The history of the relationship of the London Olympics to cycling has had many chapters, each individually saying so much about the British relationship to the bike, each succeeding the last with the inevitability of epic tragedy, like something made-up, so artistically, tragically perfect has been the symmetry of dramatic construction, running from the early official claims about how the Olympics were to be actually built around "active travel" including cycling, through all the broken promises and failure to deliver even the slightest attempt at cycling infrastructure to the venues, while a mass of pro-bike promotion flooded out of TfL; through all the protests by LCC that the road network being constructed around the Olympics was unsafe for cyclists, totally ignored by TfL and the ODA; through the death of two cyclists on the main recommended route to the Olympic Park at Bow roundabout last year under the wheels of lorries in near-identical incidents entirely attributable to the bad design of the Cycle Superhighway; through TfL's half-baked efforts to correct that design; through the closing of the one safe route near the Olympic Park, the Lea towpath, on "security" grounds, forcing all cyclists in the area onto lethal road systems; through the implementation of the Olympic Route Network, entirely ignoring, of course, the safety and comfort of cyclists; through the opening ceremony of the Games themselves, which featured winged bikes, while outside the stadium the police treated the Critical Mass riders, people just out for a bike ride, like criminals, kettling and arresting them, then holding 182 of them overnight before releasing all but three of them without charge; through the triumphs of Britain's cycling medal-winners on the track and in the road races; through the death, on the night of geatest triumph – the gold won by Bradley Wiggins in the Men's Time Trial – of cyclist Dan Harris under the wheels of an Olympic bus right outside the park, at a place where LCC had condemned the road design; through the (later retracted) suggestion by Bradley Wiggins, when asked about that tragedy in a way he perhaps was not prepared for, that a solution to cycle safety issues in the UK might be compulsory helmets (despite the fact that Harris was crushed bodily, like so many other cyclists, under the wheels of a turning heavy vehicle, and that a helmet would have been of no help), to today, Friday 10 August, when cyclists plan a mass ride and vigil to commemorate the death of Dan Harris, and the Mayor, Boris Johnson, plans some new announcement on a "cycling legacy".*
A summary of all this might be to say that though we in the UK have started now to treat our cycling sportsmen and sportswomen as heroes, our public authorities still treat those who try to get around on a bike like dirt. It's a weird juxtaposition, and one that, through its sheer existence, shows the folly of trying to equate popularity of high-level cycle sport with the dedication of political and public respect and resources to transport cycling. It shows rather that this contrast can exist, and maybe even the more we elevate sports cycling as the image of the way bikes are used in this country, the more we depress and crush the simple concept of the easy mode of transport for anyone. I'm not certain of this idea, but I throw it into the philosophising as a suggestion worth of consideration. For throughout this whole saga everyday cyclists and their organised representatives have been ignored, patronised, conned, insulted, fobbed-off, and treated as a minor irritant, not really cared about at all, by the ODA, LOCOG, the Olympic boroughs, the government, the cycling Mayor, and Transport for London, while these all claimed to espouse some kind of "cycling revolution" or "renaissance" that was nebulously linked to sporty cycling.
The vigil for the death of Dan Harris will begin with a ride from the National Theatre (where Critical Mass gathers, though this is not a Critical Mass event) setting off at 6:30pm. The vigil itself will be quiet and dignified gathering at the crash site, at the Lea Interchange on the north perimeter of the Olympic Park, from 7:30 to 8:30pm.
There has been some controversy arising out of the fact that the family of Dan Harris have reportedly said that they do not wish his death to be used for "political purposes". But it should be apparent from what I have written above that his death was not an isolated and random event, it was part of a whole history and scenario which is deeply political. Perhaps the family do not yet appreciate this. Every cyclist death on road systems where cyclists' interests have not been taken in the slightest way into account is a political issue. It was totally right for LCC, as a cyclists' representative body, to refer to the death of Mr Harris in its press release and public statements about the need for safe junction designs for cyclists in London. It is their job to try to prevent such tragedies recurring, therefore they need to describe what has actually happened, in a specific case where representations were made about a dangerous road design that was not fixed, where a predictable death subsequently occurred (exactly as at Bow roundabout). To make the points they have to refer to the specific case. This is an entirely defensible and moral thing for them to do, indeed not to do so would be immoral.
