Brent scoops the pollution prize in time for the Climate Rush "Spring Clean"

Brent has the most polluted location in London, it is revealed by the Brent & Kilburn Times:

According to the London Air Quality Network (LAQN), Neasden Lane reached the maximum of 36 Bad Air Days per year on Tuesday (11).

This means any further days could be breaking legal requirements on pollution levels.
....

It is claimed that the poor quality of air is due to waste transfer activities at Neasden Goods Yard and the proximity of the North Circular Road.

Last year the maximum amount of pollution allowed was exceeded 77 times, more than double the acceptable level.
.... 

Simon Birkett, founder and director of campaigning group Clean Air in London, who work closely with LAQN in their attempts to combat pollution said levels were ‘dangerously high’. 

He said: “This is not dust these are invisible and dangerous airborne particles including some which are toxic or carcinogenic. 

“The Neasden Lane breach is the latest evidence that there has been a failure to address the biggest public health crisis for decades.” 

Brent council confirmed that a monitoring station which had been set up on site showed that standards for air quality were ‘repeatedly breached’.

So, as we are only one quarter of the way through 2012, and Neasden Lane has already had more days over the "safe" limit than are "allowed" for a whole year (I am not sure why any days over the limit are "allowed" at all, but there you are), it appears that pollution in Neasden Lane (which I often cycle on) is twice what it was last year.

As I have discussed before, this is one district of London where cycling for practical journeys is to all intents and purposes impossible, because of the severing of the whole area by infrastructure that is almost impossible for cyclists to negotiate: the North Circular Road barrier (creating much of the pollution), the appalling huge gyratory junctions around Neasden, which force cyclists to take extremely circuitous and inconvenient ways round (and walk), or else take on motorway-style slip roads and the terrifying "Death Valley" underpass, plus the barriers of the railway corridors: the Chiltern Line, with no bridges between the North Circular and Wembley Hill Road, a distance of 1.5 miles, and the Metropolitan and Jubilee Lines, with no bridges between the North Circular and Bridge Road, Wembley, again a distance of 1.5 miles, plus the nasty lorry-filled one-way roads of the Wembley Park industrial estate, should one manage to get across the North Circular, and into that impassible triangle of land between the diverging railway lines that separates Neasden and Willesden from Wembley (only possible via the North Circular itself, and Great Central Way).

The situation of Neasden Lane, courtesy of Google maps

"Death Valley" for cyclists, at Neasden (A4088 underpass beneath North Circular)

North-south journeys through Neasden are restricted to Neasden Lane (the B453) or Dudden Hill Lane (the A4088) because of the North London freight line. Both these roads take you inexorably to the Neasden gyratory mess, unless you use the pedestrian footbridges illegally. Neasden lane itself is a very unpleasant road to cycle on, being quite wide in parts (but always one lane) and narrow in others, particularly by the tube station, and where the road passes under the North London freight line. Here, cyclists are squeezed between the constricting kerbs of the pavements, aggressive "Titan" kerbing which has been used for central traffic-calming islands, and cars and lorries roaring up from behind.

Here's the view I got when I called up Neasden Lane on Google Earth. The Google camera got it spot on: typical conditions: narrow lanes dominated by heavy industrial vehicles, with no space for cycling.

The part of Neasden north of the North Circular, totally divorced from the southern part, is sandwiched between the vast Underground railway depot, the River Brent (a tiny stream, but one with strangely few crossing points), and the Brent Reservoir. It would be lovely if there were a connection for pedestrians and cyclists from the north to the south side of the reservoir in Neasden, other than the deeply unpleasant race-track of Neasden Lane North, and I discussed the possibility that such might be created with Brent Council and British Waterways (who own the reservoir and land around it) years ago, but British Waterways kiboshed the idea because they thought it would be a "security risk" to have pedestrians and cyclists near the dam, and nobody at Brent Council was prepared to push the idea. (Why it would be a security risk uniquely here, when pedestrians and cyclists use dams for access all across the rest of the UK and Europe, I have not a clue).

The end result is that Neasden and Wembley are the most cycle-impermeable suburbs you are likely to find anywhere in Britain, and travel on foot here is also awkward, inconvenient and unpleasant. It is not in the least bit surprising that, for almost everybody, the only practical means of transport here are the car, bus, and train. It is not in the least bit surprising that Neasden Lane is the most polluted place in London. The record has no doubt been worsened by the low rainfall we have had this year. Some of the pollution is due to the waste transfer station adjacent to the road. Some may be due to the Chiltern Line, which has some diesel units, though I expect not much. Mostly it will be the traffic, particularly the diesel lorries. Neasden Lane is actually in a slight valley, into which the pollution from the North Circular will sink.

