effective cycle safety.
Two per cent of the Highways Agency budget should be earmarked for next generation cycle routes, providing £100 million a year towards world-class cycling infrastructure. Each year cities should be graded on the quality of cycling provision.
The training of cyclists and drivers must improve and cycle safety should become a core part of the driving test.
20mph should become the default speed limit in residential areas where there are no cycle lanes.
Businesses should be invited to sponsor cycleways and cycling super-highways, mirroring the Barclays-backed bicycle hire scheme in London.
Every city, even those without an elected mayor, should appoint a cycling commissioner to push home reforms.

I'll write some more on these points in a future post, but at the moment, I will just say that I fully support the manifesto, and urge everybody to do so too by signing up on the campaign page, and also writing to their MP about it. I'll even urge you to by the paper itself, as the campaign will be continuing over the next few editions.

.....

Many of the one hundred posts I have published on this blog have been very long, so that number of posts represents an awful lot of words. One of the longest posts, and the most popular of all, was 1934: The moment it all went wrong for cycling in the UK. There, I said this, comparing the post-war histories of cycling in the UK and the Netherlands:

Belisha's truce [the pre-war road safety measures introduced by Conservative transport minister Leslie Hore-Belisha] meant the safety pressures were not so strong in the UK as they became in the Netherlands. There was never, at any particular moment, the same conjunction of social forces in the UK as there was in the Netherlands in the early 1970s, where the oil price shocks, the Kindermoord campaign, the setting up of the Fietersbond, and the beginnings of the green movement, with the realisation that motor-dominated transport was unsustainable, all came together to push the government to start re-planning the Dutch environment to prioritise cycling.

and later:

The interests of the few, hardy, mostly adult male, remaining cyclists [in the UK] were never seen as coinciding strongly enough with an imperative to make the roads safer for all, particularly children, for there to be the kind of street design revolution that occurred in the Netherlands, and, to a lesser extent, in Germany, Denmark, Sweden and Finland.

Maybe The Times mainstreaming of the cycle safety issue is a sign that we now do have an appropriate "conjunction of social forces" in the UK to push through a revolution in the cycling (and walking) environment – a conjunction of greater numbers cycling (particularly women, who always attract more sympathy than men), pushing cycle safety up the political priority list, a recognition that something needs to be done about the obesity epidemic, a recognition that children need to be freed from car-borne dependence on their parents (which people across the political spectrum can agree on), and the need to reduce fossil-fuel dependence and reduce pollution-related deaths – all of which feed into an economic imperative to make the economy more efficient in a time of economic crisis.

The Times campaign talks, rightly, a lot about the unacceptable danger faced by cyclists on our streets. The rhetorical framework in which the danger of cycling is discussed by many existing cyclists seems to have transformed in the short time that I have been writing this blog (though I had been writing in a similar vein in other places long before that) and I claim some credit for this happening. When I wrote my piece Cycling is Dangerous last July, I attracted a huge amount of abuse for, as some in the cycling world often put it, "dangerising" cycling. But I have no apologies over this or similar pieces. I have not "dangerised" cycling, our road environment has none that. I have merely told the truth about the danger – as The Times is now doing.

It never did cycle campaigning any good, I have kept saying, to downplay the danger issue. It just made cyclists seem more like a species apart from ordinary people, who would never dare to ride on our roads as they stand. It just marginalised cyclists more within the psychology of our nation. Within the London Cycling Campaign I used to be reviled for talking in this way. An edict at one stage went out in the LCC for campaigners "not to used the D word", lest we put potential new cyclists off. I never saw it that way.

Since I wrote Cycling is Dangerous, others have written in similar vein, such as MCR Cycling and As Easy As Riding A Bike, we have had an LCC-supported Tour du Danger of the most dangerous junctions in London, numerous other protests explicitly about danger, and now few in the LCC seem to bat an eyelid at using talk of the danger of cycling, particularly in reference to blackspots such as Bow, Blackfriars and Kings Cross, as a campaigning tool. This is a real change, one for which I claim some credit. There is a widespread recognition of a point I have always maintained, that the "Whitehall source" quoted in The Times puts as:

One of the reasons we have had quite good results on cycle safety is because people are too scared to get on their bikes.

Or to put it more precisely, the nature of the dangerous environment on our roads for cyclists limits cycling to a tiny demographic slice who can mitigate the danger by their own efforts. That doesn't make cycling in the UK genuinely "safe", either relatively or absolutely.

But let's come back to the topic of the press, and, specifically, the Murdoch press. I wrote a post in June on The press and political will, which was prompted by some articles in The Sunday Times, one very pro-cycling, one anti, in the same edition. I wrote:

The writers in a given newspaper do not all have to have the same outlook on a particular subject, but they usually do. This is therefore interesting as it shows The Sunday Times, and probably therefore the whole Murdoch stable of papers, which are very influential, at a turning point in their attitude to cycling.

I pointed to a huge change in attitude to cycling that had occurred in the London Evening Standard as cycling levels had risen in London, and said:

Because it is the habit of the press to simplify issues, it is characteristic of their attitude to a particular issue or group that when it shifts, it tends not to shift slightly, it flips totally, almost overnight.

And I leave you with a final point from that blogpost:

In the internet age the influence of the printed news media is not as great as it was. But the attitudes of the papers are still a good bellwether of wider opinion, and of political will. Here I come to the point of my post. As cycle campaigners, we are constantly wondering, "How can we generate the political will to put into place the measures that we know will achieve a mass cycling culture?" In the UK at the moment, this seems a world away. But, like the attitudes of the papers, political will tends to be all-or-nothing. Like trying to push a vast ship down a slipway into the water, once it goes, it goes.

Support Cities Fit for Cycling.

Are cyclists allowed in the Games Lanes or not?

2012-02-01T16:51:00.001Z

About the middle of last year, it was extensively reported (see for example) that the "Games Lanes", on the Olympic Route Network (ORN) in London, would be, in no uncertain terms, out-of-bounds for cyclists, transgressors facing a £200 fine, the same as for unauthorised drivers. Where these reports came from I cannot tell, for I don't see anything clearly saying this on the Transport for London website. What TfL do say, unhelpfully, is:

These lanes, which will be clearly marked, will only be open for accredited vehicles and on-call emergency vehicles. They will typically operate between 06:00 and midnight, and only be used on multi-lane roads so there will always be at least one lane for general traffic. You could receive a Penalty Charge Notice if you drive in a Games Lane if you are not an accredited vehicle.

It's so like TfL to word a statement as if the only people entitled to use the road are driving, not riding – it shows how they really think about the roads.

When, however, a recent LCC borough group newsletter went to press, with an item warning cyclists, in passing, that they would not be allowed to cycle in the Games Lanes, a council officer closely connected with the Olympic preparations contacted the group co-ordinator in question to say that this was wrong, that cyclists could use the lanes. When read out the paragraph above, that I have quoted from the TfL website, he stated that it was "misleading", and that he would ask TfL to correct it.

I have done some further study of the detailed documents on the TfL site describing the Games Lanes. There are diagrams for every borough. For example, this diagram covers part of Camden including Euston Road, and the Upper Woburn Place to Kingsway corridor. It shows clearly that the Games Lanes in Euston Road are the inside lanes, and that they are for "Official Games vehicles only". (But could a bike be an Official Games vehicle? I leave that question hanging in the air.) However, the lanes on the north-south corridor are all over the place on the road, they are very fragmentary, and the northernmost section, in Upper Woburn Place, is marked "Official Games vehicles and cycles only". Does this yellow caption bubble apply to all the bits of yellow lane down this corridor? This is unclear to me. But another fragment on Euston Road is marked similarly.

A sample section of the Games Lanes plans: complex, confusing and discontinuous, truly a classic TfL production

The thing that strikes me about these plans is that, leaving aside the rights and wrongs of the whole thing, not only is TfL incapable of conceiving of continuous, effective bike lanes, or bus lanes, as we know from long experience, it has proved no more capable of imagining continuity when told by the IOC to create this network. How one earth are they expecting this itsy-bitsiness to work in practice? Who is going to enforce it, bearing in mind the negligible level of enforcement there is of all other painted carriageway demarcations, e.g. cycle stop boxes and hatched junction boxes? Who is going to understand this complexity, with some Games Lanes being 24 hour, some not, and some allowing cycling, some not? Is this really policeable? It looks like a classic British fudge. I wonder what the IOC will think when they see it.

I also wonder how much of the time Official Games vehicles will actually be using these lanes, and how many of them there will be. If cyclists really are to be permitted in some of these lanes, or all of them, as the council officer seems to believe, then, with the numbers of cyclists there are in London already, combined with a special upsurge for the games, combined with the fact that cyclists have few dedicated lanes of their own, maybe cyclists will prove to be the dominant users of these lanes. Maybe these lanes will provide the real "cycling superhighways" to the games, and to elsewhere, that TfL so conspicuously has not provided under its actual Cycle Superhighway programme. What will the IOC think of that?

A policy a day...

2012-01-31T21:08:00.001Z

About a year on from the first meeting of the organisation, and six months on from its official launch, members of the Cycling Embassy of Great Britain gathered in fashionable Kensington last weekend for some serious business: to bash out the optimum policies for an organisation dedicated to making riding a bike in Britain for everyday purposes as easy as possible – an organisation truly and seriously aiming to make mass cycling a reality here, as it is already in many other countries. Some preliminary information about the discussions constituting the "Policy Bash" is available on the CEoGB site here.

For those not familiar with the story, I give the background. The Cycling Embassy of Great Britain was founded by Jim Davis, now the chairman, early last year. Its early members were mostly cycling bloggers who had often used their blogs to criticise the standard of cycling provision in the UK and the lack of safety for cyclists on the roads. Some were, or had been, active in existing cycling campaign organisations, some not. Apart from being highly critical of government policy towards cycling, they were all rather dissatisfied with how existing cycling organisations had treated the "infrastructure issue". All had noted the increasing information and evidence available on how high cycling levels have been achieved in many European towns and cities through deployment of cycle infrastructure that has no real parallel in the UK, and all were dissatisfied with the response of the existing UK cyclists' organisations, which tended to either to ignore or downplay the role of quality cycle infrastructure in creating these cycling cultures, preferring to concentrate campaigning around issues of cycle promotion, cycle training, law-enforcement and road user behaviour.

Ride round Manchester at the second Embassy meeting

The founder members of the Embassy believed, and still do, that networks of effective infrastructure for cyclists that separate them safely from motor vehicles, on the European pattern, are the absolute keystone of the arch in generating mass cycling, without which all the other measures and campaigns will always fail. Because no other campaign was prepared to state this position clearly, a new one had to be formed: the Cycling Embassy of Great Britain. The name was intended to draw a parallel with the Cycling Embassies of Denmark and the Netherlands, which are quasi-official bodies that aim to export cycling know-how from those successful cycling cultures. The British Embassy is different: it is an entirely voluntary organisation that aims to import good and proven ideas that really increase cycling, from wherever they can be found, and campaign for their deployment in the UK.

So a group of bloggers acquired a collective website, a constitution, a mission statement, a committee, and a bank account, and started meeting both virtually and physically to make plans. They were then no longer a group of bloggers, but a real campaign. There is still no membership fee to join the Embassy, though donations are requested. "Members", or "Ambassadors", are those who have registered an interest on the website, and there are no tangible benefits of joining, in terms of insurance or any of the other usual inducements. The Embassy is thus not in direct competition with other cycling membership organisations; rather, it seeks to augment their efforts.

After the formal launch of the Embassy, with participation from the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands (a real embassy!), the next major event was the study tour to Assen and Groningen in the Netherlands, in company of David Hembrow, for members to get vital direct experience of how the Dutch engineering solutions actually work. This experience was documented in many photos, videos and write-ups.

The Embassy launch, September 2011

Around the same time, late last year, other significant developments occurred. The (claimed) largest urban cycling organisation in the world, the London Cycling Campaign, held a vote to determine its headline campaign demand for the 2012 London mayoral election. The winning option, by an overwhelming majority, was Go Dutch: Clear space for cycling on London's main roads. LCC subsequently published the objectives of its Go Dutch campaign, focussing on the need for quality separated cycling infrastructure on busy roads to create a real "cycling revolution" in London. So now the LCC and the CEoGB were singing from the same hymn-sheet, both referencing clearly the Dutch infrastructure example as the one to be particularly emulated. The LCC also started organising large protest rides to demonstrate the anger of cyclists over the Mayor's lack of progress in changing London's dangerous, anti-cycling street and junction designs. Other cycling protest organisations arose in London, and a campaign was launched to get cyclists to vote en-masse in the elections purely on the cycle safety issue.

Forward to this week, and the Cycling Embassy has had its Policy Bash. The policies can still be commented-on and influenced by any member – see the Embassy's Forums. Some of the many topics covered were cycle helmets, shared space versus separation by mode, one-way streets, pedestrianisation, permeability, roundabout and junction design, purpose of roads and streets, and character of networks. Also under discussion was strategy of the organisation: how to build alliance, and with whom, how to leverage funding for cycling infrastructure, how to create a resource of design expertise, how to best influence politicians and civil servants, and so on.

Bashing out policy at Kensington Town Hall

If I need to choose one thing to mention, perhaps most important for me were discussions around the DfT's Hierarchy of Provision for Cyclists, and how this should be reformed. All were in agreement that the Hierarchy, which suggests the order in which various streets interventions for cyclists in the UK should be "considered" by planners, does not generally deliver effective cycle engineering solutions. This is because it starts from an incorrect premise, that all roads on which cyclists are allowed, from country lanes to urban cult-de-sacs to inter-urban trunk roads, can be regarded in the same way, and be subject to the same mono-dimensional "hierarchy of solutions", which they clearly cannot.

There are clearly roads that are not suitable for cycling on, where parallel provision must be made, and others where parallel provision is not necessary, but other changes are. A clear consensus crystallised that the primary considerations must be the desired functions of different roads and streets, to be established first, before decisions can be taken on how cycling should be accommodated on, or adjacent to, those roads and streets, and, also, where the cycling through-route network is supposed to be, and how those streets relate to this – are they part of it, or are they not, but giving perhaps access to homes, shops or workplaces. Answers on priorities, and sharing versus segregation, must be related to these questions.

Bashing Milngavie roundabout into a more Dutch shape

A lot of time was devoted to junction design, and there was detailed consideration of one example roundabout – the one that Magnatom nearly came to grief on in Milngavie, near Glasgow. We looked at what the ideal Dutch cycle path solution to this dangerous roundabout would be, and how that might be introduced in stages, phased to reflect the importance of different routes for cyclists and the danger that they faced trying to use them, with each stage representing an incremental improvement in conditions for cyclists and pedestrians.

It is clear that the work of the Embassy has only just begun. But a solid start has been made, and, just as importantly, other organisations are taking notice, and some are following a similar path. These the Embassy is very keen to work with. Cycle campaigning in the UK has now got serious.

Events and campaigns

2012-01-23T16:21:00.001Z

The Bikes Alive protest goes again at King's Cross today (Monday) at 6.00pm. It's for pedestrians, cyclists and animals. Peter Hendy, Commissioner for Transport for London, thinks the protest is "stupid". If you think it is his roads policies that are stupid, then join the demo, or a future one.

Another tack on the politics of the roads is taken by another new organisation, Londoners on Bikes.
They are asking all Londoners who use bikes to commit to voting in the mayoral elections on the cycling safety issue alone, as "transport is the one thing the Mayor really controls". The formation of an identifiable and substantial "cycling voting block", the theory goes, will influence the candidates' policies more than they have been influenced before by the diffuse cycling lobby.

This goes along of course with London Cycling Campaign's Go Dutch mayoral election campaign, which will be formally launched on 9 February, asking that each mayoral candidate pledge to "Make London more liveable for everybody by making our streets as safe as inviting as they are in Holland" . So far there is little evidence of positive response to this from the current City Hall administration. TfL's proposed new designs for the killer Bow Roundabout are just more half-hearted concepts that bear no resemblance to anything that the Dutch would do in such a location, and do even less for pedestrians than for cyclists (nothing to be precise). I am not holding my breath that Boris Johnson's "step change in the way engineers think when planning for cyclists" (which is, suspiciously, a commitment we have not had from his lips, but only from those of his Director of Environment Kulveer Ranger) is going to amount to anything but more huff, quarter-measures, and refusal to confront the real issues of priority on the streets. We shall see.

On a more positive note, the Cycling Embassy of Great Britain holds its Policy Bash this weekend, an intensive two-day workshop in London where cycle campaigners will cast a fresh look at those familiar questions, "What do we really need to make cycling a mass activity in the UK?" and "How can we best campaign to get it"? If you cannot be there, you can take part at a virtual level: use the hashtag #CEoGBBash to take part on Twitter. In addition, you are invited on the pre-Bash Infrastructure Safari, a two-hour cycle tour of good and not-so-good cycle infrastructure in central London, to inform the following days' discussions, which will start from Euston station at 6:15 pm on Friday.

Brent Cross Cricklewood regeneration scheme "dead"

2012-01-18T02:19:00.004Z

The Standard reports that the Brent Cross Cricklewood regeneration is very unlikely to go ahead in the form previously envisaged:

Mr Johnson met key figures at Brent Cross last week and one source told the Standard that the wider Cricklewood regeneration scheme was now "dead in the water". The Mayor is now thought to favour concentrating efforts on what would be dubbed Brent Cross "town centre", the mall, which opened in 1976, and the retail park on the opposite side of the North Circular, in the face of competition from Westfield.

The huge "regeneration" scheme, the biggest in London, championed by Barnet Council, attracted more than 500 objections: amongst them being those of Brent and Barnet LCC groups, many other local environmental groups, and all Barnet's surrounding borough councils: Brent, Harrow, Camden and Haringey, who were all very worried about the generation of more traffic on their roads – Barnet's own (unrealistically conservative) estimate was for an extra 29,000 cars per day. Cyclists were most concerned about the developers' plans to make Staples Corner even more of a cycling barrier, by creating a giant dumbbell-shaped gyratory linking the Staples corner east and west roundabouts, through the Midland railway viaduct, and forcing cyclists on the A5 either over the flyover, with its terrifying motorway-style slip-roads, or onto a slow, convoluted, ramped cycle path (the original developers' idea was that this cycle path should actually use lifts!!).

The developers' 2008 plans showed this incredible proposal for the Staples Corner junction of the A5 Edgware Road, an LCN+ route and an important (unavoidable) commuting route for cyclists, with the North Circular Road, replacing the current roundabout (shown grey underneath). Cyclists were supposed to go south by taking a cycle path with lifts at either end, but no option was provided for going north!

The Broken Barnet blog has an interesting take on the curious fact that news of this collapse happened to come out on the same day that Boris Johnson visited Barnet. It may be that Johnson, facing re-election, realised that many Conservative voters in north-west London opposed the heavily car-dependent scheme and the waste incinerator (AKA Combined Heat and Power Plant) that went with it. It may just be that everybody knows that, with the collapse of retailing, there would not now be enough money from the shopping centre development to finance it. Whatever, the supposed forthcoming wider regeneration of the Brent Cross Cricklewood area has been used for years to block proposals to improve the A5 and Staples Corner for cycling. Now this regeneration looks unlikely to go ahead, this should no longer be an excuse.

The nastiness of Staples corner for cyclists and pedestrians as it is now

Personally, I am not opposed to shopping malls. They have considerable advantages in usability over a traditional high street for many, including the disabled. I am even not opposed to a further development of Brent Cross, if the developers think they can make it pay in this age of internet shopping. Shopping malls are not intrinsically bad – but what is key is to get the transport planning around them right, to make it easy for people to use alternatives to the car, an area where this development plan fell far short. And north Cricklewood could do with a certain amount of regeneration. But what it did not need was a huge land-grab by one consortium, in unholy hoc with a local council, determined to build a new high-rise city based on a nightmare 1970s concept of car-based urban planning, with pedestrians relegated to walkways in the sky, no sensible routes for bikes, a bus station made less convenient for the shopping centre than the present one, and no orbital rail or tramway. Hopefully that concept really is dead. There was, anyway, obviously never any milage in the idea of trying to create a "new town centre" straddling the North Circular Road. Such urban motorways can only ever divide.

The developers' vision of their new city on the North Circular

Barnet LCC now have an active campaigns group. They will be having a meeting this Friday at Middlesex University in Hendon – see their website for details.

Bikes Alive demonstration today

2012-01-09T02:04:00.001Z

I have received the following, which I merely pass on, without much comment, save to say that I do not find it surprising that when we have the situation, which we do, in London, where cyclists are being killed and seriously injured on a regular basis at known blackspots, and it is widely acknowledged by most parties that a large part of the problem lies in the bad road designs, which are known about, and have often been commented on even by professional engineers and consultants employed by various bodies, and yet these designs are not changed, over years and decades, even when the same type of serious incidents are occurring in the same places in the same way repeatedly, whether at King's Cross, or at Bow, or at Elephant and Castle, or at Blackfriars, or at Edgware, or numerous other locations across the capital, where the solutions are known but simply not applied, because other priorities are prevailing, then many cyclists will feel that there is no alternative than to take this sort of action, and that this sort of action is justified.

PRESS RELEASE – Friday 30 December 2011

Issued by Bikes Alive

NEW CYCLISTS’ CAMPAIGN CALLS FOR “NON-VIOLENT SELF DEFENCE” AGAINST MOTOR TRAFFIC IN LONDON

– 9 JANUARY ACTION ANNOUNCED

Cyclists and other non-motorised road users suffer death and injury (not to mention being delayed, poisoned and terrorised) by the selfish, anti-social (and frequently illegal) behaviour of motorists – despite the fact that much of the traffic in urban areas like London is completely unnecessary. In the case of private cars, much of the traffic is there for no other reason than the selfishness of the drivers concerned.

The situation on major roads and at major junctions in London is exacerbated by the policy of Transport for London (TfL), which prioritises the speed and volume of motor vehicles above the safety and sanity of everyone else.

Since polite meetings and symbolic action are having, on their own, too little effect, some cyclists now plan to take non-violent direct action to defend themselves and other vulnerable road users.

The first such (publicly announced) event will be at the lethal junction outside Kings Cross station (where York Way meets Pentonville Road and Euston Road) at 6pm on Monday 9 January 2012. Bikes Alive is calling for cyclists and pedestrians to take steps to forcibly calm the traffic there for one hour; if there are enough participants, the Kings Cross one-way system will be closed down from 6pm to 7pm that evening.

Unless TfL agrees to change its priorities as a result, Bikes Alive will endeavour to organise regular road closures, with the aim being to completely close down Kings Cross for at least one hour every week until TfL comes to its senses.

For more details of this plan, see bikesalive.wordpress.com; or e-mail bikesalive @ london.com

Albert Beale, on 020-7278 4474, has agreed to deal with media enquiries about this for Bikes Alive.

Sustainable safety, Dutch and British-style

2012-01-03T01:59:00.003Z

David Hembrow and Mark Wagenbuur have announced their intention to "call it a day" on their famous and influential cycling blog View from the cycle path, which, perhaps more than any other journal or piece of work published either electronically, or in print, has encouraged supporters of cycling in the English-speaking world to start to think differently about utility cycling, and has spread understanding of how the Dutch have actually achieved the safest cycling environment and highest transport share for cycling in the world.

I can understand why David and Mark should want a rest. Writing an accurate, high-quality blog for a long period is extremely demanding and time-consuming. Their new posts will be much missed, but their archive of posts will continue on-line as an invaluable resource for cycle advocates, transport planners and engineers around the world. Their last post to be written (though not, apparently, last to be published) is one of the best and most important of all. Entitled Campaign for Sustainable Safety, not Strict Liability, it again busts one of the great international myths about the Dutch cycling culture, explaining the true nature of Dutch liability law and its true influence on cycling conditions in the Netherlands (which is slight), before explaining the Dutch policy that needs to be understood and campaigned for elsewhere, the real basis of the Dutch road safety record: Sustainable Safety. I urge you to read it, and to pass it on to all those interested or involved in the area.

