Mostly about cycling in the
"Biking Borough"of Brent
and elsewhere in London,
but also touching on
environment, politics,
philosophy, science,
society, music and art
Further to my last post on the corporate lockdown Olympics, I heard former Labour sports minister Richard Caborn on Radio 4's today programme this morning defend the 2006 Olympic and Paralympic Games Act that he piloted through parliament, at the behest of the IOC, and, no doubt, Tony Blair, that introduced unique civil liberty violations into the British legal system. His defence was that the Olympics had been delivered on-time and on-budget, that they would be a great success, that it was necessary to protect the value of the sponsorship deals for the sponsors, that nobody had been prosecuted under the Act, and, basically, he had had not had any choice anyway as it was what the IOC had demanded.
I am put in mind of that strand of political opinion in the UK, in the Tory party and further to the right, that believes we have been taken over by Europe. I don't think we have been taken over by Europe, but we have certainly been taken over by something.
For let's look at some facts. The Olympics has been delivered on-buget according to Caborn? They were originally supposed to cost only £4 billion. The Commons Public Accounts committee now believes the cost will be around £11 billion, but other calculations, including the costs of public transport upgrades, put the figure at £24 billion. Of the £11 billion, the National Audit Office estimates the private contribution will now be only 2%: down from an originally projected £738 million to £165 million. This tiny private contribution is all we have got for the attack on civil liberties that is the 2006 Olympic Games Act!
It may be true that there have been no prosecutions as a result of the Act, but the stories of the persecution of small traders who have tried to use Olympic symbols and words in their marketing are true. You can stroll through Stratford, as I have done, and see the hasily-changed signboards on the hotels and cafés that had to bow to the threat of action from LOCOG under the 2006 Act.
Amongst other facts not mentioned in Caborn's attack on critics: that there will be no public park as a legacy of the Games. The land will be private. You may be allowed into it, but that will be discretionary.
Early promises of a sustainable transport legacy from the Games have come to absolutely nothing. Here's Sustrans's projection from 2007 of the "green" cycle and walking routes that were supposed to be built to Wembley Stadium in time for the Olympics, as an Olympic legacy (just a small part of the plan for "Olympic Greenways" for thew whole of London).
Map from Sustrans Greenways for the Olympics and London( GOAL) study for Brent, 2007
None of this ever happened. None of it. Zero. Sustrans and Brent Council hoped money would come from the Olympic Development Authority, but as the costs of the core infrastructure of the Games spiralled, all such greenwash was forgotten.
In Stratford town centre we have ended up with some curious new anodised metal artwork...
...opposite a "1.9 million square foot retail and leisure destination" by a crappy shared pavement...
...with still-unfinished, crummy urban realm...
...and no cycle access or cycle parking during the Games. (In that link Westfield Stratford "Strongly advise customers to use alternative transport measures to visit the centre whenever possible"... and they mean... alternative to the bike.)
Immediately adjacent are to be found traditional British on-pavement Totally Useless Crap Cycle Facilities...
...that go a few metres exactly where pedestrians need to walk before ending in a depressing display of meaninglessness...
...and including this new camouflaged cycle track with the most subtle possible grey-on-grey markings, again going just a few metres before colliding with a bus stop and turning coyly all "shared-use":
Here's another view with the track being sensibly ignored by an on-road cyclist, and showing a pole placed centrally on the tiny track for extra fun:
Just to the east, as this blog post by As Easy As Riding a Bike tells us, on the main access road to the Olympics from the rest of London, the A118 Stratford High Street, the promised Cycle Superhighway was never delivered, owing to crossed-wires between Newham and Boris Johnson, and cyclists ended up with absolutely nothing except cycling on a standard urban-motorway-style road.
In a couple of short months all the games will all be over, and what will be left? There's the stadium that nobody knows what to with, which may become a football stadium or something to do with Formula 1 (no, I can't work that one out either), some other sports venues, such as the Velodrome, which may have a more useful future, and some other bits and pieces including a strange piece of twisted metal sculpture. The "1.9 million square foot retail and leisure destination"will be there, certainly, and a discretionary-access private park that looks like it will probably eroded by housebuilding that local authorities will have no control over, because a quango, the Olympic Mayoral Development Corporation, will control it. The "Ethical Olympics Pledge" signed by Lord Coe and then-Mayor Ken Livingstone in 2004, which was supposed to define the long-term benefits that local people were to gain from the Olympics, was unceremoniously torn up by the ODA when it came into existence as a result of Richard Caborn's 2006 legislation.
