It's often only one person

Such is the pace of developments in London cycling infrastructure (planning if not actual execution) currently that a couple of details in my long blogpost of 11 days ago have already been superseded.

The most striking one is that a plan has now been produced for taking the East-West Cycle Superhighway past Buckingham Palace in a sensible manner, with the support of the Royal Parks Authority. There will be, if this goes through, a two-way segregated track on the north and west sides of the Queen Victoria Memorial linking a new cycle track on the north side of Birdcage Walk (currently the most stupidly-designed road in the area, with masses of space wasted in the middle of it, with giant pedestrian islands and dead areas between) with a widened two-way track on the north side of Constitution Hill. The segregation around the Memorial will be with bollards, removable for ceremonial purposes, unlike on most of the Superhighway, where it is with kerbs.

TfL visualisation of the bollard-segregated track in space taken out of the road (middle background)

Plan for the Superhighway link at Buckingham Palace

This all looks sensible enough, and people should respond to the consultation, supporting it, by 4 October. The question that is posed is: what was the problem before? Why was the Royal Parks Authority, until last week, bizarrely insisting there should be a gap in segregated the Cycle Superhighway in front of Buckingham Palace for 'safety, operational and aesthetic reasons', which would have caused, as Cyclists in the City pointed out, the Superhighway flow to get mixed with hundreds of gawping, snap-happy tourists on the Mall Service Road (effectively a pedestrian area, shown hatched just south of Green Park on the map above), obviously a recipe for disaster, and a position made even odder by the fact that, for the Superhighway solution in Hyde Park, the RPA was insisting that cyclists not share any of the current subdivided paths, but be routed via the roadway of South Carriage Drive.

South Carriage Drive, Hyde Park, a bizarrely under-used road space, will take the next section of the route westward 

Of course I've not been party to any behind-the-scene negociations, but Ross Lydall of the Standard, who generally seems to be very well-informed, seems to make things very clear:

The appointment of a new chief executive at The Royal Parks, which is responsible for the roads around Buckingham Palace, has been key to resolving the dispute.

Previous chief executive Linda Lennon was a fierce critic of many aspects of Transport for London’s 18-mile “Crossrail for cyclists” that passes through Hyde Park, Green Park and St James’s Park as it links Barking and Acton. 

The Royal Household is understood never to have objected to the plans. 

Mr Johnson said: “This is the final jigsaw piece in what will be one of the world’s great cycling routes. I am absolutely delighted that we and the Royal Parks have been able to reach agreement and I pay tribute to the agency’s new chief executive, Andrew Scattergood, his staff and TfL officers for the immense work they have put in to make it happen.

So an anti-cycling Chief Executive left, and suddenly the 'safety, operational and aesthetic' objections all disappeared and the RPA was left looking rather less like the car-oriented dinosaur that campaigners had perceived it as before (the Royal Parks of course being full of roads that are full of cars, roads used as normal parts of the through-traffic system of London, with this fact not seeming to cause the RPA any distress or sense of conflict about their purpose). Hopes are raised that, after decades of campaigners asking for it, the Outer Circle of Regent's Park might cease to be a huge gyratory for motor traffic, but might be changed so as to allow only motor access to the car parking, the zoo and residences, and to facilitate a much-needed north-westbound Cycle Superhighway, CS11.

So my message here is that often, despite outward appearances of implacable homogeneity of institutional opposition to progressive schemes, it can often turn out to be only one badly-placed person, in reality, who is causing the problem.

On the flip side, one well-placed progressive person can often galvanise an organisation and create more progress in a short time than has been achieved for many years. And I have to hand it to Cllr Phil Jones, Camden's Cabinet Member for Transport that he has, with the assistance of his officers, got Camden making better progress on actually implementing a Central London Cycling Grid (to complement the small number of built Superhighways) than all the other boroughs combined. I reported in my last post that the promised link between Royal College Street and Primrose Hill was currently stymied by bus-related arguments, but apparently these have been overcome, and Camden is now produced an attractive plan for consultation, which I recommend all London cyclists respond to favourably as well.

Proposals for Pratt Street

The proposals for Pratt Street , between Royal College Street and Camden High Street, and Delancey Street, betweem Camden High Street and Parkway, show a huge improvement over the current state of these space-wasting, unattractive, rat-runny one-way westbound roads, with a stepped cycle track going westbound with the motor flow, and an eastbound contraflow track either stepped (Delancey Street) or fully segregated (Pratt Street). The westbound flow for bikes is currently allowed, but is unattractive, particularly with the competition for road space with large vehicles including buses and squeezing at the corner of Camden High Street and Delancey Street, but the eastbound flow is not possible, cyclists from the very traffic calmed and reduced Primrose Hill area needing to access the Royal College Street or St Pancreas Way routes being forced to go via congested Chalk Farm Road or busy Parkway and Camden Street. This scheme promises to fix this long-standing, bad gap in the cycle network (as well as generally improving these streets for everyone) and others have seen the potential of this. Andrew Gilligan, the Mayor's Cycling Commissioner, has been touting this as making possible numerous long-distance cycle connections across London, in combination with the East-West and North South Superhighways:

Once the links are complete, cyclists will be able to ride from Swiss Cottage and Camden Town to Canary Wharf, Barking or Elephant & Castle entirely on separated cycle tracks or low-traffic streets. It’s testimony to the power of the relationship between TfL and a borough genuinely committed to cycling.