I've mentioned Sustainable Safety here before. It's based on five principles, that Wagenbuur goes into in detail in the second part of the article:

Functionality of roads
Homogeneity of mass, speed and direction of road-users
Predictability of road course and road-user behaviour
Forgivingness of the road environment and the road-users
Awareness of the road-user

Of these, the one that perhaps needs most absorbing outside the Netherlands, because it is so foreign to the way things are done on the roads in most other places, is the second principle: that of homogeneity of mass, speed and direction of road-users. In simple physics terms, homogeneity of mass, speed and direction of road-users means that the chances of crashes that have serious consequences are minimised because, in a given space, all the "vehicles" (and that term includes, here, pedestrians) have similar mass, speed and direction, therefore little kinetic energy relative to one another, and they therefore cannot do much damage to one another if they come accidentally into contact. Sustainable Safety, is, in a way, the simple, common-sense acceptance of the facts that humans are fallible, and that accidents do happen, but that it is possible to engineer an environment in which those accidents are rarely disastrous.

The desire for homogeneity of traffic is thus the basis for the Dutch bias towards separating out the classes of road-users, motor vehicles, bikes, and pedestrians (and in some cases buses, trams, lorries, motorcyclists and mopeds) in their own spaces, to minimise the damage they can do to one another in the event of a crash, and, where such separation is not possible, to ensure that no road-users have enough energy (through their speed, energy being proportional to speed squared) to risk serious damage to others. The homogeneity requirement essentially determines what the vast majority of Dutch roadscapes, streetscapes and townscapes actually look like.

But, strangely, straightforward as this all is, there is a huge amount of misunderstanding and misrepresentation of Dutch traffic safety principles in other counties. There is something of a propaganda campaign in the UK, and possibly elsewhere, by some people, to try to convince others that the basis of Dutch road safety is precisely the reverse of what it actually is, that it is actually about mixing up different types of road users as much as possible. Consider this, from the blog of Angela Saini, a science journalist who has just made a programme for BBC Radio 4:

For the last few months I've been asking traffic engineers and scientists whether it's possible to rebuild the streets in a way that might make us safer, happier and generally nicer people. The linchpin of this idea is an increasingly popular (if controversial) concept known as Shared Space, which is a way of designing streets without segregating road users. Essentially, everyone is encouraged to use the same street at the same time... there are no pavements as such. Pioneered in Holland, it seems to be working over there by slowing down drivers and making all road users more aware of each other. And it's since been imported all over the world.

And this is from the BBC webpage on the programme, to be broadcast today Tuesday 3 January at 21:00 and tomorrow, Wednesday 4 January at 15:30:

The early roots of this innovative concept lies in the work of the late Dutch traffic engineer, Hans Monderman. A passionate advocate of shared space, Monderman and colleagues started small - more than twenty years ago, converted an intersection in the northern Dutch province of Friesland from a conventional signal-controlled intersection to a brick-paved street, giving equal priority to cars, people and cycles. The idea was that people would use their own minds in navigating the streets, building their own informal traffic rules. Research has shown that these kinds of shared spaces automatically reduced traffic speed to under 20 mph - the threshold at which the chances of being severely injured in a road accident plummets. This highly counterintuitive approach - increasing risk decreases accidents is finding favour (albeit slowly and not without opposition) all over the world.

Today, Monderman's vision can be experienced throughout his Dutch province of Friesland, no where more so than in Drachten, an unassuming town that until recently was famous only for being the home of the Dutch electronics giant Philips. Drachten's shared space schemes (and those of its near neighbours) now attracts a regular pilgrimage of engineers and planners, from all parts of the world - Australia, Japan, Britain, South Africa, India and even Colombia.

Now this is all a load of cobblers – except perhaps the statement about the "centre of pilgrimage" – insofar as an impression is being given that shared space is quintessentially Dutch, a significant part of Dutch thinking on planning, an expanding movement in the Netherlands, or a thing that the Netherlands is actively exporting. In fact, shared space has been a very limited experiment in the Netherlands that runs contrary to usual Dutch practice, it has not been popular there, and it is not much known or discussed in the Netherlands. Drachten is a small place (population 45,000), and only a small area of the centre of the town has received shared space treatment. Other Dutch examples of shared space consist of the odd street, square or precinct, set within the normal Dutch mode-segregated street environment. (And by the way, another thing wrong in the quote is that Drachten is not "home" to Philips, Philips' HQ is in Amsterdam).

Interest in Monderman's ideas has come very much from outside the Netherlands, not within. Marttijn Sargentini, the bike cheif in Amsterdam, and thus a very important Dutch traffic planner, far more important than Monderman, told CTC's Cycle magazine (October 2007):

I'd never heard of Hans Monderman or "shared space" until all these foreign visitors came here and kept telling me about them. Here in Amsterdam we are very clear – for safety, for speed, to give an advantage to the bike, we aim to separate wherever possible.

The Dutch are always experimenting with urban design, and shared space has been a minor experiment there that is getting blown out of all proportion by foreigners who are not seeing the wood for the trees, they are not observing basically what normal Dutch street design is about. The answer Angela Saini's opening question is, obviously, "no", it's not possible to rebuild streets in a way to make us generally nicer people – what a silly idea. Sustainable safety is not about making people "nice". People are as people are, they are human, but design can minimise risks by taking their frailties and real behaviours into account.

Shared space in the UK has been mostly promoted by the architect Ben Hamilton-Baillie, who seems to have made it his trademark. According to a BBC news story on shared space in Ashford, Kent, where pedestrians have complained that the new design leaves them feeling exposed when crossing the shared space roads:

Ben Hamilton-Baillie, the architect behind the scheme, said the point of the shared space was so that pedestrians and drivers interacted and negotiated for space and right of way.

He said that although that may not be easy or comfortable for the pedestrian it did appear to work.

"So far it looks as if there has been a significant drop, particularly in more serious accidents, maybe as much as 75%," he said."That doesn't necessarily translate into how people feel when they cross the street, but the reduction in speed has been the most important single element in transforming what was an unattractive concrete collar surrounding Ashford into a civilised part of the town centre itself."

I beg your pardon? Shared space "may not be easy of comfortable for the pedestrian"? I though that it was supposed to benefit pedestrians! I though it was supposed to give them more freedom! I thought that was the whole idea of it, Mr Hamilton-Baillie!

I can't understand what the point of shared space is supposed to be. The benefits claimed for it seem to be illusory, as Hamilton-Baillie's words, if accurately quoted, seem to confirm. What are the actual better outcomes of shared space as opposed to segregation? Hamilton-Bailie here seems to retreat from any idea that shared space should feel pleasant for vulnerable road-users, to a claim about merely reducing casualties, and a claim that what he has created is somehow more "civilised" than what used to exist. I have heard this word used before by a shared space adherent, it is a favourite word of theirs: geographer John Adams used it once in Camden. It is meaningless, an expression of mere personal aesthetic preference or prejudice. How is this Ashford design "civilised"?

If pedestrians feel uncomfortable and unsafe, as they seem to feel in the Ashford shared space, then they will avoid it, and they will avoid crossing the road there (and particularly vulnerable people like the blind, disabled and elderly will avoid crossing the road there), and so casualty figures might well go down. But that's the easiest way to reduce casualties, and the worst: just frighten the vulnerable away, those who are most likely to have accidents, just exclude the non-motorised, not by law, but through intimidation. That seems to be the British version of Sustainable Safety: a kind of quasi-voluntary apartheid.

You see this in UK cycle route engineering as well: you build something so fantastically dangerous that few people on a bike will ever use it, so there cannot be many cycling casualties, because there are few cyclists, and the safety record for cyclists looks good. Something like this, a crazy cycle crossing of a motorway-type road in the Bikeless Borough of Barnet, North London, which has only ever killed one cyclist, and frightened most of the rest of them away. A good safety record: British-style Sustainable Safety in action.

It's not just me, SWOV also thinks "safety in numbers" is untrue

2011-12-31T20:41:00.004Z

The phrase "safety in numbers", as applied to cyclists, comes up a lot on this blog. It was discussed in this post and this one and this one. It's discussed here a lot because it has been a core belief of many UK cycle activists, and in particularly, organisationally, of the CTC, who never loose an opportunity to promote the idea as basically the "solution" to cycle safety in the UK. Get lots of cyclists on the roads, they say, or imply, and it will all be OK, very safe, without needing to change anything else fundamentally in the road environment.

I must acknowledge some change of tone from the CTC of late, for example, in this letter to the The Guardian written by their Campaigns and Policy Director Roger Geffen, in response to the Guardian article that I also criticised in my last post. Here Geffen does mention the role of road design in creating safe conditions for cycling, while (as usual) stopping short of calling for proper continental-type cycle infrastructure. But in general, CTC has always espoused belief in the "safety in numbers" effect as being key to generating a bigger, safer cycling culture. From this seems to flows their concentration on promoting training for cyclists (though they first started to promote training in the 1930s, long before "safety in numbers" had been heard of). If you train cyclists to cope with our road conditions, you get more of them on the roads, so the argument goes, so it becomes safer, and that encourages more cyclists out, and so on. And from the CTC's concentration on training comes the government's concentration on it. Whenever the government is asked what it is doing about cycling, basically what it talks about is training for cyclists.

There is a counter-view, that I espouse, as have others, particularly Freewheeler, and David Hembrow. This is to look at the post-war history of cycling in the UK, and to note that we have had 60 years of training for cyclists, corresponding to an ongoing collapse in cycling. In our view, training simply is not the solution. The international experience shows you do not get significantly more people on bikes without major changes to the road environment. Cycling in the UK fell from its immediate post-war modal share of about 15% to about 1% today, despite 60 years of training, for reasons that are not going away. You can encourage and train and enthuse as much as you like, but those reasons continue to hold our cycling rate to a very low level, even in the cities that are currently said to be experiencing a "cycling booom" such as London, where cycling is now (2010 figures) up to the dizzy height of 2% modal share.

The modern vogue of the "safety in numbers" theory for cycling, in the English-speaking world (and it does seem to be largely confined there), seems to be mostly down to a rather vague piece of research published by an American, P L Jacobsen in 2003, in the journal Injury Prevention. Here Jacobsen stated his conclusion:

The likelihood that a given person walking or bicycling will be struck by a motorist varies inversely with the amount of walking or bicycling. This pattern is consistent across communities of varying size, from specific intersections to cities and countries, and across time periods.

I describe Jacobsen's research as "vague" because (and you can read the full paper if you like), though it is full of statistics, it lacks sufficient discussion of the radically differing contexts of the figures from different places and times to make its conclusions meaningful. It has no proper discussion of cycle infrastructure, despite the fact that it uses statistics from the Netherlands, where the effects of segregated cycle infrastructure surely cannot be ignored. It says:

The Netherlands has implemented a range of policies to encourage people to walk and bicycle and make them safer. These efforts have succeeded in increasing bicycle use and decreasing risk.

without going into the details of these policies further. But it is these details that are critical.

It also says:

The possible explanations [for changes in cyclist casualty rates] are changes in human behavior, roadway design, laws, and social mores. However, insofar as the changes seen in the time series data occurred rapidly and with both increasing and decreasing amounts of bicycling, it is improbable that the roadway design, traffic laws, or social mores, all of which change relatively slowly, could explain the relationship between exposure and injury rates.

Here is a key unsubstantiated assertion: why is it improbable that changed roadway design could lead to rapid safety change? Surely changing roadway design is by far the fastest method of changing both behaviour and social mores and, consequentially, safety.

In Jacobsen's defence, it may be noted that his final conclusion is simply to say that:

Policies that increase walking and bicycling appear to be an effective route to improving the safety of people walking and bicycling.

And it is fair to say that that may be how it "appears" if one takes a rather blinkered, infrastructure-excluding view of the problem. And he does not say what those policies should be, he does not specify that they should be training or publicity as opposed to road redesign. But unfortunately this work has been often used as evidence for an idea that the good safety record of the Netherlands and Denmark is not due to their well-designed infrastructure, it is due to their having large numbers of cyclists.

Clearly Jacobsen only demonstrated a statistical link, not causality. His conclusion is open to the obvious objection that the causality may be (in fact, seems, on a wider view of the contextual evidence, and also on a common-sense view, far more likely to be) the other way round, that larger numbers cycling are due to higher perceived safety, which is linked to real safety, which is linked principally to road design (and users' behaviour as influenced by road design).

Anyway, all this is a just pre-amble to tell you that the Director of SWOV, the Dutch institute for road safety research, agrees with me on this. His discussion on the subject is contained in a column on page 3 of the Autumn 2011 Research Activities published by SWOV in English. I would rate Fred Wegman, Director-manager of SWOV, as the world's greatest expert on cycle safety, on the principle that you listen to those who have achieved rather than talked about a goal. I quote his article in full:

Safety in numbers: more cyclists, lower risks?

A swarm of birds or insects, a school of fish, a flock of sheep, a pack of wolves. Language has many possibilities to indicate a group of animals. Biology has taught us that a group offers protection and increases safety for the individual members of the group. It is more difficult for a predator to attack a group than one single animal. For this reason a predator uses the strategy to isolate an animal from its flock before attacking it.

This is also the thought that occurred to me when studying cyclist safety: why not compare the safety of one individual cyclist with the safety of a group of cyclists. The risk of the one single cyclists is greater than that of a cyclist who is part of a group. The American
researcher Jacobsen compared the casualties among cyclists in different countries and
tried to establish a relation with the amount of bicycle traffic. He concluded that “Policies
that increase the numbers of people bicycling appear to be an effective route to improving
the safety of people bicycling”. In other words: add more cyclists to traffic and cyclist
safety will increase. This is a popular idea among those who put effort into stimulating cycling and therefore Jacobsen’s conclusion is quoted frequently in these circles. However,
I believe that this conclusion is not correct. I will try to explain why.

If there is much cycling in a country, the risk for cyclists is indeed lower. Comparison of
statistics of different countries offers conclusive evidence. The risks in countries that have
a lot of cycling like the Netherlands and Denmark are (much) lower than in countries where cycling is a less important mode of transport. The explanation may be twofold. Firstly,
there are the expectations of the other road user. If a driver does indeed expect a cyclist
on the road, as is the case in the Netherlands and Denmark, the risk is lower. But a second
explanation is conceivable: if there are more cyclists, more safe cycling facilities will be
constructed (which in turn make cycling more pleasant). We have sufficient evidence that
cycling facilities (like bicycle tracks) reduce the risks of cycling. Not only do the Netherlands and Denmark have many cyclists, there are also many cycling facilities.

I do not expect that just a greater number of cyclists will on its own result in a risk reduction for the cyclist. On the other hand, I do expect that more cycling facilities will lead to lower risks. Policy that only focuses on an increase in cycling and at the same time ignores the construction of more cycling facilities, will not have a positive effect on road safety. Unless, of course this policy also takes care of cyclists only cycling close to one another: in a swarm, school, flock, or pack of cyclists.

This is the clearest statement I have seen in print that Dutch road safety experts do not agree with the simple "safety in numbers" idea, despite the fact that Jacobsen's work relied heavily on Dutch statistics. Wegman is very clear:

We have sufficient evidence that cycling facilities (like bicycle tracks) reduce the risks of cycling. Not only do the Netherlands and Denmark have many cyclists, there are also many cycling facilities.

And as I have often pointed out, the real clincher to the argument is that there are no counter-examples. There is nowhere that has achieved good cyclist safety and mass cycling without these facilities (like bicycle tracks).

Elsewhere in this interesting publication, we read SWOV's opinion on the correct way of dealing with the lorry danger problem, source of so much grief in the UK:

In SWOV’s opinion, the ultimate solution for the blind spot problem is a structural separation of trucks and cyclists. How this must be organised and what the economic consequences will be, requires further study. For the time being, the solution can be found in separating cyclists and trucks at intersection[s], both in time and position.

On Trixi mirrors mounted on signal posts, the devices that are being promoted in London at the moment as a method of addressing the lorry blind-spot problem for cyclists, SWOV has this to say:

This mirror has been found to barely influence truck driver behaviour and is only effective while the truck is stopped in front of the mirror.

The overwhelming impression from the whole document is of the extraordinary seriousness with which the Dutch take cycle safety, and how, far from being satisfied with already having the safest cycling and highest cycling levels in the world, they are continually spending money researching, applying and evaluating better solutions. It is clearly this attitude that lies behind their cycling achievement. "Safety in numbers" is a too-simple concept that in no way summarises the complexity of the problem and the interlocking effects which occur that influence cycle safety.

Yes, if you are talking about the flock or the herd, there is safety in numbers. I was in the Vismarkt, Groningen city centre in September, on a study tour led by David Hembrow. I was sitting there at a café table with David and the others from the Cycling Embassy of Great Britain, looking at the scene, which was this (video by Stabiliser):

Yes there are huge numbers of cyclists here, "flocks" of them, and it feels very safe for them. But why are there such huge numbers here? It is because urban planning over the whole city has made it difficult to drive here and very easy to cycle. There are no separate cycle facilities here, but that is because they are not needed here. If you look at the rest of the city, as we did, you see the massive network of segregated cycle tracks and traffic-free paths that make it both subjectively and objectively safe to cycle from the suburbs and surrounding villages to the centre, whether there are many or few cyclists cycling around you, resulting in this massive concentration of cyclists in the centre, where all the routes converge, where there is no longer need of segregation. A person parachuting in from Mars, or London, to this spot, might say "Cycle facilities, what cycle facilities? No need, as it is so safe, as the place is full of cyclists". But they would fundamentally misunderstand the context. Similarly, Jacobsen's simplistic comparison of cycling safety with cycling levels critically overlooked context.

Segregated cycle track on a main road leading to Groningen city centre

Happy new year. Let us hope 2012 will be a safer year for cycling in London than was 2011.

Cycling in recessions

2011-12-29T22:11:00.001Z

Mark King has written a very unfortunate, ill-researched piece in The Guardian, this week, titled Cyclist deaths rise during recessions, figures suggest.

The article tells us:

The DfT's 2011 annual report on UK road casualties shows that cyclist deaths across the UK rose by 7% last year, up from 104 in 2009 to 111 in 2010, just as many of the government austerity measures were kicking in. In the first half of this year the number of cyclists killed or seriously hurt on UK roads rose 12% year-on-year. Cycle deaths also rose by 58% between 1930 and 1935 and by 14% between 1980 and 1984. After both the 1930s and the 1980s recessions, the number of cycle fatalities fell back once again.

The idea that cyclist deaths automatically rise when cycling numbers rise seems a very crude one, ignoring all the factors around danger and the sources of it, and it is also the direct reverse of what the CTC is always telling us, which is that cycling should get safer the more people that do it: the safety in numbers effect. I have argued that the safety in numbers effect is not true, in the way the CTC means it, but it is also patently foolish to regard the background of risks to cyclists as a fixed given, the number of casualties then only being related to the rate of cycling.

To deal with the early 1930s: the period mentioned saw a huge expansion of motor traffic on the roads. All speed limits were removed by the Labour government's Road Traffic Act of 1930. 1934 was the record year for UK road casualties, with 7,343 deaths and 231,603 injuries, half of these being suffered by pedestrians. The new Conservative transport minister in 1934, Leslie Hore-Belisha, described this as "mass murder", and introduced the 30mph limit in towns, plus the driving test and other reforms, which had a big effect in reducing casualties from 1934. So, although there was a depression in the early 1930s, there were a lot of more relevant things going on from the point of view of cycle casualties.

And there have been a lot more relevant things going on recently, as anybody who follows this and similar blogs will realise. Such as the previous transport secretary, Philip Hammond's, War on the motorist rhetoric, his talk of raising speed limits on motorways, his cuts in road safety spending, his sidekick Mike Penning's Daily Mail driven anti-speed camera rhetoric and policy, Boris Johnson's "smoothing the traffic flow" policy, his massive cutting of expenditure on cycle safety, despite rising numbers of cyclists in London, his creation of disastrous new cycle facilities on the cycle Superhighways which have already claimed lives, and poorly-judged anti-cycling street changes elsewhere in London. And so it goes on.

Apart from all this, Mark King has completely misinterpreted Department for Transport casualty statistics, as they record contributory factors to "accidents" (based only on an arbitrary opinion of a police officer at the time, a critical piece of information King does not mention). His mistakes are pointed out by Jim Gleeson:

[King's article] gives the impression that errors by cyclists themselves are the dominant factors contributing to cyclist deaths. And that would be the wrong impression, because (a) the figures quoted refer to all accidents, not just fatal ones, and (b) by definition they exclude any actions of motorists or other non-cyclist.

....

As the TRL report says, "attribution is split fairly equally between the cyclist and driver/rider of the motorised vehicle".

The worst aspect of this article, however, is its overall thrust that cyclist casualties are generally the cyclists' own fault, for somehow riding incorrectly. So there is no discussion of the basic, endemic UK problem of purely car-centric road design, except for passages quoted from a cyclist called Paul Codd, emphasising the problems created by cycle lanes, from a vehicular cycling perspective:

"Cycle lanes in some cases can be part of the problem, the seemingly random lanes imposed on older roads. These lanes encourage cyclists to 'ride in the gutter' which in itself is a very dangerous riding position – especially on busy congested roads as it places the cyclist right in a motorist's blind spot."

Such issues (as this blog is always saying) are problems of badly-designed cycle lanes, not of cycle lanes fundamentally. There is no discussion of how our European neighbours manage cycle infrastructure, nor of the differences in real and subjective safety between their roads and ours. There is no discussion of how those places achieve far higher cycling rates with far lower casualty rates. There is also no discussion of motor speed or enforcement.

The closest King gets to the critical subject of infrastructure is where he writes:

Of the more recent high-profile fatalities in the capital, poor navigation at hotspots, such as Bow roundabout and Blackfriars bridge, as well as irresponsible driving by lorry drivers have been cited as key contributors.

Navigation? Hotspots? What the heck is he on about? Everybody knows that the problem is fatally-flawed, car-centric road designs that Transport for London refuses to change because its number one priority is getting cars through junctions. Particularly, of course, the killer gyratory systems like King's Cross and Bow. Can we call a spade a spade please, Mr King?

There is mention of training for cyclists (of course, because the emphasis here is all on what cyclists do wrong):

Lloyd said improved awareness of cycling safety training might help reduce the number of deaths, along with better education for younger cyclists.

This is Charlie Lloyd of LCC, but I suspect he has been very selectively quoted, as I am pretty sure that Charlie would not agree with an emphasis on cycle training while ignoring all that is wrong with our road system that is contributing to the appalling casualty level for cyclists.

The Guardian's article is somewhat analogous to a discussion of the "causes" of rape that analyses how many women are "responsible" themselves for becoming victims through wearing short skirts or high heels at the time. It is not possible to comment on the article on The Guardian's website. I hope, however, they will allow a right of reply. The Cycling Embassy of Great Britain would certainly be willing to correct the lamentably inaccurate view of the subject given by Mark King's article.

Christmas Message from The Vole

2011-12-26T19:44:00.001Z

The Archbishop of Canterbury likens our society to "atoms spinning apart in the dark". This is the kind of thing we expect our religious leaders to say. It is what they are for. It is the kind of thing they have been saying since the birth of their religions, and other religious leaders were saying the same before that. In the earliest writings that have survived, distinguished elders were talking about how society is falling apart, how the younger generation has no respect and no responsibility, and how everything is certain to get worse in the future. People must have been saying these things even before the first writing came about. This is a permanent part of human perception. Only the language changes slightly. The Archbishop appropriates this time concepts of science, with his atoms spinning, ironically, as the religion he represents has been opposed to scientific and rational progress, and the concepts he now appropriates, of the testable realities of invisible or non-experiential things, were developed in spite of the religious domination of human thought in the past.

