Brand new cycle facility in Harrow...

...brand new crap.

A contraflow was needed in College Road, Harrow, to help cyclists avoid the busy and unsuitable ring road system around Harrow town centre, and was campaigned for by Harrow Cyclists. Cyclists were using this section of wide footway anyway, to avoid a short one-way stretch of road which prevented direct cycling from west to east across the town centre, and were getting fined for it. It was a sensible and easy move for the council to put in a contraflow here, and, after a lot of campaigning, which included a publicity stunt where Harrow Cyclists laid a section of fake green, cycle track, they agreed, and earmarked £15,000 to be spent on the scheme.

Publicity stunt by Harrow Cyclists in 2010 showing what they wanted: the excess pavement width used for a legal contraflow for cycling in a section of College Road

This is the result, just completed, which I photographed, unfortunately, at night. I really don't want to carp, but here we have a narrow track painted on the pavement with thick raised lines which goes through a sharp 90º turn to eject cyclists directly into the path of buses passing the bus station in College Road, when all they need is to continue in the same direction along the road. Why must implementation of such facilities always be so incompetent?

Exit of the new cycle contraflow in College road, Harrow

There really should be no excuse for this kind of thing. We know that UK highway engineers seem often to lack any understanding of the requirements of cyclists, but there are guidelines for them to follow even if they don't personally know one end of a bike from the other. Sometimes these guidelines are inadequate themselves, but too often they are far better than what is actually delivered.

The London Cycle Design Standards document (Transport for London 2006) Appendix C contains a drawing of how a cycle lane at carriageway level can be turned into a cycle track at pavement level and back into a cycle lane at carriagway level (Drawing C4). Here it is:

This is absolutely clear and sensible. It also corresponds to the sort of thing I encountered on the Cycling Embassy of Great Britain study tour in Assen and Groningen last year, where we often saw Dutch cycle routes that would swap from segregated to unsegregated style because of changing road constraints, but always maintaining a high degree of continuity and smoothness for the route. Cycle routes in dense cities with many pre-existing street constraints are always going to have to adapt in this fashion, so it is critical that the transitions between on-road and off-road paths are got right.

Strangely enough I have come across an example even in the Borough of Harrow where a track-to-lane transition has been done correctly. This short facility, which can be found in Whitchurch Lane, Stanmore, at the junction with Marsh Lane, actually works effectively (probably quite by chance) to allow cyclists to bypass the queue of traffic at these lights.

Transition from on-pavement path to cycle lane in Whitchurch Lane, Stanmore

To get the path to road transition right in College Road would have not have required any extra thought or research, it would have just needed the existing TfL guidelines to be followed. It would have required more digging, as possibly a phone box and some other street furniture would have needed to be moved, and a larger section of footway reconstructed. Whether this could have been done for the £15,000 allocated, I don't know. But you do have to actually do things to create properly-engineered cycle routes on existing streets, not just paint lines on pavements, put up signs and put in the easiest possible dropped kerb. Isn't it worth councils spending enough that their attempts at the simplest cycling infrastructure do not turn out as absurd fodder for the Cycle Facility of the Month website?

Come on Harrow, if you are serious about encouraging cycling, you should be able to do better than this.

Edgware town centre's Portas Pilot piffle

Edgware is a suburb of north-west London centred 11 miles from Marble Arch, up the A5 on the way to St Albans. It is divided between three boroughs: 50% in Barnet, a bit less than 50% in Harrow, and a small part in Brent. I live in the Brent part, one mile from Edgware town centre.

Apparently Edgware town centre is suffering a decline. I say "apparently" as I don't know, as I almost never go there, because it is horrible, and there is nothing there of sufficient interest to draw me to make the not very nice (by any method) journey there.

I think Edgware town centre has long had problems. The suburb grew entirely due to the construction of the Northern Line of the London Undergound in the 1920s, of which its station formed the terminus of one branch, and, with efficient, direct connections to both the West End and the City, it was always predominantly a dormitory. The so-called High Street, part of the A5, is nothing like a high street, except at the war memorial, with a few slightly villagey-looking shops and restaurants surrounding it. Most of the High Street consists of car showrooms, car maintenance businesses, warehouses, and storage sheds, with a few seedy shops and "cafs".