Actually he could go go further. If the Mayor actually builds CS11, promised for 2016, it will be possible to go all the way from Brent Cross to Canary Wharf, Barking or Elephant & Castle on cycle tracks and low-traffic streets. So I congratulate Cllr Jones on getting his plans this far, though I have disagreed with him on the best solution for Tottenham Court Road and Gower Street, Camden's 'West End Project'.

With the West End Project,  I felt, as I said last year, that fixation on the objective of undoing a gyratory system for cars and buses had got in the way of visualising the best possible ways of changing these roads to benefit pedestrians and cyclists, who are supposed to be at the top of Camden's 'transport hierarchy'. Camden's planners are now doing as good a job as they can on trying to solve junction problems that will be introduced by having stepped cycle tracks running in both directions on a two-way (for cars) Gower Street, but I think there are fundamental problems here. The cycle tracks will be on the same level as the motor lanes at the junctions, so reduced to painted markings, Danish-style, and therefore an attempt to signalise the cycle flow separately from the turning motor flow is likely to result in cyclists just getting blocked off by cars and vans invading their space. There is something of an attempt to combine Danish and Dutch junction principles here which I fear will not work. The Danes merge the cycle flow with the left (their right) turn for motors and expect cyclists to turn right (their left) in two stages. A full Dutch signalised solution separates all the conflicting cycle/motor movements in time, but depends on segregated tracks running right up to the junction, which cannot be invaded by motors. Without segregation at junctions, how can separate signalising work without risking the blocking-off of the ahead path for cyclists on what is certain to be a congested road? However, Gower Street clearly is not wide enough for two-way motor flow plus two-way cycling segregated at the junctions in the manner of a large Dutch signlised junction. The problem here is the whole architecture of the system left by removing the one-way flows for motor vehicles. (Another bad problem with the Gower Street plans is that one of the 'Danish' tracks will be interrupted by a loading bay, something the Danes would not dream of.)

But, to get back to my main theme here, we've got some individuals in influential positions now doing a lot of good for cycling in London, and we've got one or two who have been really getting in the way. Linda Lennon may have gone, but we still have a fine example of the latter tendency in Hackney Council's Planning Sub-committee Chair and perhaps Phil Jones's polar opposite, Councillor Vincent Stops. Stops has been a long-standing and clear opponent of segregated cycle infrastructure, and most likely through his influence Hackney Council has prevented TfL implementing Cycle Superhighway 1 on the A10 in the borough, consigning it instead to indirect back-streets in the manner of the old poor-quality London Cycle Network, and sacrificing the safety of the majority of cyclists who will always wish to cycle on the direct, main road, on which 28% of the serious casualties to people on bikes in Hackney now occur. Stops has actually written a blogpost on the subject of Cycle Superhighway through Hackney, but this does not really attempt to justify the route that Hackney Council has forced on the Superhighway on any logical grounds, rather, it attacks the whole concept of cycle routes:

A route-based approach is limiting, when streets are better regarded as a network

Drawing lines on maps, declaring them cycle routes and investing heavily along the route seems to capture the imagination of cycle planners and some campaigners, even though hardly anyone cycles such a route from end to end. Some of the investment that comes from such route-based planning will be good cycling value for money. However, instead of spending all this money on CS1, there are numerous other locations in the borough where investment would have been better directed. Improving these other locations, rather than using a large pot to titivate, and not substantially make things better for people cycling would certainly be better value for money, in terms of improvements to cycling.

In Hackney, in contrast to the route-based approach, the most innovative recent work has been the creation of a Bikeability map which assesses all of the borough's streets, regarding them as a network. Incrementally improving this network, particularly where there are historic clusters of collisions, will provide the best value for limited cycle and road safety funding. Sometimes improvements may be made opportunistically.

Hackney's 'Bikeability map'. The green on minor roads represents a lower 'Bikeability skill level' than the grey-brown on  (e.g) the A10 running straight N-S down the west side of the borough.

The first thing to say here is there is nothing 'innovative' about these 'Bikeability maps' for urban areas; I've been hearing about them for years from various campaigners and officials. The approach sounds reasonable enough, if it is being used to identify the worst locations that require remedial action, but, in practice, these maps are always used as a displacement activity to avoid doing what really needs to be done. Stops is being disingenuous in his talk of 'limited cycle and road safety funding'. Hackney could have had the funding from Transport for London to transform the A10, the road, I repeat, where 28% of all cycle casualties in Hackney occur, the most direct sand useful route in the borough, into an attractive, safe, high-quality cycle corridor. They chose not to take this, but to fiddle about on back-streets instead. Stops' claim that

Hackney Council has to be congratulated for getting so much value from the Cycle Superhighway process

will be regarded with some very raised eyebrows in the borough and beyond.

