Boris Johnson is not sincere in his commitment to "Go Dutch"

On the eve of London Cycling Campaign's "Big Ride", Boris Johnson's campaign team finally told LCC that he would commit to meeting the demands of the Go Dutch campaign, joining the Jenny Jones (Green), Brian Paddick (Lib Dem), Ken Livingstone (Labour) and Siobhan Benita (independent) in that commitment. What all these have actually committed to is the following:

1. Implement three flagship Love London, Go Dutch developments on major streets and/or locations. 
2. Make sure all planned developments on the main roads that they controls are completed to Go Dutch standards, especially junctions. 
3. Make sure the Cycle Superhighways programme is completed to Love London, Go Dutch standards 

In the case of Johnson, the commitment leads to a bit of puzzle. In fact, to a whole lot of enormous puzzles. Because he could have been doing any of these things for the last four years, but has most strikingly not been doing them. The "flagship developments" that LCC have suggested include Blackfriars, where he insisted on a design that had cyclists up in arms, protesting, for most of last year, and where he refused even to impose a 20mph limit, to do the bare minimum he could have done to make it more cycle-friendly. The suggested Go Dutch developments also include the Olympic Park, which would have been, to a considerable extent, within Boris's powers to make genuinely cycle-friendly, but in which he seems to have taken not a jot of interest, leaving it to a clueless (on the subject of cycling) Olympic Development Authority, recalcitrant boroughs, and irresponsible developers, to make a general hash of cycle provision in the area. And the suggested developments include Parliament Square, which Boris has made clear he sees continuing as the ugly and polluted traffic maelstrom that it has long been, with poor concessions to pedestrians, and none to cyclists.

Boris has made some other changes to major roads and junctions in his mayoralty. Completed examples include Piccadilly and Haymarket, and Henlys Corner in Barnet. Ongoing examples include Kings Cross and Euston Circus. These are all locations where extensive rebuilding has taken, or will take, place, and where he could have had an ongoing programme of improvements to the cycle network as part of these huge works, at no extra cost. But they either have included no cycle facilities (Piccadilly and Haymarket), or very poor ones that cyclists are unlikely to use (Henly's Corner and Euston Circus), or even made things actively worse for cyclists (Kings Cross and Blackfriars). So by committing to point 2 of the Go Dutch campaign, Johnson is committing to a complete about-turn in the way he has been approaching road infrastructure projects. Is he sincere in this?

And of course, he could have built the Cycle Superhighways that he has created so far, at massive expense, to proper standards, giving cyclists their own dedicated space on the roads 24/7, with safe, properly-signalised passage through junctions, on Dutch or Danish or German models. But he did not. He splashed blue paint all over the place and left cyclists to fend for themselves amongst the buses, taxis, lorries, boy racers and white van men. So why would he start doing something radically different with the Superhighways in his next term? It's not as if cycling groups have just come up with the idea, this week, that the Superhighways could, and, should, have been done far better. LCC has been protesting about their hideously compromised designs for three years, getting thoroughly ignored by TfL and its chairman, Boris Johnson.

So it's all a bit strange. Ken Livingstone, as I have freely admitted before, has a fairly poor record on cycling as well. But that was in different times, for politics, cycling, and for cycle campaigning, when cyclists were perhaps not so clear, or vocal, or united, in what they were asking for, and so he has a lot less explaining to do on his new commitment to Going Dutch than Boris has.

The Big Ride on Saturday was indeed the biggest cycling demonstration ever seen in the UK, as predicted, with over 10,000 participants turning out in terrible weather. It has been nicely covered on the ibikelondon blog and Cyclists in the City, so I'll not add much, except to say how lovely it was to see all those tiny children cycling though the middle of London, just loving being on their bikes. Some of them will remember the day for the rest of their lives, I have no doubt.

Cyclists with a mission pack a damp Piccadilly on The Big Ride

Gone to the dogs – he had three on one bike

One of the many tots having a roaring time

So Boris had some explaining to do on his conversion to Going Dutch, but I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, and let him do that explaining, if he so wished, at The Times cycling hustings in Westminster on Monday. Indeed, the whole of the packed hall was agog to see how the candidates would interpret the "cyclesafe" agenda that the newspaper has so pro-actively and admirably been promoting in recent months.

Scene at the entrance to the hustings, appropriately at the Institution of Civil Engineers in Great George Street

The platform

Others who were there will give their own opinions on the meeting, and there is a complete report available through The Times. I won't say much about the "other" candidates. Jenny Jones was true to the form that we all know, a tireless promoter of safer streets for cycling. 

Brian Paddick came across as sincere, honest, and clued-up about the whole issue, understanding why few people are prepared to cycle in London as conditions stand (he freely admits he finds it worrying and stressful), and clear about what is required: an  end to policies designed to "smooth the flow" and put motor vehicle throughput above all other objectives for the roads, with pedestrian and cyclists safety moved to top priority, significant and meaningful reallocation of roadspace to cyclists, lower speeds, and sane junction designs. He condemned the attitude that regards dead and injured cyclists as "collateral damage" to be tolerated in an environment of rising cycling levels but static infrastructure, comparing Boris Johnson with a First World War general who just throws the troops (cyclists) into the slaughter (traffic), knowing there are enough of them, and that some of them will survive without assistance.

Siobhan Benita, whom I had not seen before, also came across as honest, clear and open, with a real agenda for change towards safer streets, as a mother who wants her children to be able to cycle without fear, noting the vast gap between established politicians' rhetoric on cycling, and the situation on the ground.