Edgware's "High Street" on the A5. Yes, it really does look this miserable. (Google Earth)

Development of the High Street, my neighbour (who has lived in the area all of his 88 years) tells me, was aborted by the development of Station Road, the road in which the Underground and bus stations are located, when the Northern Line came. Station Road became the main shopping street of Edgware, its affluent middle-class intentions signalled in the somewhat grand redbrick 1930s architecture of some of the shops and flats above them, and featuring one big, impressive pub, the Railway Hotel, built in mock "Stratford-upon-Avon" tudor style. The Railway Hotel is a suburban icon that now stands empty, falling-apart and uncared for by anyone, it would appear, including the Borough of Barnet. The prosperity of Station Road was, in its turn, usurped by the construction of a covered shopping mall off of it, in the 1990s, now called the Broadwalk Centre, including a Sainsburys supermarket and a massive car-park.

The boarded-up Railway Hotel in Station Road, Edgware (Google Earth)

The spiritual and public centre of Edgware should be the crossroads of Station Road, the High Street, and Whitchurch Lane (which leads to the church of St Mary, where Handel once played the organ and rehearsed his works). By this crossroads stands the parish church of St Margaret of Antioch. But this crossroads is dominated by through-traffic on the A5, and another massive 1930s pub – a very ugly one this time, the Masons Arms, and dismal, cheap 60s or 70s concrete architecture housing betting shops and fast food joints.

The "Masons Arms" crossroads at Edgware town centre (Googe Earth)

One big office block was built in Edgware, I guess in the 1970s: Premier House in Station Road, which at one time was the HQ of the Green Shield Stamps empire (who is old enough to remember licking those for their mum?). But it doesn't seem to have brought much benefit to the area. Just beyond this, going up Station Road, is the pedestrian entrance to the Broadwalk Centre (they ban bikes, one reason I do not go there), and then the bus station, cramped onto a very unsatisfactory site which means that buses have to go in and out on the same narrow road, making a tight right-angle turn off Station Road, the in and out flows of buses crossing over within the bus station. The bus station also has the habit of playing excruciating mock-baroque "easy listening" music to anyone unfortunate enough to be stuck waiting there, apparently to deter the "yoof" loiterers.

On weekdays during the rush hour, Station Road suffers from massive congestion, with extra pollution from the large number of buses using it and the bus station. It is a very poor walking environment, with staggered two-stage crossings with islands and cages for pedestrians to negotiate, and walking-unfriendly, wide-mouthed side road junctions at roads such as Manor Park Crescent and Edgwarebury Lane, plus a profusion of pedestrian "safety" barriers (because pedestrians can't be trusted to cross in the "right" places, and cars can't be trusted to stay on the roads). The worst place is between the A5 crossroads and Premier house, where the road in and out of the Broadwalk car park interrupts pedestrian progress on Station Road with an utterly inappropriate five lanes of traffic at a signalised junction where  it seems to take forever to get the green man to get across. Needless to say, there is no safe or appropriate way to cycle into this car park, though there is a bit of cycle parking there. There is a narrow, mal-designed cycle lane which skirts the inbound lifting barriers, but, as pedestrians also seem to have no properly-designed route from this part of Station Road to the car park, they walk here, understandably. There are several narrow pedestrian footpaths that also lead into the car park from other directions, but they all ban bikes.

Churchway, Edgware, the dismal place where five lanes of traffic in and out of the Broadwalk car park meet Station Road.

Edgware epitomises, in my view, much of what has gone wrong with British town centres, which are now failing, with their confusion between the transport and social and commercial functions of roads and streets, and their enslavement to planning for people in cars. There is no attempt at what you see in Dutch towns as the core of planning policy, the separation of "roads for movement" from "streets for communities". Edgware has a by-pass, has long had it, the A41 Edgware Way dual carriageway. This has no shops on it, is almost parallel to Station Road – running only, at minimum, 500m north of it – and so should carry all the through-traffic. But in the normal British way, the construction of the bypass was not accompanied by the removal of the town-centre from the through-traffic system. So every road is clogged by cars, parked and moving, which have multiplied to fill all the space allocated to them, with short, unnecessary car journeys facilitated at almost every point by the planning decisions that have been taken.