The true legacy of the Olympics is this litany of collapsed deals and broken promises by a confusing array of quangos and companies. An Olympics in tune with the public spirited legacy claimed could only have gone ahead if the concept of the ‘public good’ retained some meaning in today’s political discourse. Instead this term was quietly removed from legislation in 2004 reflecting the extent to which the market has squeezed the notion of the ‘public good’ out of politics.
It's a depressing view, but it's a conclusion I find it hard to disagree with looking today at Olympic London. The people of London deserved better, and Richard Caborn, and other ministers in two governments, plus the Mayor of London, should be ashamed.
There can have been few bigger lies uttered in recent history than the claim that the 2012 London Olympics would be the "Greenest Olympics ever". For "ever" is a long time, and must include the ancient Olympics, where the athletes wore no clothes, so that sounds pretty green. Even if you go back no further than the last Olympics held in London, the 1948 games at Wembley, you realise that it must have been a lot "greener" then. For nothing at all was built for the 1948 games. The stadium was already there, built for the British Empire Exhibition of 1924–5. There was no athletes' village; the athletes were put up in the homes of local people, as the Brent Magazine (p27) recently recalled. And I bet a heck of a lot more people cycled to Wembley to spectate at that games than will cycle to Stratford for this one.
I notice now a consensus emerging in the printed and on-line media across the political spectrum – an unusual phenomenon – not just the left-wing Twitterati – with articles in places as diverse as the Mail, the Spectator, and Guardian, all tending towards a distaste for what the London Olympics has been allowed to become in so many ways. An event in London where you can't buy chips or British beer. An even into which you are not allowed to bring your sandwiches. An even defended by rocket launchers sited on peoples' homes and unmanned drones flying overhead. Security paranoia, closure of rights of way. An event you can't cycle to. An event that grants a few bigwigs and lackeys and hangers-on exclusive rights to lanes on the road network, to the disadvantage of bus and taxi users and positive endangerment of cyclists. Lockdown London. Privatised London. A takeover by big business interests and the private security industry. All as far as you can possibly get from the supposed Olympic ideals.
Most disturbing of all: the breaches of British traditions of justice and free speech and overturning of basic human rights. The unique rights given to the IOC and sponsors to enforce against unauthorised use of not only symbols but common words in the English language. The fact that it has become illegal for people to put posters up in their own windows criticising the Olympics. (Where is that great defender of our civil liberties David Davis when you need him? Why hasn't he resigned and forced a by-election over this issue I wonder?) It's as if we have suddenly landed in a bizarre big-business ruled Stalinist state, the Olympic rings becoming a symbol of London not winning the Olympics, but sold to the IOC and the sponsors, chained to them, to McDonalds, Coca-Cola, Samsung and the rest. The Censorship Olympics, Corporate Lockdown London, to quote tags coined by writers other than myself.
Did London win the Olympics or the Olympics win London?
It's good to see that some ordinary people are standing up against this undemocratic, militaristic, corporatist machine that has sucked so much enthusiasm away from what could have been a great event for Britain and for London. It's only a small campaign, over an apparently minor issue, a towpath a couple of metres wide running alongside the Olympic Park, but it's worthwhile and it's important.
At the London Assembly debate on cycling on Thursday, on which I have already reported, one lady spoke from the floor about how the closure of the Lea Valley towpath had made the bike journey she used to regularly make with her kids impossible. How could she take them via the only alternative route, through the deadly Bow roundabout that claimed the lives of two cyclists last year? Did the powers who decided this have the slightest idea of how it would affect the lives of her and many other east Londoners? Do they not realise this is like closing the A12 for them? Why do walkers and cyclists have no rights to a safe place? She made a moving speech at the end of which she was almost in tears.
Enough people are angry about the towpath closure, two weeks before the games even begin (and it will still be closed long after they are ended) for there now to be a campaign to Open Our Towpath. Fifty people turned out to the first protest on 8 July, and far more are likely for the next one, which is tomorrow, Sunday 15 July at 11:30, starting from the car park of the Princess of Wales Pub in Lea Bridge Road E5. The message is getting spread widely via a Facebook group, Twitter, and blogs, and some politicians are starting to listen and make sympathetic noises. I don't give much for the chances of success against the insane Olympic security paranoia juggernaut, but I think it's good that people are protesting against it. If you can make it, do go along and add your voice.