So a group of our wise people and leaders always say that everything is always getting worse and that society is always collapsing. The Archbishop mirrors David Cameron's claim of a "Broken Britain" (while being more careful to apportion blame equally at the poor and rich ends of society). And yet others believe that there is moral progress, and that humankind is in engaged a continual evolutionary improvement of its conditions. A strong case may be made for this. Scientific and medical progress, rising average standards of living, more democratic, fair and open societies, lower levels of intolerance and vicimisation, lower levels of war, violence and insecurity, these all seem to be (also arguably) historical trajectories of human society.

How to reconcile these contradictory views? Science cannot measure human happiness comprehensively, though people try. Economic conditions can be measured fairly easily. Whether you believe in continual decline or continual progress probably depends mostly on what sort of a person you are, what your job and role in society is, and what you are expected by society to say.

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On the subject of religion, in a nice article Confessions of a recovering engineer, Charles Marohn gives some insights into the mindset of the American traffic engineer, which could well be relevant to those elsewhere as well. He says:

A book of standards to an engineer is better than a bible to a priest. All you have to do is to rely on the standard. Back in college I was told a story about how, in WWII, some Jewish engineers in hiding had run thousands of tedious tests on asphalt, just to produce these graphs that we still use today. Some of our craft descends from Roman engineers who did all of this a couple of millennia ago. How could I be wrong with literally thousands of years of professional practice on my side?

......

When the public and politicians tell engineers that their top priorities are safety and then cost, the engineer's brain hears something completely different. The engineer hears, "Once you set a design speed and handle the projected volume of traffic, safety is the top priority. Do what it takes to make the road safe, but do it as cheaply as you can." This is why engineers return projects with asinine "safety" features, like pedestrian bridges and tunnels that nobody will ever use, and costs that are astronomical.

I wonder if all this tells use something about how Transport for London arrives at the road designs that it does, despite the public and virtually all politicians – maybe, to give him the benefit of the doubt (it is the season of Goodwill to All Men, after all), Boris Johnson himself – telling it to do something different.

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One of the resolutions being proposed for the National Federation of Women's Institutes (NFWI) to adopt in 2012 is:

6. The NFWI urges Her Majesty's Government to make the wearing of helmets when cycling a legal requirement.

On their resolution briefing sheet (pp. 8–9), while there is some acknowledgement that helmets may not the be-all and end-all of cyclist safety, this bizarre statement appears:

compulsory helmet wearing may encourage more people to take up cycling, whilst improving the overall safety of cyclists.

Aside from arguments about the actual effectiveness of cycle helmets as a safety intervention, how, logically, could any activity that society wants more of, let's call that activity "X", be encouraged by making a law that requires people doing X to do some new thing on top of X that adds to the difficulty and expense of X and makes it less practically and socially convenient? It's a total, obvious, logical nonsense.

If you have not already done so, please sign the Cycling Embassy of Great Britain's petition urging the NFWI to reject Resolution 6 and:

focus instead on creating conditions in which all members of society will feel safe and comfortable riding a bicycle

The petition wording is expanded upon in an open letter to the NFWI from the Embassy. The letter covers the facts that everywhere in the world where it has been tried, helmet legislation has led to a dramatic reduction in cycling and no overall, proven increase in cyclists' safety, and that a reduction in cycling would be bad for public health, before calling on the NFWI to support a campaign for better safety for cyclists through better infrastructure:

Your resolution shows that you have the interests of cyclists and their safety at heart but we hope that you’ll be able to think wider than just helmets and training to infrastructure based on the Netherlands model that has had proven success giving freedom of movement and empowerment to all.

So the NFWI is not merely being asked to reject something here, not merely being told where they have got it wrong, but being asked to become participants in a real, positive campaign for safe cycling for all. If they did this, British cyclists would have powerful ally on their side. This is precisely the type of social coalition-building that is needed if we are ever to succeed in getting cycling in the UK to break out of its current tiny minority ghetto to attain the sunlit uplands of mass culture that it occupies in several comparable countries in the world. I urge you to sign the petition.

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Since hearing his song, via A view from the cycle path, M'n fiets is gejat ("My bike has been nicked") I have become a fan (possibly the first non-Dutch fan) of Ronnie Ruysdael (formerly the front-man of the band De Sjonnies from Nijmegen). This man is a musico-comic genius. He deserves exposure outside The Netherlands. He might get it if he did something in English, which he does not appear to have done so far.

A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from The Vole.

Change may be on the way at King's Cross, but it needs to be the right change for cyclists

2011-12-23T19:51:00.000Z

The Christmas Vigil at King's Cross to remember the 16 dead cyclists, and over 60 dead pedestrians, in London this year (with many more seriously injured), and to demand action from the Mayor and TfL to reduce danger on London's roads, took place on Tuesday, and was well-attended, well-organised, brief, poignant, and to the point. A model of a dignified public protest on a serious issue, it brought together grieving relatives of those killed, members of the London Cycling Campaign, RoadPeace, Living Streets, Transport for all, and many other individuals who feel passionately about the issue. Politicians who attended included Jenny Jones, the Green mayoral candidate, and London Assembly Members Caroline Pidgeon (Lib Dem) and Andrew Boff (Conservative).

The vigil

Here is Caroline Russell of Islington Living Streets speaking at the vigil:

And here are Mark Ames (ibikelondon) and Mustafa Arif, Board Member of LCC:

There seems to have now been a reaction to the Kings Cross safety campaign (and to the Bow campaign) from TfL. Yesterday (22 December) they published the following media release:

TfL to carry out a strategic review of the Kings Cross road network during 2012

TfL has today announced details of a strategic review of traffic movements through the Kings Cross area.

The review, which will begin in the spring of 2012, builds on previously agreed work to review traffic speeds through the area.

The study will consider how all road users, especially vulnerable road users such as pedestrians and cyclists, travel along the TfL and local borough road network around Kings Cross.

The findings will enable an informed discussion regarding the future of the Kings Cross gyratory system and the aspiration to return it to two-way working.

TfL intends to discuss the scope of this work with both Camden and Islington Councils in the New Year and will commence the study in the spring.

TfL has also now completed its initial review into the proposed Pedestrian Improvement schemes at three junctions outside Kings Cross station, in particular considering the location at the junction of York Way and Grays Inn Road where there was a fatal collision involving a cyclist in October.

The pedestrian improvement scheme has been developed and agreed with Camden Council following earlier reports by TfL identifying the need for enhancements at busy junctions around the station, helping pedestrians move more safely through the area.

The scheme, which will deliver wider pavements, reduced street clutter and new advanced stop lines for cyclists around Kings Cross station, has been reviewed to see if any further changes were possible prior to commencement of main construction in January.

York Way

Although there will be no significant changes to the original scheme in the short term, TfL will be further widening the approach to York Way junction to provide additional space for road users and cyclists through the junction.

Work will begin during the Christmas period and TfL has committed to delivering the pedestrian improvements by April 2012, ahead of the London 2012 Games.

However, TfL will include the York Way junction within its ongoing cycle safety junction review to identify, discuss and plan further improvements.

Were any potential options to be identified which would benefit all road users, TfL would look to install these after the London 2012 games.

Work on these improvements will start during Christmas between 28 and 30 December, to take advantage of the reduced traffic flows during the festive period. TfL will be working on site 24 hours a day where possible and lane closures will be in place outside Kings Cross station while these works are carried out.

When main works begin in January 2012, TfL will work overnight to deliver these improvements where possible to minimise disruption to people travelling through the area.

Leon Daniels, Managing Director of Surface Transport at TfL, said: 'Any fatal collision on the Capital's roads is one too many and the Mayor and TfL are determined to work night and day to reduce that number.

'We will be working closely with all partners to carry out a strategic review of how traffic moves through the area. However, we have an important commitment to provide pedestrian improvements around Kings Cross station ahead of the London 2012 Games. Work will begin to deliver these during Christmas while we continue to investigate further changes at this location.'

Notes to Editors:

TfL had committed to deliver the schemes before the London 2012 Games in view of the increase in pedestrian movements around Kings Cross during the Games

TfL continues to investigate making improvements to the junction at Bow roundabout and has now identified potential options for improvements. Detailed modeling and design is now being carried out and more details will be available in the New Year, when TfL begin discussing the improvements with key stakeholders and cycle groups

There seems to be a significant change of language and tone from TfL here, compared to previous statements on this and related issues. The wording

consider how all road users, especially vulnerable road users such as pedestrians and cyclists, travel along the TfL and local borough road network around Kings Cross

contains a different emphasis from previous statements which, in the last few years, always talked about "reflecting (or balancing) the needs of all road-users" It seems as if the (justifiably) emotive vigils and other campaigning actions (such as the Blackfriars Flashrides and the Tour du Danger) at the various dangerous junctions have rattled TfL. They have noticed that their language of "balance" between provision for road-users of totally different levels of vulnerability is at odds with what a lot of ordinary Londoners are thinking and saying. One can only applaud Leon Daniels stating now that "Any fatal collision on the capital's roads is one too many".

Another new thing here is talk of an "aspiration to return it [the King's Cross gyratory] to two-way working". TfL has consistently insisted in the past that it was not possible to remove the gyratory. Any big changes are being put off until after the Olympics; still, it looks like TfL have been stung by criticism arising from the death of cyclist Min Joo Lee (Deep Lee), about their unwillingness to make space for cyclists in Grays Inn Road and York Way as part of the current changes, because they are in such a hurry to get these done in time for the Olympics. As the Camden New Journal reported a couple of weeks ago:

On Monday night, Kenji [Hirasawa, boyfriend of Deep Lee] listened patiently in the Town Hall chamber – a perfect picture of dignity in his blue suit with top shirt button done up – as council officials argued they were mostly meeting cycle safety targets in a presentation of endless graphs and pie charts.

A TfL representative insisted that introducing a cycle lane at the junction would “cause considerable queues”, stressing that there was “limited time” to conduct a review of the proposed changes for the junction because of a “commitment” to make them in time for the Olympic Games.

And Caroline Russell mentioned at the King's Cross vigil that cyclist Leslie Michaelson was killed in exactly the same way as Deep Lee at exactly the same spot, 14 years ago.

So now TfL have decided that it is possible to modify the current plans, to be implemented by April, specifically

further widening the approach to York Way junction to provide additional space for road users and cyclists through the junction

– whatever that confused-sounding wording means. Cyclists are "road users": are they making space specifically for cyclists, or not? It sounds even less hopeful where they go on:

However, TfL will include the York Way junction within its ongoing cycle safety junction review to identify, discuss and plan further improvements.

Were any potential options to be identified which would benefit all road users, TfL would look to install these after the London 2012 games.

So we have more of the suspicious old language about "benefiting all road users", which has always, in the past, meant not looking after the vulnerable ones.

So what should be done? It has been suggested that there should be a segregated cycle lane installed at the north end of Grays Inn Road, to protect cyclists at the point where the deaths have occurred, but actually I cannot see how this could work. In the diagram below (reproduced from TfL's plans for the junction from before the latest announcement), the place I presume it would go I have marked with the red cross.

From TfL king's Cross consultation leaflet

A lane in this location would not work because cyclists aiming for it would get cut-up from the right by traffic trying to get into the westbound lanes leading into Euston Road. It would create exactly the same difficulty as does the segregated cycle lane on the Bow roundabout – creating an extra-difficult thing for cyclists to get to that would slow them and modify their road positioning in such a way as to make them more vulnerable to the left-hook. There would still be a battle to get into lane in Grays Inn Road. The Dutch would not do anything like this. No, to make this safe for cyclists, the whole thing needs to be rethought on "Dutch" (or Danish) lines. The stop lines for the Grays Inn Road lanes going both north and west need to be brought back to before the point at which the lanes split, so that all motor traffic exiting Grays Inn Road can be stopped at once. Then a segregated lane on the left hand side of Grays Inn Road could work, because cyclists could be put through the junction (in various directions) on a signal phase of their own without conflicting with any other flows. This style of engineering at a major, "difficult" junction in Copenhagen was recently described on the Danish Cycling Embassy site.

Many will rejoice at the hint that TfL may consider, in the longer-term, removing the whole, complex Kings Cross gyratory system. I would caution that gyratory-removal does not necessarily produce good cycling conditions. We have recently seen a major gyratory in Pall Mall and Piccadilly removed, with extremely poor results for cyclists. Gyratory-removal is not a cure-all for car-sick, cycle-excluding road-design. It does not even come close, if done badly, that is, if it is done without a central concern for the subjective safety of the cycling experience. Unless cyclists are given clear space on main roads, in the wording of LCC's Go Dutch campaign, unless, in other words, their space is dedicated and properly protected, then cycling in these roads will never feel safe enough for most people to consider cycling there.

The worst possible results for cyclists from gyratory-removal come when new two-way roads are created, as in Pall Mall and Piccadilly, where the lanes are narrow and there is no space for motor vehicles to overtake cyclists when the traffic is flowing, hence cyclists are forced to act as "rolling speed bumps", a very intimidating experience for all but the most hardened vehicular cyclists, and not a role anybody would like to see their child or grandmother play. And when the traffic is not rolling, cyclists are just stuck in the fumes, unable to get through, or tempted to cycle on the pavement. All this may be slightly safer, but is no more appealing and efficient for cycling than the old gyratory arrangements – which is why such changes will not get many more cyclists on the streets, will not reduce motor traffic volume much, and will probably lead, a few years down the line, to the authorities just saying to themselves: "Actually, why don't we try one-way traffic again, we will be able to increase capacity that way and reduce congestion and pollution", and so the gyratory system of traffic-planning fashion will continue to spin.

If you look at cycle-friendly major cities, such as Amsterdam, The Hague, Utrecht, Copenhagen, even Stockholm, Munich and Berlin, you will not see the general removal of one-way systems for motor vehicles. What you will see are comprehensive bypass networks for cyclists, so cyclists are not put through these systems, jostling for space with cars and lorries, as they are in London. There is even a case to be made that one-way systems for motor vehicles are more or less essential in getting them out of the way of cyclists on many streets in dense centres, and for creating long, inconvenient routes for cars and short, convenient routes for bikes, which is one method of prioritising and encouraging cycling.

So I think it is a mistake for cycle campaigners to regard the removal of one-ways and gyratories as a real end of campaigning in itself. There are probably a hundred different possible solutions to the King's Cross traffic mess, but I am sure that the only ones that will make the junction attractive for cycling will be the ones that separate cycle space from motor space comprehensively, and, where those spaces must overlap, separate the cycle and motor flows in time. Whether the roads are one-way or two-way is not exactly the issue.

So apposite the comments of Deep Lee's boyfriend, Kenji, on King's Cross, as quoted in the Camden New Journal article, I'll end with some more of them:

I grew up in Shinjuku, the busiest area in Tokyo. I never heard that such a dangerous junction existed in that city. The council had given a presentation about how the Town Hall was generally meeting its targets and complying with standards. It is just their normal job and duty – it is nothing special to show off like that. For me, because of their laziness, my girlfriend is killed at the junction.

.....

I will be so ashamed that Deep Lee was killed at this junction if I am a member of Camden Council or TfL. This area is known as a blackspot for cyclists. It is so shameful that there exists such a name of a place in Camden and in London, one of the most developed and advanced cities in the world.

It is indeed shameful that this situation has been allowed to continue for so many years. When TfL asked Kenji if the ghost bike could be removed, he told them to "Sort out the junction first".

And kudos to Lib Dem mayoral candidate Brian Paddick, quoted in the same article as saying:

It is better that we have to wait for five minutes in a car than have someone killed.

Candles at the Kings' Cross vigil

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While congratulations are due to racing cyclist Mark Cavendish for winning BBC Sports Personality of the Year, the idea that this could somehow lead to a new respect being shown to everyday cyclists by motorists on the streets of the UK is, of course, absurd. After all, the award has been won by cyclists in the past with no such effect. Such an idea can only be entertained by those who try to promote any solution for generating a cycling culture other than the only proven one, safe cycle infrastructure.

Handing it down

2011-12-20T15:03:00.000Z

So Kim Jong-il is gone in North Korea, and the new ruler will be his son, Kim Jong-un. According to the most primitive method of selecting a ruler of a tribe, possession of the whole nation is just handed on lock, stock, and barrel to the heir by birth, as if it were an estate, or a bureau, or an old bike, or any other material object that can be inherited. The lives and fates of millions and the wealth of the whole nation just handed on by "divine" right of the possessor, to his closest genetic copy. If property is theft, then the greatest theft of all, one of the greatest evils of which people are capable, must be the dynastic, undemocratic handing on of a nation on the death of its ruler.

It's good that the more advanced parts of the world have evolved their constitutions beyond this. But we do have a hereditary monarchy in the UK. Of course, any direct comparison between out Queen and Kim Jon-il would be crass and stupid. Our Queen has merely continued the constitutional system handed down to her. She has not meddled in every aspect of public life (so far as we know), and has definitely not caused a famine of millions of people.

We have a constitutional monarchy. But how constitutional is it? The constitution is not written down anywhere that we can definitively and easily read. I am not all that happy with our constitutional monarchy as it is. In theory, Parliament has been the sovereign body since 1689, and can choose who is to be monarch. It last did this in 1688. Since then it has allowed the succession to continue in the traditional way without interference. It also has not removed all the powers of the monarch over our government and law-making.

The Queen has a weekly conversation with the Prime minister. This is secret. We do not know what they discuss, or how she uses her influence. Probably more seriously, Prince Charles has been interfering in legislation – over "at least 12 bills since 2005" – but the details are obscure. The lack of transparency and explicitness in the relationship between the British monarch and constitution is not good for a supposedly modern democracy. We have a special breed of person in the UK (always an upper-class white man high up in the establishment) called the "Constitutional Expert" who can explain fine points to us about "The Monarchy", "The Queen" "The Crown", "Parliament" and "The State". This is a thing that appears to be unique to the UK. In the Irish Republic, for example, they don't need any "Constitutional Experts"; every schoolchild knows as much about the constitution as anybody does, as it's in a little book that they are all given. It's all written down. That's a real constitution, and real democracy.

I don't think the monarchy is the biggest problem with the British constitution. The biggest problem is the lack of a fair voting system for Parliament. But it's all embroiled in the general antiquated mess. Looking into the British constitutional system is like looking into the cobweb-filled electrical cupboard of a house where the system has not been overhauled by a qualified electrician in 100 years. It may have continued working, after a fashion, for all that time, with ad-hoc solutions and mucking about, but it's an inefficient, dangerous mess that nobody understands and nobody is proud of. And I think it reduces Britain's standing in the world, its influence, and its authority to be able to criticise corrupt, dictatorial and mediaeval political systems elsewhere. Handing over power in the state to the son and heir –"Well, that's what you do in Britain, isn't it?"

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The London Cycling Campaign and London cycle bloggers have organised a vigil at 6pm tonight (Tuesday 20 December 2011) at Kings Cross, to remember the 16 London cyclist deaths of 2011 (twice the total for 2008, the year our current Mayor took over), and protest over the lack of action from him and Transport for London in making the streets of London acceptably safe for those on foot and bike. I hope you can join me there.

Raising awareness

2011-12-17T01:26:00.004Z

Londonneur wrote recently:

I was listening to The Bike Show podcast, which covers recent events. A good portion of it is given over to Mayor Boris responding to Assembly questions.

Amongst what is mainly waffle, I noticed a startling admission. At 21:50 he says that the “whole point” of the Superhighways is “to instruct the motorist that this is a place where you are going to find loads of cyclists, so be careful”.

Well, that’s cleared that up then… The CS is not, in fact, a “superhighway” for cyclists. It is, rather an overpriced and massively over engineered road sign for the benefit of those who choose to drive. How silly of us not to realise. Any expectation that the CS ought to provide priority for cycling is completely unfounded it turns out. Indeed, viewed through the cipher of his statement, the design of the CS starts to make some sense. It wasn’t built for cyclists…

Well this kind of thing is not new. I have spent a couple of decades going to meetings with council officers and consultants in various London boroughs, looking at streets that were proposed to be part of one or another "cycle network", and after being told all the reasons why none of the changes cyclists actually needed to make them safer were possible because of either lack of money, or, more importantly, competing political demands and priorities (e.g. parking supply, motor vehicle capacity, and accommodating taxis and buses), finally getting told that what would be done instead would be to put up a few direction signs for cyclists, and paint some bike logos on the road. What was the purpose of these bike logos? Well, they were supposed to be seen by drivers and to "raise awareness" of cyclists in their minds. This was always the great UK "expert" bike consultants' phrase, "raising awareness", and seemingly the purpose of the routes, and the literally millions of pounds spent on studying them and then doing nothing but getting a man out with paint and a stencil. Not protecting cyclists, just "raising awareness" of them. But where did these "experts" get this idea that such "awareness raising" actually achieved anything to improve cyclists' journeys? What was the evidence-base for it? I asked, and was never supplied with a good answer.

I have cause to often cycle on an east to west course across the Borough of Harrow, from Edgware, near the A5, to Harrow town centre, North Harrow, or Rayners Lane. If you look at the map of Harrow, you will see that there are actually only three roads that run as continuous through-roads east-west across it.

The area between Harrow town centre and the A5

So to do this journey, or many like it across this substantial slab of north-west London (population 230,000) , you have to use one of these three roads. They are:

The A410 Uxbridge Road
Streatfield Road (and its westward continuation Christchurch Avenue)
The A404 Kenton Road

The first and last of these essentially bracket the borough on the north and south sides, and are the major, purpose-built through-routes. The A410 varies between four and two lanes width, building is generally well set back from it, with service roads in places, and it is very heavily trafficked, with several bus routes. It has narrow advisory cycle lanes along some sections, and elsewhere cyclists are directed along service roads. Needless to say, few cyclists use it, with these generous cycling features.

Uxbridge Road, Harrow, typical view

The A404 is four lanes wide all the way and is heavily used, with many buses. It is often congested, particularly at the west end near Northwick Park roundabout. It has intermittent bus lanes, which of course cyclists can use. It is not a scenic nor a pleasant road to cycle on, though not as bad as some, as most of the time there is room for cars to overtake bikes. Its main hazards are the nasty multi-lane roundabouts at either end of it, Kingsbury Circle at the east end and Northwick Park roundabout at the west end. The former can be tackled by a fast, experienced and assertive cyclist, but the latter I advise all cyclists to avoid.

Kenton Road, Harrow/Brent border, typical view

Streatfield Road is the narrow residential rat-run "C" class road inbetween these two A roads (though of course they are all residential roads). This is the kind of road the Dutch would close off, or make one-way for motors in different sections, to remove the through-traffic and allow it to be a pleasant, quiet cycle through-route. As it is, it is a narrow, minor road with high speeds (often in excess of the 30mph limit), with intermittent parking and other pinch-points creating hazards for cyclists, who are constantly overtaken aggressively and with insufficient space. It also has an entirely gratuitous very wide-geometry lozenge-shaped roundabout at the Culver Grove and Kenmore Road junction. But quite a few cyclists use it in preference to the other routes.

Harrow Council seemingly have noticed this, and, presumably, as some gesture towards trying to encourage cycling, have recently painted "awareness raising" cycle symbols on it. Though I am not really sure why they have done it, as so far as I know it is not a designated bike route, and I never heard anything about it through Harrow Cyclists (the LC group). Here is the new paint-work at the Culver Grove roundabout:

Streatfield Road, Culver Grove roundabout, Harrow

And here we are looking the other way from the same point:

Streatfield Road, Culver Grove roundabout, Harrow

Note the bad linear surface defects, creating a hazard exactly where cyclists are likely to be (or likely to get pushed to by fast overtaking traffic in the wide space). Note the geometry of the exit, which makes it very hard for a cyclist on the main route, unless he/she is very fast and assertive, not to get swept to the left and cut up by left-turning traffic. Note the totally inappropriate space on the roundabout, considering it connects two-lane roads. Note how the vegetation on the roundabout blocks the view of what may be coming round it.

