One week to go

A week is, of course, a long time in cliché land, but there really has been a tremendous lot going on in London cycling in the last week: as befits the run-up to the mayoral election, just one week away now.

Attempts by unscrupulous Addison Lee boss John Griffin to get his minicab fleet into London's bus lanes by means of bullying, lawbreaking and cajoling and bankrolling politicians – he doesn't care what he has to do to get his prize, so long as he gets it – went centre stage with his quasi-order to his drivers to break the law, and drive in London's bus lanes, adding to the hazards that cyclists face in those spaces. (Let it be said that his drivers, often criticised, rightly, for their poor driving, are not the basic problem. They are poorly-paid, exploited, often foreign, victims of his selfish business model that incentivises their careless driving.)

Cyclists, unusually, found common cause with black cab drivers, who of course also do not want minicabs in the lanes they are privileged with access to. Transport for London promptly took the matter to court, and on Thursday the High Court decided that it remains illegal for minicabs to use bus lanes, and ordered Addison Lee to withdraw its promise to indemnify its drivers against fines. But what really got cyclists angry was John Griffin's inflammatory and ignorant anti-cycling diatribe in his house magazine, in an article which came to light last Thursday, which seemed to blame cyclists killed or injured on the roads for being there at all.  This lead to a petition for Addison Lee's operating license to be removed, a call for a boycott of Addison Lee, and a "die-in" protest outside the company's headquarters in Camden on Monday.

The die-in outside Addison Lee's office

Griffin's selfish, tabloid views on cycling (which are held by many other less prominent people in this country, of course) chimed very badly indeed with the mood generated in the run-up to the London elections by the London Cycling Campaign's Go Dutch campaign, the Londoners on Bikes campaign and The Times's Cities Fit for Cycling campaign, and generated huge anger. But I don't feel like wasting too many words on John Griffin. He's a danger to London's cyclists, yes, but not so much of a danger as those politicians who don't "get" cycling. For bus lanes, whatever non-bus vehicles they may or may not contain, are basically not appropriate places for cyclists. As I have written before,

There is nothing like having to share space with buses for reducing the feeling of subjective safety for cyclists. The constant "swapping over" game when you have to overtake a bus at a stop, judging whether or not it is suddenly going to take off again, then it does, just after you have passed it, and it overtakes you again, and stops in front of you again, all this is deeply tiresome and offputting to all but hard-core cyclists. Particularly on routes where there are large numbers of buses, or they where can travel fast, buses and cyclists need to be separated to create an attractive cycling environment.

There is no point in going for half-measures. If we want a "cycle-ised city" we need the proper thing. We need separate bus lanes and cycle tracks. If there's not room on a street for that, we need wide combined (separated but unsegregated) lanes where buses can overtake cyclists with good clearance, staying on the outside of them all the time. If there is not room for such wide lanes, then there should be a cycle lane only, with, again, cyclists passing behind stops. Or a lane of general traffic can be removed to make space for one of the other solutions.

Combined bus and cycle lane turns into cycle track as it passes behind a bus stop: Assen, Netherlands (This facility on Overcingel has been upgraded since this Google Earth picture was taken, but the principle remains applicable.)

Cycle track passes behind a bus stop, Royal College Street, Camden Town

Wide combined bus and cycle lane on Waterloo Bridge, but the stop is done wrong. Cyclists have to pull out into a fast general traffic lane to get round stopped buses: better than having no lane, but very poor.

Bus lanes in London and other UK cities (but most of them are in London) have always been a very poor compromise at the best of times, and cycle campaigners should not be afraid of condemning them and calling for far better provision. For one thing they are rarely operational 24/7, but only work at peak hours, so for most of the week they do no good to bus passengers or cyclists. For another, they have never been run through junctions. They give up on the approach to them, giving place to a left-turn general traffic lane. This offers no help to cyclists trying to go straight on (or indeed turn right). For a third thing, on some roads which are decreed to be too narrow to have bus lanes on both sides, they occur on only one side. An example is that choked, angry, fuming corridor that separates the boroughs of Camden and Brent, otherwise known as Kilburn High Road. Here, the wider sections of the road have bus lanes on both sides, but where the road narrows, one or both lanes disappear.

Wider section of Kilburn High Road: bus lanes both sides, but they give up near junctions because "junction capacity" (for private traffic) is considered more important than bus priority and cycle safety.