So when I found, though the Barnet Council website, this video about Edgware, entitled Portas Pilot: Station Road, Edgware, I was intrigued to know what it would suggest for improving the area. Having watched it, I have to say I am none the wiser as to what this "Portas" vision is.

If you view this on the YouTube site you discover that there is a whole gentre of these Portas Pilot videos, from all over the country, including one from Sussex entitled, slightly amusingly, Seaford Shags Portas Pilot bid. There seems to be a small industry of producing these videos. Well, I can't see how the production of these videos is going to save one failing town centre.

The Edgware video gives quite a good impression of what the place is actually like, and shows most of the features I have mentioned above. But there is no planning or public policy solution here, just well-intentioned, but empty, blather and piffle from a variety of people. In fact, worse, it contains just more of the same historically-failed thinking as before, coming from the policeman, who thinks it important that it is made easier for people to park to access the shops that are not in the Broadwalk Centre, while we see, behind him, a Station Road full of parked cars.

I won't go here into all the evidence that shows that, even in apparently car-dependent places like this, most journeys to shops are not by car, and most expenditure in local shops is not by people arriving in cars. I won't go into the lack of evidence that  exists for the slightest relationship between the provision of car-parking, its cost, and the success of shopping centres. A good post was provided on this subject on At War With The Motorist – see also many other relevant posts on that superb blog.

All I'll say is this: People who wish to drive to a shopping centre, park in a huge free car park, and wonder round a covered mall, have ample opportunities to do such, and good luck to them. There are huge roads provided for them to get to these places, and they use them, in this area to access the Brent Cross Shopping Centre (which certainly has played a major part in undermining NW London centres like Edgware over the last 40 years), Westfield at White City, Westfield at Stratford, The Harlequin in Watford, St Anns Centre in Harrow, and so on – maybe even Bluewater in Kent.

Other people want something completely different. I mean, completely different, as an experience, and will look for where they can find it, or satisfy all their shopping needs from a comfortable keyboard at home, and their social needs in other places.

Edgware town centre, only one mile from my house, will not be seeing much of my custom in the foreseeable future. What would it take to get me there? Well, if the boroughs or Transport for London built me a convenient and safe bike route to get there, that would be a big thing. What that would have to mean in practice would be Dutch-style segregated cycle tracks along the A5, which is amply wide enough to take them. What else? Pedestrianise Station Road, at least during business hours. Demolish the ugly buildings and restore and care for the nice ones. Use the vast area allocated to car parking better. Create more intelligent access arrangements for the buses, and allow cycle access everywhere.

Without these measures, I am sorry, but I have to say:

Edgware town centre, Portas Pilot you may be, 
You are still the weakest link, so it's goodbye from me.

The A5 Edgware High Street. No room for segregated bike tracks, or course. (Google Earth)

Raising awareness

Londonneur wrote recently:

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

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

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

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

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

The area between Harrow town centre and the A5

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

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

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

Uxbridge Road, Harrow, typical view

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

Kenton Road, Harrow/Brent border, typical view

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

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

Streatfield Road, Culver Grove roundabout, Harrow

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

Streatfield Road, Culver Grove roundabout, Harrow

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

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

Streatfield Road, Kingshill Avenue junction, Harrow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

The cycle of decline in outer London

Stag Lane, Edgware, north Brent

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

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

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

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

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

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

Courtesy Jim Gleeson

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

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

Three car standard household in north Brent

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

Another Stag Lane view

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

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


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

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

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

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

Mollison Way, Brent & Harrow

Vredeveldsweg, Assen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what is to be done?

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

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

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

Assen Town square today (courtesy David Hembrow)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fryent Way through Fryent Country Park, Brent

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

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

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

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

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

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