Rather than recognise that this road is on a cycle desire-line and fix these hazards, the council has painted these "awareness raising"cycle symbols. They go all the way down. Further west, at Kingshill Avenue, we see how restriction of the carriageway width by chevron markings and pedestrian islands, plus a median strip installed to prevent right turns from Kingshill Avenue and Kingshill Drive and to block that rat-run (for all, including cyclists), have created a "trapping area" where you do not want to be caught on your bike with an aggressive driver trying to squeeze past. Note again the hazardous broken surfaces and the magic "That'll make it all right, wont' it?" awareness-raising bike symbols.

Streatfield Road, Kingshill Avenue junction, Harrow

I have cycled this road many times before the symbols were painted, at all different times of the day, and I have now cycled it several times since the symbols were painted. I can tell you that I am absolutely certain that they have made no difference to the behaviour of motorists whatever. Why should they? Motorists do not know why they are here or what they mean. It is clear to them, as it is clear to cyclists, that nothing to benefit cyclists has actually been done on this road. They can see that this is in no meaningful sense a specific "cycle route". (There are cycle advance stop lines at the Kenton Lane traffic lights, and short advisory lanes leading to them, but these existed before the new symbols were painted. The lead-in lanes are normally rendered unusable by parked cars.)

All the people who used this road as a rat-run before the symbols were painted continue to do so afterwards. They do not moderate their speed when they encounter cyclists any more than they used to. They do not give any more room or give cyclists any more consideration than they ever did. There has been no reduction in dangerous or obstructive parking. Neither have the symbols somehow magically caused an increase in the number of cyclists, which are always a very rare species in these parts. Anybody who believed these symbols would have any of these effects was living in fantasy land.

I have actually gone off using Streatfield Road recently, and been using Kenton Road more, which, although an altogether more fearsome road in terms of scale and speed of motor traffic, at lest does not have so much problem parking, and at least, most of the time, affords cars and buses sufficient room to overtake cyclists safely. The "he's aggressively revving up right behind you while you are taking the lane going through this pinch point" factor is much less.

For cycling on Streatfield Road, and innumerable other suburban rat-run roads like it all over London, is peculiarly unpleasant. The combination of restricted width, heavy traffic, speeding, impatient drivers, parking, pinch-points, bad surfaces, buses stopping (for there are buses on most of these minor suburban through-routes) and badly-designed roundabouts and junctions, leads to a massively stressful experience that people (like this man) who just see such roads on a map, and say "Yes, minor road, not A or B category, suitable place for cyclists, better than main road" simply do not understand.

The road network of Harrow, that I am demonstrating to you, with through-roads like Uxbridge Road, Kenton Road, and Streatfield Road, shows the falsity of the concept that there is a network of minor roads in London eminently more suitable for cycling on than the A roads, which just need a bit of signage and a bit of engineering work to make them into an attractive and effective network. It just isn't really like that. In reality, the political difficulty of making these roads cycle-friendly is at least as great, if not greater, than the political difficulty of installing high-quality segregated cycling infrastructure on big roads like Kenton Road – which would actually be a much more useful solution, if the junctions could be fixed as well, because another reality is that most of the places people need to go most of the time, like shops and stations, are on main roads.

So why do councils get it into their heads that there is any point in painting cycle symbols on these rat-run roads? Clearly, it's a gesture. They want to be able to say that they are thinking of cyclists, but don't want to annoy motorists by removing any space for parked or moving motor vehicles, and they think it is politically suicidal to propose closing heavily-used through roads (though when roads have been closed in similar circumstances, there is rarely a campaign by anyone to have them reopened) . These roads also cannot be traffic-calmed, as they are usually treated as priority routes by the emergency vehicles. So out comes the stencil and the paint. It's not expensive. But if one added together the cost of putting all this useless paint on all the roads in London where it has been applied, over twenty years or so, you probably would be talking about millions of pounds – enough to created one or two genuinely useful cycle facilities here and there. And that's not to mention the cost of the studies that generally precede these paint measures, which always seem to absorb most of the money allocated to cycling in the UK.

The current LCC campaign Go Dutch for "clear space for cycling on London's main roads" gets it right. Creating the space on the main roads where cyclists feel subjectively safe is fundamental to the Dutch cycling paradigm. Yes, the Dutch do a lot to minor roads as well. They do radical stuff there that has the effect of clearing the inessential motor traffic off them and establishing segregation of modes without cycle-paths. But this is the second stage. In a car-dominated society like the UK there is little political appetite for removing the motor rat-runs on the minor roads while cyclists remain such a minor political force, because of their small numbers, because, in turn, there is no obviously safe cycling space on the main roads, which are the really useful roads. In this situation that we are in, motorists, and councils, feel that they cannot sacrifice any of the current road space given over to cars.

Merely slapping down painted symbols of obscure significance, that have no effect of giving any extra legal protection to cyclists, and which do not legally oblige motorists to do anything in particular, does nothing at all for cycling. There is no "awareness raising" effect. These symbols may be noticed by a driver on his regular route once, quizzically registered in his mind, before being integrated into the constant background and forgotten, amongst all the other things that need to be given attention whilst driving.

In London we have wasted decades doing this pointless stuff. There is no evidence that it works. Cycling in suburbs like Harrow has continued falling. Bikes do not "belong" on the minor roads any more than cars do. Give cyclists safe routes on main roads, and then we can think about the rat-runs.

All the fun of the fair

2011-12-15T22:11:00.001Z

This festive season there is a funfair in Hyde Park. I took these photos on the Saturday before last.

The presence of the funfair, and all the other Londoners here for whatever other reason, causes the cycle route at the south-east corner of the park to look like this:

It has become unusable and totally impassable on a bike due to the crowds of pedestrians. It is slow enough on foot. Now of course we all know that the West End does attract crowds at Christmas, and nobody wants to be a killjoy about people enjoying innocent entertainments in the park. But is this sensible? Would the authorities allow the equivalent route for cars, Park Lane, to be rendered impassable to vehicles by crowds of pedestrains? I doubt it.

This kind of situation arising on a major cycle route in London is symptomatic of failure of design and planning. It is a result of cycle facilities, as always, being woven-in around other features of the city as a total afterthought, a squeezed-in compromise between various public authorities all more or less uncomprehending of the actual requirements for proper cycle routes.

There is always a problem with the route at this point. The decent-width of line-segregated cycle and skate path on Broad Walk, parallel to Park Lane, progressively becomes narrowed as it goes round the corner, crosses Serpentine Road (without a clear, sensibly-marked crossing or clear priorities vis-a-vis pedestrians, cyclists and cars) and joins Rotten Row. Here it becomes constrained down to (I guess) a couple of metres width: ludicrous for a heavily-used bi-directional cycle path.

The reason for all this is that when the path was created, which goes back at least 25 years I think (it was part of the Ambassador's Cycle Route put in by the GLC: who remembers that now?), by the gracious goodwill of the Royal Parks authorities, who had never before allowed cycling at all, nothing was actually changed. A line was merely painted bisecting the original pedestrian paths. Since then, cycling in London has greatly expanded, and (wholly inadequate) attempts at implementing dedicated cycle crossings at Hyde Park Corner have been made, other local cycle facilities have been constructed, and these have contributed to an enormous increase in use for both leisure and commuting cycling, this stretch having become a critical part of many cyclists' commute. Yet still nothing has actually been changed.

The southern arm of the cycle path circuit of the park could have been accommodated properly, either by widening the existing path, or, probably better, by moving it completely away from the main pedestrian areas by transferring it to a re-designed South Carriage Drive, where, by reallocating the space on this under-used but fast road, through construction of a proper kerb-segregated bi-directional cycle path, the problems could have been solved, and all pedestrian-cycle conflict eliminated. But these options would have actually involved spending a little bit of money, not on the perennial, pointless "attitude studies" of users so beloved of our parks authorities, but on actually altering things to fit in with how the activities of Londoners have changed over time. The simple fact is that Londoners now want and need to do different things than in the past, and our roads, paths and open spaces do need to change to accommodate these. There needn't be any loss of green space, but there does need to be proper planning for cycling. The space for cycling should, as far as possible, be taken out of roads, not out of paths, and there should be decent, safe, high-capacity designs for the crossing-points between motor and cycle flows.

The tendency in the UK has always been for planners to think of cycling and walking as almost the same thing, to put them into the same "bucket", accommodate them similarly with things like Toucan push-button crossings, and divide between the two modes a pittance of space, leaving the motorised hegemony unchallenged, creating conflict and ill-will between the sustainable transport modes through so doing.

We see this tendency even in recent official publications, such as the Department for Transport's October 2011 policy paper Signing the Way. Although this paper contains some good suggestions, notably the proposal to allow local authorities to put up a sign simple creating an exception to one-way roads for cyclists without any other infrastructure (a practice that has long been normal on the continent), the confusion in thinking over the nature of cycling is apparent in the proposal to allow cycle connections to be established by allowing cycling over zebra crossings. Apparently the CTC has lobbied for this, but it is a foolish idea.

The basic idea of zebra crossings, as places where pedestrians cross the road and all vehicles must stop for them, should not be confused in this way. Instead, cyclists only need proper junctions between proper, clearly demarcated cycle paths and roads, marked with the normal priority markings, or equipped with signals, hence treating cyclists on cycle paths as a proper flow of traffic, as they do in the Netherlands. Cyclists should stop at zebra crossings, they should not ride across them, because they are vehicles. This principle should not become confused. Otherwise, we just get more of the button-and-sheep-pen cycle crossing nonsense (a brand new example of which in Barnet has been videoed by Londonneur).

Cycling is just completely different to driving, and completely different to walking. Though when flows are low and vehicle speeds are kept down, a mixture is sometimes possible, for transport purposes in the centre of a dense, massive city, with heavy flows of all three, the infrastructure should clearly and safely separate the modes and allow none of them to block or render impractical another. This seems to me to be common-sense, and I think it's time our planners caught up with the idea.

Proper treatment of cycle path and road junction: Het Kanaal, Assen, the Netherlands

Foolish confusion of cycle and pedestrian space at a London road junction: Putney Bridge

Walking away from Europe (or should that be driving?)

2011-12-14T02:17:00.005Z

It seems to me that David Cameron's decision to veto the amendment to the Lisbon treaty sets the UK clearly on a course to ultimately leave the EU, or to leave it in all but name. It was an epoch-making decision. The UK could "leave the EU in all but name" if the other 26 members proceed with closer fiscal and political union independently. Ultimately they could decide to exclude the UK from the single market in goods, labour, services and capital, as it would be easy for twenty-six to gang up on the one that was outside the new club. They could make their new rules without the need for unanimity. This is the huge risk that Cameron's decision runs. UK industry (what is left of it) is clearly worried about this too.

It is totally pointless for Nick Clegg to express his "disappointment" about the result of the summit. He is part of this government and he is jointly responsible for all its actions. This is at his door too. If he could not ensure that he, as the leader of the minority party in the coalition, had a veto on the veto, then his coalition seems to have failed at a critical point. The very fact that Timothy Kirkhope, the leader of the Conservative MEPs, feels he has to say "We are still a full member of the European Union and will remain so" indicates how in his mind, and that of many others, we are actually on the way out.

It does seem that withdrawal from the EU is what the British people want:

52 per cent of people agree that the euro crisis is an ideal opportunity for Britain to leave the EU altogether.

The British media has convinced British people of the absurd idea that, in the words of Nigel Farrage,

[Europe has] decided to head off on the Titanic towards economic and democratic disaster and we are now in a life boat.

There has been a massive failure of pro-European leadership in the UK over a long period. It would be hard for youngsters growing up now to understand how it was that the Conservative Party originally took Britain into the EU. Edward Heath's Conservative party was pro-European, but since then the party has become by imperceptible steps more and more anti-European, to the point where nobody notices the fact that David Cameron, regarded as being somewhere in the centre or on the left of his party, is by far the most anti-European leader we have had, not excluding Margaret Thatcher. Cameron made his direction plain even before he became PM, by withdrawing his MEPs from the European People's Party, the main centre-right group in the parliament, and aligning them with various odd far right elements instead. This was a harbinger of the situation we now find ourselves in: on a course heading further and further into the fringes of Europe.

In the last few years no-one in the British political mainstream, to my knowledge, not even the most pro-European, has been arguing that the UK would be better off in the eurozone – which it clearly would have been, particularly had it joined when the zone started. The European argument in Britain has been lost by default. We are abandoning ship. Many agree that ship is The Titanic. But it is not, this belief is mere insular schadenfreude. We are casting ourselves adrift in an open boat while the mother ship sails away with renewed purpose. For the idea that the euro or the EU will fail is absurd to nearly everybody in the rest of Europe. The economic ills of the eurozone counties are no greater, less in many cases, than those of the UK.

The UK has become ridiculously dependent on the financial services industry, and that industry has benefited enormously from the free market in capital. The argument that resulted in the veto revolves around a proposed tax on financial transactions in the EU, 75% of which occur in the City of London. Cameron therefore argued that the UK would be disproportionately affected, which is true. Other leaders argued, however, that any exception for the UK, any difference in the taxes on transactions between different states, would undermine the single market, which is also true. Hence stalemate.

The problem at bottom is therefore the unbalanced character of the UK economy, not anything being done in Europe. The problem is the collapse of British manufacturing. We do not have enough to export any more, we have to import too much, and the stuff we have to import, particularly oil and metals, is becoming much more expensive, hence a huge budget deficit. Blaming this on the American mortgage market of several years ago, or the banks, or the overspending of the Greeks, is bizarre blame-shifting.

Another problem has been the failure to start to put the UK economy on a more environmentally-sustainable basis. The Germans introduced their tough environmental and recycling laws two decades ago, and everybody in the UK at that time said these would bankrupt them, and would bankrupt us if we followed suit. Well, who is bankrupt now? But this is still the view of the present Chancellor of the Exchequer, who views UK and European environmental regulations as a brake on growth, and who feels that sustainability and wealth-creation are opposing desires which need to be "balanced". Hence, for example, this government's new planning proposals, which drive a coach and horses through the whole concept of publicly-controlled planning for the benefit of all, in favour of a market free-for-all.

The German government has genuinely promoted cycling, as the UK's has not. The Germans also introduced (eminently sensible) legislation requiring all bikes to be sold with lights (a idea always resisted by the UK cycle trade). Result: the Germans have developed an industry manufacturing high-quality bike lighting, and we buy all our bike lights from them (or the Netherlands, or Taiwan). OK, this is very small beer on the scale of the motor industry, or most other areas of the economy. But it is an example of the interrelations between environmental policy, industry and economic success in a world trying trying to establish more sustainable economies.

The drift of the UK away from the EU matters to a blog mostly concerned with cycling, this one, because with it goes, most probably, a psychological drift away from more collective, egalitarian and pro-environmental transport solutions, and a drift back towards the exclusive influence of the English-speaking world, the USA, Canada and Australia, with their emphasis on the right to use a car everywhere and for everything. In practice, a political drift away from Europe is likely to make UK transport campaigners' jobs even harder.

One tangential result of all this, however, which has probably not occurred to the Conservative and UKIP europhobes, is that their campaign is also pushing the United Kingdom apart. For the Celtic nations are not in agreement with the English about wanting to sever ties with Europe. The current UK may break away, but this greatly increases the chances of the other parts of the UK breaking away from England, in order to remain as full members of the EU. An independence referendum is on the cards in Scotland in 2014 or 2015, and the SNP wants to make an independent Scotland part of the Nordic group of countries, economically and politically tied to Norway, Sweden and Denmark.

So in seeking to preserve that which they most want to protect, an independent and strong United Kingdom, the anti-Europeans may themselves actually drive its destruction. And then where will England be?

Sticking-plaster solutions for the recession

2011-11-28T16:05:00.000Z

George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer (that's the archaic name we use for our finance minister in the UK, I have to explain for my overseas readers) has announced that he will be using £40 billion of public money to underwrite bank loans to small businesses, as there is perceived to be a problem with these businesses not being able to obtain credit from the banks, and this is said to be hindering the "recovery".

What this amounts to is the government taking over part of the banks' job for them, using the its ability to borrow money at low interest rates to subsidise the loans to businesses. It would mean firms being able to borrow at 4% rather than 5%. Across the political spectrum this is generally regarded as being a good thing.

But it seems to me strange that a Conservative chancellor is effectively nationalising banking in this way. Is this not big-statism, and an interference in the normal commercial working of the banking system, things to which you would expect right-wing politicians naturally to be opposed? What are the implications of this?

The government is able to borrow money at low rates of interest because it is perceived by lenders to be at very low risk of defaulting. Businesses are charged a higher rate by the same lenders because they pose a higher risk. If there is a problem with firms being able to obtain credit, this must be because the banks do not feel certain enough that they will be able to make a profit on the lending without charging a high rate. The credit problem is not a problem with banks being nasty or selfish, it is indicative of underlying contraction or stagnation in the economy: a recession without "recovery".

By nationalising part of the risk of lending to businesses at low rates, the government must reduce its own creditworthiness, creating a risk that it will be charged marginally higher rates in the longer term, as the risks of businesses defaulting on their loans are transferred through government accounts. To an extent, therefore, in an indirect way, this government is advocating a similar approach to that which it is so ready to criticise in the heavily-indebted European countries like Greece and Italy, where interest rates charged to government have spiralled because of uncertainly about repayment in the long term. Where there is uncertainty about economic expansion in the near future, there is no free, easy way out of a credit crunch. The government juggling bits of the lending system between public and private sectors is a sticking-plaster solution which cannot change anything fundamentally because the recession is really out there, for reasons other than what banks do.

Somehow politicians and the media have managed to convince the public that the recession is a product of the problems of the banking sector, rather than the problems in banking being just a symptom of a real fundamental economic problem. The recession was all caused by unwise mortgage lending in the USA, according to many. More recently, the stress has been on the idea that it is all the fault of those running the Euro.

I have always believed that there is an underlying recession which exists because of the reasons that recessions and depressions always occur: commodity shortages and environmental issues, which are opposite sides of the same coin. Problems in banks and national banks are just a delayed manifestation (delayed by borrowing on the future) of the costs coming through due to the effects of global warming, other environmental problems associated with energy-intensive development, and demand for essential commodities outstripping supply with world population growth and the rapid expansion of the emerging economies.

The answers to the crisis are not fiddling with banking and taxation or even radically cutting public expenditure, which will just have to be increased again in the future to sort out the problems created by the current round of cuts. The answers lie in sustainable development, particularly reducing reliance on fossil fuels, better, more efficient planning of society (not a laissez-faire "business always knows best" approach), reviving manufacturing industry, engineering and science, the activities which genuinely create wealth, as opposed to speculation, which does not, making people skilled and productive in areas that genuinely benefit society, making society fairer, more democratic, equal and hence better-satisfied, and above all, controlling global warming and developing a climatically stable and fair development path for the whole planet.

Not easy. The hardest thing will be to convince people that they have to get used to the fact that growth, as defined in the past, will have to stop. There may never be a "recovery". That does not mean that peoples' lives will get worse however. They will have to change. The big challenge for politicians is explaining the difference.

The tragedies at Bow

2011-11-20T23:54:00.001Z

The vigil in the centre of Bow roundabout

There are spaces in our cities that don't exist. These are the places that planners never expected, nor wanted, anybody to go, nor provided any facilities for them to be reached. They have no function except to give shape to the road junctions that flow around them. They are the bleak, dirty, litter-strewn concrete island pavements that the major road planning of the late twentieth century made so familiar to us: the centres of roundabouts, the places under flyovers. But one of these non-existent places took on a remarkable life on Friday evening. In the centre of Bow roundabout, in east London, people gathered to remember the two cyclists killed trying to negotiate that junction, on Boris Johnson's tragically mis-conceived Cycle Superhighway 2. Those people each personally had to take calculated risks even to reach that gathering point. There are no pedestrian crossings; the only way to the centre is to wait for the lights to go red and dash across at the white line, one stage at a time, from one bleak island non-place to the next. To cross when the lights are red, but when you have not seen them just go red, would be very foolish, for they can change again in an instant, and the traffic would be on top of you.

The message of the vigil

The dead cyclists were Brian Dorling, hit by a left-turning lorry while cycling east on 24 October 2011, and Svitlana Tereschenko, hit by a left-turning lorry while cycling west on 11 November 2011. The vigil was organised by the Tower Hamlets and Newham borough groups of London Cycling Campaign. Candles were lit and David Tuckwell, a local cyclist, led a minute's silence. Then the son of Brian Dorling spoke, then his widow, then the sister (I think) of Svitlana, then a local politician – I could not make out who that was, as it was hard to hear proceedings through the throng of 200 people who had turned up. A "Ghost Bike" was set up at the NW corner of the roundabout, where Brian had been killed, while a small shrine to Svitlana was seen at the SE corner, where she died. Press, TV reporters and prominent politicians attended: Brian Paddick, Liberal Democrat candidate for Mayor (who has also been supportive of the cyclists' protests at Blackfriars), and local MP Rushanara Ali. There were many children there, including (I gather) a boy who had actually witnessed Svitlana's death. Poor boy.

Ghost bike for Brian Dorling

Shrine to Lana Tereschenko

Another member of LCC said to me how sad it was to meet at such an occasion. But I said that I could see a good side to this. For of the 33,000 road deaths in the UK over the last 10 years, few can have attracted such attention, caused such outrage, and led to so much political pressure for change as these two. These two deaths were so similar in their circumstances, came so close together, and so soon after the opening of Cycle Superhighway 2, whose opening had been proceeded by such unambiguous warnings from campaigners about the danger of what had been provided there, so clearly against Transport for London's own consultants' recommendations, the deaths being so clearly due to the defects in the design of the Superhighway that anybody who studied it could see, so clearly due to negligent design, that public outrage was inevitable, as was more publicity than has probably ever before followed a cycle fatality on London's roads. The high-profile nature of Boris Johnson's Cycle Superhighways scheme, his personal association with cycling and with this scheme, and the nature of this specific route, being the recommended route for Londoners to use to cycle to the Olympic Park, ensured this. So now there is real pressure for change, both here and on the other Cycle Superhighways, and on London's dangerous junctions more generally. It is sad this was achieved through this succession of events, but it is the good side of this double tragedy.

The "cycle facilities" that killed Brian Dorling

Daytime view to show clearly the defective design (picture courtesy LCC)

The design disaster of the Cycle Superhighway on this roundabout is clearly seen in these pictures. Large lorries and other vehicles are able, and encouraged by the design, to make a high-speed, low angle left-turn across the blue cycle lane. The potential for tragedy was always here, before the lane was painted, because of the inappropriately wide geometry of the turn and the excess lane widths. A cyclist pursuing a prudent course through this roundabout, in its pre-superhighway state, would not have been on that strip on the left, but in a more central position in the left-hand lane, to be clearer of the possibility of the left-hook and more in the line of sight of drivers.

Both the blue strip and the segregated section of lane on the outer edge of the roundabout that have been provided for cyclists have clearly made a dangerous junction far worse for them. The segregated strip is the biggest error. For to aim for its narrow entrance, a cyclist is going have to take the worst possible course, the one that makes it most likely for them to be overtaken on the outside and then mown down by the inattentive driver of a left-turning lorry. The narrowness of the entrance of the segregated section and the precision of the move required to get into it will inevitably slow the cyclist, making it more likely that they will be unwittingly overtaken and ploughed into by a driver having limited visibility from his cab.

This is a totally disastrous mis-application of segregated cycle engineering to a junction – one where the basic problems of the junction have not been fixed, and the best, but still highly unsatisfactory, course for a cyclist remains a high-visibility, fast, vehicular cycling approach, yet they are forced or encouraged to modify that approach to fit in with a facility that does not protect, thus creating a hugely amplified risk. Nobody who understood cycling could have designed this.

