Shared Space again

Following my post Byng Place and the influence of the anti-infrastructural "Shared Space" movement,  another cycling blogger has had a good go at those highly-paid urban designers who think that replacing tarmac and York stone with granite setts somehow achieves an urban nirvana in which all road-users interact in a relaxed and non-threatening manner with another, and all the problems created by motor traffic magically disappear. He has some good info on the Exhibition Road, London SW7, scheme. (This seems to have been going on forever – I have emails from 2005 describing it as "forthcoming", and it is still not finished. No wonder it is costing £27 million for just 750m of road. That's £36,000 per metre. Somehow Britain managed to build most of its railway network in nine years between 1836 and 1845.)
He also has some interesting data from studies that show how pedestrians actually behave in Shared Space environments. Surprise surprise, when traffic speeds or volumes are above a very low level, the space isn't shared at all, pedestrians defer to motor traffic, and keep to the side of the road, where the pavements should be, and only cross when there are gaps in the traffic. Plus ça very expensive change.

He also posts a video of Byng Place which shows nicely how this 150m long £1 million Shared Space (that's a cost of only £6,600 per metre – a bargain), that I discussed in my piece, construction of which which involved the removal of the pioneering segregated cycle track here, works in practice. Here it is. Note how no pedestrians attempt to share the space with the motor vehicles. Marvel particularly at the woman dashing for her life, nearly being run down by an ambulance about 30 seconds in.



No wonder the author entitles his piece The delusion of "shared space" as an urban transport panacea. The tragedy of all this is that the money being wasted on these mis-conceived, modish street makeovers could be being spent on creating the type of infrastructure that is proven to get large numbers of people on bikes. To get a real "cycling revolution", we wouldn't have to spend any more than we are spending at the moment on superficial street alterations, we would just need to get the money that is being mis-spent at the moment directed to the measures that we know will work. A future post will demonstrate this point in more detail.

Cycling is dangerous

Paul M commented on my last blog post, which dealt with cycling advocacy and understanding the European experience of promoting cycling:

I agree with virtually every word you say, except where you say, more or less explicitly, that cycling is dangerous. It is not, relatively speaking and relatively is the only way you can speak of any type of risk. Cycling is no more dangerous than many other activities or pastimes, and indeed in some respects is less so...

Though, from how his comment develops later, I think in fact he has no real disagreement with me,

Just as people falsely assume that flying is dangerous (although it doesn't seem to stop them doing it) when in fact they are at far greater risk driving to the airport, people fear the danger in cycling, and their fear is not so irrational - a truck passing you at 30 or 40 with only a couple of feet to spare feels dangerous when of course "a miss is as good as a mile", and even if you are coldly rational about the true danger, it feels bloody unpleasant.

I thought I would take up this point. So, here, rather than saying it "more or less explicitly", I'll say it so there is no doubt. Cycling is dangerous. What do I mean? I mean that by any realistic, useful definition of the word, cycling on UK roads is dangerous. So dangerous that the vast majority of people will never do it under current conditions. I will expand on this point.

I'll reveal first of all that, these days, I don't cycle that frequently. Last week, the only days I used my bike were Tuesday, Wednesday, and Sunday. Tuesday was a journey of only a total length of a mile, so hardly counts. On Wednesday I did a suburban trip through the Borough of Brent that totalled 12 miles, and on Sunday I was on a ride in the Hertfordshire lanes with a group of 10 others that totalled 25 miles. I recall two incidents with traffic clearly from this week of 38 miles cycling in town and country.

On the Wednesday trip I was cycling at about 15mph northbound on Honeypot Lane, Kingsbury NW9, the A4140, at 8:45pm. This is a main road, but it only has one fairly narrow carriageway in either direction at this point. It is further narrowed by pedestrian islands and sporadic parking. It is an extremely unpleasant road to cycle on, with most of the traffic exceeding the 30mph limit, and it carries a lot of heavy freight vehicles. I avoid it as much as I can, and recommend others to avoid it too. As I was passing through on of the pinch points created by a pedestrian island, I was overtaken by a truck travelling at about 30mph, which squeezed through the gap and passed me with about a foot clearance. I was shaken.

The second incident I recall from this week occurred on the ride in the Hertfordshire. On a narrow woodland unclassified lane, an impatient motorist in a small red car forced his way past the group, passing the cyclist at the front of the group, who had not moved in as far as the others, who were cycling in single file, with one foot clearance. As he passed he shouted "Get out of the way!"

Now on the suburban trip I was no doubt passed by many other lorries, whose drivers gave me safe clearance. And on the rural trip, the vast majority of drivers on the lanes of Hertfordshire were courteous to the group of cyclists. But the bad incidents remain in my mind. They could both have turned out very different. Because "a miss" is not "as good as a mile". That is a patently stupid saying, as it is retrospective and therefore totally unhelpful in the context of risk is that is random and statistical. You need an adequate margin for error in a lift-and-death situation. These drivers did not allow sufficient margin for error. Had something been slightly different, has something been wrong with the road surface, or the cyclists been less well in control, the margin for error would have disappeared and they could have been knocked off. Those drivers, without thinking, risked serious injury or death to those cyclists for the sake of a few seconds off their journey.

And this is the typical result of a typical week's cycling. For every 10 to 20 miles cycling, I reckon I witness at least one very close call for me or someone with whom I am cycling, irrespective of the environment. These are incidents that stick in the mind. They are incidents that, occurring to a new cyclist, as they inevitably will, trained or not, are very likely to make them say to themselves, "This is stupid. This is too dangerous. I'm not going to do that again." I believe that most people who try cycling on our roads quickly give it up, and this is the reason. Cycling is dangerous.

Now I am not interested in people giving me statistics on how many deaths per mile there are from various forms of transport. These are totally beside the point. Why? Because they don't measure the real danger of cycling on our roads. Because the cyclists on our roads now are an unrepresentative, self-selected group. Measuring their casualty rate per mile does not measure the true danger of cycling, it measures the risks to a group who are peculiarly able to mitigate the risks of cycling in fast motorised traffic  though their speed, athleticism, confidence and assertiveness. This group consists predominantly of young to middle-aged men – for good reason. Their ability to mitigate the risk through their athleticism and assertiveness and  does not change the fact, that, fundamentally, cycling in the motorised environment is dangerous. It is, simply, objectively dangerous to have metal boxes weighing up to several tons moving at speeds from 20 to 70 mph in the same space as unenclosed human beings. I find this such a blindingly obvious fact that I cannot for the life of me see why we have argument about it.


Paul Gannon was, as well as a cycle campaigner, a keen hillwalker and mountaineer. To pursue that avocation in Wales he left cycle campaigning and London. He would make an analogy between cycling in traffic and mountaineering. Mountaineers have all sorts of equipment that they use to mitigate the risks of their sport. Ropes, crampons, axes, whatever (I have no idea, it's not my field). The point is that their equipment and their skill is able to mitigate the risk to them, but it does not remove the basic danger of what they are doing. Mountain-climbing is without doubt an objectively dangerous activity, in the same way that cycling in fast traffic is.