Of course I'd not dispute that streets should be regarded as a network, and, ultimately, almost the whole network needs its quality raised for cycling, but the points that are missing from Stops' analysis are 'utility' and 'standards'. Some routes are of far more utility and importance to cyclists than others, and it is here that investment at this early stage in developing a cycle network must be concentrated, to develop what I'd describe as the 'backbone network' of obviously attractive and useful routes that is needed to pull people in to cycling. Generally, but not always, these routes will be on the main roads, where, to achieve acceptable standards of actual and subjective safety, cyclists need segregation.

Stops wishes to focus on the wider network, and implicitly, to focus on small roads, because he seems to have a horror of the idea of subdividing the space on larger roads using kerbs, which he considers to be 'pesky' things that will disadvantage pedestrians, bus passengers, or others. But the 'Bikeability map' approach that Stops praises is fundamentally discriminatory and opposed to inclusive cycling, because it accepts a general and permanent compromise between efficiency and safety that is inimical to creating to a quality cycle network with uniform provision. What this 'Bikeability' thing, in this context, is really about is classifying cyclists, not roads. The very concept of 'Bikeability' in play here is a motor-oriented one, confusing 'cycling skill' with 'willingness to cycle with motor traffic'. Brave 'skilled' cyclists (normally young men) will continue to push their way down the A10, with its bad crash rate, because it is the most efficient, useful route for them. The slow and less assertive will, if they try to cycle at all, which most of them will not, be consigned to an indirect, low-priority, hidden 'superquietway' that will not be easy to use and will not get them to the places they need to go. This is not a good approach if your aim is mass cycling. But I sense this may not be Stops', or Hackney Council's, real aim.

Stops goes to a bizarre extreme in inventing arguments against segregated cycle tracks, for example when he commented on Twitter on the forthcoming East-West Superhighway:

How will an 8 year old get through a more congested Parliament Square as a non CSH route user?

...as if there are eight year-old cyclists using Parliament Square now who could possibly could be inconvenienced (rather than enabled) by the cycle track! (Even if you accept the wrong contention that the cycle track will cause congestion, I challenge Stops or anyone to stand at Parliament Square for a day, or a year, counting eight year-olds on bikes. There will be more flying pigs seen, except, of course, when road are closed for events like the RideLondon.)

Stops likes to claim that Hackney is London's best borough for cycling. I'm sorry, but the truth is that cycling in Hackney is, by and large, crap. I've often cycled in Hackney, and I cycled through Hackney the other day. There is no provision on main roads, which are choked with buses and other heavy vehicles, and the minor road routes are slow, deprioritised, badly-maintained and uncomfortable. You are bumping over severe traffic-calming all the time, and badly-maintained surfaces, taking long ways round, trying to follow neglected or non-existent signage in obscure places, you are constantly having to give way to main roads, or even slightly more important roads, and where you meet a main road to negotiate a straight across or dog-leg junction you have no help and no protection. Hackney can't even can't keep these poor backstreet routes open. The famous one running east-west from Canonbury to London Fields is currently blocked by major digging where the railway goes over in Middleton road, and cyclists just have to use the pavement.

Cycling in Hackney is inefficient and dangerous on the backstreet routes that borough provides, and very dangerous on the direct main road routes that it does nothing to make attractive or comfortable. Contrary to Stops' frequent claim that Hackney is some sort of great cycling leader amongst London boroughs, it actually (according to TfL cycle counts) has a similar cycling level to the boroughs of Richmond upon Thames, Hounslow, Islington and Lambeth, places with very different local circumstance and policies. The 2011 census gives utility cycling actually at a higher level in Richmond upon Thames than in Hackney (though I don't put much store by census transport data, as it comes from a self-survey, and may just mean that Richmond people want to believe they cycle more than Hackneyites do).

TfL counts had (2013) Hackney on 6% of journeys compared to Richmond, Hounslow, Islington and Lambeth on 5%

2011 census data had Richmond ahead of Hackney on cycling

Richmond and Hackney are very different places, the former outer London and Conservative-controlled, the latter inner London and Labour, but I think the reasons for the high (by very low UK standards) cycling levels they share are a result of similar factors. Both have within them or very close to their borders a lot of parkland and waterside space where cycling is possible, attractive and car-free (in Richmond Park and other parks and along the Thames in the case of Richmond and in Victoria Park and other parks and and along the canals in the case of Hackney). In neither case is this much to do with the roads policies of the council. Hackney is, in addition, a flat and compact borough within easy commuting distance of the City of London, and it does seem that Hackney does disproportionally well out of commuting to the centre (it is the commuting mode share that the proponents of Hackney's 'cycling success' usually quote), while cycling to school remains at only 2% of trips, not high even by UK standards, and indicating the lack of a genuinely broad-based cycling culture.

Cllr Stops' partner Rita Krishna, is strangely (or not so strangely, if you know the local situation) on the Committee of Hackney Cycling Campaign. Since she appears to share the same views as Stops, those Hackney cyclists wishing to campaign for good-quality infrastructure in their borough had best lend their support to the rival campaign, Hackney People on Bikes, which does support the policies promoted in this blog (which are also the official policies of the London Cycling Campaign). In any case, it looks like Hackney will continue to be a blockage to the development of a high-quality, inclusive cycle network for Londoners while Vincent Stops remains influential on the borough's transport policy.