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.
One of the first cycle superhighways takes you round the back of Elephant & Castle – that cunning little cut-through that I sometimes use.
Though I have to tell you ...sometimes I just go round Elephant & Castle because it's fine. If you keep your wits about you, Elephant & Castle is perfectly negotiable.
This, about the statistically most dangerous junction in London, that has seen 89 cyclists casualties in the last two years. That statistic alone tells you, even if you have never visited the place, that Elephant and Castle is not "fine", and it is not "perfectly negotiable", irrespective of where your "wits" are. It is unacceptably dangerous for cyclists, just as are literally hundreds of other junctions and sections of road across London. Though TfL keep creatively finding ways to combine statistics to suggest that cycling in London is getting safer, as in this attempt:
It is encouraging that the proportion of cycling collisions on TfL roads that result in fatal or serious injuries has declined since 2008, indicating that the severity of collisions is falling,
A claim that cycle casualties per journey are declining, that TfL makes in this document, is statistically dubious, for the reasons explained in this valuable blogpost. In any case this is an irrelevant statistic, as it is the casualty rate per distance travelled that is the real measure of risk. This last-mentioned reference does demonstrate that we actually haven't got much of a clue as to what the cycling rate in London really is, so it is very hard to tell how risky it is, and how the risk is changing. As with everything in cycling, the Dutch do this better. The Dutch have a saying, measuring is knowing. The Dutch know what their cycling rate is, because their cycling is largely on cycle paths, and they have automatic counters on the cycle paths that look like this, that tell them how many cyclists use the routes:
Cycle traffic counter in Groningen
Because, in the UK, we don't actually know what the split of cycling is between major roads, minor roads, pavements and paths, and in most of those places, we don't count cyclists, we haven't really got a clue about how much cycling there is, and how dangerous it is. What we can say is that people increasingly feel that cycling in London is too dangerous. That is what the cyclists on the Tour du Danger were there to highlight, and to highlight, specifically, Transport for London and Boris Johnson's failure to redesign the streets and junctions they control with cyclist (and pedestrian) safety in mind. And they succeeded in highlighting it. The mainstream media is noticing this issue as never before. And, as I write, TfL have been forced to respond on Bow:
Transport for London (TfL) director Ben Plowden promised to look "very closely" at the cycling superhighway which ran through the Bow Roundabout.
He also said cyclists would be advised to avoid the route, which runs to the Olympic Park, during next year's Games.
Where else cyclists will be advised to go, to get to the Games, is not clear to me. Also, the question is, what is there to look at "very closely", that was not looked at last year when the design of the Superhighway was decided upon against all advice from cycle campaigners? Nothing has changed. TfL took a deliberate decision then to risk the lives of cyclists rather than produce a proper design for cycling. The two cyclists who have died there paid the price of that decision. Looking at this one roundabout "very closely" will not fix it, nor any of the others of hundreds of dangerous junctions and roads in London, without a fundamental change of approach from TfL.
For TfL's approach to cycling reflects the views of Boris Johnson closely. Where he says "it is just fine, so long as you keep your wits about you", and, again, "sometimes I don't think that physical streetworks are the answer", he is, as a cyclist himself, only expressing a type of view that has always had some currency amongst British cyclists: the view that the issues are personal and a matter of character and determination, not public, structural and political. This view is exemplified by the slogan, as formulated by David Hembrow, "I cycle, so you could cycle too". It demonstrates a profound lack of insight into how human beings operate, a profound failure of empathy – a quality you would have thought a successful politician would need. As Green Assembly Member Jenny Jones put it:
The Mayor is an experienced cyclist who wants roads that are safe for him to cycle around. In contrast, I am an experienced cyclist who wants roads that are safe for a twelve year old to cycle on. That is the gulf between us.
As an experienced motorist, cyclist, cycling instructor and trainer of cycling instructors I'd like to say that the Elephant & Castle and the majority of the Cycling Superhighways are bloody awful for cycling - which is why you hardly see any secondary school children, especially girls, cycling there.