Let me conduct a Thought Experiment. Thought-experiments are used by physicists, most famously by Einstein, who used them to develop the (now well-proven) Theories of Special and General Relativity. They are used to explore possibilities of reality that cannot be tested by real, practical experiments. Thought Experiments involve suspending certain aspects of reality in order to test others, which is why they are not real experiments. Let us suppose, in this spirit, that we could magically create, in an instant, a million new cyclists on the roads of Britain, distributed all over the non-motorway road system, all on their bikes at once, all appearing from nowhere in the spaces between the moving motor vehicles. Let us further suppose that they are all children and pensioners. What would happen?


Well according to the CTC's theory of "Safety in Numbers", because (they think) there is a necessary relationship between cycling numbers and cycling safety, cycling would, in that moment, suddenly become very safe, and everything would be great – lovely. But I think differently (or different as Steve Jobs might have it). I think they would all be killed. Cycling in traffic is fundamentally dangerous.


Why am I going on in this nonsensical way? Why am I writing all this rubbish about experiments that break the laws of physics that can prove nothing? My point is simply this. Whether I say that cycling is dangerous, or where the CTC or anyone else say that cycling is not dangerous, does not matter two twigs. If I say cycling is dangerous, it will not make one single cyclist stop cycling, nor prevent one single non-cyclist from starting to cycle. If CTC says cycling is not dangerous, it will not make one single non-cyclist cycle. Not of itself. For people make decisions about actions that involve physical risk on he basis of their physical perceptions. They fly in planes because it feels physically safe, not because they have studied the statistics. Similarly for travelling in cars and trains and buses.

Human beings long ago evolved the capability to measure instinctively how dangerous any activity is to themselves; they all have it – it is a visceral feeling, a feeling in their guts, and you will not argue them out of it using statistics, which are a form of abstract thought. That is just not how human beings work, not how they have evolved. A fit young person will be quite happy to jump from a river bank into a boat lying unteathered a couple of feet away, because they know their physical ability and instinctive reactions allow them to do this safely. Someone like my partner, Helen, who has multiple sclerosis, which inhibits the balance and messes up muscular reactions to complex physical situations, will not do this, because they know they can't – it would be too dangerous for them. People know their capabilities and they know what is physically dangerous to them. (Some people might be born who lack this ability, but they will tend to die young.) People make these judgements accurately for themselves. These correct, accurate, personal judgements are what lies at the root of the 1% transport modal share cycling has in Britain. People are calling the danger of cycling correctly for themselves, and all the propaganda that TfL, CTC, or anyone else can put out will never make a blind bit of difference.

In our modern industrialised society we have become risk-averse. Most, even possibly, slightly risky activities (even something as ordinary as organising any public event which might attract more than a handful of people) are institutionally and legally surrounded by the culture of Heath and Safety and risk assessment and control, often to the ludicrous, Nth degree. In this context, cycling on the roads has become a total anomaly. It is legal and uncontrolled, yet totally outside "Heath and Safety" culture – an expression of utterly the reverse, in fact.

People who get on bikes in traffic quickly realise they have no protection other than their own physical capabilities and wits. They discover that they are totally on their own. Nobody and nothing will protect them, not the Highway Code, not the police, not the Crown Prosecution Service, not the courts. And the roads are often designed to make things as dangerous as possible for them. This utterly uncontrolled, socially anomalous danger of cycling is what makes it unique as a legal activity. Being a pedestrian can sometimes have a similar character, but not for so long, as pedestrians are mostly segregated from traffic. Cycling, for a normal activity, that we would hope would be an everyday one, as opposed to a special one like mountaineering or skydiving, is tolerated by our society as uniquely dangerous.

If we want more cycling, we have to reduce the danger of the cycling environment first. We don't do this by trying to alter the cyclists – either by making them more visible, or by giving them plastic hats, or by trying to train them to fit in with the roads as they are. These approaches all fail through ignoring a basic fact of human nature: people don't want to be altered to be made more suitable for doing what others want them to do. People want what they want.

If we want more cycling we have to reduce the danger on the roads. There are many ways in which to do this. But it starts with not denying the danger. It starts with accepting the fact that, currently, cycling is dangerous.

Cyclenation and Europe, again

I see there has been a reaction in the June edition of CTC's Cycle magazine from Cyclenation (previously known as the Cycle Campaign Network) to the magazine's excellent article in the previous edition, Don't ride, won't ride? That article was a welcome offering because not particularly characteristic of CTC; the last time they covered the subject of continental cycling culture was in October 2007, in a similar article entitled Going Dutch. In the April 2011 article, Dave Horton, the leader of Lancaster University's major Understanding walking and cycling study, on which I have blogged before, discussed the reasons why so few people in the UK use the bike as everyday transport, contrasting this with the situation in other parts of Europe. As he put it so succinctly:

In Britain we have so far failed to civilise the car, and we have failed effectively to separate cycling from the car. In doing neither, we have failed to produce a cycling culture.

So Simon Geller, the Secretary of Cyclenation, has written a letter published in the current Cycle magazine, as follows:

I was very disappointed by Mikael Colville-Anderson's comments in the April–May issue. I really think he ought to find out more bout cycle campaigning in the UK  before he passes judgement on us. We seem to be in [sic] caught in a cleft stick – on the one hand we are characterised as vehicular cyclists who are confident on the road and have no conception of what it is like to be a novice cyclist, and on the other we are only interested in fighting our own corner. If the former were the case, why would we bother?

Mikael Colville-Andersen [correct spelling] is the man behind the famous Copenhagenize blog, one of the most influential cycling blogs in the world. If you read that, you will know that he knows a thing about cycling cultures. He has seen and compared them across the world. And he does also know a lot about cycling and cycle campaigning in the UK, contrary to what Simon Geller says. If he did not, he could not have written something so cuttingly accurate as this, quoted in the article by Horton. This is what Geller is complaining about, as it strikes to the core of the Cyclention and CTC ethos and tradition:

Britain could learn volumes from the Danish and Dutch experiences. [Your] reluctance to advocate protected infrastructure is the broomstick in the spokes.

In Britain, it seems to be small groups of [different] "cyclists" advocating for no one but themselves insted of promoting a return to a Britain where the bicycle was, if not king, then crown prince. This sub-cultural focus on cycling is the greatest hindrance to Britain's re-emergence as a cycling nation.

Which is bang-on. The CTC's practice of claiming to represent "cycling", and by implication, all UK cyclists, to government, while actually only representing one minority tradition, or sub-culture as Colville-Andersen puts it, that of leisure cycle touring on the roads, has long been a big problem with cycling's representation and image in government. The CTC has made some effort to broaden, but not enough. Their re-branding of a few years ago, changing their name, from "Cyclists Touring Club" to "CTC", was a classic fudge, a missed opportunity to really change, get a proper new name, and become the proper national UK advocacy body for all cyclists. The basic problem is that they have never advocated for the conditions necessary for the large mass of the population who will never define themselves as "cyclists" to start to use the bike for the short utility journeys to which it is ideally suited. Similarly Cyclenation, which also claims to be a representative national body for cycling, an overarching body to which local campaigns subscribe. Cyclenation cannot seem to escape from the tyranny of the close-minded John Franklin Cyclecraft vehicular cycling philosophy, which effectively just excludes the vast majority of the population from the joys of the bike, while re-enforcing the grip of car culture in the UK. It is into this yawning gap in UK national-level cycle advocacy that the Cycling Embassy of Great Britain has been brought into being, by a group of extremely frustrated individuals.