I paid a visit to the Embankment on Friday to see how the East-West Superhighway construction is getting on (and to examine those pesky kerbs). Only a 500m section is currently open, between Horseguards Avenue and Westminster Bridge, and it is only accessible to westbound (or southbound) cyclists, as there is no way to reach it eastbound. However, looking at the rest of the work on the two kilometre section between the open section and Blackfriars Bridge, I expect all this length to be open by the end of the year.

Completed Superhighway section looking south (up river). The basic two-way track is 4m wide in general.

This is all cycling space. The right-hand area is a lane for right-turning cyclists, who will cross the carriageway using the signals 

Completed Superhighway section looking north (down river)

The track is smooth, machine-laid tarmac. The kerb on the river side has not been altered, though I think it has been made lower by laying of the track. The kerb on the new segregating island is chamfered,  a good detail, allowing wider effective width and reducing the chance of pedal-strike.

Make no mistake, this is the proper thing, and very satisfying to see, as the first piece of truly high-quality cycle infrastructure ever built on a main road in Central London. This is the most significant thing done for cycling in London since Camden built its tracks at the turn of the century, and, before that, well perhaps the most significant infrastructure put in since the 1930s (though that was suburban, not central). It's worth re-emphasising here: this is a gain from road-space. Nothing has been lost by pedestrians (in fact a lot has been gained). A simple transfer has taken place from space dominated and, from the point of view of most people, monopolised by motor vehicles to space dedicated to active travel. We'll see a lot more of this with the rest of this Superhighway scheme, and the north-south one from Elephant and Castle to the border of Camden. The politicians and public servants, like Vincent Stops and Linda Lennon, who say they support cycling, but do not want to see this kind of thing on their patch, will in future be seen more and more as an anachronism and an impediment to the development of a more civilised, pleasant and sustainable city. 

The new Superhighways and Camden's grid routes point the way to a future pattern of use of road space that gives everybody an opportunity to cycle their journeys if they wish. The discriminatory approach based on keeping direct main routes as the cycling preserve of a tiny fit and brave minority must be consigned to the dustbin of history.

The Mayor's Vision for Cycling in London: 18 month assessment

I last wrote extensively on The Mayor's Vision for Cycling in London shortly after it was announced, in March 2013. We are now 18 months on, so I thought I would try to assess 'how it is going'.

A reminder: the Vision is aiming for a doubling of cycling in London over 10 years, achieved mainly through these four programmes:

1. Cycles Superhighways (Including the E-W "Bike Crossrail")
2. The Central London Grid
3. Quietways outside Central London
4. Outer-London mini-Hollands

About £900 million was earmarked for spending over 10 years on these, but only £370 million was expected to be spent by May 2016, the rest of Boris Johnson's tenure as Mayor, with the rest being dependent on the wishes of whoever is elected to replace him.

Now the first thing to say is that the rate of progress has been disappointing. Summer is the usual time for spades to be put in the ground for major work on the roads.  I thought a year would be adequate for Transport for London to put their plans in place and assemble the correct staff, and that we would probably see something happening this summer. But summer passed, and nothing much happened, except a draft of the much-delayed, and in the event exceedingly lengthy and somewhat un-focused London Cycle Design Standards document was released for consultation. (See the excellent Cycling Embassy response on this.)  The Cycling Commissioner, Andrew Gilligan, has been giving talks everywhere, and press releases have been common, but there's been no spades in the ground. What has been built in the last 18 months was either in train before (as was the Cycle Superhighway 2 extension), or the result purely of a borough initiative (as was the rebuild of the Royal College Street cycle track).

On the other hand, though it is getting going painfully slowly, there are signs of a seriousness to the project that go far beyond what we have been used to seeing before in the politics of UK cycle provision. I have, for example, actually watched (sad, benighted creature that I am) the examination of the chief officers of the project, including Gilligan and Lilli Matson, TfL's Head of Delivery Planning, by the GLA's Budget Monitoring Subcommittee. It is very clear if you watch this that we are in a rather different world to the borough Town Hall meetings of old where a 'Cycling Officer', a rather unimportant council employee who happened to be quite keen on cycling, would turn up before a few pretty uninterested councillors in a dirty yellow lycra suit and explain how he proposed to spend a few thousand pounds on painting some lines on pavements. Now, we have people establishing the serious business case for the expenditure, monitoring and auditing by actual outcome, of how many cycle journeys are generated, for hundreds of millions of pounds spent across a city of 10 million people. This is a hard-headed world which is little to do with wanting to 'look green' or create a bit of good PR with 'cyclists', but everything to do with keeping a major city moving and keeping it in business, and spending public money sensibly and effectively.