Narrower section of Kilburn High Road: bus lane (intermittent) on one side only

This is all a pathetic compromise. If bus lanes are worth having on a road, they are worth having on both sides all the way along. If that means getting rid of the general through-traffic, or making general traffic one-way in order to accommodate adequate bus and cycle lanes on both sides, then that's what needs to be done. If not, why bother? I once said to a Camden traffic planner that the best "Dutch" solution to the problem of Kilburn High Road would be to make it one-way, except for buses and bikes. He thought for a while and then said, "But what do you do with the other direction of traffic?" But worrying about the other direction of traffic, most of which shouldn't be there anyway, is part of the problem. If we really wanted bus priority, we would just do it. Bus priority in London, even separating it entirely from cycling considerations, has always been hideously compromised and ineffective. Trying to incorporate cycling on this flawed network doesn't work well at all. We need to re-think it all along Dutch lines.

The thinking behind bus priority in London was always insufficiently radical to really make much difference to anything. There was never any concept of the lanes being truly dedicated and continuous. It should be realised that the modern move towards extensive bus lanes in London started before the establishment of the GLA and TfL – in fact, under a Conservative government in the late 1990s. I remember this, as I was involved with LCC campaigning at the time. Representatives of the Livingstone administration in City Hall tend to claim bus priority as his achievement, and he always was quite committed to buses, but he only extended a trend that was already occurring when he took office, financing it with his congestion charge revenues.

At the last Street Talks meeting, at which Ashok Sinha, and Richard Lewis of London Cycling Campaign talked on the Going Dutch campaign, in questions from the floor, Livingstone's one-time Deputy Mayor, Nicky Gavron, who clearly has little grasp of cycling issues, seemed to want to claim the bus-lane installing record of the Labour London administration as a great achievement for cycling. She was quickly disabused of this idea by the cyclists chiming in to say how unpleasant they found it to cycle in the bus lanes on London's main roads, and how they would not let their children do it. Yes, bus lanes are sometimes better than congested general traffic lanes because they are sometimes less full of traffic. But they are no basis on which to build a Dutch-style "eight to eighty-year-old" cycling culture. Let us be clear, if we want that, we will have to do some surgery to London's bus lanes, and in some places we will have to get rid of them: particularly where they don't work well anyway.

So I think cyclists should be less worried about Mr Griffin and his bus lanes campaign, and more concerned about the politicians who are supposed to be protecting cyclists, and who are failing in that duty. Like the minister for road safety, Mike Penning, and the minister for cycling, Norman Baker. The Commons Transport Select Committee interviewed them on Tuesday, in a session closely watched by campaigners and journalists alike, in the wake of the huge publicity for the "cyclesafe" agenda created by The Times. But the hearing was an abysmal affair, in which it became entirely apparent that this government has no strategy on cycling, no programme to make it safer, and actually no understanding that there is a serious problem – so serious that it has caused a traditionally conservative newspaper to embark on a "crusade".

The contents of the ministers' statements were accurately predicted beforehand on the brilliant blog At War With The Motorist, that very predictability and repetition of decades-old orthodox political mantras on cycling ("cycling is booming", "the answer is more cycle training" etc. etc.) a sure sign of these ministers' failure to set the UK on a new, successful cycling policy course. Even that perspicacious blogger, Joe Dunckley, could not have predicted, however, such idiot comments from ministers as those from Baker and Penning, who both claimed that the the UK is "doing safety [for cyclists] better than they [the Dutch] are", in defiance of all known statistics and even the opinions of their own department, which stated in its May 2011 Strategic Framework for Road Safety (page 16):

For cyclists we are also seeing in an improvement in the fatality rate per mile travelled, but, in comparison to overall road safety casualty data, in this area we are behind many other European countries.

How extraordinarily far behind we are is demonstrated by statistician Jim Gleeson in this tremendously important blogpost, where he shows that the chances of a cyclist receiving a serious or fatal injury in a collision with a motor vehicle is, per km travelled, 8.3 times higher in the Netherlands than in the UK.