There is a tradition in the UK of road deaths being swept under the carpet as "accidents" that "should not be used for political purposes". The results are injustice, and more deaths. Bereaved families have to greave, but the rest of us should take action.
*Update: this announcement was merely of another Skyride-type event for next Summer, not of anything worthy the epithet "legacy". Utterly pathetic, but no surprise.
Showing posts with label Olympics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Olympics. Show all posts
Friday, 10 August 2012
Tuesday, 31 July 2012
Bread and circuses
It was said in ancient Rome that the way to appease the populace was to give them bread and circuses. This of course was in the context of an authoritarian system where dissent was not tolerated and there was no concept of "human rights".
But while Britain's turbulent history of activism and political dissent was being celebrated in the ceremony and on TV, while the Suffragettes, who got arrested and mistreated for their fight for equality were remembered, strangely enough, right outside the Olympic arena, the great circus, people fighting for a equality and fair treatment in a different field were being arrested and mistreated by the police, pepper-sprayed and kettled. If a novelist imagining a dystopic sci-fi future Britain had composed the scene, he would have been doing a pretty good job.
It was probably inevitable that the Critical Mass bike ride on the night of the opening of the Games would end in trouble. Not because those involved wanted trouble; far from it, but because there was simply "no room" on the streets of Olympic London, both in a physical and a spiritual sense, for an event like this on that night. The police could not let it it happen. They could not allow the possibility of an area of streets close to the Olympic Park being gridlocked at that time. On any other occasion, yes, they could grudgingly live with it, but not on this occasion.
Yet Critical Mass is not a beast which can be controlled, for it has no organisation, no plan and no leader. It is merely a tradition, the kind of tradition which might otherwise have been celebrated in a show like Boyle's opening ceremony: a tradition of gathering of people on bikes at a particular time, the evening of the last Friday of the month, in a particular place, on the South Bank of the Thames, for a particular purpose, a meander round streets on a route determined on a whim by those at the front of the group, the objective being to fill the streets with a slow-moving cavalcade of bicycles in which riders feel safe and freed, for the moment, from the otherwise ever-present threat of dangerous interaction with motor vehicles: a critical mass of bikes.
It has often been said in the last few days that Critical Mass in not a protest, it is just a ride or an event, but in fact it shares characteristics of both protest and festival. It exists because the normal conditions for cycling on the streets of London (and other cities around the world where Critical Masses take place) are no good at all. There is no right enforced for cyclists to proceed safely, with fair and civilised treatment, on our roads as they stand. Critical Mass is definitely a kind of protest against, and a reaction to, that fact. It is a protest demanding a different order in transport and street hierarchy as much as the Suffereagettes were a protest demanding a different hierarchy in sexual politics. There is no Critical Mass in the Netherlands, where cycling is treated as a first-class form of transport, prioritised equitably with other modes.
The police tried to ban Critical Mass from the north side of the Thames, and they tried to prevent it from invading the sacred space of the Olympic Lanes, both of which conditions were inconsistent with the freeform nature of the event. There was a fundamental discordancy between the spirit of Critical Mass and the nature of Olympic Lockdown London. Eventually, after considerable unpleasantness, the police broke up the mass and herded the rump of it into a small street in Bow, where the participants were kettled, and in the end 182 of them were arrested and taken away in buses. Of this 182, only three have been charged with offences. The experience of one of those not charged, but held overnight in a cell, has been written up on opendemocracy.net. It makes a salutary read. You have to keep reminding yourself that the place where all this took place was not Burma, but London.
I have no relationship with Critical Mass. I have been on it, twice I think in two decades, in order to find out what goes on, and I am neither a fan of it not a detractor. I seek to understand. As with the suffragette movement, it seems to me there is a clear way for the government to deal with the recurring problem that Critical Mass poses, and that is to understand what the problem is that it is a reaction to, and to address that problem, by starting to correct the lack of resources and rights, the fundamental power imbalance, between those who choose to use the streets using their legs and using human-powered machinery, and those who choose to use them in motor vehicles.