Note how Geller's letter on behalf of Cyclenation does not really deal with the issues. It criticises a foreigner's subjective impression of the UK cycling advocacy scene, but does not broach the, for Cyclenation, too-delicate substance of the original article, the assertion that a mass cycling culture in the UK comparable to what has been achieved in several European nations is simply not possible without substantially separating the car from the bicycle, through high-quality dedicated cycle engineering.

The CTC's traditional stance on this issue is a bipolar one of lack of enthusiasm for dedicated cycle engineering coupled with a bizarre faith in the powers of persuasion for getting UK citizens to cycle under current conditions, mostly though repeating the mantra "cycling is not dangerous"– a faith that remains undented by all real experience. There are some signs of shifting of this, but not clear ones. CTC's official policy spokesman, Roger Geffen, seems really undecided on the critical issues. He writes here, in an article published on 3 June:

CTC would of course agree with the proposition that large-scale investment in quality cycle facilities could substantially increase cycle![sic] After more than 50 years of car-centric planning and highway design, much of our road network is thoroughly off-putting to the majority of would-be cyclists, especially children (and of course their parents). We would like to see every road in the UK transformed, so that cyclists of all ages and abilities can get from A to B easily, confidently and safely, wherever they are going. We are a very long way from achieving that vision. 

Actually, on most urban streets, the solutions don't require a great deal of funding – we just need to introduce 20mph speed limits. 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.

.... Elsewhere though, busy urban streets and one-way systems may require more radical overhauls, and major inter-urban dual carriageways and their associated junctions certainly do!

However if the answer to those main roads is segregated facilities, we first need to work out how we persuade politicians and traffic planners to allocate the road-space and the funding needed for these to work well.

If the answer is segregated facilities, if... How much evidence do Geffen and the CTC need? And in a later response to comments on that article, after others have referred to the "too pessimistic" and "deeply depressing" attitude of CTC, he just goes on again about a "divisive debate" (my paraphrase) on segregation:

It is really important to build on this political will, and not to scupper it though in-fighting. In the early 1990s the cycling lobby did a fantastic job of building the political will for the then-Government to launch a commendably ambitious (but woefully under-resourced) National Cycling Strategy in 1996. Then what happened? - we managed to fall out spectacularly over this very issue of segregation. The result? - Ministers concluded that cyclists themselves couldn’t agree what we wanted, and therefore gave us nothing. The NCS fell apart and the targets were quietly dropped a few years later. Please let's not make that mistake all over again.

I am afraid this is a funny old interpretation of history. For the National Cycling Strategy of 1996 was deeply flawed from the start and was never going to go anywhere. For, influenced by CTC and CCN (now Cyclenation), it was a vehicular, and thus an exclusionist cycling strategy. Geffen is right in saying "Ministers concluded that cyclists themselves couldn’t agree what we wanted, and therefore gave us nothing", but much of that disagreement came about through disinformation put out by CCN, as I pointed out before.

Then, in another response to another Guardian piece the same day Geffen repeats all the usual CTC "cycling is not dangerous" and "we can persuade loads of people to take it up even under current conditions" happy-clappy rubbish:

The good news is that cycling gets safer the more cyclists there are: cyclists really do gain from "safety in numbers". London is an excellent example of this: cycle use has more than doubled in the past 10 years (up 117% on London's main roads) while cyclist casualties are down by 24% - which means that the risk per cyclist is down by something around 50%. Leicester is one of a number of other towns and cities which have achieved [a] similar result.

That isn't to say that London has reached cycling nirvana - far from it. The point however is that, if we portray cycling as far more dangerous than it really is, we are shooting ourselves in the foot in our efforts to encourage more people to cycle, and to discover all its benefits in terms of health, time-saving, money-saving, and the sheer fun one can have while simply getting from A to B. Is there any other way of getting around to match it?

Meanwhile, promoting the positives of cycling can help improve cycling conditions, not just through the "safety in numbers" effect itself, but also potential[ly] by boosting the number of votes in cycling. The more people there are cycling, the more politicians will be prepared to support its continued growth.

So please, for anyone looking to build increased political support for cycling, we do ourselves no favours by "dangerising" it. We have far more to gain by promoting its health and other benefits, rather than giving people safety-related excuses for deciding not to cycle. 

It's true that not everyone will respond to the positive promotion of cycling, not under current conditions...

Not everyone... Not everyone!!?? I ask you. I think definitely 1% of the population is not everyone.

The CTC conception of "not everyone".

(OK, I am assuming the identity of mode share with "number of cyclists", and "number of cyclists" could be greater than mode share, depending on how you define "cyclist", but you get the idea.)

The "safety in numbers" hypothesis I have dealt with before on this blog. It is false. Cycling is currently increasing but getting more dangerous nationally. In London, on the TfL road network cycle safety has flatlined since 2004 despite a 70% increase in cycling there. The question is, who is really "shooting themselves in the foot", in Geffen's words, those who are realistic about the danger of cycling and about the fact that it is danger that is putting virtually everybody off, and who recognise that to reduce that danger and get more people cycling the only sensible option is to learn from what has worked elsewhere in Europe and the world, or the CTC and Cyclenation, who remain in denialist mode about the real reason that 99% of British people will not consider cycling, and unwilling to learn the international lessons?

For, though Cycle magazine doesn't cover this debate very much explicitly, in every issue there are contributions from ordinary CTC members that, in passing and incidentally, underline the point, as this in the latest issue, in an article from Chris Bell, who cycled across Europe, and after 50 days experiencing cycling conditions in numerous other countries, four of which he stated provided cycle paths that made for "easy cycling" and on which he was able to average 100km a day (c.f. the common UK view that "cycle paths are for slow cyclists", and also note that none of these countries were The Netherlands or Denmark), returned to England to remark:

My arrival back in the UK on my 60th birthday began with the nightmare of cycling off the ferry and through Dover. I wonder what European visitors think? Cyclists are expected to dice with death – what  grim welcome!

I blogged yesterday about The News of the World scandal, and our politicians cosying up to News International. At the time I didn't think of any connection of News International to cycling, but of course there is one. The connection is Europe. The papers owned by Rupert Murdoch, an anti-EU Australian with a transatlanticist viewpoint, have consistently, over many years, fed the British people a diet of rubbish and misinformation about the European Union and European culture generally (where they have not ignored it totally). The result has been to breed, or encourage, in the British public a tendency to distrust European solutions to any problems, from law and order to the environment to defence to transport.

And this public distrust reflects back on our elected politicians, who have been themselves only too eager to placate Murdoch. Which has been why, for so long, the UK has looked almost exclusively to the English-speaking world for solutions to virtually all political questions, even ones to which the English-speaking world shows a conspicuous lack of credible answers, such as dealing with crime, and organising environmentally-friendly transport. This tendency is based on exaggerating the cultural differences between the UK and mainland Europe, and diminishing the major cultural differences between the English-speaking nations. (One experience that always convinces me of the huge cultural gap between the USA and the UK is watching US television news, and, even more strikingly, sport.)