Graph by Jim Gleeson

There were some brilliant contributions to the select committee hearing from witnesses, particularly from CTC President Jon Snow, who stressed that paint on the roads is not infrastructure, that UK cycle infrastructure is not developing, that there is simply no leadership from the state on cycling policy, that cycle training is not enough, and that it is essential, through planning law, to make the provision of cycling infrastructure compulsory as part of new developments. But the standard of the committee itself may be judged from the fact that the chairman did not even know that the Dutch organise their streets on completely different lines to the British. And the ministers came across as uncaring, complacent, visionless, arrogant, and ignorant of the most basic facts related to their own portfolios. As @citycyclists tweeted,

"I thought Penning's comment on Dutch success showed sheer contempt for the lives of UK cyclists".

I think that's not too harsh. Penning has shown appalling ignorance of his brief before, when he appeared not to know that he was in charge of roads (trunk roads) that cyclists legally use – in some cases, have to use, because of a lack of more suitable alternatives. He has, in his past political life, been associated with the far-right anti-EU Tories who had the whip removed by John Major. He is therefore not one likely to look to continental Europe for solutions to problems. I would have expected a bit more sense from Lib Dem minister Norman Baker, but this was conspicuously lacking. In another comment Baker gave us the self-fulfilling prophesy, comparing British towns to Leiden, with 13,000 bikes parked at the station, that "We're never going to get to that situation", prompting the retort from @citycyclists "Because of you, minister".

Both Penning and Baker plumbed a new low of indifference to those for whose safety they are responsible. In the national media, apart from The Times, the select committee on cycling was largely eclipsed by the Leverson enquiry into the doings at News International, and speculation about the position of Jeremy Hunt, the Culture Secretary. But if there are any politicians who should have been disgraced enough to lead to resignation on that day, it was Penning and Baker. For while nobody has died as a result of the News International affair, avoidable cycle deaths happen weekly. The most recent occurred in Bedfordshire on Sunday. The only consolation I can think of is that ministers like Baker and Penning rarely remain in their jobs for more than a couple of years. They really are, to quote Sir Robin Day, "Here today, gone tomorrow".

So where does all this leave us? It looks unlikely that, unless there is an irresistible public upsurge of sentiment demanding it, this Con-Dem coalition government will ever adopt a worthwhile cycling policy. Perhaps The Times campaign will achieve even that eventually, but it still appears a remote possibility. As a result of the newfound zeal of campaigning organisations, and the real upsurge in cycling in inner London, and perhaps even the negative publicity arising out of the Addison Lee affair, more of the mainstream media is starting to understand what the real differences between UK and Dutch roads policies are, as demonstrated in this broadly excellent piece by Jasmine Gardner in the London Evening Standard, clearly inspired by LCC's Go Dutch campaign. But with central government intransigent, the only hope of progress lies with the devolved administrations in London, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and possibly some of the large English unitary local authorities like Manchester and Bristol. These administrations and authorities have big enough budgets, and have enough freedom, and strategic control, to start to set a new direction for their roads and streets policies, even if Westminster keeps its head in the sand-bucket.

So the focus goes back to the campaigns in London and Edinburgh, both coming to a head with mass actions by cyclists on Saturday: The Big Ride and the Pedal on Parliament respectively. Thursday's big news in London was that Ken Livingstone has announced he accepts the demands of the Go Dutch campaign. That means that he agrees to these three clear commitments:

1. Implementing three flagship Go Dutch developments in prominent locations
2. Building all planned developments on the TfL main road network to Go Dutch standards
3. Completing the Cycle Superhighways programme to Go Dutch standards

The Lib Dem and Green candidates for Mayor, Brian Paddick and Jenny Jones, have already agreed to these demands. Boris Johnson, the independent candidate Siobhan Benita, and the UKIP and BNP candidates, have not.

LCC's detailed analysis of the policies of the mayoral candidates gives highest marks to Jenny Jones, and second to Ken Livingstone. They can't recommend for whom cyclists should vote for, because they are charity that cannot be overtly party-political. But Londoners on Bikes can make such a recommendation, and they recommend cyclists give their first preference vote to Jenny Jones, and their second to Ken Livingstone. I concur with their judgement, which also has hard words for Johnson:

Unless he changes his opinions sharpish, Boris Johnson will continue to be a disaster for London cycling. Statistics on cycling casualties show falling casualties between the year 2000 and 2007. In 2008 Boris came into office and casualty rates started climbing. It’s no coincidence. His policy of ‘smoothing traffic flow’ has made roads agressive and more dangerous... At last week's Sky Mayoral debate, Ken and Brian made valid points about cyclist safety, and Boris made a joke.