It's not a thing that will be achieved in one legislative stroke, as was possible with Votes for Women. It will be a policy process. It has not started yet. Until it does, our cities will have to accommodate events like Critical Mass. There is a third alternative, which is that the right to peaceful protest on the streets will be stamped out in the UK. We seem to have gone a long way down that road already.
A police statement said:
Like the Roman rulers criticised by Juvenal, the rulers of modern Britain seek to distract attention from the decayed and disfunctional states of both our democracy and our environment by giving us entertainment and spectacle, while shoring up the privileges of an elite. The Roman Empire did not fall for 300 years after Juvenal wrote of panem et circenses: it's a policy that can work, for the emperors at least, for a long time. It's a Big Mac and an Olympic ticket now – never mind that all the expediently-made promises about the green and socially-responsible Olympics were all broken and forgotten.
A state run in this way, is however, quite inefficient, and, as the declining disposable income of citizens attests, I expect a continuing slow economic decline for a UK that neither modernises its political culture and structures, nor embraces dissent and alternative views, nor tackles significant social inequalities, nor learns to live in harmony with the natural environment, nor allows safe space in its cities for children and old people and others on bikes.
There is a petition to sign demanding justice for the Critical Mass 182, and the campaign against the closure of the Lea towpath goes on. And there's a good outsiders' view of what is going on in London from, of all people, the Americans, on NBC News.
In modern usage, the phrase is taken to describe a populace that no longer values civic virtues and the public life.And if the bread becomes more meagre, then of course the circuses become more important. So as it is announced today that disposable income of UK citizens, on average, is at its lowest now since 2003 (quite an indictment of the economic performance of the country under two contrasting governments), the fact is somewhat lost in the razzmatazz around that greatest circus of all taking place in East London and elsewhere. Everybody feels so great about that, don't they? They more or less have to, don't they? Nobody really was allowed not to like the Danny Boyle spectacular, you were putting yourself in the company of a rather weird right-wing Tory and pretty much no-one else if you did not.
But while Britain's turbulent history of activism and political dissent was being celebrated in the ceremony and on TV, while the Suffragettes, who got arrested and mistreated for their fight for equality were remembered, strangely enough, right outside the Olympic arena, the great circus, people fighting for a equality and fair treatment in a different field were being arrested and mistreated by the police, pepper-sprayed and kettled. If a novelist imagining a dystopic sci-fi future Britain had composed the scene, he would have been doing a pretty good job.
It was probably inevitable that the Critical Mass bike ride on the night of the opening of the Games would end in trouble. Not because those involved wanted trouble; far from it, but because there was simply "no room" on the streets of Olympic London, both in a physical and a spiritual sense, for an event like this on that night. The police could not let it it happen. They could not allow the possibility of an area of streets close to the Olympic Park being gridlocked at that time. On any other occasion, yes, they could grudgingly live with it, but not on this occasion.
Yet Critical Mass is not a beast which can be controlled, for it has no organisation, no plan and no leader. It is merely a tradition, the kind of tradition which might otherwise have been celebrated in a show like Boyle's opening ceremony: a tradition of gathering of people on bikes at a particular time, the evening of the last Friday of the month, in a particular place, on the South Bank of the Thames, for a particular purpose, a meander round streets on a route determined on a whim by those at the front of the group, the objective being to fill the streets with a slow-moving cavalcade of bicycles in which riders feel safe and freed, for the moment, from the otherwise ever-present threat of dangerous interaction with motor vehicles: a critical mass of bikes.
It has often been said in the last few days that Critical Mass in not a protest, it is just a ride or an event, but in fact it shares characteristics of both protest and festival. It exists because the normal conditions for cycling on the streets of London (and other cities around the world where Critical Masses take place) are no good at all. There is no right enforced for cyclists to proceed safely, with fair and civilised treatment, on our roads as they stand. Critical Mass is definitely a kind of protest against, and a reaction to, that fact. It is a protest demanding a different order in transport and street hierarchy as much as the Suffereagettes were a protest demanding a different hierarchy in sexual politics. There is no Critical Mass in the Netherlands, where cycling is treated as a first-class form of transport, prioritised equitably with other modes.