We had an example of this in the recent referendum on electoral reform, where we were asked to choose between the traditional "winner takes all" system (normally, but inappropriately, referred to as First Past the Post) and the Alternative Vote system. But the opponents of change were able to argue that the Alternative Vote is used hardly anywhere in the world, which is true. It is an English-language world innovation; it comes from Australia. Nobody in the UK really wanted the Alternative Vote, which is very similar to the existing system, but with additional complications, which is why the campaign for change lost spectacularly. People in the UK are split between those who don't care, those who like the current system (which suits the Conservative Party most of all), and those who want Proportional Representation (or "Fair Votes"), as they have in the rest of Europe. But we were not offered the European solution.

The same has been true in cycling. We have not been offered the European solution. David Hembrow has remarked on the unfortunate way our media, where it picks up on cycling stories from overseas, tends to concentrate on those from the low-cycling English-speaking world, while largely ignoring what goes on just across across the North Sea, where the world's highest levels of cycling are to be found.

A contributor to the forum on the CEoGB site wrote:

My wife and I have been discussing the perception of us as everyday transport cyclists with children. Most people including our parents think we are strange and it is an odd thing to do. It is almost impossible to discuss things with people because as soon as you mention that for Holland/Denmark/Germany we would be considered normal they just say, well its different there and ‘bang’ they have closed their minds. This closed minded attitude does not exist with American culture which is celebrated and copied ad nauseum. I think people in the UK are culturally conditioned not to want to follow Europe and so our problem of advocating Dutch style cycling is complicated by the general Euro-phobic nature of the UK.

I think this is right. To what extent "the general Euro-phobic nature of the UK" has influenced the policies of our cycling organisations is difficult to say, but they have certainly been influenced by the relative freedom with which information comes to us from the English-speaking world, compared to the restricted access implied by the need for translation, as I mentioned in my earlier post on Cyclenation. And it is a problem that we have to convince politicians that this is an area where we need to follow Europe, when they are mostly mistrustful of European solutions.

The letter from Simon Geller to Cycle magazine shows that Cyclenation do not really take in the issues yet. He has not appreciated the importance of what Colville-Andersen says, because like all people who are part of a problem, he can't see it – like the motorists stuck in jams who complain about the "bloody traffic". I will warm to Cyclenation and CTC the day they break free from the Franklin "training, not infrastructure, is the solution" motorised status quo supporting hegemony, and start advocating for the provision of effective cycle infrastructure for all cyclists.

The News of the World

I have to say that have found much of the coverage of The News of the World scandal to be fantastically disingenuous. Yesterday, when it was announced the paper was to close, BBC Radio 4 news did about a 5 minute report detailing the history of the paper. The reporter told us of its original lofty Victorian intentions, its takeover by Murdoch in the 1960s, its subsequent dubious journalistic methods including entrapment of celebrities, how Max Mosely fought back in the courts and won, etc. But never was it mentioned what the most famous thing about The News of the World was, and a major, or maybe the major, contributory reason why many people (of the male sex) bought it. It was full of pictures of naked women.

So now Andy Coulson has been arrested, surprise, surprise, and David Cameron has been defending his decision to employ him as a spin doctor and to keep him on for a long time after allegations against him became widespread. One could argue for a long time about how much evidence there was at what time about the role of Coulson. In July 2009 the former editor of another Murdoch paper, The Times, Andrew Neill, said of The Guardian's revelations about phone-hacking:

It suggests that rather than being a one off journalist or rogue private investigator, it was systemic throughout the News of the World, and to a lesser extent the Sun.

Particularly in the News of the World, this was a newsroom out of control … Everyone who knows the News of the World, everybody knows this was going on. But it did no good to talk about it. One News of the World journalist said to me … it was dangerous to talk about it.

If a journalist comes to you with a great story, one of the first questions you ask is how did you get it. How you got it is relevant to judging its accuracy and preparing yourself for any legal challenge.

If this behaviour was systemic in the newsroom, why would you not know about it, why would you of all people, not know about it? Either you're incompetent or complicit.

At this stage, Cameron continued to give Coulson the benefit of the doubt. But hang on. Let's ignore the whole phone-hacking thing for a moment, which was only an accusation in July 2009, though one coming from very authoritative sources like Neill. Let's get back to the theme of "disingenuousness". Let's get back to the boobs, and all their associated apparatus, that the BBC so delicately overlooked.

What were our leading politicians, Labour and Conservative, ever doing getting into bed with, hobnobbing with, employing in their staff, having anything to do with, a bunch of women-debasing porn merchants, trivial but damaging and public debate-debasing celebrity tittle-tattle scandal mongers, and libellous, scurrilous, contemptible, shabby entrappers? Which it was always totally manifest to all that the editors of The Sun and The News of the World were? What were our politicians doing sucking-up to these miserable specimens of humanity, who any self-respecting person would have crossed the street (even a street run by TfL) to avoid ? That is the real scandal, and a bigger one than parliamentary expenses, in my opinion.

Election Night Special

All credit to the leadership of LCC for organising an "alternative vote" referendum of the membership to determine its headline campaign demand for the 2012 Mayoral elections. If you are a member, do vote. The choices are:


1) Start Right: getting 100,000 children cycling regularly to school
2) Love Thy Neighbourhood: double the number of local journeys by bike
3) Go Dutch: clear space for cycling on main roads in every borough
4) Unwind: replace the 10 worst gyratories with cycle-friendly junction

The choices are explained further on this page. 


Option 3 is a committee-watered-down wording of what I wanted. The committee was afraid of the horrible word "segregation" and didn't want to use it. So the clarity of "segregated space" became the nastily ambiguous "clear space". And the wording of the "target",

International standard space for cycling on at least one major road in every borough within the next mayoralty,

is also horribly unclear. What kind of space, how much of it, and how many miles of it, are the questions that are begged. And another problem with this is that there are boroughs (e.g. Harrow) where there are no roads under Mayoral control. The wording I suggested to the LCC Campaigns Committee, 

Upgrade all the Cycle Superhighways to the Dutch standard of cycle infrastructure within the next mayoralty, 

was far better, being a precise and clear demand. All the Mayor would have to do to fulfil that would be to get some Dutch engineers and tell them to get on with it (or send his people on one of David Hembrow's study tours to find out how).


Similar blurring and watering-down of what members very clearly want by the small activist core of opponents of segregated infrastructure has happened before. Five or six years ago when LCC held a big consultation of members on what its "vision" for London should be (this was the Blair era when we had more "visions" than in the Old Testament), the overwhelming call went up: "Make London like Amsterdam or Copenhagen". Which the then leadership turned into the empty slogan "Working for a world-class cycling city". And a lot of good that did.

I think, however, it should be obvious to readers which option I recommend members vote for, if we are not to have another 30 years of largely ineffective campaigning for cycling in London. The campaign the LCC carries out on this occasion may or may not have an effect on the policies of the next Mayor, but this vote should set the campaigning direction of the organisation for the future, and, as the largest cycling organisation in the UK that is primarily a campaigning one, the effect of LCC's new position will be felt nationally.