And all this is little more than a mile from Wembley Stadium, the national sports stadium, the biggest of the six stadiums hosting the 2012 Olympic Games. Wembley however only will host two Olympic events: men's and women's football. That's probably just as well. We don't want too many of the athletes of the world to be given asthma at the London "greenest Olympic Games in history". As to our own teams that play there regularly, well, they are British, they must be used to it by now: lungs of steel, and all that.

If you are seeing the Olympic football, or any other match, or any other event at the stadium or concert arena, my advice is not to try to get to Wembley by bike. Unless you live in the part of London to the north of Wembley, which you probably do not, it would be a major challenge. There was a plan, about five years ago, to create "greenway" cycle and walking routes to Wembley Stadium from all directions, in time for the Olympics. Sustrans was involved. It was called, cleverly, the Wembley GOAL project, standing for Greenways for the Olympics And London. Of course, as usual for these things in this country, there was no funding for it, beyond the initial studies, and nothing ever happened, save for employing consultants for a few weeks, and wasting a few days of LCC volunteers' time. Pretty coloured maps were produced, residential streets and parks were cycled around, "stakeholders" were consulted, and the project then vaporised. I could write a whole long post just on this scandal – it is a story that has not yet been told – but I will not do so today. Little enough has been done for cycling and walking access to the main Olympic Park in East London, as many other bloggers have mentioned, but at least something happened there. At least a new platform was constructed to allow the route along the Lea canal to be continuous, even though it looks like that route, crazily, will be closed for the Olympics themselves because of, again, the absurd "security" obsession. But precisely nothing happened in Wembley, or in Brent.

The fantasy "greenways" conceived for the Sustrans Wembley GOAL study of 2007, never built

Here is a newer version. Sustrans still propose (or was still proposing in 2009) this contorted Greenway "network" for Brent. Apart from the fact that it has made practically no progress, in my view, this entire concept is wrong, of attempting to push cyclists onto obscure, un-useful byways. Large-scale popular cycling will only ever be achieved by giving people on bikes direct, convenient, safely segregated routes on main roads, as they have done in the Netherlands, Denmark and Germany.


So pollution in Boris Johnson's London continues to spiral out of control, killing 2,200 people per year, according to the latest research reported by the BBC. This is about ten times the number of people killed in road crashes in London. And of course everybody's health must be affected, not just that of those who die as a result of the pollution. Johnson's "solution" is to put pollution suppressants in front of air quality monitors, so reducing the number of occasions on which the PM10 value is reported to be breached and reducing the number of smog alerts, both preventing the public from being warned of the dangerous conditions, and attempting to circumvent the discovery of legal breaches, and application of fines. This is what the Campaign for Clear Air in London, a non party-political organisation, condemns as "public health fraud on an industrial scale". And as the MP for Brent North, Barry Gardiner, said in a Tweet yesterday: "Boris's pollution suppressors near air quality monitors is like putting breathing apparatus on the canary in the mines!"

Those living or working on or near main roads like Neasden Lane and the North Circular Road are the ones at the sharpest end, the ones who will pay the heaviest price for this truly criminal public health fraud. But its all connected, and we all suffer, from the failure to control motor traffic in London, the failure to provide decent routes for walking and cycling, the failure to live up to the spin of "the greenest Olympics ever", the failure to arrest the degradation of the environment.

If you can, support the Climate Rush Spring Clean walk and cycle march, rally and direct action, today, Thursday 19 April, at 6:00pm outside DEFRA, 17 Smith Square, London SW1. And of course, come on the LCC Big Ride, calling for "streets as safe and inviting for cycling as they are in Holland", on 28 April. Most importantly, do vote in the London mayoral election on 3 May for a candidate who does not think the best way to combat pollution is to try to glue it to the road.

Something for cyclists in Barnet

I noted in a previous post how parts of one of the few pleasant traffic-free routes for cyclists in the Borough of Barnet, the path along the Dollis Valley in Finchley, marked on earlier editions of the Transport for London Cycling Guides as open between Waverley Grove, off Hendon Lane, and Dollis Road, and on the current guides as running not so far north, up only to Hendon Avenue, had been closed to cyclists by Barnet Council, apparently at the behest of local residents.