The police tried to ban Critical Mass from the north side of the Thames, and they tried to prevent it from invading the sacred space of the Olympic Lanes, both of which conditions were inconsistent with the freeform nature of the event. There was a fundamental discordancy between the spirit of Critical Mass and the nature of Olympic Lockdown London. Eventually, after considerable unpleasantness, the police broke up the mass and herded the rump of it into a small street in Bow, where the participants were kettled, and in the end 182 of them were arrested and taken away in buses. Of this 182, only three have been charged with offences. The experience of one of those not charged, but held overnight in a cell, has been written up on opendemocracy.net. It makes a salutary read. You have to keep reminding yourself that the place where all this took place was not Burma, but London.
I have no relationship with Critical Mass. I have been on it, twice I think in two decades, in order to find out what goes on, and I am neither a fan of it not a detractor. I seek to understand. As with the suffragette movement, it seems to me there is a clear way for the government to deal with the recurring problem that Critical Mass poses, and that is to understand what the problem is that it is a reaction to, and to address that problem, by starting to correct the lack of resources and rights, the fundamental power imbalance, between those who choose to use the streets using their legs and using human-powered machinery, and those who choose to use them in motor vehicles.
It's not a thing that will be achieved in one legislative stroke, as was possible with Votes for Women. It will be a policy process. It has not started yet. Until it does, our cities will have to accommodate events like Critical Mass. There is a third alternative, which is that the right to peaceful protest on the streets will be stamped out in the UK. We seem to have gone a long way down that road already.
A police statement said:
People have a right to protest and it is an incredibly important part of our democracy … What people do not have the right to do is to hold a protest that stops other people from exercising their own rights to go about their business – that means athletes who have trained for years for their chance in a lifetime to compete, millions of ticketholders from seeing the world's greatest sporting event, and everyone else in London who wants to get around.That of course is an argument that could effectively be used to end all street protest, at any time. A right is not a right if it can be taken away whenever it has inconvenient consequences for some people. It is a method of oppression to try to forcibly prevent protest rather than listening to what the protesters want and adjusting policy accordingly, which would, if not bring an end to all such protests, reduce their support and nuisance value.
Like the Roman rulers criticised by Juvenal, the rulers of modern Britain seek to distract attention from the decayed and disfunctional states of both our democracy and our environment by giving us entertainment and spectacle, while shoring up the privileges of an elite. The Roman Empire did not fall for 300 years after Juvenal wrote of panem et circenses: it's a policy that can work, for the emperors at least, for a long time. It's a Big Mac and an Olympic ticket now – never mind that all the expediently-made promises about the green and socially-responsible Olympics were all broken and forgotten.
A state run in this way, is however, quite inefficient, and, as the declining disposable income of citizens attests, I expect a continuing slow economic decline for a UK that neither modernises its political culture and structures, nor embraces dissent and alternative views, nor tackles significant social inequalities, nor learns to live in harmony with the natural environment, nor allows safe space in its cities for children and old people and others on bikes.
There is a petition to sign demanding justice for the Critical Mass 182, and the campaign against the closure of the Lea towpath goes on. And there's a good outsiders' view of what is going on in London from, of all people, the Americans, on NBC News.
Tuesday, 17 July 2012
How's your LOCOG?
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).
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.
As Anna Minton, (who spoke at a Movement for Liveable London meeting in March) has written:
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 |
In Stratford town centre we have ended up with some curious new anodised metal artwork...
...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.
As Anna Minton, (who spoke at a Movement for Liveable London meeting in March) has written:
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.
Saturday, 14 July 2012
People-power and the Olympics
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| Photo by Rubbish Rider |
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.
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| Did London win the Olympics or the Olympics win London? |
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.