Most of the motorists I know dislike many of TfL's roads and junctions, and they've undergone loads of training and a test! So what are the odds of your average soft, squidgy person who can't drive merrily pootling around these roads on bikes? Bugger all...
In the Netherlands they work really hard to make the route for cyclists friendly, obvious, direct and safe, subjectively and statistically, because they want their children to cycle and they recognise their vulnerability.
Here Boris just tells the boys and girls to grow some cojones and jump in front of the HGVs.
What a pillock.
Charlie later changed the last word to "buffoon", but I prefer his original.
So the Cycle Superhighways project always reflected Boris's view that what was really needed to get people cycling was publicity, encouragement and razzmatazz, not safe, clear cycling space on the roads. It was thus always going to be an entirely predictable, grim farce. Many are now saying that the scheme needs rethinking or abandoning, but to me (and I am not pleased to have been proven right by events), the failure was apparent from the early planning stages of the Superhighways. In August 2009, I urged London Cycling Campaign, under its then Chief Executive, Koy Thomson, unsuccessfully at that stage, to withdraw co-operation from, and support for, the whole Superhighways project. When Brent Cyclists was asked to help with the planning of Superhighway 11, proposed to run along the A5, I wrote, on 6 August 2009, the following to Thomson:
My option is that we should not take part. I am certainly not inclined to take part after having put a lot of effort into LCN+5 (more or less the same thing as Highway 11) which achieved absolutely nothing.
I think the whole LCC policy on the Highways (or are they Superhighways, TfL can't seem to make up its mind) is now wrong. We should rethink. I think we should not be co-operating with this project as the information with we have been supplied, particularly the presentation from last week's meeting at LCC, indicates that both the funding and the conception behind these routes is so calamitously inadequate to the task that they will be a total waste of time and money, and, worse, will attract inexperienced cyclists onto main road routes that have not been made any safer than they are now, with junctions that are still highly dangerous and unsuitable for all but the most skilled with-traffic cyclists.
The email below [not quoted here] from Koy, Rik [Andrew] and Tom [Bogdanowicz] says:
"The TfL presentation makes clear that the infrastructure element will be accompanied by soft measures such as cycle training, parking and promotion of cycling."
In fact, the presentation makes clear there will be no infrastructure element. Even the few slightly promising-sounding elements in the earlier (May) TfL presentation, particularly closing-off side roads along the routes, and "reorganising" parking and loading, seem to have been ruled out in last week's presentation, on Slide 9, "Constraints" where it says "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". If B[oris] J[ohnson] did not realise that prioritising cycling would be controversial, why did he start on this in the first place?
The next paragraph on that slide is key for Route 11: the statement "The Boroughs are King". LB Barnet continues to be totally opposed to putting a route on the A5. It stopped LCN+5 and it will stop this. There is absolutely no point in us putting any more work into it before we get a definitive statement of a change of policy from Barnet. All the issues for the section from Kilburn High Road northwards have been covered fully in the LCN+5 CRISP report anyway.
In short, though I can see the argument that LCC needs to make the Highways as good as possible within the constraints, after last week's presentation, I think the balance of advantages to LCC (and London cyclists) has now shifted to one where we would gain more from publicly opposing the Highways scheme, and making a big media thing of doing so, rather than from being associated with the total failure and embarrassment that they will surely be.
Am I alone in LCC in thinking this?
David Arditti
This is a complete and unabridged quote from the email that I wrote in August 2009. I found the policy of conciliation and cooperation with TfL on the manifest impending disaster of the Superhighways, favoured by Koy Thomson, "for fear of losing all influence" to be very unfortunate. Since then, and with a new chief executive, LCC has changed its tone on the Superhighways a great deal, and I support their current position.
I was perfectly right then in pointing to the fundamental problem that anti-cycling boroughs like Barnet were able to veto the Superhighways. That is what happened to CS 2 when it reached the borough of Newham. The anti-cycling Mayor of Newham, Robin Wales, caused CS 2 to stop dead at the Bow roundabout, with no further facilities. The Superhighway may not have been any better implemented on that roundabout had Wales allowed it to continue into Newham, for, as Assembly Member John Biggs was told, it was TfL, not Newham, that was so obsessed with not reducing the traffic capacity of the Bow roundabout as to not be prepared to put in any signals for pedestrians or cyclists. Cycle Superhighway 11 has not yet been "built" (i.e. painted), but it is now planned, like CS 2, to just end, bang on the border of the Bikeless Borough of Barnet, at another nasty junction (the junction of the A41 Hendon Way and Finchley Road), where cyclists will, again, just be "dumped".