Transport for London's consultants on the CS2 project were Jacobs Consultancy. They told TfL that signalised crossings for cyclists were needed and that off-carriageway cycle lanes should be provided around the roundabout, to "encourage less confident cyclists to use the route". Though the wording about "less-confident cyclists" is peculiar – cyclists have the right to protection whatever their level of confidence, and Brian Dorling, for one, was certainly an experienced and confident cyclist – this was correct advice, with which LCC agreed. We know why TfL did not build the crossings. This was made very clear by the answer Boris Johnson gave to London Assembly Member John Biggs in May:

TfL have been unable so far to find an immediate solution for providing controlled crossings at Bow Roundabout that doesn't push the junction over capacity and introduce significant delays to traffic.

"Traffic", here, as usual when "cycling champion" Johnson uses the word, means, of course, motor vehicles. "Significant delays" to pedestrians and cyclists don't matter in the Johnson–TfL world – significant delays such as being dead for the rest of eternity.

This blog is not afraid to pull its punches, and I think we should stop diplomatically hiding the personal decisions of Boris Johnson behind the acronym "TfL". The way TfL is set up, legally, makes the Mayor effectively its dictator. Johnson personally decided on the trade-off between delays to motor traffic and risk to cyclists at this junction, and at others like it all over London. He could have instructed TfL officials to adopt a different policy, but he did not. People have talked about "corporate manslaughter", but I am not sure there is anything particularly corporate here. If there can be said to be manslaughter connected with recent cyclist deaths at at London junctions, there is only one individual behind it. We know where the buck stops.

More broadly, one should consider that if an attempt is being made to set up a safe cycling network in a city, it would make sense to take expert advice from those who have proven experience of delivering this elsewhere in the world. There is no proven experience of creating safe and effective cycle networks in the UK, thus expertise should have been drawn from abroad, ideally from the Netherlands, and officials should have been given the freedom politically to act on the that expertise. I have been saying for the last 20 years that London should get transport engineers for the Netherlands to redesign its roads, but this never happens.

In every industry in the private sector these is a flow of expertise from one country to another; those who are the real experts in every field move internationally to raise standards everywhere. Whether you talk about manufacturing, engineering, banking, media, arts or sports, we do not live in a nationally-compartmentalised world. In every one of these fields the real experts operate internationally, and are called upon to go wherever they can best help and most increase productivity, quality and profits.

But UK road engineering is different. It seems to exist in a bubble of its own that admits little influence or interference from people trained in places that do the same better. There are two aspects here: street engineering involves interrelated technical and political issues. The correct policies need to come from political leadership, but there needs also to be the technical expertise available to best realise the political ambitions when they are clearly crystallised.

We might forget all about cyclists for a moment, and think about how to design major junctions safely for motorists. We have not a clue about this in the UK either. Standing in the centre of the Bow roundabout, it was easy to observe the designed-in chaos of the motor vehicle interactions at this intersection, with, despite the signal control, near-collisions being a constant feature, with honking of horns and sudden braking all the time showing clearly the problems created by the wrong geometry of the entrances and exits, the multiple lanes and excess lane widths. These are not problems of user behaviour. To think in this way, as Johnson seems to, is to not have progressed to a sensible, realistic understanding of the interaction of human beings with the technology of transport infrastructure. These are problems of design.

The Bow intersection is a bad example, but not untypical of major UK intersections. There are many others similar in London. There are many junctions in London that frighten not just cyclists, but motorists, and are hated by many of them. I guess Bow would be one. Another that I know, because motorists in my area have mentioned to me how much they dislike it, is Northwick Park roundabout in Harrow: another chaotic, open geometry, multi-lane gyratory. This is terrifying to cycle on, and I do not do so, except to make a left-turn, and I advise cyclists to avoid it.

Northwick Park roundabout, Harrow and Brent

Another appalling junction that I do cycle through regularly, because, as at Bow, there is no other option for crossing a major linear barrier (the River Lea in the Bow case), is Staples Corner West. This provides the only practical way to cross the North Circular Road on the east side of Brent and the west side of Barnet. Staples Corner West is very similar to Bow Interchange. In both cases the east-west and north-south routes have both been taken across on uninterrupted separate motorway-style infrastructure. In the case of Staples Corner there are two levels of flyovers, for the A5 and the North Circular Road, over a roundabout. At Bow, the A11 is taken over the roundabout and the A12 is taken under. In both cases, slip roads connect these roads to interchange at a signalised multi-lane roundabout. In both cases, cyclists following the commuting desire-lines in and out of central London are faced with a choice of whether to take the flyover, avoiding the roundabout, but risking the low-angle, high-speed interactions with motor vehicles on the slip roads, or to go round the roundabout, risking the chaos there.

Staples Corner roundabout is not quite so bad as Bow as the spaces are not so wide, but it is sufficiently bad to greatly increase my tendency to take the tube into central London rather than to cycle down the A5. There was proposed to be a Cycle Superhighway here as well, CS 11, but TfL thought better of the idea, or Barnet, which part-controls the A5 here, did not want it, so CS11 has been redirected to the A41 (where it will still not penetrate into the anti-cycling Borough of Barnet).

Staples Corner West roundabout in Brent and Barnet

The sources of danger at all these intersections for drivers, pedestrains and cyclists are the multi-lane gyratory arrangements which encourage switching of lanes, the excess lane widths and broad turning geometries which encourage too much speed, the lack of convenient pedestrian crossings at surface level (Staples Corner has a network of little-used elevated walkways, while Northwick Park has a pedestrian tunnel), and the obvious lack of safe cycle facilities.

I am sorry to have to keep repeating myself, but the fact is that the Dutch know how to do roundabouts. They have unrivalled expertise in making roundabouts safer for all road users (including motor vehicle occupants), and it is very hard to undersand why in the UK we continue to pig-headedly avoid importing their expertise. The Dutch design roundabouts according to the principles of sustainable safety, meaning that they make it hard for road users to make dangerous errors. From the Dutch SWOV (Institute for Road Safety Research):

Homogenous use of the infrastructure is one of the Sustainable Safety requirements. On urban main road intersections, where all traffic types meet, this homogeneity requirement translates into reduction of the number of potential conflicts and lower driving speeds. [Dutch] Roundabouts meet this requirement because of their features.

By "homogeneous use" they mean all road users using the infrastructure in the same correct, predictable manner, because it was designed to make them do that. This is the reverse of the junction chaos that UK designs typically create.

Dutch turbo roundabout, from SWOV publication

Here is a Dutch "turbo" roundabout for motor vehicles only. A separate cycle path can be seen to the top right of the picture. The roundabout is designed to satisfy the need for high capacity simultaneously with creating sustainable safety. Vehicles bound for particular destinations, having particular origins, follow fixed, predictable courses through the roundabout. There are two lanes, but no switching and no conflicts. There is only one way to go, chosen by the driver before he reaches the roundabout. This is the simplest possible turbo roundabout, but many more Dutch roundabout designs, of increasing complexity, and including cycle facilities, can be found in this paper.

On relatively low-traffic Dutch roundabouts, cycle lanes may be located on the carriageway round the periphery of the roundabout, provided that the geometry is such that vehicles entering and leaving the roundabout cross the cycle lane almost at right-angles. Here is such a roundabout that I photographed in Groningen:

Unsegregated cycle lane on Groningen roundabout

However this is not the safest nor most modern design, and the Dutch generally provide entirely separate cycle paths around their roundabouts now. This would be the case always when there is a high vehicle flow. The cycle paths cross the motor vehicle entrances and exits almost at right-angles. There are several possibilities for priority. In rural areas the Dutch usually have the give-way markings on the cycle track, but in urban areas, often the motor vehicles have to give way.

One-way unsignalised cycle track round roundabout near Groningen: cyclists give way

Cycle priority on cycle path round Dutch roundabout

These solutions will not be satisfactory where motor vehicle flows are very high, and here signalised crossings for the cycle paths are required, so the crossing of the path with each arm of the roundabout is turned into a separate signalised junction. These signals can either be automatic, phased with other signals, or they can be push-button, or, most satisfactory for cyclists, they can be controlled by a magnetic loop detector embedded in the path which detects the presence of a bike and gives the cyclist a green as he or she approaches the crossing.

Two-way signalised cycle path round roundabout in Utrecht

This technology is so well-established and developed in the Netherlands it is not necessary for us to dangerously experiment with cyclists on busy roundabouts in the UK. The solutions are known. David Hembrow has provided a post which shows and explains every single roundabout in Assen (there are 19 of them), showing the wide variety of designs, and the fact that they all have separate cycle paths incorporated into their design.

Though I am no traffic engineer, or indeed graphic designer, I have made the crude attempt below to show how the part of the Bow roundabout on which Brian Dorling died could be modified to make it safe for eastbound cyclists, using Dutch-style engineering. This is of course not intended to be a definitive solution, but merely demonstrative of a possibility.

My suggested design for Bow

All TfL's blue markings need to be imagined as removed. An off-road cycle track is needed to cross the entrances and exits from the A12, some way back from the point at which vehicles make their turn. The kerblines need to be altered so that the turns off the roundabout are tightened, and vehicles cross the cycle track slowly and perpendicularly. Because of the very high volume, signals are essential for the track and slip road intersections. These would allow pedestrians to cross as well. Each crossing of the track by a slip road needs to become a small signalised junction. The lights could be phased to allow cyclists fast passage across both the exit and entry slip road, stopping only once, if at all. This solution is the sort of thing that can easily be produced within existing space constraints once throughput of motor vehicles ceases to be the over-riding criterion. Motor occupants benefit too from a safer, calmer, more predictable junction.

Fixing the Bow roundabout would not fix Cycle Superhighway 2, which I cycled on my way back from the vigil on Friday. The rest of it is a travesty of safe cycle infrastructure as well. The blue lane, marked intermittently in the inner half of the bus lane, does nothing to remove conflicts between cyclists and buses and conflicts at other junctions. This lane has no legal force, not being a mandatory cycle lane (not bounded by a white line), and it gives cyclists no protection in law, nor in practice. The A11 is a horrible road with a peculiarly aggressive "Gotham City" feel to it as you cycle towards the huge, overbearing towers of mammon of the City of London, looming up ahead. The implementation of this Superhighway, of all of them, was uniquely disappointing, as the space for creating proper, segregated cycle tracks on both sides of this road was so clearly present, even without alteration of the current vehicle lanes. The road is enormously wide, with much unused pavement space.

Bow Road, the A11, photo by Oxyman, taken before the implementation of the Superhighway. Plenty of space here for a wide segregated cycle track.

Basically, the Superhighway here, as with all of them, was done quickly, on the cheap, and with no coherent thinking on what it was actually supposed to do, save for waymarking a route which was obvious anyway: it is, after all, just the main road, the one that anybody cycling from the City to Stratford has to follow.

As I pointed out in my last post, it was clear at least as far back as August 2009 that the Cycle Superhighways were going to be like this. That was when TfL told LCC that:

Cycle Superhighways does not have the time or the budget to... seek major changes to traffic operations (e.g. via side road orders or controversial Traffic Regulation Orders).

Traffic Regulation Orders are the legal mechanism used in England and Wales for all significant alterations to highways, such as altering lanes, changing parking arrangements, or altering junctions. In ruling out seeking these, the Superhighways team was making clear that nothing would actually change on these roads. At that time I advocated that LCC should condemn the Superhighways programme and call for it to be stopped. Now, at its AGM last Wednesday, LCC has finally done that. In an Emergency Motion, overwhelmingly passed, the meeting resolved to:

1. Call upon TfL to immediately redesign the Bow roundabout junction, providing continuous, safe East-West cycle crossings and safe approaches and exits.

2. Call upon TfL to halt work on the remaining Superhighway routes until issues of road space reallocation and junction danger are addressed and resolved.

3. Call upon the Mayor to intervene and give TfL the mandate and political direction to provide clear space for safe cycling on London's main roads.

4. As part of out "Go Dutch" campaign, seek a commitment from the mayoral candidates that the Cycle Superhighways will be completed (including resolving barriers on existing routes) to the highest international best practice standards, in accordance with LCC's "Go Dutch – Key Principles" document.

TfL's response so far to the furore over the Bow deaths has been to announce the following:

Work is beginning on how London gears up to move to the next level of cycling infrastructure and continuing to improve safety for cyclists.

This includes a commitment from TfL to review all major schemes planned on TfL roads as well as to review all the junctions on the existing cycle superhighways.

That work will include an assessment of Bow Roundabout, which TfL have been asked to report back to the mayor on as a matter of urgency.

This could be interpreted as progress, but it could be intepreted as fobbing-off. We have had reviews and studies of cycling in London until our eyes fall out. What we need is not more reviews by TfL, but a change in policy by Boris Johnson, away from putting motor vehicle throughput above safety for all road-users. If these reviews are a face-saving way of him making this change, that is good. But I worry that what will come out of this will be some nonsense such as merely moving the blue lane at Bow roundabout from the outside to the middle of the carriageway. "The next level of cycling infrastructure" sounds fascinating. Is this the level where cyclists only get their limbs crushed under lorries, as opposed to their heads? For I believe that is what actually happened to both the victims of Bow.

I, for one, would like to see Boris Johnson apologise personally to the relatives of Brian Dorling and Svitlana Tereschenko, and personally promise to them to start to mend London's deadly junctions, in Brian and Lana's memory. I end with a video I made of the one minute's silence on Friday.

Cycle danger in London and the predictable, grim farce of the Superhighways

2011-11-16T02:46:00.002Z

While I was finding "Causes for optimism in November", others were not being so cheerful about the state of cycling in London. The Tour du Danger protest ride against the policies of Transport for London, particularly its refusal to redesign dangerous junctions to make them safe for cycling, which was organised by ibikelondon and Cyclists in the City, attracted a large crowd. They were spurred on by, firstly, the second cyclist death in three weeks on Cycle Superhighway 2 at the Bow Roundabout, and, secondly, by Boris Johnson's outrageous comments in response to questions in the London Assembly about cyclist safety, perhaps the worst of which was:

One of the first cycle superhighways takes you round the back of Elephant & Castle – that cunning little cut-through that I sometimes use.

Though I have to tell you ...sometimes I just go round Elephant & Castle because it's fine. If you keep your wits about you, Elephant & Castle is perfectly negotiable.

This, about the statistically most dangerous junction in London, that has seen 89 cyclists casualties in the last two years. That statistic alone tells you, even if you have never visited the place, that Elephant and Castle is not "fine", and it is not "perfectly negotiable", irrespective of where your "wits" are. It is unacceptably dangerous for cyclists, just as are literally hundreds of other junctions and sections of road across London. Though TfL keep creatively finding ways to combine statistics to suggest that cycling in London is getting safer, as in this attempt:

It is encouraging that the proportion of cycling collisions on TfL roads that result in fatal or serious injuries has declined since 2008, indicating that the severity of collisions is falling,

in fact the casualty rate per mile cycled in London is getting worse, according to Department for Transport figures:

A claim that cycle casualties per journey are declining, that TfL makes in this document, is statistically dubious, for the reasons explained in this valuable blogpost. In any case this is an irrelevant statistic, as it is the casualty rate per distance travelled that is the real measure of risk. This last-mentioned reference does demonstrate that we actually haven't got much of a clue as to what the cycling rate in London really is, so it is very hard to tell how risky it is, and how the risk is changing. As with everything in cycling, the Dutch do this better. The Dutch have a saying, measuring is knowing. The Dutch know what their cycling rate is, because their cycling is largely on cycle paths, and they have automatic counters on the cycle paths that look like this, that tell them how many cyclists use the routes:

Cycle traffic counter in Groningen

Because, in the UK, we don't actually know what the split of cycling is between major roads, minor roads, pavements and paths, and in most of those places, we don't count cyclists, we haven't really got a clue about how much cycling there is, and how dangerous it is. What we can say is that people increasingly feel that cycling in London is too dangerous. That is what the cyclists on the Tour du Danger were there to highlight, and to highlight, specifically, Transport for London and Boris Johnson's failure to redesign the streets and junctions they control with cyclist (and pedestrian) safety in mind. And they succeeded in highlighting it. The mainstream media is noticing this issue as never before. And, as I write, TfL have been forced to respond on Bow:

Transport for London (TfL) director Ben Plowden promised to look "very closely" at the cycling superhighway which ran through the Bow Roundabout.

He also said cyclists would be advised to avoid the route, which runs to the Olympic Park, during next year's Games.

Where else cyclists will be advised to go, to get to the Games, is not clear to me. Also, the question is, what is there to look at "very closely", that was not looked at last year when the design of the Superhighway was decided upon against all advice from cycle campaigners? Nothing has changed. TfL took a deliberate decision then to risk the lives of cyclists rather than produce a proper design for cycling. The two cyclists who have died there paid the price of that decision. Looking at this one roundabout "very closely" will not fix it, nor any of the others of hundreds of dangerous junctions and roads in London, without a fundamental change of approach from TfL.

For TfL's approach to cycling reflects the views of Boris Johnson closely. Where he says "it is just fine, so long as you keep your wits about you", and, again, "sometimes I don't think that physical streetworks are the answer", he is, as a cyclist himself, only expressing a type of view that has always had some currency amongst British cyclists: the view that the issues are personal and a matter of character and determination, not public, structural and political. This view is exemplified by the slogan, as formulated by David Hembrow, "I cycle, so you could cycle too". It demonstrates a profound lack of insight into how human beings operate, a profound failure of empathy – a quality you would have thought a successful politician would need. As Green Assembly Member Jenny Jones put it:

The Mayor is an experienced cyclist who wants roads that are safe for him to cycle around. In contrast, I am an experienced cyclist who wants roads that are safe for a twelve year old to cycle on. That is the gulf between us.

But I thought Charlie Holland on the Kennington People on Bikes blog put it best:

As an experienced motorist, cyclist, cycling instructor and trainer of cycling instructors I'd like to say that the Elephant & Castle and the majority of the Cycling Superhighways are bloody awful for cycling - which is why you hardly see any secondary school children, especially girls, cycling there.

Most of the motorists I know dislike many of TfL's roads and junctions, and they've undergone loads of training and a test! So what are the odds of your average soft, squidgy person who can't drive merrily pootling around these roads on bikes? Bugger all...

In the Netherlands they work really hard to make the route for cyclists friendly, obvious, direct and safe, subjectively and statistically, because they want their children to cycle and they recognise their vulnerability.

Here Boris just tells the boys and girls to grow some cojones and jump in front of the HGVs.

What a pillock.

Charlie later changed the last word to "buffoon", but I prefer his original.

So the Cycle Superhighways project always reflected Boris's view that what was really needed to get people cycling was publicity, encouragement and razzmatazz, not safe, clear cycling space on the roads. It was thus always going to be an entirely predictable, grim farce. Many are now saying that the scheme needs rethinking or abandoning, but to me (and I am not pleased to have been proven right by events), the failure was apparent from the early planning stages of the Superhighways. In August 2009, I urged London Cycling Campaign, under its then Chief Executive, Koy Thomson, unsuccessfully at that stage, to withdraw co-operation from, and support for, the whole Superhighways project. When Brent Cyclists was asked to help with the planning of Superhighway 11, proposed to run along the A5, I wrote, on 6 August 2009, the following to Thomson:

My option is that we should not take part. I am certainly not inclined to take part after having put a lot of effort into LCN+5 (more or less the same thing as Highway 11) which achieved absolutely nothing.

I think the whole LCC policy on the Highways (or are they Superhighways, TfL can't seem to make up its mind) is now wrong. We should rethink. 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.

The email below [not quoted here] from Koy, Rik [Andrew] and Tom [Bogdanowicz] says:

"The TfL presentation makes clear that the infrastructure element will be accompanied by soft measures such as cycle training, parking and promotion of cycling."

In fact, the presentation makes clear there will be no infrastructure element. Even the few slightly promising-sounding elements in the earlier (May) TfL presentation, particularly closing-off side roads along the routes, and "reorganising" parking and loading, seem to have been ruled out in last week's presentation, on Slide 9, "Constraints" where it says "Cycle Superhighways does not have the time or the budget to... seek major changes to traffic operations (e.g. via side road orders or controversial Traffic Regulation Orders". If B[oris] J[ohnson] did not realise that prioritising cycling would be controversial, why did he start on this in the first place?

The next paragraph on that slide is key for Route 11: the statement "The Boroughs are King". LB Barnet continues to be totally opposed to putting a route on the A5. It stopped LCN+5 and it will stop this. There is absolutely no point in us putting any more work into it before we get a definitive statement of a change of policy from Barnet. All the issues for the section from Kilburn High Road northwards have been covered fully in the LCN+5 CRISP report anyway.

In short, though I can see the argument that LCC needs to make the Highways as good as possible within the constraints, after last week's presentation, I think the balance of advantages to LCC (and London cyclists) has now shifted to one where we would gain more from publicly opposing the Highways scheme, and making a big media thing of doing so, rather than from being associated with the total failure and embarrassment that they will surely be.

Am I alone in LCC in thinking this?

David Arditti

This is a complete and unabridged quote from the email that I wrote in August 2009. I found the policy of conciliation and cooperation with TfL on the manifest impending disaster of the Superhighways, favoured by Koy Thomson, "for fear of losing all influence" to be very unfortunate. Since then, and with a new chief executive, LCC has changed its tone on the Superhighways a great deal, and I support their current position.

I was perfectly right then in pointing to the fundamental problem that anti-cycling boroughs like Barnet were able to veto the Superhighways. That is what happened to CS 2 when it reached the borough of Newham. The anti-cycling Mayor of Newham, Robin Wales, caused CS 2 to stop dead at the Bow roundabout, with no further facilities. The Superhighway may not have been any better implemented on that roundabout had Wales allowed it to continue into Newham, for, as Assembly Member John Biggs was told, it was TfL, not Newham, that was so obsessed with not reducing the traffic capacity of the Bow roundabout as to not be prepared to put in any signals for pedestrians or cyclists. Cycle Superhighway 11 has not yet been "built" (i.e. painted), but it is now planned, like CS 2, to just end, bang on the border of the Bikeless Borough of Barnet, at another nasty junction (the junction of the A41 Hendon Way and Finchley Road), where cyclists will, again, just be "dumped".

Contrary to their protestations, TfL's officials seem to learn no lessons in stumbling from the failed implementation of one Superhighway to the next. Here is Leon Daniels, TfL's Managing Director of Surface Transport, answering a question from Assembly Member Joann McCartney last month (p33 of the minutes of the GLA Transport Committee):

Joanne McCartney (AM): This Committee looked at cycle superhighways and we came up with a list of recommendations which included having a minimum standard on all of the superhighways, for example a minimum two metre wide blue strip, about improving consultation prior to a superhighway going in and about revisiting the pilots to make any improvements that were necessary. I am just wondering how you got on with some of those recommendations?

Leon Daniels (Managing Director of Surface Transport, TfL): Again, loads of lessons to learn from the initial cycle superhighway not just in respect of the superhighway schemes themselves but also the way in which the construction is done and the disruption to general traffic and so on. In just about every case we are looking to - this is a big compromise because, at the end of the day, the carriageway space is fixed and therefore we are trying to squeeze a quart into a pint pot.

I agree entirely with you about minimum widths and so on. Just in some places, on the ground, practically, we are faced with what we have to do. In many cases - and Members will know some of these - there is a requirement for a certain footway width, the frontages need some space, there are requirements for loading and unloading, we need to keep ordinary traffic moving as well and, therefore, in many cases, we are shoehorning this into a narrow space. I agree entirely with you that a minimum width for cyclists is desirable but, again in many cases, we are stuck with what we can do practically and cost effectively.