Thursday, 19 April 2012
Brent scoops the pollution prize in time for the Climate Rush "Spring Clean"
Brent has the most polluted location in London, it is revealed by the Brent & Kilburn Times:
As I have discussed before, this is one district of London where cycling for practical journeys is to all intents and purposes impossible, because of the severing of the whole area by infrastructure that is almost impossible for cyclists to negotiate: the North Circular Road barrier (creating much of the pollution), the appalling huge gyratory junctions around Neasden, which force cyclists to take extremely circuitous and inconvenient ways round (and walk), or else take on motorway-style slip roads and the terrifying "Death Valley" underpass, plus the barriers of the railway corridors: the Chiltern Line, with no bridges between the North Circular and Wembley Hill Road, a distance of 1.5 miles, and the Metropolitan and Jubilee Lines, with no bridges between the North Circular and Bridge Road, Wembley, again a distance of 1.5 miles, plus the nasty lorry-filled one-way roads of the Wembley Park industrial estate, should one manage to get across the North Circular, and into that impassible triangle of land between the diverging railway lines that separates Neasden and Willesden from Wembley (only possible via the North Circular itself, and Great Central Way).
North-south journeys through Neasden are restricted to Neasden Lane (the B453) or Dudden Hill Lane (the A4088) because of the North London freight line. Both these roads take you inexorably to the Neasden gyratory mess, unless you use the pedestrian footbridges illegally. Neasden lane itself is a very unpleasant road to cycle on, being quite wide in parts (but always one lane) and narrow in others, particularly by the tube station, and where the road passes under the North London freight line. Here, cyclists are squeezed between the constricting kerbs of the pavements, aggressive "Titan" kerbing which has been used for central traffic-calming islands, and cars and lorries roaring up from behind.
The part of Neasden north of the North Circular, totally divorced from the southern part, is sandwiched between the vast Underground railway depot, the River Brent (a tiny stream, but one with strangely few crossing points), and the Brent Reservoir. It would be lovely if there were a connection for pedestrians and cyclists from the north to the south side of the reservoir in Neasden, other than the deeply unpleasant race-track of Neasden Lane North, and I discussed the possibility that such might be created with Brent Council and British Waterways (who own the reservoir and land around it) years ago, but British Waterways kiboshed the idea because they thought it would be a "security risk" to have pedestrians and cyclists near the dam, and nobody at Brent Council was prepared to push the idea. (Why it would be a security risk uniquely here, when pedestrians and cyclists use dams for access all across the rest of the UK and Europe, I have not a clue).
The end result is that Neasden and Wembley are the most cycle-impermeable suburbs you are likely to find anywhere in Britain, and travel on foot here is also awkward, inconvenient and unpleasant. It is not in the least bit surprising that, for almost everybody, the only practical means of transport here are the car, bus, and train. It is not in the least bit surprising that Neasden Lane is the most polluted place in London. The record has no doubt been worsened by the low rainfall we have had this year. Some of the pollution is due to the waste transfer station adjacent to the road. Some may be due to the Chiltern Line, which has some diesel units, though I expect not much. Mostly it will be the traffic, particularly the diesel lorries. Neasden Lane is actually in a slight valley, into which the pollution from the North Circular will sink.
And all this is little more than a mile from Wembley Stadium, the national sports stadium, the biggest of the six stadiums hosting the 2012 Olympic Games. Wembley however only will host two Olympic events: men's and women's football. That's probably just as well. We don't want too many of the athletes of the world to be given asthma at the London "greenest Olympic Games in history". As to our own teams that play there regularly, well, they are British, they must be used to it by now: lungs of steel, and all that.
If you are seeing the Olympic football, or any other match, or any other event at the stadium or concert arena, my advice is not to try to get to Wembley by bike. Unless you live in the part of London to the north of Wembley, which you probably do not, it would be a major challenge. There was a plan, about five years ago, to create "greenway" cycle and walking routes to Wembley Stadium from all directions, in time for the Olympics. Sustrans was involved. It was called, cleverly, the Wembley GOAL project, standing for Greenways for the Olympics And London. Of course, as usual for these things in this country, there was no funding for it, beyond the initial studies, and nothing ever happened, save for employing consultants for a few weeks, and wasting a few days of LCC volunteers' time. Pretty coloured maps were produced, residential streets and parks were cycled around, "stakeholders" were consulted, and the project then vaporised. I could write a whole long post just on this scandal – it is a story that has not yet been told – but I will not do so today. Little enough has been done for cycling and walking access to the main Olympic Park in East London, as many other bloggers have mentioned, but at least something happened there. At least a new platform was constructed to allow the route along the Lea canal to be continuous, even though it looks like that route, crazily, will be closed for the Olympics themselves because of, again, the absurd "security" obsession. But precisely nothing happened in Wembley, or in Brent.