So what of the four programmes? In brief, if you haven't got time to read further, I'd say this: The Cycle Superhighways are now looking quite promising as the standards, programme and timetable for them is becoming clear. The timetable, nature and likely ultimate success of the Central London Grid is much less clear, and that is because TfL doesn't control most of it, the boroughs do. The programme for the Quietways is becoming slightly clearer, but the standard of implementation is in doubt. There seems to be a problem with people understanding the nature of the Quietways; Andrew Gilligan seems to have to keep explaining it again, and that must be his fault for not being clear enough from the start. The mini-Hollands still have not progressed sufficiently to draw any conclusions.

Superhighways

According to Gilligan at the budget subcommittee, around half of the total budget for Superhighways (£209m) is scheduled to have been spent by May 2016. The initial four superhighways that were created by painting the road blue – CS2 from Stratford to Aldgate, CS3 from Barking to Tower Gateway,  CS7 from Merton to The City  and CS8 from Wandsworth to Westminster are promised to be re-engineered 2016. However, the only one for which we have seen plans is the notorious CS2. These are being consulted on currently (ends 2 November), and look worth supporting, containing a large element of segregation, though the solution for Bow Roundabout is still sub-optimal, and a further round of improvements here is promised at a later date.

Then there are the two 'new' un-numbered Superhighways, known as the East-West (previously 'Bike Crossrail') from Tower Hill to Acton, and the North-South from Kings Cross to Elephant & Castle. These are due to be completed by May 2016, except for the Westway section of the East-West. They are being consulted on now (here and here). You should act quickly to respond, if you have not already done so: consultation closes 2 November. The plans have been well-received by campaigners and bloggers, being again for mostly segregated tracks achieving a generally high standard of provision and capacity. These new Superhighways also meet two of the main criticisms levelled at the original Superhighways plan: that the routes didn't go into the centre, and they didn't connect up. These two Superhighways will cross at Blackfriars north junction, though they will be at different levels there. They will be connected by a major junction remodelling, converting one of the current slip-roads off the bridge into the connecting two-way cycle track. Construction of all this will mark the final success of the Blackfriars campaign that this blog covered extensively in 2011.

What LCC demanded in 2011

What is now being offered. Sustained campaigning and protest by thousands of people put this on the table as a realistic possibility.

The plans for the East-West and North-south Superhighways are really not complete at all. The North-South, in particular, seem not to deserve its name, as it is just a 'stub' compared to the far more important East-West, and most of what has been planned is south of the Thames, further emphasising the Superhighway network's already very strong south-of-the-Thames bias. Far from getting anywhere near 'north' London, it peters out in the backstreets of Clerkenwell's existing Seven Stations Link (London Cycle Network Route 0) in the Ampton and Cubitt Streets area, seemingly baffled by the King's Cross Gyratory. It could connect with Camden's proposed route on Midland Road up towards Camden and Kentish Towns ultimately, but still it seems disappointing in concept compared to the East-West route: we might have expected a high-profile main road route up at least as far as Kings Cross. However, let's not be churlish: with a good segregated cycle track on Blackfriars Bridsge, we could finally declare the Battle for Blackfriars won.

There are still big gaps in the East-West plan, mostly concerned with the Royal Parks. What to do at St James's Park and in front of Buckingham Palace still has not been decided, though the suggestion of replacing the horse ride by Constitution Hill with a cycle track is a good one. Andy why, at the chaotic Wellington Arch, why do TfL propose 'a larger shared space to replace sections of grass to provide more space for pedestrians, cyclists and horses'? Why not just have clear dedicated routes so everybody knows where they are? Using the Carriage Drives in Hyde Park is a good plan, as they don't get disrupted by the park's frequent commercial entertainments, but these sections have not been designed yet. Different options are given in the Lancaster Gate area, and the idea for using the elevated A40 Westway to Acton seems still sketchy: further consultation on this is promised in 2015.

On the other hand, the plan for The Embankment, Bridge Street and Parliament Square is a clearly-defined game-changer: a high-capacity, high-profile two-way cycle track driven right past the Houses of Parliament and across the formerly intimidating and hostile gyratory of the Square. For this section alone the plans would deserve massive praise, and the scale and ambition of the East-West and North-South Superhighway concepts overall demand that all who are interested in the environment of the city and its transport network, whether they cycle or not, show their support.

Of the other Superhighways, CS5 Belgravia to New Cross is supposed to be finished by the end of 2015, and there may then be an extension east of New Cross. The plans for extensive segregation of the inner section, Belgravia to Oval, were consulted on this Summer, and look quite good. The outer section will use semi-segregation, we are told, but the exact character of this does not seem to have been decided.

CS1 City to Tottenham will not be on the roads originally planned, it will be on smaller roads, and possibly built by Autumn 2016. CS11 from Regents park to Brent Cross is also due to be finished by Autumn 2016. It depends on Westminster and the Royal Parks agreeing to the closure to through-traffic of the Outer Circle. It will thence run up Avenue Road, Finchley Road and Hendon Way, but we have see no plans for this so far.

CS4 Tower Bridge to Woolwich is supposed to be finished by 2017, and a new (so far un-numbered) Superhighway is planned on Lea Bridge Road in connection with the Waltham Forest mini-Holland project. CS9 which should have gone from Hyde Park to Hounslow has run into opposition from the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. It looks like TfL will only be able to progress the sections in Hammersmith & Fulham and Hounslow, and the timetable for these is currently unclear.