So there you have it. It's a case of "trying to squeeze a quart into a pint pot". It's a case of a minimum width being desirable, but "we are stuck with what we can do practically". What Daniels is clearly saying here is that, though this is supposed to be a scheme for cycling, cyclists are, in reality, still at the bottom of the pile on these roads. Footway requirements can't be altered, loading requirements can't be altered, and capacity for "ordinary traffic" can't be reduced (he might as well have said "proper traffic", that would probably have better reflected the way he was thinking), so the thing that has to "give" is space for cycling. Cycling needs no space, right, because cycles are so narrow? After starting by saying "Loads of lessons to learn", Daniels makes it crystal clear he is learning nothing at all. He is sticking to the same old "big compromise" line (i.e. compromise into meaninglessness) that has caused all London cycle infrastructure schemes over the last 20 years to fail, from the London Cycle Network, to LCN+, to the present.

I don't think Daniels, or Johnson, have the slightest idea what proper cycling infrastructure looks like, what it actually does, or how it can be implemented. I don't know if they have seen what they have in Holland, Denmark and Germany. Maybe they have, but just concluded, in classic British fashion, "This is not why they cycle here, they cycle here because it is flat". Presumably they have never seen the cycling infrastructure in Switzerland, Austria and Italy. Certainly Boris seems to make a big thing out of hills. When the ex-coordinator of Harrow Cyclists, Colin Waters, tacked Boris at a public meeting in March 2010 in Harrow School, on the question of why the Superhighways were no good, Boris totally avoided the question, turning it to humour, loudly asking Colin, to the audience, "Goodness me, did you cycle here? Up this fearsome hill? Congratulate that man, give him a round of applause!"

Boris's vision of a "cycle-ised city" (a phrase he copied from LCC) seems to be of a city pretty much as it is now, with perhaps a few more cyclists fitted in, in the gaps between the cars, just to take up space more efficiently, and take a few more people off the tubes. It's not a vision of the radically reconfigured, re-prioritised, safe, people-friendly environment developed by the Dutch and Danes. For some reason, he thinks that's no good, or not possible here. The fact that, in his vision, some cyclists fitted into those little gaps are inevitably going to get squashed by the motor vehicles doesn't seem to occur to him, or if it does, he thinks he can't do anything about it. He thinks that "physical streetworks are not the answer". He won't admit the bleeding obvious, that it is the physical state of his streets now that is the problem.

I don't really see him and his cohorts moving on from that position. We need change at the top.

Causes for optimism in November

2011-11-08T23:21:00.001Z

Grey November is here in London, and a very grey, damp one we have been having so far. But every season has its place, and there is nothing wrong with the grey dampness of the London November, in its place. It provides a contrast to golden October, a pause before the hardness of winter sets in, with the (sometimes forced) jollity of the Festive Season, and, with nothing much growing or needing harvesting any more, and no sky to see, a time for reflection, with few distractions from the natural world. As Thomas Hood wrote in 1844:

No sun - no moon!
No morn - no noon -
No dawn - no dusk - no proper time of day.
No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
No comfortable feel in any member -
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds!
November!

And so I cycled off yesterday, armed against the darkness and damp of November with a new Schmidt dynohub, which perhaps I will review sometime (brief review: it is a superb gadget), to plan Brent Cyclists' Infrastructure Safari. This ride will take place this Saturday, 12 November. I am sorry that it coincides with another high-profile ride in central London, Mark and Danny's Tour of TfL's 10 most dangerous junctions for cyclists, but my ride was scheduled first. Its idea is somewhat the reverse of Mark and Danny's ride. We will not be deliberately going to dangerous places. The idea of this ride is a constructive one, to look at as many implemented examples of cycle infrastructure in inner London as possible on a short ride, to critique them and assess how they are working, note how they could be improved, and also note locations with no infrastructure, which patently need it.

What I am going to say next is purely based on subjective opinion arising out of my exploratory ride yesterday, interspersed with the odd fact, but I think it is worth saying, bearing in mind the highly negative (but I believe realistic) articles I have written recently about the state of cycling in outer London. It should be borne in mind that when I lived in the Borough of Camden, up until eight years ago, I cycled in inner London every day. Since moving to the outer suburbs, I have been cycling less to the centre. So I am perhaps more likely to notice the gradual changes there, on the occasions when I do cycle down, than those who now cycle there every day.

The disclaimer is that because I was exploring cycle infrastructure, I was likely to be going to places where more cyclists are; even poor cycle infrastructure has some positive effect on cycling numbers, in my experience. Also I was cycling around at peak time on a weekday.

What I have to say is that I got the feeling that cycling in inner London, particularly in Camden, Islington, Southwark and the City, has taken off in a new way, that I had not seen before, and is now probably on an irreversible upward trend. Last week, at an event I attended in Parliament, on behalf of the Cycling Embassy of Great Britain, the Cycle Rail Awards Ceremony (never mind what that is, it's not important), the well-known transport commentator Christian Wolmar stated that "cycling in parts of London has now almost reached Dutch levels". This is an exaggeration. The highest-cycling borough, Hackney, had, in 2009, a mode share of 6% officially recorded, and though it might have gone up since, it is unlikely to be comparable with the mode share of cycling in Dutch city centres, which I guess would be typically above 50%, since they have whole cities, including suburbs, with a mode share of 30–50%.

Nevertheless I felt, riding yesterday, that a qualitative as well as a quantitative change has occurred in cycling in central London. It felt very different to how it felt only a couple of years ago. It is also starting to look different. Yes, it is still dominated by young to middle-aged men wearing high-viz and helmets and riding fast bikes fast, but not so much as before. There seems now to be a high proportion of women in the mix, mostly young women. There seem to be more continental-style bikes on the road – practical, town bikes with hub gears, mudguards and chainguards, integral lighting, luggage-carrying features, and an upright riding position. I even saw a lady on a sit-up-and-beg bike with handlebars decorated with flowers, as you see all the time in the Netherlands. The sedateness of the Boris Bikes seemed to have made its impact on the cycling atmosphere as well.

Starting my journey from north Brent, I saw there is still no cycling at all to speak of north of the North Circular Road. But after going through the horrible Neasden pedestrian/cycle underpass, getting into south Brent, on the quieter backstreet routes and in the parks, I was seeing women on bikes, and even families of children on bikes. And from Camden Town onwards there seemed to be a flood of people on bikes. When I cycled around Camden a decade and more ago (when I was involved in planning the Camden segregated cycle tracks with Camden Cycling Campaign), when I stopped at junctions, I would need to be wary of the cars around me, wondering what the drivers were likely to do, but I would not have checked for the presence of cyclists behind me, because there would never have been any (as in outer London today). But yesterday there seemed to be cyclists behind me all the time, if they were not in front or to the sides.

The cycle facilities in inner London still do not make up anything resembling a coherent network, on the Dutch or Danish or German pattern, but some of the gaps that used to annoy me intensely have now been closed up. In Camden, Islington and the City, at least, there now seems to be the beginnings of a functioning network. There has been an improvement in cycle permeability, and also a fall in motor traffic. This last is not an opinion, but a fact, confirmed by a useful analysis by Jim Gleeson.

The segregated cycle facilities in Camden are now getting absolutely packed, confirming both the popularity of this style of engineering with a broad range of cyclists (though still not adopted widely by other boroughs, or by Transport for London on its Cycle Superhighways), and the fact that these highly-engineered routes are now being fed better by better bike permeability elsewhere. This is what we always intended, in Camden Cycling Campaign, in our campaigning for them in the late 1990s. We never imagined many London roads would have segregated cycleways on them – just a few, to create a few high-profile, highly-attractive routes, in the Dutch style, fed by lower-profile permeability and cycle priority measures on other routes.

The signs are that this has worked, and I felt for the first time, on this journey, that the undoing of this work has now become unimaginable. Though, as I have reported before, there have been threats to the Camden segregated cycle tracks, I can't see them being taken away now: they are too popular. Unless, that is, cyclists were to be given the whole road, as they have been in Goldsmith's Row, Hackney, where a segregated cycle track was removed. But I can't see this happening in the Camden cases – there is too much commercial activity needing servicing by motor vehicles on these streets, so the segregated tracks remain the best solution.

The tracks still stop dead at the Westminster border, though the routes notionally continue. There has been no change in the anti-cycling attitude of Westminster Council (though they are, for reasons of their own budget, now starting to reduce free parking, which should benefit cycling). But the City Corporation has had something of a turn-around in attitudes, and the effects of this are noticeable.

There remains much to do in the City. The very useful Queen Street and King Street corridor north of Southwark Bridge, extending Cycle Superhighway 7, that I noted in my article on the bridge, has become such a high cycle-traffic route it needs to be converted to a proper bicycle road, Copenhagen style, with priority at the junctions, and none of the silly button-pressing and confusion with pedestrian facilities that currently occurs at the Cheapside junction. The Gresham Street to Moorgate route via Coleman Street is also so popular it needs regularising, with a properly signlised crossing of London Wall, for bikes only.

Back in Camden, I saw, and perhaps this is the first time this has ever occurred in British history, proper measures to divert and keep protected a cycle route when the usual route is closed by building work. This is a diversion on the Royal College Street two-way cycle track:

Diversion currently operational on the Royal College Street cycle track, Camden (picture courtesy Jean Dollimore).

I noted the problem with these works back in June, and I know that Jean Dollimore, co-ordinator of Camden Cycling Campaign (whom I happened to meet yesterday on the track: two-way cycle tracks are particularly sociable places) has been working hard to try to resolve it since then. My earlier photo showed the famous UK-standard "Cyclist Dismount" signs on the track. Now the solution implemented by Camden officers looks so good it is almost as if they have been reading A view from the cycle path.

Just to cast our minds back, before 1998 this road was a three-lane one-way race track for cars, with cyclists directed to a wiggly and inconvenient back street route. Just like Matthew Wright now thinks is the best, indeed the only practical, solution for London cycling. Since then one lane for cars has been removed, and the remaining two lanes have been narrowed and calmed, to make way for the cycle track and segregating strip. Now, one of the remaining lanes has been taken away from cars to keep cyclists safe for the expected 6–12 months duration of the building work. Note the child cycling in the picture. Segregated cycle tracks on main roads are particularly crucial to getting children cycling. Keeping them safe and the priorities unchanged when works are carried out is particularly critical, as the Dutch know. It seems that one London council is now aware of this as well.

Unfortunately I can't lavish too much praise on Camden council, as two other important cycle routes in the borough, that I used yesterday, are also blocked by street works, and without satisfactory mitigating measures for cyclists. One is in Tavistock Place between Marchmont Street and Judd Street. Jean informs me this blockage, for cable-laying, should only last a few days. At least the closure of the track here is clearly signed in advance. The other is Malet Street, in the centre of the University of London, where major street rebuilding work, taking a long time, should have had temporary cycle facilities incorporated, on this very high-cycling street. The result of the lack of them is cyclists annoying pedestrians on the pavement.

Cycle facilities in Islington looked relatively neglected, with a failure to sign routes consistently. In the City and Islington, cyclists were not directed around temporary blockages to their routes.

Going back out to Brent, I found that there is still a lot of work needing doing on permeability there, in the southern parts of the borough that I don't often cycle in. Brent did attempt at one time to create an off-road cycle path linking Canterbury Road, near Queens Park Station, to Kilburn High Road, but the details of the execution are poor, without even dropped kerbs in the right places. For this route to be useful, something needs to be done about the dangerous gyratory system around Queens Park Station. There needs to be a bypass to get cyclists from Albert Road to Salusbury Road without getting involved in the one-way system. Then very simple bike permeability measures, like cut-throughs at the road closures of Chevening Road/Winchester Avenue and Christchurch Avenue, where they meet Brondesbury Park, and Lechmere Road at Willesden High Road, have not been thought of.

Basically, the pattern is that conditions for cycling deteriorate as you go out from the centre of London, with fewer and worse cycle facilities, and the number of cyclists falls off correspondingly. The divide between the two cities, inner and outer London, the first of which has clearly had at least a bit of a "cycling revolution", and the other, which certainly has not, is becoming more and more striking.

I don't believe in the thesis of "safety in numbers". Cycling safety comes from good infrastructure design, and that then gets the numbers up – the safety does not come from the high numbers themselves. This is demonstrated by the increasing casualty rate amongst London cyclists, both absolutely and relatively, despite their rising numbers. This is a great cause for concern, and can fairly be blamed on Transport for London's lack of concern for the safety of cyclists, and their prioritisation of motor vehicle flow, as most casualties are occurring on the major junctions managed by TfL, not the boroughs. The boroughs are increasingly concerned about this, and are speaking out publicly about it. Anger, particularly at recent deaths at London's major junctions, widely commented to be unsafe for cycling, is behind the ride around the 10 most dangerous junctions.

It may be that a tipping-point has been reached in central London, where the number of cyclists has now become so great that they can exert themselves, through protests, conventional lobbying of politicians, and through the London Cycling Campaign, as a serious political force for gaining real change on the still, for the most part, far too hostile roads. If so, this would generate even more cycling, and a virtuous circle of rising cycling and improving conditions would be established, the reverse of the cycle of decline that I described operating in outer London. Not wanting to be complacent, it now looks to me, for the first time, on the basis of yesterday's ride, on a cold, damp November evening, as if that point could have been passed, and that inner London could be leading a revival of cycling in the UK, ahead of such traditional English cycling towns as Cambridge, Oxford and York, and despite many of the policies of London's mayor.

If you are interested in the Infrastructure Safari, join Brent Cyclists at 11:45 on Saturday at Gladstone Park Railway Bridge (the foot of Parkside, NW2). A meeting point closer to the centre could be arranged if anyone not from Brent wishes to join us.

What people are saying about the M5 crash

2011-11-07T13:57:00.004Z

Helen, a.k.a. Mrs Vole, who spends more time on the internet than most, with a focus on transport (some people do have strange girlfriends), comments on how the crash is discussed in rather contrasting terms, comparing news websites and cycling forums. On the news, the focus is on the fireworks display, the smoke, fog, poor visibility, rain and wet road. On the cycling newsgroups, they talk about speed and tailgating. In those discussions there is understanding of the concept of "contributory factors", whereas the general news channels look for the "cause" of the crash.

I sometimes think that perhaps all the most intelligent motorists are cyclists – at least part-time cyclists.

Hopefully there will be one last casualty of the M5 crash: the government's idea of increasing the speed limit on motorways to 80 mph (129 km/h).

More on this in a good article from Peter Willby in the Guardian: "Ministers are nudging drivers in the wrong direction".

Some more thoughts on Dutch cycling

2011-11-04T01:53:00.004Z

It is over a month since I returned from the Cycling Embassy of Great Britain study tour in the company of David Hembrow. I have referred to this tour quite a lot here already, but there are some major points that I took from it that I have not covered, and, in the light of a suddenly increased interest in the UK as to what "Going Dutch" could and should mean, I think it is a good idea to go into these.

The tour was very enjoyable as well as enlightening, and I hugely recommend anyone who has the slightest concern with developing cycling in any country other than the Netherlands to follow in our footsteps, and get over to Assen to do it. The Embassy hopes to put together another group to go next September, so start thinking about it. Or, if you want to go at any other time, David Hembrow will try to oblige.

For those "real cyclists" amongst you, don't imagine that "study tour" like this is all cerebral and nerdy. Well, it was a bit cerebral and nerdy, with plenty of photographing of bollards and videoing of traffic light sequences, but it was also physically enjoyable. Cycling 70 km in a day on a solid three-speed sit-up and beg Dutch bike with all the accessories was something the like of which I had done for a long time, and it was fantastic. Perhaps the highlight for me was the dynamo-illuminated night ride on cycle paths back from Groningen to Assen on the last day, which some of our party foolishly absented themselves from, by wimping out and taking the train! Taking the train with a bike in the Netherlands is extremely easy, and so always a temptation. I can't blame them.

How did the trip affect my views on providing for cycling? Well, the trip did not change my views in any major way, but it cemented and developed them. I had already understood the elements of Dutch cycle policy and infrastructure provision from reading A view from the cycle path, other websites, and talking and corresponding with others who had spent time cycling there. But there really is no substitute for experiencing it yourself. The cycling environment is so utterly different from what we have in the UK that we really cannot imagine it from this side of the North Sea. It is hard to adequately describe. It has to be felt, seen, and experienced. The scale, quality, ambition and complex diversity of the system developed to allow average people to cycle safely, comfortably and conveniently to anywhere they need to go in the whole country is beyond what I would have guessed, and beyond what any of us expected.

There were some situations where I thought I knew what the Dutch solution was, but what I found was that there was far more diversity in the solutions as used in different places than I expected. There are many possible ways in which cycle space can be arranged in towns and countryside, and I found that there are often several Dutch solutions to the same question. The Dutch have experimented constantly with cycle provision. So you don't find consistency, but do do find a large range of possible solutions to problems. Whatever the traffic or infrastructure problem is, that is hindering cycling, there is a Dutch solution, and, usually, a choice of solutions.

One point about which my opinions needed revising were give-ways, and the significance of them. Having gone around for a long time telling people in the UK that Dutch cycle tracks have priority over roads that they cross, if the junctions are not signalised, I found that often this is not the case. There are quite a lot of give-ways on Dutch cycle tracks and paths. Not in the way we have in the UK, where you get shared-pavement cycle routes with stupid give-ways at driveways and minor side turnings – Dutch cycle tracks always have priority over minor roads. But the Dutch paths, particularly when not adjacent to roads (i.e. when tending towards the suburban or rural cycle path model rather than the urban cycle track model) do often give way when crossing major roads, as minor roads would do, and they sometimes give way to the arms of roundabouts when encircling them. However, I discovered that in practice this is not a problem, for in an environment where motor traffic is so much lower on major roads than it is in the UK, you are not delayed much by these give-ways. They are not frequent. In addition, many drivers give way when not legally required, and a linked factor is junction and roundabout design, which tends to give motorists tighter corners than in the UK, which slows them just before many of these give-ways on cycle paths are encountered. Where cycle paths encounter very major roads with a lot of traffic on them, there are signals, or the path blithely continues on its way through a tunnel or over a bridge. Problem solved.

Before I went, perhaps I expected the achievement of the good cycling conditions in the Netherlands to be more about priorities and the law and codes of behaviour and enforcement, about what various road-users can and can't do, than it turned out to be. (Matthew Wright, writing on the Guardian's cycle blog, articulated this mistaken view recently.) But it turns out it's far more about the design of the roads, tracks and paths than about making road users behave correctly. There is actually a fair amount of chaos in how various road users behave, as there is anywhere, but the Dutch principle of "sustainable safety" has led them to design out the most dangerous conflicts. They have simply designed the environment so that it is hard for road-users to make mistakes, and the mistakes they can make are likely to be less dangerous ones.

There is a noticeable difference in approach compared to Germany, where I have also studied high-cycling towns. There, there is more freedom allowed by design, but more restraint expected though law-abiding behaviour. The German system of allowing cyclists on a cycle track to pass though a junction on a green light that is simultaneous with the green for cars on the adjacent carriageway gives cyclists on the track a high degree of priority, but their safety depends on drivers obeying the rule that they must not turn across the cyclists' path. The Dutch, on the other hand, not trusting drivers to behave in this way, completely separate the green phases for cars and bikes. However their traffic-light phasing still minimises delays to cyclists.

The Germans sometimes implement high-quality cycle tracks as well, but their junction principles are different. Münster, Germany.

I tended, before I went, to buy the line that is often believed in the UK that because only 10% of the roads in the Netherlands have segregated cycling on them, there is still a lot of interaction between cyclists with motor vehicles on all the other roads, but that this is safer because of good behaviour from the motorists in an environment where "everybody cycles". In fact that 10% statistic is highly misleading. Its implication is, in UK cyclists' minds, that 90% of the time you are sharing space with motor vehicles. But this is not so for several reasons.

Firstly, the roads where you do have segregation are the long ones, the important ones, and the ones on which you spend most time cycling. They are the critical "backbone" routes. Secondly, at least in the towns we visited, you spend a lot of your time cycling on totally separate cycle paths that are unrelated to the road network. Thirdly, you encounter few motor vehicles on the unsegregated roads. So, with this combination of factors, you find that the separation of cyclists from motorists in the Netherlands is astonishingly complete. Cyclists rarely have to "negotiate" with motorists in the UK vehicular cycling sense. We did find places where they did, have to, kind of, particularly in the busier Groningen, as opposed to smaller, quieter Assen, but these places were exceptional. So, with this degree of separation, it is not necessarily for motorists to be remarkably well-behaved towards cyclists for cycling to feel very safe.

One should bear in mind that a large part of the unsegregated 90% of roads are the narrow residential streets and cul-de-sacs that are irrelevant to transport (except for the few minutes you spend riding on them to leave or return to your home or other destination on them). One should not confuse traffic-calmed or traffic-restricted areas in the residential "Home Zone" or Dutch Woonerf sense with the cycle routes used for transport. They are separate, as they must be. The last thing you want in a Home Zone, where children should be paying in the street, is commuting cyclists rushing through it. This is a frequently-misunderstood point in the UK.

With the fact that the separation between cyclists and motor vehicles is almost complete in the Netherlands, it follows that the common (not universal) 30 km/h, or 18 mph speed limit, though it certainly makes towns and cities more pleasant for pedestrians and cyclists, is not so critical a factor in the safe cycling environment as is believed in the UK, where extending 20 mph is the main plank of campaigning for many organisations. Hence Roger Geffen, of the CTC, quite thoroughly misses the whole point of the Dutch model where he writes:

Even in the most cycle-friendly countries such as the Netherlands, most urban streets simply have a 30kmh limit, perhaps with some nicely-designed traffic calming, and no cycle-specific provision whatsoever.

And Matthew Wright is also far off the mark to say:

In reducing the Dutch approach to being mainly about paths, LCC is misrepresenting it. Their campaigns for a 20mph speed limit (widespread in the Netherlands), and the crucial issue of strict liability would make a more sensible centrepiece for Go Dutch.

---

It is very difficult to give an accurate and complete picture of what the Dutch cycling environment is like to those cyclists in the UK who have not experienced it. So again, I do encourage them earnestly to come and see for themselves. The trouble is that the context, the background of what we are working with, is so different. When you have spent 40 years implementing Dutch policies, which have led to so many more bike journeys and so many less car, bus, train and taxis journeys, everything in the landscape is transformed, and nothing seems directly comparable with what you see in the UK.

When we sent back pictures of what it was like cycling on a main road linking Assen with an adjacent village, a correspondent in England, well-known cycle campaigner, kept arguing that we were not showing something that had relevance. "That's not a distributor road" he said. "Go somewhere busier and take a photo". He thought we had found some traffic-free country lane leading nowhere to show him and hold up a false comparison with main roads linking towns and villages in the UK. But it was a true comparison. Analogous roads in the Netherlands and the UK, having exactly the same function, and linking settlements of comparable populations, look totally different. That 40 years of prioritising the bike has changed everything, and those who have spent their whole lives campaigning for change in the UK, with only very limited success, just cannot, without seeing it, imagine the Dutch environment, and understand how it has been achieved.

Is this a distributor road or not? Gasterenseweg, Loon, Assen

Likewise, many campaigners who cycle on busy roads in London and other UK cities just cannot imagine how their roads could be transformed if Dutch policies were to be implemented. They see problems everywhere: lack of space, competing demands from parking, buses, taxis, deliveries, pedestrians. "What can you possibly do here?" they often ask, in a despairing tone". But there is a huge range of Dutch solutions, as I have said, and implementing them widely through a city changes the whole background context, and makes things possible in "difficult" places that could not have been imagined before. Suddenly you don't need to find all that space for parking and for buses and other motor vehicles, and you can start improving the "difficult" streets. But you can't change everything at once, and it is important to realise how the Dutch got to where they are now. They started by doing the easy things, and that is what we will have to do in the UK. They then kept working on it and improving things, little by little. As David Hembrow always says, you just have to start, and then keep working on it, like the Dutch did. But you do have to start.