According to the London Air Quality Network (LAQN), Neasden Lane reached the maximum of 36 Bad Air Days per year on Tuesday (11).
This means any further days could be breaking legal requirements on pollution levels.
....
It is claimed that the poor quality of air is due to waste transfer activities at Neasden Goods Yard and the proximity of the North Circular Road.
Last year the maximum amount of pollution allowed was exceeded 77 times, more than double the acceptable level.
....
Simon Birkett, founder and director of campaigning group Clean Air in London, who work closely with LAQN in their attempts to combat pollution said levels were ‘dangerously high’.
He said: “This is not dust these are invisible and dangerous airborne particles including some which are toxic or carcinogenic.
“The Neasden Lane breach is the latest evidence that there has been a failure to address the biggest public health crisis for decades.”
Brent council confirmed that a monitoring station which had been set up on site showed that standards for air quality were ‘repeatedly breached’.So, as we are only one quarter of the way through 2012, and Neasden Lane has already had more days over the "safe" limit than are "allowed" for a whole year (I am not sure why any days over the limit are "allowed" at all, but there you are), it appears that pollution in Neasden Lane (which I often cycle on) is twice what it was last year.
As I have discussed before, this is one district of London where cycling for practical journeys is to all intents and purposes impossible, because of the severing of the whole area by infrastructure that is almost impossible for cyclists to negotiate: the North Circular Road barrier (creating much of the pollution), the appalling huge gyratory junctions around Neasden, which force cyclists to take extremely circuitous and inconvenient ways round (and walk), or else take on motorway-style slip roads and the terrifying "Death Valley" underpass, plus the barriers of the railway corridors: the Chiltern Line, with no bridges between the North Circular and Wembley Hill Road, a distance of 1.5 miles, and the Metropolitan and Jubilee Lines, with no bridges between the North Circular and Bridge Road, Wembley, again a distance of 1.5 miles, plus the nasty lorry-filled one-way roads of the Wembley Park industrial estate, should one manage to get across the North Circular, and into that impassible triangle of land between the diverging railway lines that separates Neasden and Willesden from Wembley (only possible via the North Circular itself, and Great Central Way).
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| The situation of Neasden Lane, courtesy of Google maps |
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| "Death Valley" for cyclists, at Neasden (A4088 underpass beneath North Circular) |
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| Here's the view I got when I called up Neasden Lane on Google Earth. The Google camera got it spot on: typical conditions: narrow lanes dominated by heavy industrial vehicles, with no space for cycling. |
The end result is that Neasden and Wembley are the most cycle-impermeable suburbs you are likely to find anywhere in Britain, and travel on foot here is also awkward, inconvenient and unpleasant. It is not in the least bit surprising that, for almost everybody, the only practical means of transport here are the car, bus, and train. It is not in the least bit surprising that Neasden Lane is the most polluted place in London. The record has no doubt been worsened by the low rainfall we have had this year. Some of the pollution is due to the waste transfer station adjacent to the road. Some may be due to the Chiltern Line, which has some diesel units, though I expect not much. Mostly it will be the traffic, particularly the diesel lorries. Neasden Lane is actually in a slight valley, into which the pollution from the North Circular will sink.
And all this is little more than a mile from Wembley Stadium, the national sports stadium, the biggest of the six stadiums hosting the 2012 Olympic Games. Wembley however only will host two Olympic events: men's and women's football. That's probably just as well. We don't want too many of the athletes of the world to be given asthma at the London "greenest Olympic Games in history". As to our own teams that play there regularly, well, they are British, they must be used to it by now: lungs of steel, and all that.