That's a total of twelve Superhighways, the number originally projected, though they are not all in the originally projected locations. The original CS12 Angel to Muswell Hill and CS10 Hyde Park to Park Royal have been abandoned. CS10 is supposedly replaced by the East-West route on the A40, but this means, with the original CS11 alignment having been moved east, from the A5 to the A41, that Brent, quite an inner borough (though technically an Outer London one) will have been completely left out of the Superhighways programme.

I have to say I take all TfL's projected completion dates with a massive bag of salt. We were told, after all, in late 2012, that CS5, 9, 11 and 12 would be launched in 2013. Well, clearly the rethink on the whole nature of the CSHs after LCC's Go Dutch Campaign and the appointment of Gilligan as Commissioner caused that three-year delay. But the longer timescale is for the best if what we get is actually good. The designs we are seeing now show a step-change in quality from what we were offered before. Problems tend to come at a few places at big junctions where there is slightly too much emphasis on mixing and sharing with pedestrians: we need separation and clarity to allow flows of both cyclists and pedestrians to continue to grow and co-exist in harmony. We need efficient cycle routes and we don't want pedestrians to get intimidated. But the basic battle for space and separation from heavy flows of traffic seems to have been won.

Central London Grid

The Grid is the name given to the combination of Superhighways and Quietways in Central London. We have a map of the Grid, and we have the Superhighway plans so far as they go, and we have solid proposals for some of the Camden routes, but that seems about all. We have little indication of the standard that the boroughs other than Camden will apply to the Quietway routes. We have had one Quietway proposal from Southwark (QW2) in detail, and this has been criticised in detail elsewhere, with suggestions for how it could be better. It seems likely to fail LCC's criteria of vehicle flows below 2,000 PCU per day and speeds under 20mph with the design that has been proposed. It seems that the problem is political will from the borough to cut the minor-road rat-runs (like Tabard Street, which is parallel to the A2 and should not be a through-route), and it looks very likely that this kind of issue with the Grid Quietways will be repeated more widely unless Boris Johnson and his aides can somehow bring more persuasion to bear on these boroughs.

Current Central London Grid plan

I've written about the inadequacy of many parts of the Grid plans before. The problem is basically one of the Mayor trying to promote changes on roads he doesn't control. One answer would have been for him to have included more TfL roads in the Grid. Kensington and Chelsea is most obviously not playing ball, and Westminster's commitments remains very vague, which is deeply worrying since, as can be seen, much the largest part of the Grid is in Westminster. The general lack of concrete plans by the boroughs for implementing the non-Superhighway elements of the Grid at the moment makes it look very likely that little of the Grid will have progressed beyond the paper stage by May 2016.

Quietways outside Central London

The Quietways beyond the Grid area are a separate funding stream for TfL, and this also is the only source of funds for new routes (or upgrades of old ones) for the boroughs that lack mini-Holland funding (that is, most of the outer boroughs). Sustrans was put in charge of doing the initial planning of these Quietways, and immediately there seemed to be divergences of opinion over what the scheme really was about. The emphasis in the Mayor's Vision for the Quietways was on 'low traffic back streets and other routes', but it also stated:

Where directness demands the Quietway briefly join a main road, full segregation and direct crossing points will be provided, wherever possible, on that stretch.

We will use judicious capital investment to overcome barriers (such as railway lines) which are often currently only crossed by extremely busy main roads. Subject to funding, land and planning issues, we will build new cycling and pedestrian bridges across such barriers to link up Quietway side-street routes.

This was always going to be a prescription that was hard to apply in many places in Outer London, where 'low-traffic back routes' are not very available or useful, and therefore the joining of main roads might not be so 'brief'. I pointed out last year how the level of funding allocated to these routes did not suggest that many intractable problems that require heavy engineering solutions, such as the mess of railway and main road corridors that makes the centre of the Borough of Brent quite impenetrable by bike, could actually be solved within the limits of this programme. It soon became clear that Sustrans and some people in the boroughs were interpreting the Quietways as being necessarily, and thus limitingly, on quiet roads, and being necessarily low-intervention, which is, of course, what the name does suggest. However, Andrew Gilligan had repeatedly said that where no satisfactory back-street route exists on the desired alignment, Quietways can be on main roads, and they can be high-intervention, i.e., physically segregated. This raises an unanswered question of how bad the backstreet route has to be before the backstreet idea is abandoned. The other question which remains unanswered is the same as for the Grid: how prepared will local councillors be to actually cut the rat-runs to make back-street routes attractive?

The planning for the Quietways, so far as it has got, seems to have been rather secretive, and LCC has only with difficulty managed to compile this plan, low-res version below, of roughly where the first routes are currently proposed to go.