And the Go Dutch petition now has nearly 40,000 signatures, corresponding to 2% of those who voted in the elections last time, less than the difference between the two main candidates in some polls. It's all to play for, this week has been a long one in London cycling politics, and next week could be even longer. If you are within reach of London, do your bit and turn up for The Big Ride tomorrow, Saturday, demanding London's streets be made safe and inviting for cycling as they are in Holland. Organised start points from all over London are given on this map. Tips on how to "survive" the ride are given by ibikelondon. The Vole will make the long journey from Edgware, and will see you there.

The IAM's worthless "research" on accidents

The Institute of Advanced Motorists (IAM), which styles itself, disingenuously, as "the UK's leading road safety charity",  has produced a report called Licensed to skill  (funny-punny-groan-groan) on the contributory factors in road accidents (or what us more enlightened/PC people call "crashes").

The Telegraph breathlessly calls this piece of work "startling" (they must be easily startled), continuing:

Using data gathered by police and spanning 700,000 accidents from 2005-2009, the Institute of Advanced Motorists (IAM) has analysed, in breathtaking detail, the anatomy of a road accident.

Analysis? Breathtaking detail? Anatomy?? Well what this sorry affair is all about soon becomes clear:

Unexpected findings emerged, not least the relative unimportance that speeding plays in road accidents that kill six people each day in the UK, leave 68 others seriously hurt and 535 with less serious injuries. 

"It has been an eye-opener," says project manager Neil Greig, of the IAM. "Not just in terms of what causes an accident but in terms of dispelling some of the popular myths. For instance, if you look at Government campaigns they seem to say that speed is the number one problem. But illegal speeding – when drivers exceed the posted limit – accounts for only 13.9 per cent of fatal accidents. A bigger cause [15.9 per cent] is going too fast for the conditions – entering a bend too quickly, for instance – when you might well be under the actual speed limit."

So it's not about speed then. What is it about? The answer comes (with my emphasis):

The statistics are quite clear on this and it's "driver error or reaction". It's listed by police as a factor in more than 65 per cent of fatal crashes and the heading covers a multitude of driving sins many of which you're probably on first-name terms with. Topping the charge sheet is failing to look properly (the Smidsy factor – "Sorry mate, I didn't see you', relevant in 20.5 per cent of fatals involving driver error), followed by "loss of control" (34 per cent) which, says Greig, often means leaving yourself with "nowhere to go" after entering a bend or other situation, too quickly. Other errors include "poor turn or manoeuvre" (12 per cent) and "failed to judge other person's path or speed" (11.6 per cent.).

Second biggest cause of fatal accidents, to blame for 31 per cent, is the "injudicious action", an umbrella term for "travelled too fast for the conditions' (15.9 per cent of those labelled injudicious), "exceeded speed limit" (13.9 per cent) or "disobeyed give-way or stop sign" (2.1 per cent)?

Third culprit in the daily gamble on who lives and who dies is "behaviour or inexperience" (28 per cent), which covers faults such as "careless, reckless or in a hurry" (17 per cent), "aggressive driving" (8.3 per cent) and "learner/inexperienced" (5.3 per cent).

.........
So it goes on. So what's the purpose of all this? What's the IAM's purpose, and what's The Telegraph's purpose in their presentation? 'Cause on my reading of this, they are starting out by telling us that the role of speed in "accidents" is a "myth", and then as it goes on, as my emphasis shows, it turns out, it is mostly about speed.

So what the heck are they trying to tell us? All this amounts to saying is that crashes occur because drivers make mistakes that their speed or another's speed makes it impossible for them to correct before they collide with another road user. Amazing. Big deal. Who would have thought it?

One good thing about The Telegraph is that the readership is quite intelligent, so the comments on the story are mostly worth reading, many of them making more intelligent points than the article itself. And Telegraph readers know the difference between "their", "there" and "they're", and think it worth pointing these errors out.

As busmanj comments:

Instead of delivering "evidence on the causes of road traffic accidents" the problem is simply restated. You might as well say accidents are caused by errors. Or accidents.

This is so far behind safety-industry norms - notably, airline risk management - as to be depressing, given the richness of the statistical data. One no longer speaks of 'pilot error', because it is so vague as to be meaningless, implies culpability, and is essentially a truism... but instead seek[s] to get away from obvious proximate cause to underlying, often obscure fundamental causal factors, including (but not limited to) organisational and environmental factors which combine to put the human 'software' we all of us run in a position where it comprehensively fails. 