Before I went I had already formed the impression that 90% of what British cyclists say about cycling in the Netherlands is wrong, but I was not certain which 90% was wrong and which 10% was right. Now I know. Indeed, most of what is believed about cycling in the Netherlands, and how the cycle culture there has been achieved, on this side of the North Sea, is dead wrong. Here are some wrong ideas that I have encountered, and the answers to them:

1. The Dutch have encouraged the bike by making it very difficult to drive and park

Not so. You can get everywhere by car in the Netherlands, with fair convenience. The Dutch have fast roads, motor access to everywhere that might be needed, and plenty of inexpensive or free parking where it is needed. The Dutch seem to have fewer traffic jams than we have. An argument can be made that driving, using and owning a car in the Netherlands is actually easier than in the UK.

2. The Dutch have encouraged the bike by good planning, putting everything within easy cycling distance

True only to a limited extent. What is "easy cycling distance?". Everybody's mileage varies. But if you make cycling really pleasant and relaxing, people, even the unfit, may be willing to cycle surprisingly long distances. There are dense developments in the Netherlands, and there is urban sprawl. There is good planning and less ideal planning, such as you find anywhere in the UK. There is no strong relationship between cycle uptake in the Netherlands and planning characteristics of the towns, cities and suburbs. There is high cycling in some very low-density regions, and less cycling in some higher density regions that might be thought to be more amenable to bike use. The strong relationship is between cycle facility provision and cycling levels. In other words, a city or region with a high standard of infrastructure, but more need to travel, can have more cycling than a city or region with less good infrastructure, but smaller typical distances to travel. It's more related to subjective safety than distances.

3. The Dutch have ensured that motorists behave well through "strict liability" and other laws

As in the UK, you sometimes encounter motorists behaving stupidly and selfishly. There were occasions in our travels where we encountered motorists driving at us, and we might comment on those occasions, "He didn't seem to be particularly worried about his strict liability, did he?" Dutch motorists are not all brilliantly behaved towards cyclists. The real and subjective safety of cycling in the Netherlands comes from good design, and from the general separation from motor traffic, not through having made motorists saints. Therefore the stress that is being placed on campaigning for Strict Liability now by some UK cycle organisations and commentators is a mistake. Strict Liability might be a good thing to have in the longer term, but it should not be a priority (and it is very far from general political acceptability in the UK anyway). The efforts would be far better spent on campaigning for good infrastructure, which is far closer to political achievability in the UK. The effectiveness of the infrastructure should not be seen as depending on any changes to the law.

A further "it depends on the law" argument is around priorities at junctions. Roger Geffen of CTC again, in the article mentioned earlier:

Another important pre-requisite for segregation to work is legal priority for cyclists at junctions, given that this is where around 70% of cyclists' injuries occur. In countries like Denmark and the Netherlands, if you're on a cycle track and travelling straight ahead at a junction, the law says you have clear priority over drivers turning across your path, even when the driver has a green traffic light.

Apart from conflating different countries which do things differently (I have mentioned differences between the Netherlands and Germany), this is simply wrong in the Dutch context, which I believe provides the best model that we should follow. Most modern Dutch junctions use the simultaneous green for cyclists system, where all motor traffic is held at red twice in the full cycle, while all cycle movements are allowed, the cyclists turning in different directions negotiating with one another (this takes practice, which, of course Dutch cyclists get plenty of). So there is no potential conflict with motor vehicles, and no role for the law in defining priority. Again, the viability of translating infrastructure to the UK should not be seen as needing changes to our laws. Waiting for these will probably delay us for ever. The favourable position enjoyed by cyclists in Dutch law followed the establishment of the infrastructure-based mass cycling culture, came as a political consequence of it. That was the way round it happened.

4. Dutch cycling culture is just about slow utility cycling

When you have created such good conditions for cycling as the Dutch have, and cycling becomes normal transport from kindergarten to dotage, non-utility cycling also mushrooms and blossoms in every conceivable direction. Far from there being a lack of "enthusiast" or "sports" cycling in the Netherlands, the country is full of racing cyclists, time-trialists, Audaxers, long and short distance touring cyclists, leisure and enthusiast cyclists of every description, even, would you believe it, mountain bikers (there are specially constructed rough and muddy mountain biking courses, to make up for the lack of true mountains, or even hills). Every town of consequence has a racing bike track (far from the case in the UK), and you see all these breeds of leisure and sports cyclist far more frequently than you do in the UK. While the vast mass of cyclists is not really that interested in their bikes, as they are not enthusiasts, merely people using a machine, that they have limited understanding of, as a tool for transportation, this mass is in addition to the enthusiast cadre, which is itself much larger than in less favourable cycling countries.

Assen's cycle racing track

And another thing, another huge misunderstanding: cycling in the Netherlands is fast. As fast as you want it to be. Cycling through Dutch towns on cycle infrastructure is much faster than cycling through British towns on roads, because of the junction priorities, the planning that has reduced the frequency of junctions (in old urban areas achieved through closing many of them), the "clear space for cycling", the lack of obstructions and hazards to watch out for all the time, the separation from traffic, and the quality of the surfaces. A critical point, never commented on in the UK: unless you separate cyclists totally from heavy motor vehicles, you can never have decent smooth surfaces for cycling on, because the heavy vehicles will always mess the surfaces up faster than it is economic to repair them. Segregated cycle tracks and paths can have perfect surfaces: they are indeed the only economical way perfect surfaces can be achieved. And that means speed, as well as safety. In the countryside, unrestricted by frequent junctions, the cycle paths allow cycling at any speed you want. Joe, in our party did indeed attempt to attain 40km/h on the cycle path, on the flat (well, everywhere is flat), but narrowly failed, saying it was because the rest of us were in the way.

Perfect surfaces are standard on Dutch cycle paths, making for no speed limit other than that imposed by your legs

So if you want to, you can cycle very fast in the Netherlands. But of course most people don't wish to. The fact that you don't need to cycle fast or assertively to be safe, or to make the mode work for you, to benefit your life, is key to the universality of Dutch cycling – the fact that you cycle at the speed you want, that there is no pressure. It's the reason so many Dutch people go on cycling into their seventies, eighties and nineties. Despite the health benefits of cycling, we all have to die some where, some time, and many Dutch people literally drop dead on a bike – one reason to be very cautious about the meaning of cycling fatality figures compared between the Netherlands and other countries. People commonly die on bikes, or after falling off them, with no involvement of other traffic. An old person suffering a low-speed fall from a bike is much more likely to die as a consequence than is a young person. But this kind of cycling fatality, though sad, is an indication of success of Dutch cycling policy, not failure.

No pressure: cycle gracefully through middle and old age in the Netherlands (and I'm not referring to Sally)

I am glad that I now understand far better how the Dutch achieved the highest cycling rate and the safest cycling in the world. I hope these posts help in the understanding of this in the UK other countries. For understanding is the start of change, and though change takes time, and can be difficult, if it proceeds through accurate understanding, it is easer. Let's get to work.

Picking cherries and other low-hanging fruit

2011-10-29T20:14:00.002+01:00

There are plenty of videos on the internet showing large numbers of people cycling in high-cycling towns and cities. Here's a nice example from Copenhagenize, showing morning traffic on Nørrebrogade – allegedly the busiest cycle street in the world.

There always seem to be people of a certain persuasion, writing on the internet in English, who react to these videos with the cry of cherrypicking. You are creating a distorted impression of the scale or nature of cycling in these places, they claim, picking deliberately unrepresentative locations or times at which to make these videos.

Of course anybody making any kind of political point cherry-picks what they present. When the Cycling Embassy of Great Britain decided to go on a study tour this year, we cherry-picked the nation of the Netherlands to visit. We did not pick Russia, or Berkshire, or Los Angeles. And there was a reason for this. And, strangely enough, a staff team from the London Cycling Campaign soon after cherry-picked the Netherlands to go to, to study cycling policy as well. Coincidentally – nothing to do with me. Surprising?

The point about cherrypicking surely is this: one can only do it where there are cherries to be picked. The sort of cherry seen in the Copenhagen video can only be picked in a couple of countries in the western world. There is nowhere else this could have been filmed, that's the point. There is something special going on here, that those other countries, where this could not have been filmed, need to understand.

One needs to look for what is common to those countries, regions and cities, where this sort of scene can be witnessed at all. I've stressed this before, but it seems to be one of those things that needs saying again and again. So here is the graph again, a few years old, it has to be admitted, courtesy of CTC, "The UK's National Cyclists' Organisation".

From CTC's Safety in Numbers

It's a pity I can't find a more up-to-date presentation, and one that includes Germany and Switzerland, which have both developed their cycling cultures in the last few years. But here we see how the Netherlands and Denmark stand out "by a mile" (or 1.61 km) as Europe's leading cycling nations, despite being not all that culturally similar. We see how the other Nordic countries, plus Austria and Italy, cluster far behind, but still significantly ahead of the others.

And we note that what these high to moderate-level cycling nations all have in common, across major cultural differences, and differences of climate and physical and human geography, is the provision of networks for cyclists separate from motor traffic. Cycle paths and cycle tracks, as you see in the video. And we see there is a perfect correlation. The Netherlands and Denmark have far more cycle-specific infrastructure than the other countries, and they have far higher cycling rates, and genuinely safer cycling. The cluster of nations further to the left all have a significant amount of quality cycle infrastructure, but far less than the Netherlands and Denmark. The nations on the left of the graph have hardly any proper cycle infrastructure (though the city of Paris at least seems to be making some progress on this).

The CTC wanted to demonstrate in this graph a relationship between cycling safety and numbers of cyclists, which clearly does exist, but they have largely ignored the most important lesson of this data, which leaps out from it: that you get safety and high cycling numbers simultaneously from high quality dedicated cycle infrastructure. Their document from which this graph is taken has nothing to say about infrastructure!

I can't cherry-pick a scene in London to video, comparable to the bicycle rush-hour on Nørrebrogade . The closest I can get is this scene in Bloomsbury, which I have shown before. And, funnily enough, the infrastructure in this picture, exceptionally for the UK, looks a little bit like Dutch or Danish cycle infrastructure.

But, such rare exceptions notwithstanding, the UK, by and large, continues on a strange cycling path of its own, a path of trying to "promote" cycling rather than actually accommodating it. Here's some "low-hanging fruit", that I snapped in my garden in June:

Low-hanging fruit in Brent

What's this got to do with anything? Well, here's another picture from this summer. It shows a slightly sad stall that Gerhard Weiss of London Cycling Campaign was manning for Transport for London at the Gladstonbury Festival in Gladstone Park, Brent.

"Catch up with the bicycle", Gladstone Park, Brent, London

The family-friendly bikes and bike attachments on display here are things not often seen on the streets of Brent. I didn't see them getting much serious interest from locals either. When I asked Gerhard what the purpose of this was, he replied that TfL were paying LCC to take this stall round various community festivals in London, particularly in the outer London Biking Boroughs. TfL's purpose here was to target families with children in these suburbs as "low-hanging fruit", as they chose to put it: people who needed just a little nudge, perhaps as little as being shown the existence of the right type of family-friendly gear, to get them cycling.

Well, with no criticism intended to Gerhard or the other staff of LCC, but plenty of criticism intended for TfL, I have to say I think this is utter bunkum. When bureaucrats come up with crappy phrases like "low-hanging fruit", you know you are in fantasy-land. They should have taken cognisance of what Griet Scheldemen of Lancaster University said, commenting on the Understanding Walking and Cycling study of which she was a part:

Regrettably, we did not find this mass of people on the threshold of change, who only needed a little push to start cycling as a daily means of getting around...

For the truth is there is no way that many families are ever going to cycle the main roads of Brent with their kiddies in these cycle trailers or child seats, without an infrastructure revolution in London of which there is absolutely no sign. There is no way these families using these contraptions will "take the lane" through the deadly concrete tunnel in Neasden under the North Circular Road, or ride on the equally terrifying motorway-style flyover across the North Circular at Staples Corner: the junctions on that road that lie immediately to the north and west of this park. And, if they want to go the the areas of Brent to the north and west of this park, if they live in Neasden, Wembley or Colindale, these two roads are where they are going to have to cycle. Because there are no other crossings of the North Circular Road for miles in either direction that you could get these bike trailers through.

Staples Corner

Because the only other crossings of the North Circular near here are a footbridge that you are not allowed to cycle over, between Kenwyn Avenue and Neasden Recretion Ground, and a preposterous "shared" pedestrian/cycle tunnel at Neasden Lane. Here is the first of these:

The approach to the footbridge across the North Circular Road at Kenwyn Avenue

It wouldn't be legal, but just try cycling your bike trailer loaded with its precious cargo round the tight square bends on the ramp up to that footbridge. Just try to get your bike and trailer there in the first place, round those (perfectly legally) parked cars which thoroughly block access to the ramp from the road. And if you do manage to get across, and you land up on Neasden Recreation Ground on the north side, try getting anywhere else from there without cycling on pavements. You will find you get sucked into the Neasden northern roundabout, a nasty place, of which more later.

Here's the second off-road option I mentioned, the horrible Neasden cycle/pedestrian underpass. Try getting your Bakfiets or Christiana round those barriers and corners. The lady with the pushchair is having enough trouble.

The pedestrian/cycle underpass of the North Circular Road at Neasden Lane

If you just have a normal bike, which you can squeeze past these barriers, and you try to access this underpass from the south, from Neasden shopping centre, you find you have to cycle the wrong way along a stretch of slip road coming off the North Circular, as in this picture. The entrance you are aiming for is marked by the archway in front of the white house.

One-way slip road at Neasden shopping centre that makes it impossible to legally cycle to the official bike underpass of the North Circular

If you take this route, by illegally cycling on the pavement, or wheeling your bike, or ignoring the no entry sign and hopping a kerb, and negotiate the barriers, curly ramp and steep slopes, you end up in this delightful tunnel. The pink slippery tiling is the part specially reserved for cyclists (the part you see all the pedestrians on). I met a woman who had broken her shoulder through a fall from a bike in this tunnel, as the paving is treacherous when wet.

The shared pedestrian/cycle tunnel under the North Circular at Neasden

Supposing it is not too wet and you make it through here without injury or collision with pedestrians, what do you get when you emerge from this tunnel on the north side of the North Circular Road? You get this:

The Neasden cycle/pedestrian underpass exit into Neasden Lane North

You can't rejoin the road here because (1) there is no dropped kerb, (2) there is no way to cross this busy section of Neasden Lane North, which feeds southbound traffic from Neasden Lane North on to the North Circular eastbound and eastbound traffic from the North Circular off it in various directions, and, (3) if you did cross the road and tried to go north you would immediately be fed on to the northern Neasden roundabout, a terrifying, fast, multi-lane gyratory, seen here in a view from the north, with Neasden Lane North and the underpass exit in the distance.

Neaden northern roundabout

There is a theoretical alternative to all this, indicated with short green and purple lines on the TfL London Cycle Guide No. 3, which is to take another leg of the the underpass diagonally under the Neasden Lane North–North Circular junction, and then a footbridge to a small road called Vicarage Way, which at least gets you on the correct side of the Neasden northern roundabout, though you still end up very close to fast heavy traffic, to its left. But (wait for it) there are a couple of problems with this: (1) you are not allowed to cycle into and out of this exit from the underpass, as shown by the sign in the view below, and, (2) you are not allowed to cycle on the footbridge leading to Vicarage Way.

Exit from Neasden cycle/pedestrian underpass on the west side of Neasden Lane North

In any case, with your tagalong child bike, or Christiana, or Bakfiets, that you have bought, inspired by the TfL Catch up with the Bicycle display, I'll wager you won't be able to negociate any of this pathetic "infrastructure". You'll HAVE to use this road, that we are looking down on to here. THERE IS NO ALTERNATIVE.

The Neasden North Circular Road underpass , looking north-west

This is the view looking from the non-cycling footbridge into what Brent cyclists call "Death Valley": the vehicle route, the A4088, under the North Circular at Neasden for all traffic heading north-west from the Willesden area. The picture was taken with a good camera in good daylight, but look at the motion blur on those vehicles. Do you fancy keeping to the right of the traffic turning left on to the slip road with all your family in tow? And, by the way, there is another slip road that merges from the left, coming off the North Circular, at the other end of Death Valley. And, if you are going this way, cycling north or west from Gladstone Park, Neasden Station or Willesden, this is not the first barrier you will have encountered, for to get to Death Valley, you first have to negotiate the southern Neasden roundabout, seen in the background in this view, looking the other way from the same footbridge.

Neasden's "Death Valley" looking towards the southern Neasden roundabout

If you make it through the southern roundabout, and Death Valley, with its slip roads, in one piece, you are then led onto the next section of Neasden Lane North, where you are crammed into two narrow lanes of heavy traffic:

Neasden Lane North junction with Verney Street

To continue north-west to Wembley or Kingsbury you carry on over the River Brent, where this road becomes Blackbird Hill. This is another route to which, in Brent, the borough of infrastructural Thatcherism, there is no alternative. For this is where the tiny stream of the Brent (plus the Grand Union Feeder Canal) is first bridged downstream of the Brent reservoir, and this bridge, Kingsbury Bridge, which has stood here since Saxon times, and was last widened for the British Empire Exhibition of 1924 (for which the old Wembley Stadium was built), still carries all the traffic between the north and south parts of the borough: another great environment to cycle in with your kids on their tagalong bike.

Blackbird hill, the meeting-point of Neasden, Wembley and Kingsbury

And beyond that... well, "the world's your oyster". As you would expect from Brent, there are a few nasty junctions and viscious mini-roundabouts at the top of this hill where routes fork between Wembley to the west and Kingsbury to the north, but I think that is enough of this safari, you'll have got the idea by now. And that ideas is:

It is not the slightest bit surprising that families cycling with children are seen round here less frequently than UFOs.

Much less frequently, in fact. If anybody wanted further explanation of why, as mentioned in my last post, the wards of Brent to the north of the North Circular have true cycling mode shares probably below 0.5%, here it is. When TfL come up with this crap about just needing to put a bike trailer under the noses of their "low hanging fruit" of Brent parents who are just dying to cycle their kids on these monstrous roads, or trying to negotiate these impossible, crappy, tenth-rate cycle "facilities", I have to despair.

What the Dutch and the Danes teach us is that, with cycle facilities, you have to engineer for everybody to make it work for anybody. You have to build your cycle infrastructure to a quality that works safely and efficiently, simultaneously, for 8 year-old children on their own and fit young adult commuters and for everybody inbetween, including every kind of bike and bike trailer. If you under-engineer, or try to cheaply adapt already inadequate pedestrian facilities with just a bit of lining or surfacing, or try to get away with something that some idiot in the council thinks might be "OK for slow cyclists or novices or those afraid of the traffic", you just get unusable rubbish. If TfL can't get together the money and political resolution to implement sensible, safe cycling infrastructure, they should stop trying to promote cycling at all with these ridiculous tents at community festivals. For doing so is simply a waste of money.

The Dutch do not seem to waste their money in this way. They actually build things. They are strange, like that. The nation of dyke and dam and sluice builders and drainers of polders actually build stuff all the time. While the infrastructure of Brent, and most of outer London, seems frozen in a time-warp as it was left by the road and flyover builders about 1972, with seemingly all further change impossible, or impossible to afford for the UK, the eighth richest nation in the work, apart from putting in the odd stainless steel anti-cycling barrier, or putting down of two colours of slippery paving in a narrow, wet, horrible pedestrian subway, the Dutch constantly build high-standard bridges, tunnels and underpasses everywhere, from one end of their country to the other, to separate cyclists from motor vehicles and pedestrians and let cyclists travel in safety, speed, and style, to all the places they could want to go. If the North Circular Road were in the Netherlands, cyclists would go under it like this:

Dual carriageway and two-way cycle track go under a motorway in Assen, Netherlands

Or they would be taken over it like this:

Cycle bridge over a motorway in Groningen, Netherlands

But, to end with, I'll indulge in a little fantasy. Maybe we could soon get a decent crossing for cyclists of the North Circular Road in Brent: something the Dutch would recognise as cycle infrastructure. Because the North Circular Road–A5 junction at Staples Corner is due to be rebuilt – and not with public money. The developers of Brent Cross Cricklewood have to pay for a total rebuild of this junction, as part of their ~~new out of town shopping centre~~ regeneration scheme. The main company behind the Brent Cross Cricklewood scheme is Hammerson PLC. Hammerson's Development Director during the planning of this scheme was Michael Bear, who now has been elected Lord Mayor of London. (That's the largely ceremonial Mayor of the financial "square mile" of the City, not the post held by Boris Johnson, for my foreign readers.) And he seems to have got quite keen on cycling.

So are Hammerson going to give the cyclists of north-west London something like this? I'm afraid I'm not holding my breath.

The cycle of decline in outer London

2011-10-21T22:13:00.001+01:00

Stag Lane, Edgware, north Brent

I shouted at my partner Helen, the other day, "I've seen a female cyclist in Stag Lane". This is a thing we do. We comment every time we see a female cyclist cycle pass our house. Helen could not remember the last time we saw one. I reckon it was not within the last few months. I reckon we see one, between us, about once every six months. We live in the city of Boris Johnson's much-trumpeted Cycling Revolution. We are not on the outer edge of that city. Oh no, starting from here, there are about 3 more miles of suburbs and one mile of green belt before you reach the border of Hertfordshire. And as neither of us go out to work, we spend quite a lot of time looking out of the windows here. And Stag Lane is a very busy road. It has two bus services (three on another section). It is a significant artery connecting the suburbs of Edgware, Burnt Oak, and Kingsbury. Peak vehicle flow I estimate at 2000–3000 per hour. The road has a lorry ban (not always observed). And we seem to see one female cyclist on this road every six months (not the same one).

This is all as subjective as you could get, but the Brent Biking Borough report, produced by MVA Consultants, confirms the extraordinarily low level of cycling in this part of London. It lists, amongst many other things, the cycling modal share for journeys to work in the all the wards of Brent, based on the 2001 census. This ward, Queensbury, has 0.7% journeys to work by bike. This is not quite the lowest in Brent: adjacent Fryent and Kenton wards get 0.6% and 0.5% respectively (though, at this level, these differences are probably not statistically significant). And remember these are cycling to work rates. Cycling normally gets a higher proportion of work journeys than of all journeys in low-cycling places. Commuters are the easiest group to get cycling, as they tend to be fit adults. The Brent cycle to work average is 1.6%. (The highest cycle to work ward is affluent Queens Park, adjacent to Westminster, with 4.2%.) But Transport for London's Travel in London report (2009) reports a mode share for cycling trips of 1% for Brent. So we can be sure the mode shares are lower than the cycle to work numbers, probably by about one third.

Further information in the same report tells us that the London Travel Demand Survey 2006–9 found that in Kingsbury NW9, about 40% of people had not used a bike at all in the last year, the highest non-biking rate in Brent listed. (They didn't do Edgware HA8. Stag Lane is divided between Kingsbury NW9 and Edgware HA8.) The area is also very Asian (about 50%). The LTDS found that of Asians in Brent, 90% never cycle, compared with 74% whites, 78% other and mixed, and 85% black. I feel that caution is needed in relating ethnicity to cycling rates, however. It may not be that Asians as a group are disinclined to cycle. It may be that they just live in the areas of Brent where cycling conditions are least attractive. I think this is probably the case to a considerable extent.

The report does not break down cycling to school rates by ward, but tells us that, for Brent as a whole, it is 0.3% (same for secondary schools as primary). It also, very unfortunately, does not tell us cycling rates by sex. This is a lamentable omission, because of the strong relationship, that I have pointed out before, between cycling rates and gender equality in cycling. As cycling rates get lower (in developed western countries) so the gender split becomes more unequal, with fewer and fewer women cycling. Only in the highest cycling country, the Netherlands, do more women cycle than men. So I don't actually know, but it would appear to me that, of the tiny number of people cycling in this part of Brent, a very low fraction are female. Hence the "once every six months" observation.