It appears that this map shows the very most that will be achieved by May 2016. It will be seen that Andrew Gilligan's early concept of naming routes after tube lines that they follow has been abandoned, except for the Jubilee Line Quietway. This one seems a poor shadow of what he promised last year, when he spoke of a route from Central London to Wembley. Here is is shown stopping short of the North Circular, at Dollis Hill. The fact that there is a serious intention to extend it beyond the North Circular is indicated by an announcement of funding for a new cycling bridge over the A406 in Brent (and also another in Redbridge), but the timescale for these larger Quietway interventions seems to be beyond this mayoral term.

The Jubilee Line route, like CS11, depends at its southern end on the Royal Parks and Westminster agreeing to the closure of Regents Park to through-traffic. Through Camden the route, oddly, is only one or two blocks away from CS11, and then it follows an old LCN route in Brent, which requires more mode-filters and reversal of priority at junctions with other minor roads if it is to be made much more attractive than it is now. There's no guarantee of local councillors agreeing to measures like this, and little the Mayor can do to make them. So the worry is about standards. It's all very well to draw these lines on maps, but if the routes are fiddly to use, and traffic levels remain as they are at the moment, and on many roads, such as Maygrove Road and Chapter Road on the Jubilee route, cyclists just get squashed into tightly-parked narrow corridors with cars trying to get past them, then the Superhighways will prove far more attractive to all cyclists, of whatever level of experience, than the Quietways, which were supposed to be the routes 'particularly suited to new cyclists'.

Chapter Road, Brent, as it is at the moment, part of the the proposed Jubilee Line Quietway.

Perhaps the most serious problem for the inner Jubilee Line route occurs where it meets West End Lane, West Hampstead, which it has to follow for a short while to connect between side-streets, because there is no other way to cross three railways. Traffic on this road is far above a 'quietway' level, but there is also no space for segregated lanes, and no realistic political prospect of closing this quite important local through-route to motor vehicles. Sustrans' proposal for this location has been a fanciful 'shared space' repaving, rejected by Camden Cyclists, rightly, as quite beside the point. This situation points to a fairly deep conceptual problem with the Quietways. Andrew Gilligan wrote in the Mayor's Vision that the Quietways would exploit London's 'matchless network of side streets, greenways and parks'. Where are the links in this network, exactly, and how should conflict be resolved at places like West End Lane?

Again, the most advanced of the Quietway plans seems to be CS2 in Southwark and Greenwich, which Gilligan has indicated will be delivered by 2016 subject to planning permission for a new path along the railway past Millwall Football ground. Bits like this could prove to be good and could justify the name 'Quietway", but examination of the map above will show that, in general, Sustrans have not succeeded in identifying the apocryphal 'matchless network of side streets, greenways and parks', because, of course, it is not a continuous network, and could never be made into one within the constraints of the funding offered, not to mention the realities of local politics. The concept is not entirely without merit: it is not that different to the orbital Green Routes plan of Copenhagen that I covered in my blogpost on that city. The political climate there, however, is sufficiently different, through cycle culture being sufficiently established, that the complete removal of traffic, parked and moving, from minor streets, and their conversion to genuinely green pathways does really occur. It is hard to see that happening immediately in many places in the London suburbs.

On a pessimistic assessment, it looks like the Quietways could become just a third attempt at the London Cycle Network (following Ken Livingstone's failed LCN+ project), on very similar routes: a byword for complex, inefficient, out-of-the-way routes that most cyclists will avoid and which will not significantly encourage cycling in Outer London, where encouragement is most desperately needed. What I would really have liked to have seen would have been a far better-funded equivalent of the Superhighways project specifically targeted on strategic main road sections in Outer London that would often be orbital, not radial routes. There are one or two projects coming from the boroughs that do approximate to this: there is currently a consultation out from Hounslow on possible cycle tracks on Boston Manor Road, the A3002, with proposals that look really rather good. I think this kind of thing, solving specific outer borough link problems, is likely to prove a more effective expenditure of funds than the very distributed low level of funding not achieving consistent high quality that is possibly emerging as the pattern for the Outer London Quietways.

Mini-Hollands

Three mini-Hollands were selected this spring: Enfield, Kingston and Waltham Forest. The following description is taken directly from the TfL site:

Kingston
A major cycle hub will be created and the plaza outside Kingston station will be transformed. New high-quality cycling routes will be introduced together with a Thames Riverside Boardway - a landmark project which could see a new cycle boardwalk delivered on the banks of the river. 

Enfield
The town centre will be completely redesigned with segregated superhighways linking destinations, three cycle hubs delivered across the Borough and new greenway routes introduced. 

Waltham Forest
A semi-segregated Superhighway route along Lea BridEnfge Road will be developed as well as a range of measures focused on improving cycling in residential areas and creating cycle friendly, low-traffic neighbourhoods.

These are funded to the tune of £30 million each. The Enfield project seems to have proved most locally controversial, with shopkeepers mobilising against it, and the Enfield Cyclists organising a counter-campaign of demonstratively spending money in shops to try to prove the power of the 'pedal pound'.

