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.

'Cities fit for cycling' flashride and debate – the Ship of State moves

I have not yet reported on the 22 February protest ride organised by ibikelondon, Cyclists in the City and the London Cycling Campaign, in advance of the Commons debate on cycle safety inspired by The Times's Cities fit for Cycling Campaign.

Well the ride was a huge success – as we knew it would be. Cyclists, for the first time in my 26 years of riding in London, are now prepared to stand up (or sit in the saddle) and be counted, and are not prepared to let the status quo continue. I arrived at the top of Duke of York steps to see a picturesque sea of winking red lights from the throng of riders gathered below on The Mall. There were clearly hundreds here, though all of them were not in view.

Looking down on the start of the ride from Duke of York Steps

The ride took off, and wound its way very slowly down The Mall and into Horse Guards Road, then headed for Parliament Square, turning right at the Palace of Westminster, down Millbank, across Lambeth Bridge, then back along the south side of the river to Westminster Bridge, across the bridge, past St Stephen's Tower (Big Ben) and up Whitehall, to Trafalgar Square, and back to The Mall. Police on bikes did an excellent job of keeping impatient motorists, taxi drivers and motorcyclists at bay, and of minimising conflict, and the LCC marshals also did a sterling job in keeping the ride together.

The police estimate was that 2000 cyclists took part. This is a similar number to that on the last Blackfriars flashride, but this ride felt symbolically and emotionally far better, and just more like an important historic moment. It was a protest ride in the right place, winding round the centres of power, Westminster and Whitehall. It was enthusiastic and noisy (previous flashrides had been quite quiet). It included MPs, London Assembly members and councillors. It was a ride riding a national wave of publicity and concern over the issue. Everybody on it, from "almost never cycle" people on bikes in their ordinary clothes, to long-distance touring cyclists and road racers in their usual get-up, knew why they were there and what they wanted, united in pushing the messages that cycling needs to be made safe, and that the way to make it safe is to build "cities fit for cycling". No more victim-blaming, no more persecution, no more putting the burden of taking all the protective measures on to the cyclists, no more letting motorists get away, literally, with murder, no more road designs that ignore cyclists – the slogan Cities fit for cycling encapsulates the point: it is the environment and the law which need changing, not the people on the bikes. The point was made, and made to people who matter, as subsequent events proved. It felt like a turning-point.

The ride was noticed, and had its effect on the debate next day. Several of the MPs taking part in the debate had been on the ride. The debate, attended by 75 MPs, has already been widely reported and commented-upon. Of course, those MPs attending were largely those converted to the cause already. But it proved that a surprising number have been converted to the cause, and a surprising number either are cyclists already, or know that they want to be, and would be, if the necessary measures to increase safety on the roads were taken. The Prime Minister's disarmingly honest statement on the afternoon of the flashride that

Anyone who has got on a bicycle – particularly in one of our busier cities – knows you are taking your life into your hands every time you do so...

had already galvanised the debate. There was mercifully little of the traditional UK pantomime of "cyclists should do more to protect themselves" and none of the equally-traditional comedy number "cyclists must get their own house in order and obey the law before we spend money on them" (when was that argument ever used against any other social group?). The MPs here basically understood the agenda that The Times has been driving home: our streets on which cyclists have to ride are not fit for purpose. And they, broadly, recognised that fixing the situation was going to cost a good deal of money, and take much time and political determination. There was also a recognition we has been here before – the National Cycling Strategy of of 1996 had aimed for 10% of trips to be done by bike by this year, 2012 – and a feeling that the same failure must be avoided, at all costs, this time around.

I can pick out a few problems with the debate. There was quite a lot of harping on the "safety in numbers" fallacy, which just confuses the debate on cycle safety. I've written about this in detail before. Basically, my position is that "safety in numbers" is a kind of illusion resulting from the fact that the places that have both large numbers of cyclists, and good safety for cyclists, also have much better physical conditions, either through separated infrastructure, or motor traffic removal. As the Director of SWOV, the Dutch institute for road safety research, says:

I do not expect that a greater number of cyclists will on its own result in a risk reduction for the cyclist....Policy that only focuses on an increase in cycling and at the same time ignores the construction of more cycling facilities will not have a positive effect on road safety.

The trouble with the "safety in numbers" concept is that, though it contains a grain of truth, there is certainly a correlation there, it is basically unhelpful for forming policy, as it encourages a view, that UK cycling organisations have often come dangerously close to suggesting, that all you have to do is to encourage and train as many people as possible to cycle on the roads, and the roads will then automatically become safe for cycling, and we will have solved the problem of how to create a mass cycling culture without all of that annoying, expensive, dedicated cycle engineering clutter that those silly continentals put in. As David Hembrow puts it (in his now miraculously resuscitated blog)

Cycle training can help a few nervous but keen individuals to cycle in a hostile environment. However, it's not something which scales to support the entire population in cycling for a significant proportion of all journeys. 