If you are seeing the Olympic football, or any other match, or any other event at the stadium or concert arena, my advice is not to try to get to Wembley by bike. Unless you live in the part of London to the north of Wembley, which you probably do not, it would be a major challenge. There was a plan, about five years ago, to create "greenway" cycle and walking routes to Wembley Stadium from all directions, in time for the Olympics. Sustrans was involved. It was called, cleverly, the Wembley GOAL project, standing for Greenways for the Olympics And London. Of course, as usual for these things in this country, there was no funding for it, beyond the initial studies, and nothing ever happened, save for employing consultants for a few weeks, and wasting a few days of LCC volunteers' time. Pretty coloured maps were produced, residential streets and parks were cycled around, "stakeholders" were consulted, and the project then vaporised. I could write a whole long post just on this scandal – it is a story that has not yet been told – but I will not do so today. Little enough has been done for cycling and walking access to the main Olympic Park in East London, as many other bloggers have mentioned, but at least something happened there. At least a new platform was constructed to allow the route along the Lea canal to be continuous, even though it looks like that route, crazily, will be closed for the Olympics themselves because of, again, the absurd "security" obsession. But precisely nothing happened in Wembley, or in Brent.
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| The fantasy "greenways" conceived for the Sustrans Wembley GOAL study of 2007, never built |
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| Here is a newer version. Sustrans still propose (or was still proposing in 2009) this contorted Greenway "network" for Brent. Apart from the fact that it has made practically no progress, in my view, this entire concept is wrong, of attempting to push cyclists onto obscure, un-useful byways. Large-scale popular cycling will only ever be achieved by giving people on bikes direct, convenient, safely segregated routes on main roads, as they have done in the Netherlands, Denmark and Germany. So pollution in Boris Johnson's London continues to spiral out of control, killing 2,200 people per year, according to the latest research reported by the BBC. This is about ten times the number of people killed in road crashes in London. And of course everybody's health must be affected, not just that of those who die as a result of the pollution. Johnson's "solution" is to put pollution suppressants in front of air quality monitors, so reducing the number of occasions on which the PM10 value is reported to be breached and reducing the number of smog alerts, both preventing the public from being warned of the dangerous conditions, and attempting to circumvent the discovery of legal breaches, and application of fines. This is what the Campaign for Clear Air in London, a non party-political organisation, condemns as "public health fraud on an industrial scale". And as the MP for Brent North, Barry Gardiner, said in a Tweet yesterday: "Boris's pollution suppressors near air quality monitors is like putting breathing apparatus on the canary in the mines!" |
Those living or working on or near main roads like Neasden Lane and the North Circular Road are the ones at the sharpest end, the ones who will pay the heaviest price for this truly criminal public health fraud. But its all connected, and we all suffer, from the failure to control motor traffic in London, the failure to provide decent routes for walking and cycling, the failure to live up to the spin of "the greenest Olympics ever", the failure to arrest the degradation of the environment.
If you can, support the Climate Rush Spring Clean walk and cycle march, rally and direct action, today, Thursday 19 April, at 6:00pm outside DEFRA, 17 Smith Square, London SW1. And of course, come on the LCC Big Ride, calling for "streets as safe and inviting for cycling as they are in Holland", on 28 April. Most importantly, do vote in the London mayoral election on 3 May for a candidate who does not think the best way to combat pollution is to try to glue it to the road.
Wednesday, 1 February 2012
Are cyclists allowed in the Games Lanes or not?
About the middle of last year, it was extensively reported (see for example) that the "Games Lanes", on the Olympic Route Network (ORN) in London, would be, in no uncertain terms, out-of-bounds for cyclists, transgressors facing a £200 fine, the same as for unauthorised drivers. Where these reports came from I cannot tell, for I don't see anything clearly saying this on the Transport for London website. What TfL do say, unhelpfully, is:
When, however, a recent LCC borough group newsletter went to press, with an item warning cyclists, in passing, that they would not be allowed to cycle in the Games Lanes, a council officer closely connected with the Olympic preparations contacted the group co-ordinator in question to say that this was wrong, that cyclists could use the lanes. When read out the paragraph above, that I have quoted from the TfL website, he stated that it was "misleading", and that he would ask TfL to correct it.