Ken Livingstone never appears all that comfortable talking about cycling, preferring to major on "getting people out of their cars" by whatever method, and talking a lot about long-term investment and long-term plans for transport in general, without giving too much detail on what he thinks a future, cycle-friendly London would actually look like. His main commitment is a tangential, but significant one: to install Jenny Jones as his cycling supremo, with authority to "do what ever is necessary" to reduce danger and achieve high levels of cycling. He was talking about cycling becoming 15% of road traffic, but this is actually is not much, and has probably been exceeded in many places already. He was also talking about re-starting the London Cycle Network, which, as I have mentioned before, failed so badly when he was Mayor last time. He sounded to me something like a manager trying to steer a middle course between competing expensive demands: tube, bus, tram, cycling, rather than someone who had a radical new vision for the streets. But he was clear that he thought the London of the future needed to contain far less motor traffic. And I have no reason to believe he would not, or that he would not allow Jenny Jones, as his cycling deputy, to implement the Go Dutch demands.

It appeared to me that Boris made no concessions to the campaigns of the last year at all. He did not admit that his Cycle Superhighways have been very poor and have not lived up to the initial promises he made for them. He did not agree that cycling casualties per mile are increasing. He several times referred to people who want a cycling infrastructure "ideal world" which is unachievable, implying that talk of giving cyclists proper, protected space on London's main roads, in other words, Going Dutch, is not really possible. Towards the end of the meeting he seemed to be implying that the cyclists in the room were all greeny unrealistic lefties, wanting to see the back of all motor traffic in London, saying, in a bizarre improvisation on words, that it was not possible to "Pasturise [or should that be Pasteurise] London". He also annoyed the meeting by dwelling on the law-breaking of some cyclists. Well, we all know about that, and it is a complex phenomenon with context and causes. But Paddick hit the nail on the head by remarking that comparing the law-breaking by cyclists with law-breaking by motorists is failing to compare like with like, for the totally different potential for damage that such actions carry. Again Paddick struck me as having common sense and humanity. Boris faffed and blustered and joked. He constantly resorted to attacking Livingstone by claiming that the latter would have no money to do anything because of his fares cut pledge.

Boris failed to get it. He failed to understand why The Times, a right-wing newspaper, had been pursuing its campaign. He failed to understand why LCC is calling for London to Go Dutch. He failed to understand why all the people in the room were there, not appreciating that they were all just normal people, of all political persuasions, all professions, all backgrounds, all types, who wanted to use bikes to get around the city without fear. He failed to acknowledge that as a legitimate aspiration, preferring to come out with some stupid stereotypes about the type of cyclist that he is not (brown skinny legs, or some such cobblers – it doesn't matter, it was irrelevant nonsense). He wanted to tell the audience that cyclists were not "morally superior" – when nobody had claimed they were, merely that they needed to be made safe. He failed to engage with practical, realistic arguments, referencing places like Holland and Demark, and German, Italian, Swiss, Swedish and South American cities, where it has actually been done, about how a city could and should be progressively, but radically, remodelled to favour people over cars, or at least to give pedestrians and bikes more equal priority with cars. He seemed to think people who thought like that were head-in-the-clouds eco-extremists who wanted an end to civilisation as we know it.

I don't think Boris much cared about how people at this meeting felt, in the end. That's the only way I can explain his behaviour. I think he believes he has this election in the bag. I think he intends to serve another four years as Mayor pursuing exactly the same policies as he has pursued for the last four. That seemed to be very clear from what he was saying. I expect he will then not stand for the mayoralty again in 2016, but will go back into Parliament and attempt to win the leadership of the Conservative party whenever David Cameron relinquishes it. I think his calculation is that none of this, not The Times, not this hustings, not LCC's campaign, nor anything that bloggers like me say, will make any difference to this. I think his calculation is that he can continue to treat the cyclists of London with contempt, with no undue long-term harm to his political career.

It follows that his endorsing of Go Dutch is a cynical and dishonest ploy. It was clear from all that he said that he has absolutely no intention of carrying out the three Go Dutch pledges in the way LCC means them, and has clearly defined them. No intention at all. He is taking us for a ride. A Big Ride, one might say.

So I'd like to think again, at the end of this piece, about those young children enjoying their first taste of cycling freely, and without fear, on the roads on Central London on the LCC Big Ride on Saturday. They will remember that day. Will they remember it, in twenty or thirty years' time, as the start of something big and new, themselves in the roles of an unwitting, innocent, advanced guard of a revolution that started that day? Or will they think of it, sadly, as a brief, elusive, glimpse of how things might have been, had history been different? Will they be able to send their own children on bikes, on their own, across their city, in near-certainty they will come to no harm, as the parents of Amsterdam, Copenhagen and Helsinki can do today? Or will they have to fight the same battles again, go on the same protests for the same basic rights once more? 

Time will tell. I don't know. At the moment it doesn't look good.

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

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

The vigil

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



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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

York Way

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes to Editors:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From TfL king's Cross consultation leaflet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

.....

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

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

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

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

Candles at the Kings' Cross vigil

-----

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

The tragedies at Bow

The vigil in the centre of Bow roundabout

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

The message of the vigil

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

Ghost bike for Brian Dorling

Shrine to Lana Tereschenko

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

The "cycle facilities" that killed Brian Dorling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Northwick Park roundabout, Harrow and Brent

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

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

Staples Corner West roundabout in Brent and Barnet

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

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

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

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

Dutch turbo roundabout, from SWOV publication

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

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

Unsegregated cycle lane on Groningen roundabout

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

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

Cycle priority on cycle path round Dutch roundabout

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

Two-way signalised cycle path round roundabout in Utrecht

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

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

My suggested design for Bow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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