Exactly. "Organisational and environmental factors", i.e., relating to the way the way our society is run. The IAM's "research" is worthless. As britishbastion notes:

After each injury accident the police fill in STATS 19 report form which lists a set of possible causes of the accident for the officer to chose from. It is their opinion of what has caused the collision.

While there is a wide range of causes of collisions, the injuries that we suffer and the damage to vehicles and property is 100 percent attributable to the speed and energy of collision.

All this work by the IAM seems to be is an aggregation of the STATS 19 data collected by police officers. We know that the amount of time and money spent by the police investigating each collision is grossly inadequate – according to Amy Aeron-Thomas of RoadPeace, they spend typically £2,200 on fatal crash investigations, £250 on serious injury crashes and £60 on slight injuries, compared to £20,000 on a typical homicide. And there are no national standards for crash investigations, so 43 local police forces do their own thing, and it's rare to get accurate speed estimates. So this data is all just based on assessments of which of a set of fixed options on a form best correspond to the causes of an accident as it appears to a possibly ill-trained (for this job) and ill-equipped police officer doing a rushed and often superficial and inadequate investigation of a crash, in a manner that is not even nationally standardised. Just aggregating this published data hardly amounts to real research on the "causes" of "road accidents".

One suspects a "political" motive. One suspects the IAM started by knowing what they wanted the message of their report to be before they looked at any data, and that this was the whole purpose: to put the message out that "speed is not the problem". One may view it in the context of the coalition government's and the right-wing media's campaign against speed enforcement, and Transport Secretary Philip Hammond's declared "end to the war on the motorist". As Amy Aeron-Thomas also points out, the only references to "speed" in the Department for Transport's Business Plan, under the heading "Switch to more effective ways to make our roads safer", are:

i) Stop central government funding to local bodies for new fixed speed cameras

ii) Work with local authorities to publish speed camera data

whereas in fact the contributory factors to road deaths, in terms of enforceable offences, in 2009, looked like this:

Contributory factors to UK road deaths in 2009

The apparent DfT/police argument indicated here about exactly how many crashes are due to drink driving highlights the subjectivity and doubt inherent in all these statistics. But the simple message many motorists will take from the IAM's work and The Telegraph's reporting of it, the message they are intended to take, is that "Speed does not cause accidents, so it's OK to speed".

But as britishbastion and other commentators on the Telegraph story note, the real issue is not "accidents". It is the damage done to people. And that damage is of course closely related to speed, whatever "causes" are attributed to the crash. Accidents will happen, people will come into collision with fast-moving masses of metal, or the fast-moving masses of metal will come into collision with one another, and then it is the speed that counts. As Forlornehope tell us:

The energy dissipated in a collision increases as the square of the speed so at 30 mph you will do more than twice as much damage as at 20.

Unfortunately fake "studies", like this IAM one, and propaganda in the right-wing media, conspire to create the atmosphere that "killer" Hammond and his road safety minister Mike Penning ("Minister for the Slaughter of Vulnerable Road Users" as Freewheeler called him) exploit in their tilting-at-windmills easy-political-win-campaign against the tabloid fantasy of the "War on the Motorist". In response to the 7% increase in the number of cyclists killed and injured in 2009, Mike Penning commented that the Government was "looking at how we can improve cycle safety" – at the same time as ordering local authorities to publish accident and casualty statistics at speed camera locations (a move which the police opposed), using this language:

We want to stop motorists being used as cash cows. For too long information about speed cameras has been hidden in the shadows. This data will end that by clearly showing whether a camera is saving lives or just making money.

(Penning is also trying to push longer lorries on to our city streets, but that's another story.) And, as Amy Aeron-Thomas further points out, the DfT's 2011 Road Safety Strategy states:

We intend for the action we take [on road safety] to be seen as acceptable and proportionate to the majority of motorists.

My (and her) emphasis: it's the majority of motorists, not the majority of people. And here's David Cameron launching the UN Decade of Road Safety:

He's flanked by two racing car drivers. Not many vulnerable road users get killed on the racing track. So that proves it, as the IAM wants us to believe, it's not about speed, it's about skill. It's about being an "advanced motorist". With an institute specially for you. To tell you there's no problem with your speed so long as you are skilful enough. In a nation where everybody who wants to use the roads needs to get into metal boxes filled with airbags and crumple zones to protect them from all these other skilful drivers.