Talk of "safety in numbers" just distracts attention from the real, hard-engineering measures that are needed to create mass cycling in an advanced industrialised nation. As I say, it just confuses the debate, and it did indeed confuse some MPs' advocacy of the cycling cause in the debate. It is an idea we need to move beyond.

Then there was the "strict liability for drivers" issue, another thing where there is a bit of a correlation with high cycling levels in various countries, but we get the causation, again, the wrong way round in this country. Driver liability is an insurance technicality, legal small-print, if you will, which really cannot affect people's real-world, moment-to-moment decision making on the roads. It can have little effect on safety. It was introduced in the Netherlands after they already had mass cycling based on good infrastructure. It came as a consequence of that. It doesn't itself create, or significantly contribute to, mass cycling, anywhere. It's another distraction.

Then there was the minor distraction raised of "the need for showers and workplace lockers" – whereas a characteristic of mass cycling based on good infrastructure is that it is relaxed, not fast and furious, and people dress for their destination, not for their mode of transportation. These things again should be seen as largely irrelevant to what we are trying to achieve.

Then again, there was a lot of mixing up of cycle sport with "cycling as transport" in the debate. Unfortunately, because the one word "cycling" in English covers both of these quite different and largely unrelated areas, this usually happens. (The Dutch have two different words.) This was all the more understandable in view of the impending Olympic Games, and I do not entirely discount the possibility that some people may be inspired to start cycling, either for leisure or utility, as a result of media focus on the sport, and I recognise this to be a good thing. But unless we follow up this burst of enthusiasm with real change on our roads, to make people continue to cycle, by making it a pleasurable experience for them to do so, we will be back to how we were within a year or two. So: cycle sport, nothing wrong with it, but not really the issue here.

So there were these bits of foolishness and confusion in the debate. But overwhelmingly it was on the right lines. There was a huge amount of concern by MPs at avoidable deaths and injuries of their constituents while cycling, and a recognition we have both to physically put our roads right, and get prosecution and sentencing of road traffic offenders right. Ian Austin talked memorably about "the derisory sentences drivers [who kill] receive". Julian Huppert came down to the hard facts of the case when he said that "£10 per person per year is needed to turn Britain into a prime cycling nation".

Ben Bradshaw, a Labour ex-minister who has been involved with cycling at the parliamentary level for many years, noted, from his experience of government, how getting action on cycling tended to be dogged by two things: firstly, a failure of the different government departments that need to be involved – treasury, transport, environment and local government, and health – to collaborate, with what he described as conflicting cultures between the departments, and, secondly, the presence of so many disparate voices from the cycling lobby. This last certainly has been a problem in the past, but my sense now is that cyclists are far more united now in calling for the measures that really increase safety and cycling numbers. I think the flashrides have been evidence of this.

MPs merely having this debate doesn't actually get anything done. Cyclists, and The Times, still do not have any of what they are asking for. Delivering those is down to the Prime Minister, who knows that cycling in the UK involves "taking your life into your hands', and his senior ministers, particularly the Chancellor, and the Secretary of State for Transport. There was nobody at the debate who could deliver for the government. Under Secretary of State for Transport Norman Baker was really the fall-guy for this debate: he was in clear, and embarrassing, difficulty, trying to justify the record of the coalition so far – that of his government, that had abolished the already meanly-funded Cycling England quango and not replaced it with anything coherent, and which had nothing to offer but £11 million per year for training cyclists in techniques to avoid getting squashed on the roads by negligent drivers and lorries that shouldn't be there in the first place, and a Local Sustainable Transport Fund that mixes £15 million for a paltry few cycling schemes of questionable quality with far too much other stuff. Everybody, including him, seemed to know that this is just not action on a scale that is going to work. He candidly revealed his "envy" for the "fantastic" cycling environments in Amsterdam and elsewhere in the Netherlands. He knows that they achieved it by spending about 80 times his total expenditure, per person per year, for forty years. He knows what is needed, but can't yet deliver it.

So the onus remains on cyclists, and their supporters in the media and politics, to keep pushing to put cycling's supporters in the government, like Norman Baker, (and maybe David Cameron himself?) in a position where they can deliver what is needed. In the London Cycling Campaign, our next step, apart from the Go Dutch petition, will be a protest ride on 28 April, which should be the biggest ever. If you can possibly get to central London to take part in this, wherever you live, start planning to attend now, please. If you don't live within cycling range, there are always trains, coaches (and, dare I say, cars), and Boris bikes at the London end!