Contrary to their protestations, TfL's officials seem to learn no lessons in stumbling from the failed implementation of one Superhighway to the next. Here is Leon Daniels, TfL's Managing Director of Surface Transport, answering a question from Assembly Member Joann McCartney last month (p33 of the minutes of the GLA Transport Committee):
Joanne McCartney (AM):This Committee looked at cycle superhighways and we came up with a list of recommendations which included having a minimum standard on all of the superhighways, for example a minimum two metre wide blue strip, about improving consultation prior to a superhighway going in and about revisiting the pilots to make any improvements that were necessary. I am just wondering how you got on with some of those recommendations?
Leon Daniels (Managing Director of Surface Transport, TfL): Again, loads of lessons to learn from the initial cycle superhighway not just in respect of the superhighway schemes themselves but also the way in which the construction is done and the disruption to general traffic and so on. In just about every case we are looking to - this is a big compromise because, at the end of the day, the carriageway space is fixed and therefore we are trying to squeeze a quart into a pint pot.
I agree entirely with you about minimum widths and so on. Just in some places, on the ground, practically, we are faced with what we have to do. In many cases - and Members will know some of these - there is a requirement for a certain footway width, the frontages need some space, there are requirements for loading and unloading, we need to keep ordinary traffic moving as well and, therefore, in many cases, we are shoehorning this into a narrow space. I agree entirely with you that a minimum width for cyclists is desirable but, again in many cases, we are stuck with what we can do practically and cost effectively.
So there you have it. It's a case of "trying to squeeze a quart into a pint pot". It's a case of a minimum width being desirable, but "we are stuck with what we can do practically". What Daniels is clearly saying here is that, though this is supposed to be a scheme for cycling, cyclists are, in reality, still at the bottom of the pile on these roads. Footway requirements can't be altered, loading requirements can't be altered, and capacity for "ordinary traffic" can't be reduced (he might as well have said "proper traffic", that would probably have better reflected the way he was thinking), so the thing that has to "give" is space for cycling. Cycling needs no space, right, because cycles are so narrow? After starting by saying "Loads of lessons to learn", Daniels makes it crystal clear he is learning nothing at all. He is sticking to the same old "big compromise" line (i.e. compromise into meaninglessness) that has caused all London cycle infrastructure schemes over the last 20 years to fail, from the London Cycle Network, to LCN+, to the present.
I don't think Daniels, or Johnson, have the slightest idea what proper cycling infrastructure looks like, what it actually does, or how it can be implemented. I don't know if they have seen what they have in Holland, Denmark and Germany. Maybe they have, but just concluded, in classic British fashion, "This is not why they cycle here, they cycle here because it is flat". Presumably they have never seen the cycling infrastructure in Switzerland, Austria and Italy. Certainly Boris seems to make a big thing out of hills. When the ex-coordinator of Harrow Cyclists, Colin Waters, tacked Boris at a public meeting in March 2010 in Harrow School, on the question of why the Superhighways were no good, Boris totally avoided the question, turning it to humour, loudly asking Colin, to the audience, "Goodness me, did you cycle here? Up this fearsome hill? Congratulate that man, give him a round of applause!"
Boris's vision of a "cycle-ised city" (a phrase he copied from LCC) seems to be of a city pretty much as it is now, with perhaps a few more cyclists fitted in, in the gaps between the cars, just to take up space more efficiently, and take a few more people off the tubes. It's not a vision of the radically reconfigured, re-prioritised, safe, people-friendly environment developed by the Dutch and Danes. For some reason, he thinks that's no good, or not possible here. The fact that, in his vision, some cyclists fitted into those little gaps are inevitably going to get squashed by the motor vehicles doesn't seem to occur to him, or if it does, he thinks he can't do anything about it. He thinks that "physical streetworks are not the answer". He won't admit the bleeding obvious, that it is the physical state of his streets now that is the problem.
I don't really see him and his cohorts moving on from that position. We need change at the top.