In exploring the Brent Cyclists route to the Great Divide Ride starting point at New Southgate, I was able to confirm that at least one small good thing has happened for cycling in Barnet recently (which I had already read of in newspaper reports): the stream-side path from Hendon Lane to Hendon Avenue, through Windsor Open Space,  has been re-vamped, and given new (rustic, wooden) signage, and the signs banning cycling are gone (though I did not see any specifically encouraging cycling either).

The new path, seemingly intended for cyclists and pedestrians, alongside the Dollis Brook through Windsor Open Space

It would appear that this is now intended to be a cycle route, and it appears that this aspect of the Open Space improvement works was pressed on to the normally cycle-indifferent (to put it charitably) Barnet Council by Boris Johnson. According to the Hendon & Finchley Times,

The bulk of the money for the scheme came from a £400,000 grant from the Mayor of London, with £250,000 was also secured from Transport for London for cycle and footpath improvements.

The plan won a competition for funding from the mayor back in 2009, in which the public were asked to vote on-line. The cycle route was mentioned at that stage, when the relatively enlightened Cllr Andrew Harper was Barnet's environment chief. I am certain of that, despite the fact it is not mentioned in the newspaper articles, because I recall that cyclists on the internet were mobilised to support the plan, which is possibly why it won. It fell to a new (or back in the job again) Barnet environment chief, the notoriously anti-cycling Cllr Brian Coleman (also London Assembly Member for Camden and Barnet) to finish the job, and I can only assume that Boris must have leant on him, for, in spite of a vociferous anti-cycling lobby in the area (in reality probably only one or two bigoted people, as usual), he did so, though the quality of execution of the work, and its state of completion, remain locally controversial. So it is curious that perhaps the best bit of cycling in Barnet has been put in place, against the wishes of some of his constituents, by a man who once wrote:

I consider cycle lanes to be an unnecessary obstruction to cars, for which of course, roads were built.

But they say there is more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner that repenteth...

The new shared path is only half a mile long, and there is some merit in the arguments of opponents, to the extent that it is not actually wide enough for sharing. Beyond Hendon Avenue the path continues but has not been resurfaced, and is un-cycleable, so one must return to the road. The cycle path could, in principle, with sufficient investment and political will, be made to go the whole four miles or so along the stream from Totteridge in the north to Hendon in the south, or even to Brent Cross, and link in to another path, now banned to cyclists, east-west along the Mutton Brook from Hendon to East Finchley, which would give cyclists a nice route parallel to part of the North Circular Road. But such grander "Greenway" plans have never made much progress in this part of London, despite some abortive efforts by Sustrans. (Ken Livingstone is promising £10 million for Greenways should he win the election.)

There is another cycleable section of the Dollis Valley, in Totteridge, where, surprisingly, Dutch-style separate paths for cyclists and pedestrians were provided, years ago. To connect between the two off-road sections one is supposed to use a quiet "back street" route that runs to the east of the brook, between Dollis Road and Whetstone, marked as part of the London Cycle Network. Dollis Road itself, unfortunately, is a particularly nasty piece of narrow rat-run where it runs under a constricting arch of the Northern Line (Mill Hill Branch) viaduct. This has always been the problem point on this route. I have seen signage indications that an off-road route may have been provided here as well as part of this work, but I have not tested it. The on-road LCN route north of Dollis Road is not bad, as it is not a rat-run, though has a difficult crossing of Argyle Road, which is a rat-run, as it forms part of one of the few east-west routes for motor vehicles across the middle part of Barnet, along with the famous Partingdale Lane, over which Brian Coleman successfully battled environmentalists, residents, judges and cyclists to open it to through-traffic, and subsequently widened it. I have encountered several conspicuous examples of motorist aggression on this route.

At its intersection with a path called Lovers Walk, the LCN route also sports one of the most ludicrous anti-cycling barrier constructions I have ever seen. Cyclists are require to dismount and wiggle through two caged sections to get between Gordon Road and Brent Way. And what all that extra barrierage adjacent to the footpaths is for, I haven't a clue. When I first saw this, I was incredulous. I could hardly refrain from shouting out loud "Bananas! Absolutely bananas!" as I remounted and cycled away from the spot.

Candidate for Cycle Facility of the Month? Junction of the Dollis Valley route with Lovers Walk, looking towards Brent Way, Barnet.

Remember, there is no road running through here. This is just the intersection of two paths. That somebody in the council office, with a drawing board, though that all this steelwork was necessary to protect walkers using Lovers Walk from cyclists using the Dollis Valley route is quite incredible. It is probably more evidence of a local hostility to cycling. Only in a nation completely clueless about utility cycling could something so absurd exist. Barmy Barnet: I rest my case, m'Lud.