There remains much to do, and we are not close yet to getting the demands of even The Times's too-modest manifesto. Nevertheless I think the national debate has decisively changed. If this were a war, this would not be the Beginning of the End, but I think it could be the End of the Beginning.

I'll finish by going back to the start of the Westminster flashride. I arrived at the top of Duke of York Steps. As I took photos from the top of the steps, many pedestrian passers-by, all types of people, asked me what was going on. It was difficult to explain quickly, but I told them it was a peaceful protest to highlight to MPs the need for better safety for cyclists. Everybody I spoke to was 100% in favour of the protest when I told them this. All agreed that this protest was a great thing to happen, even if it did get in their way temporarily.

These people were not cyclists. These reactions, more than anything else, lead me to think that a rubicon was passed on the night of 22 February 2012. The vast ship of public indifference to cycling safety and cycling conditions in the UK, that campaigners have been pushing and shoving at for decades, getting nowhere, had started moving. Almost imperceptibly, over the winter of 2011–12, it had started to slide down the slipway into the river. The Times campaign had given it a welcome shove, but their effort was dependent on those of many others who had toiled away long before.

The ship may yet stick temporarily, and may require many more a hard shove, but I have no doubt it will enter the water, now that it has started moving. In the bar afterwards we toasted the moment. The Vole celebrated with tea.

The riders grouped at Duke of York Steps after the ride

Paris, London, and meaningless consultation

Stabiliser has visited Paris, and his write-up of the state of cycling there contrasts somewhat with mine posted here not long ago. His study was clearly more extensive than my brief impression, and shows considerable development in conditions for cycling in certain places, with well-designed segregated tracks on some streets, and part-time closures to motor vehicles on others, which seem to be boosting cycling. I am happy to admit that I was wrong on how cycling is developing in Paris.

Meanwhile, in London:

The Corporation of London's assistant director for planning and transportation, Iain Simmons said "On some roads such as Cheapside cycles account for more than 50% of the traffic and these numbers are going up and up every year. 

Cycles account for up to 42% of traffic on Southwark Bridge, 35% on Blackfriars Bridge and around a quarter of all traffic entering central London in the morning peak hour according to TfL monitoring.

This reinforces an opinion I have put forward before, that if we are going to have a "cycling revolution" at all in the UK (and the word "revolution" can be taken in either of two possible ways, as "dramatic change" or "uprising"), it's going to start in the Square Mile, as unlikely as that may have seemed a few years ago.

At the moment, Transport for London, despite its ludicrous hype on cycling, is actually doing everything it possibly can to make cycling in London more dangerous, prompting complaints direct to transport minister Norman Baker. He sounded terribly neutral when he spoke to the Parliamentary Cycle Group:

The government wants to provide the framework to allow local authorities freedom to provide for the transport choices of all people.

But we need some clarity about that framework from the government. LCC is absolutely right (except they get details wrong) to say that:

DfT ministers should make it clear that the Transport Management Act [they mean the Traffic Management Act 2004] should no longer be used to block local policies aimed at reducing road danger and increasing cycling. In London hundreds of proposals to reduce danger for cyclists on the London Cycle Network and the Cycling Superhighways [they mean Cycle Superhighways] have been over-ruled in order to maintain motor vehicle capacity.

That's it. Many cycle activists have essentially given up responding to TfL's and their borough's meaningless "consultations" on cycling schemes because, in recent years, everything they have suggested has been met with the response: 

Sorry, that's not possible because of capacity constraints – capacity has to be maintained because of our duty under the Traffic Management Act to keep the traffic moving.

This argument has rendered the Mayor's Cycle Superhighways programme lame and purposeless, though it continues to limp on pathetically, wasting millions of pounds of public money on a combination of pointless consultation and the laying of blue surfacing that wears off after less than a year due to being driven all over by cars, taxi and buses. 

But this is not just about TfL. Many, if not all, London boroughs, and local authorities round the country have been interpreting the Traffic Management Act to mean that "motor traffic must be given as much space and priority as possible". And yet, arguably, the original intention of the Act was totally the reverse, as the Act was at pains to specifically recognise as "traffic" pedestrians and cyclists. 

Quite honesty, what the original intention of the Traffic Management Act was is not clear to me, but its effects have been very damaging. The government needs to sort it out.

Worth watching

Carlton Reid has made a video in which he, Jim Davis (Cycling Embassy of Great Britain), and Ashok Sinha (London Cycling Campaign) make transport minister (with responsibility for cycling) Norman Baker aware of the controversy surrounding Blackfriars Bridge, which he seems not to have been aware of, along with other parliamentarians. He states that though he has no power over TfL, he will make them and the Mayor of London aware that the issue has been raise with him.

Also in the video is a very clear and significant statement of LCC's position on cycle provision by Ashok Sinha which moves the organisation away from support for the DfT's and CTC's Hierarchy of Provision.