What's wrong with the other three options? Well, 1 and 2 are just suggesting putting in place more of the "fantasy targets" beloved of UK cycling policy. The Mayor cannot get 100,000 children cycling, or double the number of local journeys made by bike, by magic. The Mayor can just agree these are desirable targets and then do nothing, forgetting them as all the other fantasy cycling targets get forgotten. They certainly cannot be achieved without doing Option 3 first. 

Option 4, the gyratories, properly gets absorbed into Option 3. High-standard infrastructure on a number of priority routes would imply solving the gyratory barriers for cyclists. But to call for the removal of the gyratories as an objective in itself is a mistake, and one that LCC has made before, about 7 years ago, when it had a big "Junctions Campaign" that achieved little. It achieved little because removal of such gyratories is not politically likely before we have got far more people cycling through the provision of attractive, continuous routes. It is also arguable that removal of gyratories is not necessarily desirable. In a transformed environment they could be useful in creating longer, less convenient journeys for cars than for bikes – acting as positive priority features, as they do in The Netherlands. The best possible result from a isolated junctions campaign is a few "spot improvements" on the road network that will not create the continuous, obviously safe and attractive routes we need to get a much bigger section of the population cycling. The roads leading to the junctions would still be horrible. Replacing existing gyratories with clogged-up crossroads, without providing dedicated space for cycling, would not be a breakthrough, and would not get many more people cycling.

A nice aspect of this poll is that you can see how it is doing in real time. It's early days, with only 265 votes cast out of an electorate of 11,000, but here's the results early on Wednesday morning, 6 July:

Quelle suprise. Paul Gannon wrote 11 years ago after Camden built its segregated cycle tracks that "Current cyclists vote with their wheels for segregated facilities". Well today they can vote with their mice as well, and the vole is pleased about that.

I never said there was only one type of effective cycle infrastructure

Many of my posts here have been promoting the need for segregated cycle tracks or paths in the UK to make cycling far more attractive to the average person. But perhaps this concentration on one type of infrastructure has produced a misleading impression of my views. For it is obvious, looking at the high-cycling cities and communities the world, that use of a variety of methods of providing for and prioritising the bike is what works: the "right solution in the right place" as Ashok Sinha, Chief Executive of LCC, said in this video. There are many streets on which segregated provision for bikes, or even line-separated lanes for bikes, are not necessary, or sensible.

I just say this because I have has a weird correspondence with a Paul, who lives in The Netherlands. He believes that the cycle infrastructure in The Netherlands is not the cause of their cycling culture, and, if I understand him right, not even in any way related to their high level of cycling. He says his point is demonstrated by the fact that there is much expensive cycle infrastructure in The Netherlands that is little-used, and many places where there is no infrastructure where there is a great deal of cycling. To try to prove this, he sent me a link to this video of a street in Amsterdam, a which he believes has no cycle infrastructure.


A Walk | Ride | Drive Sample from Amsterdamize on Vimeo.

Of course, the video does not prove his point. I proves the reverse, and demonstrates the truth of what I have been saying about the direct relationship between the provision of a high-quality cycle environment, and cycling levels.

Paul writes:

This street has been left as it was, apparently since about the 1980's (bollards went out of fashion and are no longer used). It has no cycle lane and no cycle path, and neither does the canal it crosses here. The intensive use by cyclists is not the result of providing them with anything extra, but of restricting car usage. The main restriction is the one-way system. Every car trip via this street is longer than its alternatives, so there is little incentive to use it [the car, I presume]. It is not however segregated.

Of course there would be no sense in segregating cycling in this street. It would not be "the right solution in the right place" But this is high-quality cycle infrastructure all right, of a type that is almost unknown in the UK. The whole context has to be taken into account, as Paul explains.

The making of cycle journeys more convenient and pleasant by giving cyclists high-priority routes which are different to those which are given to cars, through all the well-known traffic engineering means: partial road closures, one-way systems, junction priority, allowing only access traffic, cycle-only streets, etc., is a major strategy that must be used, particularly, in dense, small-scale, old urban locations like this, to get a shift from cars to bikes. Note how this street is one-way for cars but two-way for bikes.

In an area like this, clearly, high-capacity segregated cycle tracks on or next to roads are going to be less relevant than they are in suburban areas, in rural areas, in more modern, more spacious urban layouts, and in 19th century capital city boulevards. In an area like this the solutions will be mixed, with cyclists often sharing the roads with a level of slow, considerately-driven, essential motor traffic. But it is all cycle infrastructure, all part of accommodating and prioritising the bike. It is still "ALL ABOUT THE ENVIRONMENT, STUPID!"as I said in my Team Green Britain Tosh post – and not about vague "cultural" factors. As the last Labour Secretary of State for Transport, Lord Adonis, said:

Cycling in Holland is not in the genes, it's in the facilities that are available.

I find it difficult to fathom why this  concept is such a problem for some people. Here, by contrast, is a typical video of a cycling journey in a UK city. Would all those people in the Amsterdam video be cycling if they had to do it in these conditions? If you think they would, I fear there is little more I can say to you.

Byng Place and the influence of the anti-infrastructural “Shared Space” movement

Apologies for a long post again. This post started as merely a codicil to my last one, on Camden's cycle tracks, which was suggested to me by photographs I took on Wednesday showing how a short section of the Bloomsbury cycle track has suffered a totally unnecessary and counterproductive makeover since it was first built. The post then developed into a long essay on Shared Space.

My last post discussed at some length the problems and opposition that the campaigns to implement the London Borough of Camden's segregated cycle tracks in Royal College Street and Bloomsbury had to overcome. The opposition from taxis drivers one might have expected. But I also discussed the opposition from some cyclists. There were (are) two strands of thinking here, really: the first, that the cycle tracks would necessarily be so poorly implemented that we shouldn't bother. This argument is best addressed by demonstrating examples of best-practice internationally. However, there was, and is, also a more fundamentalist objection, which some cyclists actually do put forward: that cycling is best and most efficiently done in an environment containing motor traffic. This strand of thinking, exemplified in the writings of John Forrester and John Franklin, is unpicked in Paul Gannon's essay Segregated Facilities:

His [Franklin's] response was that he was describing how Dutch cyclists often report having problems with motor vehicle traffic when they come to the UK. This was what he meant by a lower competence. But this, and other discussions with people who oppose segregated cycle facilities, show just how much people misunderstand the reality of cycling in places such as the Netherlands...

There is a deep rooted, unquestioned assumption here – namely that the key cycling skill is about dealing with motor vehicles. The argument becomes a circular one – the skill that matters is dealing with motor vehicle traffic, ergo anything that reduces the relative significance of that skill is undesirable....

I suspect that the fear of segregated facilities is really a fear that hard-won, highly-valued skills of handling all those motor vehicles will be become less important.

But another strand of opposition to these tracks has been different again. This has sometimes come from cyclists, but more typically from architects and self-styled “urbanists”, who believe that the well-tried, tested and proven Dutch model of separating out cyclists, pedestrians and motor vehicles in their own spaces is inferior to their favoured theory of Shared Space, where all three groups intermingle and negociate harmoniously in a suitably-designed environment. This is the point of view that I will deal with in the rest of this blog post, demonstrating the results of the interference of the anti-infrastructural Shared Space movement on a small part of Camden's Bloomsbury cycle track, in Byng Place, WC1.