The most actual action so far has been seen in Walthamstow, where a series of temporary experimental road closures were put in and then taken out again. This is like the '20 bollards' game, where you have only twenty bollards to distribute around your town, and you need to position them to most effectively reduce rat-running traffic to create useful new cycling and walking routes and enhance local life. Again, reaction has been mixed, but there seems a lot of positivity around the Waltham Forest mini-Holland, and campaigners seem to think it has a good chance of being accepted by the community, and forming a good template for other Outer London town centres in the longer term. But broadly, because the selection process took so long, not enough has actually happened in the mini-Hollands yet to write much about them. 

The selection procedure itself, the holding of the competition, was I think one of Andrew Gilligan's aims, successfully completed. It did get some previously pretty cycle agnostic, or even hostile, local authorities to start seriously thinking about radical change to kick-start more cycling in Outer London, lured by the cash promise, and the fact that the subject seemed to be suddenly in fashion, and that this was the project of a Tory mayor, potentially outflanking the Left on a 'green' issue. It remains to be seen whether anything from these unsuccessful mini-Holland bid plans will see the light of day; Gilligan has promised in letters to the boroughs that some projects will be pursued, and has budgeted for a number of mini-Holland 'consolation prizes' to finance the best ideas that came out of the competition in the non-winning boroughs, including the two new bridges across the North Circular I have already mentioned. Implementation of these however seems to be beyond 2016.

Conclusion

How to summarise? It has been difficult writing this post. I have started several times, and had to rewrite because of new developments and announcements. The Mayor's project is now gathering pace. A couple of months ago I would have made a much more negative, perhaps slightly bitter, assessment of where it had got to, compared to the promises of the Vision document. But now we have seen more of the new Superhighway designs, we can see that our campaigning over the last four years or so has been a success: it has produced a mind-shift in the ambitions of the people tasked with designing cycle facilities in London. The mind-shift of course has not spread to many local politicians, who have direct control over most of our roads, and therein lies the rub. There is plenty more campaigning that needs to be done, in fact, there will never be an end to it, as David Hembrow points out from the example of the apparently miraculous Netherlands. LCC had exactly the right idea with its Space for Cycling Campaign for the local elections: taking very specific demands for each ward right to each local ward councillor and candidate. This did have an effect, rather like the mini-Holland competition process, of making a few more people think properly about the issues, or at least start listening to the arguments, for the first time, though I don't expect miraculous results from it of all the ward 'asks' actually being delivered in the next few years. It was a stage in a process.

London's cycling revolution will certainly spread from the centre outwards, and the Superhighways will carry it to the suburbs. In the foreseeable future it will remain quite limited, though. The target of 5% mode share by 2025 might well be achieved, but this would still leave most Londoners out from the benefits that cycling can provide, which is rather sad, and it will also limit the success of the city overall. We've see a tremendous reaction from business leaders to the Superhighway proposals, and it's been found that a vast majority of ordinary Londoners support them as well. I always expected this kind of reaction to visionary, transformative proposals for our streets; I have said repeatedly in this blog that this is what would happen if you put to people a striking, coherent vision for change. I said this was why we in the cycling world should stop messing around asking for scraps that nobody really could see the point of, and should start to think far bigger, about what a real cycling and linked quality of life revolution would look like in London. There is now a growing realisation that London needs to compete with other world cities in terms of the quality of life it offers to a highly mobile skilled workforce. Competing on salaries or low levels or either personal or corporation tax is not enough. It is this economic driver that is increasingly recognised, and will increasingly be recognised, as the impetus for change.

This should encourage Boris Johnson and his aides and officials to become even more bold in laying down the infrastructural basis for the cycling revolution before he leaves office. We need all the other Superhighway plans quickly, and we need top quality maintained at the difficult places with many competing demands. We need better control and more up-front leadership over the Central London Grid and the Outer London Quietways to prevent any money being wasted on cosmetic projects which fall short of the best standards. We need the Royal Parks Agency, the Corporation of London, the City of Westminster and Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea to come unambiguously on board and we need to find ways to put pressure on the from every angle, from residents, businesses and commuters, to do so. We need flexibility over the definitions of the various projects, so it is clear to all that we can have segregated tracks funded on long stretches of main road in Outer London, and this in fact becomes a thing that is expected. We need the major essential linking infrastructural elements such as the new North Circular crossings delivered more quickly. We need more funding for Outer London and plans for a second round of mini-Hollands after 2016 to start to develop a real usable cycling grid outside the centre. Finally, the Mayor and GLA need to get a grip on miscellaneous 'third-party' development projects, such as, in my part of London, Brent cross Cricklewood, and Old Oak Common, and ensure that everything built in them meets the Cycling Level of Service  in the London Cycle Design Standards. There should be no question of more major road junctions being rebuilt in London without high-quality cycle provision.

There is progress, but the gap between London and the best places for cycling in world continues to grow. We continue to lose further generations of children to cycling. We continue to see illegal levels of pollution in our city, and massive levels of pollution-related disease. We need to be sober. Cycling appears quite popular at certain places and certain times in London, but we're really still in the remedial class of world cities for cycling. Cycling still hasn't made the breakthrough to become the obvious method for most people to consider for short, routine journeys. Our roads still feel, and, are, far too dangerous. We need to continue to demand far more. We can't let up.