I have done some further study of the detailed documents on the TfL site describing the Games Lanes. There are diagrams for every borough. For example, this diagram covers part of Camden including Euston Road, and the Upper Woburn Place to Kingsway corridor. It shows clearly that the Games Lanes in Euston Road are the inside lanes, and that they are for "Official Games vehicles only". (But could a bike be an Official Games vehicle? I leave that question hanging in the air.) However, the lanes on the north-south corridor are all over the place on the road, they are very fragmentary, and the northernmost section, in Upper Woburn Place, is marked "Official Games vehicles and cycles only". Does this yellow caption bubble apply to all the bits of yellow lane down this corridor? This is unclear to me. But another fragment on Euston Road is marked similarly.
The thing that strikes me about these plans is that, leaving aside the rights and wrongs of the whole thing, not only is TfL incapable of conceiving of continuous, effective bike lanes, or bus lanes, as we know from long experience, it has proved no more capable of imagining continuity when told by the IOC to create this network. How one earth are they expecting this itsy-bitsiness to work in practice? Who is going to enforce it, bearing in mind the negligible level of enforcement there is of all other painted carriageway demarcations, e.g. cycle stop boxes and hatched junction boxes? Who is going to understand this complexity, with some Games Lanes being 24 hour, some not, and some allowing cycling, some not? Is this really policeable? It looks like a classic British fudge. I wonder what the IOC will think when they see it.
I also wonder how much of the time Official Games vehicles will actually be using these lanes, and how many of them there will be. If cyclists really are to be permitted in some of these lanes, or all of them, as the council officer seems to believe, then, with the numbers of cyclists there are in London already, combined with a special upsurge for the games, combined with the fact that cyclists have few dedicated lanes of their own, maybe cyclists will prove to be the dominant users of these lanes. Maybe these lanes will provide the real "cycling superhighways" to the games, and to elsewhere, that TfL so conspicuously has not provided under its actual Cycle Superhighway programme. What will the IOC think of that?
These lanes, which will be clearly marked, will only be open for accredited vehicles and on-call emergency vehicles. They will typically operate between 06:00 and midnight, and only be used on multi-lane roads so there will always be at least one lane for general traffic. You could receive a Penalty Charge Notice if you drive in a Games Lane if you are not an accredited vehicle.It's so like TfL to word a statement as if the only people entitled to use the road are driving, not riding – it shows how they really think about the roads.
When, however, a recent LCC borough group newsletter went to press, with an item warning cyclists, in passing, that they would not be allowed to cycle in the Games Lanes, a council officer closely connected with the Olympic preparations contacted the group co-ordinator in question to say that this was wrong, that cyclists could use the lanes. When read out the paragraph above, that I have quoted from the TfL website, he stated that it was "misleading", and that he would ask TfL to correct it.
I have done some further study of the detailed documents on the TfL site describing the Games Lanes. There are diagrams for every borough. For example, this diagram covers part of Camden including Euston Road, and the Upper Woburn Place to Kingsway corridor. It shows clearly that the Games Lanes in Euston Road are the inside lanes, and that they are for "Official Games vehicles only". (But could a bike be an Official Games vehicle? I leave that question hanging in the air.) However, the lanes on the north-south corridor are all over the place on the road, they are very fragmentary, and the northernmost section, in Upper Woburn Place, is marked "Official Games vehicles and cycles only". Does this yellow caption bubble apply to all the bits of yellow lane down this corridor? This is unclear to me. But another fragment on Euston Road is marked similarly.
 |
| A sample section of the Games Lanes plans: complex, confusing and discontinuous, truly a classic TfL production |
I also wonder how much of the time Official Games vehicles will actually be using these lanes, and how many of them there will be. If cyclists really are to be permitted in some of these lanes, or all of them, as the council officer seems to believe, then, with the numbers of cyclists there are in London already, combined with a special upsurge for the games, combined with the fact that cyclists have few dedicated lanes of their own, maybe cyclists will prove to be the dominant users of these lanes. Maybe these lanes will provide the real "cycling superhighways" to the games, and to elsewhere, that TfL so conspicuously has not provided under its actual Cycle Superhighway programme. What will the IOC think of that?
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