Now I have to say here that I am totally unconvinced by the arguments of the Shared Space movement. I can think of so many counter-arguments to the whole Shared Space concept, I find it hard to know where to begin. But I will try.

Shared Space advocates think that the model of segregating different modes of transport is inferior to that of integrating them in the same space. But in what sense it is really held to be "inferior" I find it difficult to fathom, in that I find it difficult to see any evidence-base supporting the Shared Space theory that demonstrates in any concrete respect better outcomes – be they social, transportation, health, safety or economic outcomes – for Shared Space as opposed to segregation.  Segregation for cycling (and I know some people dislike that word, but it is a clearly-defined term, so I will continue to use it), segregation for cycling, in its Dutch and Danish and North German forms anyway, is about prioritising the bicycle. By definition, Shared Space cannot prioritise anything – so is it not, by definition, a fundamentally weaker method of promoting sustainable transport?

I feel much of this may really come down to purely personal aesthetic choices and value judgements. To support this idea I will give you the story of John Adams and the Bloomsbury cycle track. Professor John Adams is a well-known proponent of Shared Space in the UK – to be precise, in Camden, at University College London, where he teaches geography. Interestingly, this is right next to the Bloomsbury cycle track. So when Adams talked to Camden Cycling Campaign in 2005, it was interesting to hear what he said about this. Some of what he said is in the report on the CCC webpage, but this also covers many other topics on which he spoke, and some of what he said on the cycle track issue was not reported there, but I noted immediately afterwards in an email to to the CCC Yahoo! group.

Adams said of the Bloomsbury Cycle Track:

"Whatever its other merits, no-one could claim it is attractive"

and of the Bloomsbury streetscape:

"It is my ambition to civilise it to a level where segregation will no longer be needed "

So there you have two purely arbitrary value judgements: a cycle track is "unattractive" (though it certainly is, in another sense, "attractive" to the hundreds of cyclists who use it every day) and it is, in some mysterious way, "not civilised" enough for Adams. Not a very scientific position from the Professor of Geography, it seems to me. Rather, this is pure prejudice.

The cycle track in Torrington Place WC1: "not attractive" or "civilised" according to John Adams, but "attractive" enough to the large numbers of cyclists using it.

After Adams stated that the the cycle track was "not attractive", I objected to this passing of a purely subjective aesthetic judgement on a piece of functional engineering that is there to do a job. I asked the Camden cyclists at the meeting to vote, by a show of hands, whether they thought the road had been made more or less attractive by the installation of the cycle track. Most people thought the road had been made more attractive. But Adams then, objecting to my formulation of the poll, asked rather if we could not have a choice between those options and his ideal solution, which he described as a thorough mixing of all three modes without segregation, but with greatly reduced and calmed traffic. Many people supported this.

This brings me to another objection to Shared Space. It is ahistorical, and politically naive. What Adams was asking for was a vote on something that was never on offer, and could never be on offer without a powerful political movement to make it so. He had no mechanism to offer for how this greatly reduced and calmed traffic environment could be achieved by the methods of Shared Space alone.

What I mean by describing it as "ahistorical" is that Shared Space offers no explanation of how things came to be as they are now. It therefore is unconvincing in its assertion that the problems that we have on streets, with all their modern infrastructure, can suddenly be solved merely by removing the infrastructure and leaving the street "naked". For the infrastructure we have evolved to solve perceived problems. Why should putting policy into reverse-gear and going back to a mediaeval street not result in just all the same problems that the infrastructure developed to solve? Proponents of Shared Space claim it is "all in the design", but, quite frankly, I can't see that design is that powerful. Engineering and laws and their enforcement are powerful, coloured paving slabs are not. And I think the evidence of the performance of Shared Spaces and Naked Streets that have been implemented supports me in this.

Paul Gannon, again, puts the "ahistorical" argument powerfully (this post is lengthy but worth reading in full). It is, in his view, all about power:

The facts of power and status on the roads - which people understand tacitly - is what lies behind people saying that cycling is dangerous. The effectiveness of the cavalry attack depended on the horse and rider, individually or in a mass, approaching at a high speed and with weight. If a square of soldiers could withstand the shock of the attack, they could survive; if they dithered and cowered, or as individuals, they never stood a chance. The psychological component of the weapon was intimidation, playing upon the natural human inclination to get the hell out of the way when a half a ton of fast-moving mass is coming straight at you. The modern equivalent of the charging horse is the motor vehicle (and not just the 4x4) because it uses the same effect as the charger to establish its priority by fear of ‘flesh to metal interaction’.

This can be seen by referring to the recent discussion about pedestrian priority at junctions, as per Highway Code, and vehicle priority, as per reality. Pedestrians did not give up that priority willingly, saying to car drivers, ‘no, no, you go ahead, please’, but in stepping back from potential bodily damage from an approaching mass, eventually established the ‘standard’, with only a fossil memory somehow still preserved in the Highway Code.

The simple fact of the matter is that people do not want to have to be put in the position of constantly having to face the life and death decision of "Do I carry on or give way?". When the odds are so heavily against you in the event of an error (in terms of asymmetric physical consequences for cyclist/pedestrian and vehicle driver), factors of power are unavoidable.

Crossrider has, more recently, taken a very similar line:

Sharing is a great concept, but it presupposes that the parties sharing are more or less equal in power, and there isn't one group of bullies in the playground that are so much bigger and tougher than the other kids that they are able to intimdate their way to the lion's share of what's on offer.

The reason pavements work is everyone is of more or less equal strength and weight, and each individual is usually not capable of inflicting much damage on another (at least, unintentionally)....

As soon as you introduce cars into the shared space, the dynamic changes. Even if most drivers act with care and consideration, it only takes one or two before pedestrians are anxiously looking about, grabbing their childrens' hands and scurrying to the side the every time they hear a car engine. So you get a 'scared space', not a 'shared space'.

I'm going to suggest that shared space is actually a nonsense concept. It's used to justify spending a fortune on York stone slabs, granite setts, and generally digging up the road and giving it a makeover to keep highway engineers in a job. All you really need to do is get rid of the traffic. 

Adams, and also another "expert" on the urban environment who I heard talk recently, Andrew Cameron of WSP Group, who gave one of the Movement for Liveable London's Street Talks at the Yorkshire Grey pub, are believers in naked streets: in reducing signage and clear instructions to road-users in order to introduce chaos and uncertainty deliberately into the street environment, in the belief that this is actually desirable, to make road-users more careful and considerate. They talk about a "good chaos". But what is this, and does it really happen when soft human beings and hard metal masses on wheels are mixed up together chaotically?

I feel there is something in the argument that we could, without loss, reduce the marking and signage on UK roads. British roads are certainly far too marked-up. They are the most marked-up and cluttered with signs and symbols and painted lines in the world. The roads that I observed in Hami, Xinjiang, China, (with segregated cycle/moped tracks), were almost totally devoid of give-way lines, lane markings, and such like, but appeared very safe. However, the Chinese did segregate two-wheelers from other traffic, in this particular town anyway. And of course, I haven't seen their KSI stats, if, indeed, this closed regime publishes such things. So this observation doesn't prove much.