And what if you want to walk or cycle? God help you, because accidents happen, and when they do, it's their speed that kills you.

Conflicts of interest and conflicts of policy

Recently I spoke to someone who I thought might be in the LCC. The person in question confirmed that they had been in the LCC, but, since they were now working as a transport planner for a London borough, had left, as it could be construed as a "conflict of interest". I have been turning this small point over in my mind. The borough in question has a policy to increase cycling. Explicitly, it's in their transport plan. LCC's objective is to increase cycling. So how can there be a conflict of interest? Where can the conflict arise? Would it be a "conflict of interest" for a local authority transport planner to be a member of the AA, or of the CTC, or of Living Streets, the pedestrians' lobby group, or a public transport users' group, or, indeed, a local residents' association? If a transport planner is working for a council that is actually trying to make things better for cyclists and boost cycling, doesn't it positively make sense for them to be in an organisation where they will get a better idea of what cyclists are saying and demanding? Does it necessarily alter their professional objectivity and independence? They could, after all, be reading all the cycling blogs, like this one, which nobody would know they were doing, and which, in general, reflect more strident views than LCC does. There is something odd about this, but I can't quite pin it down.

Quite disconnectedly, I came across a section of The Guardian for Wednesday (I didn't buy it). This is 4  broadsheet pages devoted to the question of "What can the UK do about growing traffic congestion?" "Produced in association with TomTom" (suppliers of traffic information/satnav systems), and containing a half-page ad for them, plus numerous mentions in the text, this supplement contained not one mention of cycling or walking, and few of public transport. Surprise, surprise, the methods of dealing with congestion that were being focussed on were, apart from the suggestion of road pricing, all concerned with high-tech traffic information management  using the kind of technology TomTom supplies. And the focus of the road-pricing discussions were not really on reducing motor traffic, but rather, on using pricing as a mechanism to distribute it more efficiently.

In this supplement is a column written by Conservative transport minister Mike Penning. He writes:

The government recognises the importance of addressing the environmental impact of road use. But, rather than drive the motorist out of the car, we want to drive the carbon out of the car. We are making that areality with measures to support the purchase and use of ultra-low carbon vehicles, like our Plug-in Car grant and Plugged-in Places scheme.

So, there you have it. The government does not have a policy to "drive the motorist out of the car". Which I presume means they have no policy to reduce car use. It doesn't mean they have a policy to increase car use, or to allow car use to increase, but one would have to ask the minister about that. Clearly no policy to reduce car use, only to de-carbonise the car. I am sure I don't have to explain to anybody who knows any science at all what the problem is here: that, if he is talking about electric vehicles, as he seems to be, the carbon issue is not dealt with, but merely transferred back to the power station stage. So unless a huge increase in nuclear generation is being proposed, and I haven't heard the government saying that since Fukushima, how does this help with CO2? It doesn't, but nevertheless the we are heading for a huge expenditure (I don't use the word investment) in on-street electric vehicle charging points: money that could have been used to provide safe cycle infrastructure.

Penning's background, according to Wikipedia, is in the army, as a firefighter, in business, and in political journalism. So not a scientist, then. He was in the past associated with the far-right anti-EU Tories who had the whip taken away by John Major. So, also, not a person likely to be influenced by how they sort transport in continental Europe.

I have long believed it a serious problem with Britain's democracy in this science and technology dominated world, where a fair level of scientific understanding is necessary to appreciate many of the most important issues, pre-eminently, global warming, that so many of our MPs are drawn from the professions of the law and journalism, and so few are scientists or have degree-level scientific training. Anyway, whenever you hear this government make any pronouncements on the environment, transport, cycling, or walking, bear this key fact in mind: they have no policy to reduce car use.

Conflicts of interest, conflicts of policy. As Enrique Peñalosa, former Mayor of Bogotá, said in a talk recently in London,  "Choosing between a city friendly to people or a city friendly to cars is a conflict". Perhaps what's wrong in the case of the person who feels there is a conflict between membership of a cycling organisation and being a publicly-employed transport planner, is that it really is a conflict, because the government really doesn't believe in reducing the role of the car in our country – and that leaves no room increasing the role of the bike.