I don't want to be excessively gloomy here. People sometimes accuse me of "talking down" cycling. But I want to tell it as it is. I am not in what David Hembrow (or a friend of his) called the "Everything is good committee" The fact is that, in part of a so-called Biking Borough, in a city which, according to its Mayor (who came up with the Biking Borough phrase), is undergoing a "cycling revolution", cycling, all cycling, is at an almost vanishing low level. And for women, children, and old people, it is practically extinct: virtually unheard of.

Jim Gleeson, of the excellent, data-focussed blog (Drawing) Rings Around The World, has extracted census data showing how cycling has changed in outer and inner London 1971–2001. Here it is:

Courtesy Jim Gleeson

We see that as cycling grew more popular in inner London, it continued its long-term decline in outer London. How this would look if 2011 data were included we don't yet know, but I would guess that there will have been a large rise in inner London cycling to work and little change in outer London, or a small drop.

Jim Gleeson calls this "the urbanisation of cycling in London", and wonders what the reasons for it have been. I have little doubt about those reasons. They seem obvious to me: they are all around you as you cycle in north Brent. Here is another picture of Stag Lane, showing how, typically for this area, the front gardens of the houses have been paved over, and are almost invariably occupied by three cars.

Three car standard household in north Brent

If there are not three cars on the forecourt, there will be two there and one parked on the street. Or there will be three parked on the forecourt and one parked on the street. The three or four car household is absolutely standard in this solidly middle-class area. But the houses are quite modest, and the street width they occupy small, so there is a problem in fitting all these cars in.

Another Stag Lane view

The cars, as you see, are parked everywhere. Jutting out of properties, crossing the pavements, both sides of the narrow road. The whole environment of this minor, but busy, road is utterly dominated by, and cluttered-up with, cars. This is typical of north Brent. The road is 30 mph, but speeds of up to 45 mph are normal, particularly on the straight downhill stretch between the Holyrood Gardens and Beverley Drive junctions. There is no traffic calming on Stag Lane except for a table at the junction with Princes Avenue (which is a 20mph zone). The reason for this is that the council say it cannot be traffic-calmed as it is a priority route for emergency vehicles.

If you try to cycle on this road, you find you are in the way of very impatient motorists and white van drivers who have no understanding of cycling whatever and who will overtake dangerously all the time with insufficient room. You find you are constantly having to pull out to pass parked vehicles, which gives no room for the stream of traffic behind you to pass the opposing stream. You have to "take the lane" and risk the incomprehension or aggression of the motorist behind. You need nerves of steel to cycle on a road like this, far more so than to cycle on a main road like the largely parallel A5, where there is at least space, and I avoid cycling on it, even though I live on it, preferring to go round a different, longer way, via the 20mph zone of North Way and Princes Avenue, for most journeys.

But this is a minor suburban through-road, a yellow road on the Ordnance Survey Landranger maps. On roads like this, there is virtually no cycling (except on the pavements) because there simply is no room for the bike. And there is virtually no cycling in the whole area because for most journeys there are no alternatives to roads like this.

On the straight section of Stag Lane cars typically travel at 30 mph plus, and this is where you have to cycle

Let's compare another street in this area, Mollison Way, with a street I photographed in Assen, on the Cycling Embassy of Great Britain study tour in September with David Hembrow, Vredeveldsweg. Mollison Way is another very typical street for north Brent and Harrow. In fact, it forms the part of the boundary between these two boroughs.

I am comparing these two streets because they are so similar. They have similar total width between property boundaries, similar amounts of green space in the streetscape, similar trees, similar size houses, similar pavement and carriageway widths. These streets are both typical for their areas. The pictures were taken with the same camera at the same focal length. Spot the difference.

Mollison Way, Brent & Harrow

Vredeveldsweg, Assen

It's the cars. People do own cars in the Dutch street, and they do park them on public land, but the Dutch do not allow the total chaos of parked cars everywhere that you get in the London suburbs. The residents of Mollison Way have cars parked on their own paved-over front gardens, on the driveways where they cross the grass verges, and on the street as well – narrowing it down to a narrow canyon so that two cars cannot pass easily, and any cyclists will certainly have an awkward and intimidating experience.

Vredeveldesweg has cycle lanes on both sides, done with nice paving. Parking is not allowed in Dutch cycle lanes at any time. It also has very mild traffic calming (that is not a problem to cycle over). There is one central, undivided lane for cars. Cars that pass in opposite directions might overlap onto the cycle lanes, but this is not a problem if there are no cyclists there. If cyclists are there, one car would have to wait. Likewise, cyclists would not be confined to the cycle lanes in the absence of cars. The speed limit in Vredeveldsweg is 20km/h (18.5 mph). The speed limit in Mollison Way is 30 mph.

Note also a fine detail of good Dutch design not significant to cycling, but to pedestrians: the way the driveways slope to the road. They only do so in the last section, so the pavement is flat, for walking and wheeling wheelchairs on. On the other hand, the London driveways slope continuously from the property boundary to the road, so forcing pedestrians and the disabled to walk or wheel on a slope much of the time. Overall, the Dutch suburban environment is simply of far higher design quality than the London one. It encourages walking and cycling, which the London environment certainly does not.

What has happened in outer London, over the period that Jim Gleeson has graphed, is that a cycle of decline has been allowed to operate whereby people have acquired more and more cars and been allowed to store them everywhere on the streets, so making those streets more and more difficult for walkers and cyclists. At the same time, of course, traffic levels have soared. The cyclists that there were in the 1970s, over time, have been squeezed-out, and given up, and then acquired cars themselves, which have been added to the pool, making things even worse. A couple of generations have grown up with no experience of cycling whatever, and so no understanding of what treatment cyclists on the road need, so they give them scant consideration when driving. That hostility has forced most of the few cyclists who were still on the roads off them. The culture of cycling has been wiped out almost entirely.

Cycling to school has disappeared (the 0.3% is a Brent average and is likely far lower in Queensbury ward). Children are constantly ferried around in cars by their parents or older siblings, not only for school, but for all their after-school and weekend journeys. A huge number of the journeys in our suburb are accounted for in this way, I know for a fact. Those parents are then relieved from this duty by the obligatory graduation of the children to driving themselves, getting their own cars at age seventeen. This has become entirely normal and expected.

So huge numbers of cars have to be accommodated, parked and moving, and more and more space becomes unavailable to pedestrians and cyclists. So the standard of the street environment declines, and the decline in cycling continues. With essentially no enforcement of speed limits or driving standards, and very large numbers of aggressive young men behind steering wheels, a significant number uninsured and unlicensed, very few are prepared to take on the hostile environment on two wheels. Most of those who are prepared to do so are young men. Nobody would want their granny to cycle in this environment, and no-one would allow their 12-year old child to cycle on their own.

How can we start to reverse this cataclysm for cycling? The Brent Biking Borough report came up with this list of recommended measures:

20 mph zones
Review and removal of restrictions and bans on cyclists
Improved cycle parking
Improved wayfinding and cycle signage
Bike and ride at rail stations
School cycling initiatives
Further roll out of Greenways
Maintenance and advice clinics
Cycle training
Targeted interventions such as information in homebuyers' packs and information for employees and those with health issues
Events and challenges
Cycling on prescription
Cycle try-out schemes
Bike recycling schemes
Awareness training for cyclists and goods vehicle drivers.

"Oh dear!" is all I can say to that lot. The (now much missed) "Crap Waltham Forest" blogger Freewheeler analysed this report as well, and I cannot do better than his scathing summary:

This MVA Consultancy report does a professional job of identifying the poor condition of cycling in Brent. However, it doesn’t diagnose it because it is incapable of understanding the reasons for it, and therefore its cures for the condition are rather like medical cures of the pre-modern era – a mixture of quackery and superstition. All the traditional cycling folk remedies are here – cycle training, signposting, promotional activities, recycling old bikes – and none of them will save the patient.

More recently, TfL's chief Peter Hendy said this:

But while it's one thing to pedal round Hyde Park Corner or the Vauxhall gyratory in the rush hour, in outer and suburban London, there are plenty of quiet roads and routes that could be developed to help people leave their cars at home.

This is why we also have the innovative Biking Boroughs Scheme to really try to develop local cycle hubs in places where the potential for a shift to cycling is greatest and resources can be targeted. These cycle hubs will become beacons of cycling excellence in outer London and act as catalysts for change in these areas.

In pursuit of this, earlier this year, thirteen councils across London made successful bids for a share of £4 million funding after pledging to put cycling at the heart of their local transport plans. The money will be used to install more cycle lanes and other cycling infrastructure. So residents of these boroughs will benefit from measures to make cycling safer and more convenient: Barking and Dagenham, Bexley, Croydon, Havering, Redbridge, Brent, Ealing, Haringey, Hillingdon, Hounslow, Bromley, Kingston and Merton.

So what is a "cycle hub"? Sorry, I haven't got a clue, and I don't think Hendy has either. This is a patent load of waffle, that, like the MVA report, totally misses the point and displays no comprehension of the problem. It is utter rubbish to say that:

In outer and suburban London, there are plenty of quiet roads and routes that could be developed to help people leave their cars at home

If you actually live and cycle in these places, you know that all the really quiet routes are no use because they lead nowhere. All the useable minor through-routes, like Stag Lane and Mollison Way, whatever colour of road they may be on the map, are choked with parked and moving cars, and most of them are bus routes as well. This reminds me of something Kevin Mayne, Director of the CTC, said some years ago when he was invited to talk to Camden Cycling Campaign. He laid stress on what he called the "white roads" (from their colour on OS maps), and the fact that 90% of them (or something like that) were in towns, and claimed that utilisation of these was somehow the "solution" to UK urban cycling (as opposed to the outlandish concept of Dutch-style cycle tracks that CCC was exploring at that time). These ideas can only be produced by people who have no idea of the true on-the-streets reality of the UK suburbs, and also no idea of the standard of environment, demonstrated by the street in Assen, and thousands of other streets in the Netherlands, that is actually required to generate a mass cycling culture.

So what is to be done?

It seems to me that we will not get much more cycling in the London suburbs until the typical street (Mollison Way) looks a lot more like the Dutch street (Vredeveldsweg). But how can we possibly get that? We can't just take all those cars away from people in a democracy. We can't tell them they can't own and use all those cars. No politician could say that; it would be electoral suicide, when people's whole current lifestyles are bound up so intimately with use of those cars. And we can't magic up more space. People need a viable and attractive cycling alternative first, before we can start to reduce car use and car ownership. But it's the cars that are preventing people cycling. This seems like a chicken-and-egg situation. Where do we start?

It seems to me we have to first throw out all that stuff from the Biking Borough report and all this fantasy about using "quiet roads". We have to start by doing what the Dutch did at first. They were in a not entirely dissimilar situation 40 years ago, when they first started to invest heavily in cycling infrastructure. They never had such a bad situation as us, they never allowed it to go so far, so it is not an exact parallel. But it is the best parallel. The video on this posting from Mark Wagebuur explains it. The Dutch did succeed in turning a not totally dissimilar situation around. They de-cluttered their once car-dominated urban environment and made it safe and attractive for cycling. From having higher car-ownership than the UK, the Dutch reversed this position.

Assen town square in the 1970s (courtesy David Hembrow)

Assen Town square today (courtesy David Hembrow)

I think the new LCC campaign, Going Dutch, has it right, which is why I have been supporting it. The start of a real cycling revolution in outer as well as inner London must be to create "clear space for cycling" (as this campaign words it) on main roads. The main roads are the routes people actually need to use to get to the places they need to get to. They are in general the most direct and useful routes and the roads which have space that could be be reallocated with least political pain and most obvious gain. Like the A5, Burnt Oak Broadway, at the north end of Stag Lane. Here, a huge width available between building lines means that, with a proper re-design of the whole width of the road, it could easily include Dutch-style, high-quality, protected cycle tracks, plus good pavements, plus two lanes of general traffic in both directions, plus some parking for the shops. If it was all designed correctly, on Dutch principles, neither the parking nor the bus stops would interfere with the cycle tracks, which would have signalised priority at junctions.

Burnt Oak Broadway junction with Stag Lane, Edgware: a huge width available for cycle infrastructure

This is the kind of thing the Dutch and Danes did at first. They put in the really useful cycle facilities in the places people really needed them on the main roads. They established the primary cycling network. That is the thing that really gets cycling up at first, and establishes in people's minds the viability of the cycling option, with quality, high-profile provision.

Quality Dutch-style cycle infrastructure can be achieved on main roads in London: Royal College Street, Camden.

The next step in Going Dutch is to deal with the minor residential through-routes like Stag Lane and Mollison Way, that at the moment do so much to hinder cycling. With the political goodwill towards cycling generated by the success of the high-profile main road routes, it becomes possible to alter the function of these roads.

At the moment in these suburbs we have far too many residential through-routes. If I decide to drive, or get a taxi, from my house to, say, Stanmore, Harrow, or one of the other local suburban town centres, there are probably 50 different routes the car could take. A few of them are on main roads, and the rest are rat-runs, threading through the network of residential streets. To get Dutch-type cycling conditions on minor roads, this has to be changed.

LCC did a good job, years ago, of mapping all the recommended minor-road routes in London for cyclists, and these now appear on the TfL Cycle Guides as the "yellow routes". But in my area, all these yellow routes are also open to cars, so they are rat-runs, and they do not, in reality, offer significantly better cycling conditions than the main roads.

What the Dutch have done, in their towns and cities, with extraordinary comprehensiveness, is to ban all the rat-runs. The minor road routes between local centres are only available to cyclists. This has been achieved through a combination of road-closures with cycle access, and strategically-planned patterns of one-way streets, with cycle exceptions. This latter option is very general as it is very cheap to implement. The patterns of one-way streets force cars to use main routes while maintaining all necessary motor access, while good design, plus the 20 km/h limit (or lower limits in Woonerven or "Play Streets"), keep speeds down. Residential areas are broken down into discrete "cells", that cars use residential roads to get in to and out of, but travel between on major roads. Few choices of route are open to them, while cyclists have more options, and, usually, more direct routes.

One-way residential street in Assen with cycle exception: the standard pattern for Dutch streets of this type

There are a couple of objections to doing this on our residential roads which need to be addressed. One is the dense grid of bus routes we have in outer London on the residential roads, like Stag Lane and Mollison Way. Another is emergency vehicle access. But these needn't be problems; the solutions to them can be similar. One solution that has already been used in some UK towns (I have seen it in Cambridge and the London Borough of Camden) is the electronic rising bollard that can be used to let buses and emergency vehicles through, but block other motor traffic. But here is a simpler solution I saw in the Netherlands: an obstruction in the road which only allows through wide vehicles, i.e., usually buses.

Device on a road in Groningen that only allows wide vehicles through

Then a third class of measure which is integrated into the mix in the Dutch paradigm is the off-road "green" cycle path. These are always seamlessly and safely linked in with the main road cycle tracks and the minor road routes, with minimal interaction required between cyclists and motor traffic. There is huge potential for such paths in the outer London boroughs, including Brent. Not far from the locations I have shown you, we have Fryent Country Park, a large open space between Kingsbury and Wembley, with no usable cycle paths, but a 40mph main road, the A4140, bisecting it.

Fryent Way through Fryent Country Park, Brent

The paths you can see in this picture are footpaths, and cannot legally be cycled on. Cyclists are expected to share those narrow carriageways, with all that hatched-out space wasted in the middle of the road, with 40 mph (if drivers obey the limit) heavy traffic. See how easy it would be to create high-quality Dutch-style cycle paths here, on both sides, between the road and the footpaths. You can even see exactly where they should go, between the lamp posts and the line of trees, nicely separated from both cars and walkers.

Using these three main classes of measure: segregated, high-quality infrastructure on the main roads, elimination of through-traffic from minor residential streets through closure and one-way patterns, and "green", off-road, cycle paths, cycling can be made viable again in the suburban environment, and the cycle of decline can be put into reverse. The use of cars can be brought under control, and then the street environment can start to be de-cluttered. The quality of the residential roads can then be improved, and streets like Mollison Way will start to look like Vredeveldsweg. Then cycling in the suburbs will really have come back, and pedestrians will have hugely benefited too, as will anybody who cares about the quality of the environment.

All this would clearly take a long time to achieve. But the sooner we start, the sooner we will get it. What we need is the political will and the money. The money should not be difficult. The UK is a wealthy country. If the Dutch can afford it, we can too. If we can afford the third biggest defence budget in the world, we can afford cycle infrastructure. But we need to be realistic about money. The Brent Biking Borough allocation from TfL is £294,500 for the next three years. That's about £100,000 per year, which is about 3% of the sum one state-run corporation, the BBC, spends on subsiding car travel by its employees ever year, or approximately the same as TfL spend on subsidising their own employee's car trips every year. This sum is a joke. It is 38p a year for each Brent resident. And the adjacent boroughs, Harrow and Barnet, just as needful of cycling infrastructure, are not Biking Boroughs, so they get nothing from this fund. Dutch expenditure on cycling is about €30 per head of population per year.

So Dutch expenditure on cycling is two orders of magnitude higher. At this rate, to build what the Dutch have built in 40 years, it would take us 4,000 years. Can we afford to wait that long? And of course, as David Hembrow always says, cycling infrastructure is cheaper to build than not to build, in other words, cheaper than paying the costs of the alternative, in terms of road deaths, ill-health, traffic congestion and pollution. But that message has not yet sunk in with UK politicians. The current government wants to spend £897 million on new roads for cars.

It depends in the end on what sort of society we want. We can't rebuild the suburbs of outer London, but we could alter them radically, with the correct, directed investment, over a long period, and they could be really cycle-friendly places once again, as they were when built in the 1930s. We have fallen a long way, to the point where a fraction of one percent of Brent's children travel to school by bike. In Assen, virtually 100% of children get to school by bike. In Amsterdam, the figure is 60%.

Here's a picture to end with: young children cycling home from school on their own, in Assen. If we start now with the right measures and a sensible level of investment, in a few decades we will be able to take a picture like this in Edgware, Kingsbury, Harrow or Wembley. How much is that worth?

Another woman under a lorry survives

2011-10-19T18:09:00.004+01:00

Photo by Neil Hammet, 18 October 2011

Witness Neil Hammet took this picture yesterday by London Bridge Station. This is the junction of Joiner Street with Borough High Street. He reported on the London Fixed and Single Speed Forum, subsequently re-reported on Londonist,

Suddenly people started shouting "Stop! Stop!" and I could hear a rapid crunching/popping noise.

Turning round I saw an articulated lorry, driving toward the bridge.

On her back, knees bent and feet on the front bumper, was a lady who was being pushed along the ground by the lorry - her bike was just going under the front wheel which was the crunching/popping noise.

The driver was looking around him at all these people shouting "Stop! Stop!" and shrugging - his reaction was "they cannot be shouting at me", so he kept going.

It was probably all over in seconds, but it seemed to be a long time before he finally decided that the people (including myself) who were waving/pointing at him, the lady and shouting, did mean that he should stop.

The lady cyclist probably got pushed 2-4 metres, hard for me to judge and I'm wary of exaggerating.

When he stopped lots of people rushed over and escorted the lady to the side of the road, she was fine, just shocked, she said that she thought she had made eye contact with the driver at the lights, but then he'd just driven straight into her/over her bike.

She then went to sit down on some steps as a PCSO ran over.

The truck driver was out of his cab by now, and circling his vehicle taking photographs.

Not once did he approach the cyclist, didn't speak to her at all- he must have taken from her ability to walk that she was ok.

Maybe he is under orders not to apologise for accidents lest it be taken as an admission of fault, but still- if the cyclist had not had the presence of mind (amazing, under the circumstances) to get her feet on the bumper the driver would have been standing there having killed her.

So it's happened again, another female cyclist in a miraculous lorry escape. On 11 July a woman went under a lorry, with her bike crushed, on New Bridge Street, Blackfriars, but escaped almost unharmed. The lorry crossed her path turning left into Queen Victoria Street. I recall seeing a photo of that incident as well but can't find it now. In that case I think the woman got trapped under the high part of the lorry trailer and got out before her bike went under the back wheels.

This latest incident follows hard on the heels of the death of Min Joo Lee at Kings Cross on 3 October. Olaf Storbeck predicted this death in April 2011. From the Islington Gazette report:

Min Joo Lee, a 24-year-old fashion student from Korea, was pronounced dead at the scene after the incident at 11.40am on Monday.

She is the third cyclist in five years to die at the junction, which joins Euston Road, Pentonville Road and York Way.

The driver of the heavy goods vehicle, a man in his 60s, was treated for shock at hospital.

The woman is believed to have become caught under the wheels of the truck.

Dr Odeh Odeh, 32, a surgeon at St George’s Hospital, Tooting, who witnessed the aftermath, said: “I saw a mangled bicycle lying in the road with a body next to it. It was a horribly graphic scene – many people were staring in shock. It is not something you ever expect to see.

In 2006, Emma Foa, 56, died after her bike was in collision with a cement mixer lorry at the same junction. [Slightly incorrect: it was nearby, at the junction of Goodsway and Camley Street]. Cyclist Madeline Wright died in 2007 near King’s Cross Station after a collision with a lorry.

A spokesman for Transport for London said: “We are extremely sorry to hear of the death of the woman following a collision with a HGV in Euston Road. More needs to be done to prevent serious harm befalling London’s cyclists, and TfL is working with other organisations across London to tackle this serious safety issue.”

The spokesman said it was the 13th cycle death in London in 2011 compared to 10 last year.

The other 12 deaths have been, courtesy of Olaf Storbecks's tabulation:

Gary Mason: Sandy Lane South, Wallington, killed by van
Daniel Cox: Dalson Junction, killed by lorry
Tom Barrett: A40 at Northolt, killed by van
David Poblet: Tanner Street, London Bridge, killed by lorry
Paula Jurek: Camden Road, killed by lorry
Gavin Taylor: Mildmay Grove North, Islington, died after colliding with parked car
Female cyclist: Queen Caroline Street, Hammersmith, killed by lorry
Thomas Stone (age 13): Bell Farm Avenue, Dagenham, killed by car
Male cyclist age 62: Layhams Road, Bromley, killed by car
Paul McGreal: Hackney Road, killed by lorry
Johanna Bailey: Cavendish Road, Lambeth, killed by van
Sam Harding: Holloway Road, killed by bus after getting knocked off by car door

As the TfL spokesman says, more certainly "needs to be done to prevent serious harm befalling London's cyclists".

There are clearly massive problems at the major junctions around all London's main rail stations for a start. These are places lots of cyclists go. We needs an urgent, concrete and comprehensive action plan to tackle these. Not more contemptible weasel words from TfL about "balancing" or "reflecting the needs of all road users".

Why do we make no progress on the issue of lorries and cyclists in London down years and decades? As I have said before, it is because we have a hold of the wrong end of the stick. The (main part of the) answer is not educating lorry drivers and cyclists to be better aware of one another. It is separating cyclists and heavy vehicles, whose drivers can't necessarily see them, by design. Designing so that drivers and cyclists don't take risks, or when they do take them, the consequences are slight. Prioritising the movements of pedestrians and cyclists. The Dutch concept of sustainable safety.

Unfortunately such thinking seems to be as far away as ever in London. TfL's latest cycling-related idea seem to be to effectively pay people for cycling, in an inducement scheme. As Croydon Cyclist says,

It gives two pictures, on one side TfL want to make the traffic flow for motorised vehicles as quick as possible, but on the other side they want to get people out of their cars and onto the streets which they have just put fast-moving and dangerous traffic on to.

I think, unfortunately, this scheme could work. People are quite inclined to accept material inducements to do dangerous things, particularly in difficult times. We'd better get ready for more tragedies.