Cycle track/service road and street in Hami, NW China. No white lines in sight.

I have also observed the ancient walled cities in Morocco,  where there are no pavements or kerbs of any kind, all space is shared, and there is just a slow milling mass of animals, humans, motor vehicles, bikes, carts etc. all day. This is Shared Space. But it is also an under-developed country. And again, we don't have their danger statistics. So I doubt how much we can learn from examples like this in the UK. In an advanced industrialised country, we need to prioritise some things over others to meet the twin goals of maintaining both speed and efficiency of communications, and encouraging people to take more environmentally-friendly options where they are practical. We need to consider how best we can do this, and ensure social equality at the same time.

Here's an example which may appear irrelevant, but it shows these relationships in action. When I visited rural areas in eastern USA, I noticed that railway (railroad) lines don't have controlled level crossings with roads, and it doesn't seem to cause disasters. In the UK, level crossings have gates and are controlled by signals. But in the USA, rail services are slow, and most people there prefer to travel by car or by air. My point is that not segregating can be environmentally counter-productive. We in the West cannot in general go back to the kind of "primitive" society I saw in the ancient walled cities of Morrocco, and it is what might be termed "Shared Space romanticism" to think that we could. There are also issues, as my partner Helen would point out, of inclusion for disabled people. She would not enjoy the "primitive" streetscape in her wheelchair, and would not be happy to have our street in Edgware made a "naked road".

Now I have observed examples of Shared Space in continental cities that appeared to work very well. But they have been a particular type of place. They have been the centres of old cities, in locations that are "final destinations" in themselves. Like the market square in Münster, Germany's leading cycling city. This is surrounded by quite an area of Shared Space streets. But the important point here is that this is a destination, not a place of throughput, not a route. And motor traffic is very low here, reduced to essential access, because this is the very epicentre of a city design that has been developed, in recent years, to minimise motor traffic in the centre by the provision of ring-roads to take the traffic elsewhere, by a network of segregated cycle tracks to encourage cycling in the city, and by a road system that makes it very difficult to drive and park in the centre. So the Shared Space of the square only tops-off this regime, so to speak, it doesn't generate its own environment. I would be fearful of this kind of Shared Space just plonked down in the centre of London, on a through-route (as indeed they are trying to do at Exhibition Road, South Kensington).

Shared Space in the market square, Münster, Germany.

Here's another example of a seemingly successful Shared Space street (well, shared-ish, in this case), from the old town in Geneva. Here the cobbles have been carefully done so some semblance of the concept of a pavement and carriageway has been retained, yet so has a "mediaeval" feel, in this very narrow street from which, again, all but essential motor traffic has been excluded. But the same applies here as for Münster. It's the epicentre of a big area that has had a comprehensive stack of measures applied to to eliminating motor traffic. There is plenty of segregated infrastructure, for bikes, trams, cars and pedestrians elsewhere in Geneva. Oh yes, the Swiss are very hot on segregation of the modes in general, on the through-routes.

Shared Space in Geneva old town

Segregated cycle track to the right, and segregated tram track to the left, on a main road in the outskirts of Geneva

It is important to for UK audiences to assess how important, in reality, the Shared Space concept has been in generating cycle cultures in Europe. It has not been at all important. In the October 2007 issue of CTC's Cycle magazine there was an article about the continental, mainly Dutch, cycling experience. It mentions Hans Monderman's concept of Shared Space, but also interviews Martijn Sargentini, bike chief in Amsterdam, a very important person. He says:

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. On some routes we now need broader paths to reduce cycling congestion.

So the ongoing thrust of Dutch cycling policy continues to be the segregation of cyclists from other traffic. No case can be made that the success of any of the major high-cycling cities in Europe has anything significantly to do with Shared Space. And our resident English cycle blogger in The Netherlands, David Hembrow, is none too keen on the examples of Shared Space he has come across:

For me, cycling in places like this is the closest I come in this country to the conditions in cycle unfriendly towns of the UK where cycling is a fringe activity. I find I am happy to be out of it and back on the normal Dutch provision...

In my view, Shared Space is the one real mistake that has been made in the Netherlands. It's not liked by cyclists, and it really doesn't work well for cyclists.

Another point I have noticed about Shared Space is that many of its proponents are pretty vague on what it actually is. In the real world, the rhetoric on Shared Space and Naked Streets leads to three possible physical outcomes, which I will designate here as:

1) Strong Shared Space, 
2) Weak Shared Space, and
3) The Naked Street that is actually no different to what we had before.


1) Strong Shared Space 
This is where all the kerbs have been removed, so there is no pavement. This is what, I believe, we are due to get in Exhibition Road. This is the type that really put the willies up the disabled and the blind.

2) Weak Shared Space
This is where there is a shared cycle path and pavement, and a kerb of some description between that and the road. This is an arrangement guaranteed to annoy pedestrians and to make cyclists opposed to the concept of cycle paths, if there is any significant level of cycle traffic, which, of course, is exactly what we are aiming for as cycle campaigners. As I will show, this is what has been done on part of the Bloomsbury cycle track, and here, on a strategic cycle route, it is A Bad Thing.

3) The Naked Street that is actually no different to what we had before
This is when a certain amount of repaving, putting up of "artistic" street lamp columns designed by students at the local art college, and a little bit of street furniture removal has been performed, but we are left with pedestrians on the pavement and (most) cyclists and cars on the road, with a kerb separating them, as we normally have in the UK. This is a description of the much-hyped Naked Street development of Kensington High Street.

Kensington High Street, courtesy of Wikipedia, photo by Tom Graham. This Naked Street looks to me exactly like the motor-dominated environment we had before

And so, on to Bloomsbury. In 2006 Terry Farrell, the most influential architect in London, and an adviser to Boris Johnson, was commissioned by Camden Council to write a document called Bloomsbury: A Strategic Vision. This, far from being strategic, just proposed a cosmetic revamping of a few streets, some of them in Shared Space style. In the artists' pictures in the report, pedestrians were shown skipping in carefree manner on the roads of Bloomsbury, or enjoying a continental café culture there. But, strangely, there was no mention of how all the through-traffic would be removed from the streets. There was also no recognition of the fact that a strategic, high-use cycle route ran through here, the Seven Stations Link, or LCN Route 0, as I described in my last post.

Typical picture in the Farrell report on Bloomsbury showing the concept of Shared Space: but where's the traffic gone??

The Farrell report recommended destroying the highly-popular segregated cycle track through  Torrington Place, Byng Place, Gordon Square and Tavistock Square, built only 4 years before at great expense, and replacing it all with Shared Space. Worryingly, the case put forward was purely an aesthetic one, just like John Adams' arbitrary aesthetic view of the same track, not one based on safety or on promoting cycling. The cycle track was in fact an irrelevance to Farrells. They hadn't even understood what it was for. And nothing in their plan actually took motor traffic away.

Torrington Place. Farrell's plan was to replace all this with Shared Space, without removing all those cars

As soon as the Farrell plan appeared, it was praised by certain cycle campaigners who had never liked the concept of the segregated Seven Stations Link in the first place. Camden Cycling Campaign (CCC) fought the Farrell plan and largely won, probably because lots of other locals, businesses and groups thought it was daft as well, and objected, and because there was not the money to implement it – though I am not sure it is entirely dead even now. Little of the Farrell plan has been implemented, but one short section of the Seven Stations Link (LCN Route 0), Byng Place, was changed. Farrell's original plan proposed Strong Shared Space here, no kerbs at all, but Weak Shared Space was implemented: the original, clearly demarcated, green asphalt cycle track designed by CCC was removed, and a strange, bleak, puzzling expanse of tiles was put in its place, at a slightly higher level than the cycle track connecting to it at each end. Some benches were placed on this expanse. Similar tiles were used on the roadway, but at a lower level.

This picture shows the green track outside the University of London Union building. This is what Byng Place was like before the makeover (I don't have a photo of Byng Place before the makeover.)

Torrington Place by ULU, looking towards Byng Place

And this shows the new design of Byng Place looking towards Torrington Place, with the strange expanse of paving, and the benches. Notice how pedestrians have an enormous pavement here anyway, and don't need the "expanse". What on earth was the point of this? What has it achieved?

Byng Place Shared Space with Boris Bikers

What it has in fact achieved is confusion. Here are two hapless pedestrians wandering on a strategic, high-volume cycle route.

Pedestrians on Byng Place cycle route

I overheard the conversation of these pedestrians after I took this photo. They had noticed the cyclists zooming past their ears at 15–20mph and were palpably disturbed. "How were we supposed to know this was the cycle path?", one said. "We can see it is green over on that side, and over on that side, but why does it disappear here?" I spoke to them and tried to explain that the cycle track used to be continuous, but that some clever architect had not thought it attractive enough, and had decided to replace it with this grey paving that was designed deliberately to confuse road users and create "good chaos", but I knew what I was saying would make no sense to them. It made no sense to me. Shared Space, I am afraid, makes no sense.

As Easy As Riding A Bike blog has recently reviewed a Shared Space Street in Horsham, Sussex, and also given it a thumbs-down:

By my estimates, pedestrians outnumber vehicles by around 30:1. Yet the two vehicles that drive down the street – albeit reasonably carefully and considerately – completely dominate the environment. There is, ostensibly, an equality between what I dislike calling ‘road users’ in this shared space, but unfortunately some road users are more equal than others. Can we honestly say that East Street is ‘shared’, when the minority mode of use hogs it?

.... Motor vehicles are taking over. They are systematically destroying the pedestrian-friendly furniture. They are increasingly clogging up the street, and making pedestrians more wary of having to deal with ‘traffic.’

One thing I notice in the discussions of the Shared Space proponents is that they are aware of many of the objections that people raise to the concept, the objections you have read here. But there is an apparently emotional attachment to the concept, what I have called Shared Space Romanticism, that leads them constantly to be searching, seeking, for that magical Shared Space solution that will give true Shared Space but without all the downsides. From Reinventing Urban Transport:

Could shared-space design be modified to retain a sense of 'subjective safety' for pedestrians and bicycle users WITHOUT giving motorists too much confidence about their right-of-way? Can the vulnerable street users be given safe havens without prompting motorists to get complacent and assume they will stay within their designated spaces?

Are Dutch-style bicycle paths really not compatible with a shared space? Are protected pedestrian crossings? 

In places that are candidates for shared space treatments, we really want a calm environment that makes people feel very comfortable walking and cycling. We want motorists to proceed with caution and to feel uncertain of their right of way in locations where sharing the streets is important. But we actually DON'T really want vulnerable road users feeling vulnerable or facing uncertainty about their safety.

Can we get such a 'best of both worlds' outcome?

Philosophically, this is very reminiscent of old-style Soviet communism: a romantic attachment to an ideal that could never quite be made to work out properly in the real world, but which kept inspiring adherents to try harder to make reality match the "true, pure theory".

And on the webpage referenced above there are some more good public comments on Shared Space. One of them:

The shared space concept seems to me to be using fear of hitting people as a mechanism for traffic calming. I would rather use trees or other obstacles to calm traffic, rather than a kid in the road.

And another:

I live in Germany. The street I live in has recently been turned into a "shared space" place. It's actually quite appalling. No-one has any idea what to do. It's only about 30 metres and on the boundary of a pedestrian area, so a lot of pedestrians think they're in a mall and can safely walk out into the middle of the road, and then so many people just end up confused and quite probably scared. I hardly think that is the intention of "shared space", scared pedestrians.

A lot of the cars that drive down the street are coming out of a carpark. The street is one-way; they follow the signs to a carpark, and when they leave they have to turn right and go through the unfamiliar shared zone. They're often confused and drive cautiously. Mission accomplished.

Then there's the regulars. Most of them treat it not much differently than they treat the clearly separated road before it. They drive just as fast and in the inimitable style of German drivers leave almost no margin for error. Again, I hardly think this counts as achieving the desired result.

The net result is that pedestrians have to keep out of the way of cars, except that they don't have the confidence of knowing that this particular area is out of the way of cars.

When visiting relatives in Holland, they complained about exactly the same things. It makes pedestrians feel unsafe, it's confusing. How can that be a good thing?

When I heard about the idea, I thought it sounded pretty good. Now I have experienced it, I don't think it has any value at all. There's plenty of better approaches to traffic calming.

Shared Space was invented by Hans Monderman. According to this biography:

Although Monderman has been championed as a traffic engineer who revolutionized the profession by designing streets not just for motorists but for pedestrian and cyclists, he always remained a car-lover who relished tooling around the backroads of Holland in his green Saab.

Whatever "tooling" means...

My final summary of the arguments against Shared Space is as follows:

1. It doesn't achieve the objectives of prioritisation of desirable modes of transport that need to be fulfilled in an industrially advanced but sustainable society and economy; it is historically and technologically naive in believing that desirable outcomes can be achieved just by the removal of infrastructure;

2. It doesn't provide a mechanism or real political movement for challenging the dominance of the car in cities: it is overly theoretical and idealistic, and doesn't address real issues of power and intimidation;

3. It doesn't take into account the views of the vulnerable, such as the frail, blind and disabled; It risks the motorised (or cycleised) intimidation these groups, and others, in its search for the elusive ideal Shared Space environment;

4. It doesn't recognise that many people do not want to have to "negotiate" for space and safe passage: they wish to be protected by infrastructure and by laws;

5. There are no, or few, good, generally-recognised successful examples of shared space;

6. Where there are apparently successful examples, a good case can be made that the success was actually down to there never having been much motor traffic in the first place, or down to motor traffic removal through other measures;

7. There is a lack of good demonstrable examples of Shared Space actually having increased walking or cycling by itself.

The danger of introducing "good chaos" into the street environment is that you introduce, well, just chaos, where the weak lose out. This is the reverse of civilised progress. Chaos is what physicists call Entropy. The Third Law of Thermodynamics says that Entropy always increases. Well, perhaps it increases a little bit more when we have the Shared Space brigade in charge. Me, I would prefer a rational, orderly society, with activities so far as possible occurring on infrastructure designed to take them. Is that too much to ask?