Demo on CS 11 tomorrow: show support for a cycle highway for NW London and a tranquil Regent's Park

When 'The Regent's Park' was laid out by John Nash and his associates in the early 1800s, the Outer Circle road was created, to quote a contemporary document, 'for the purpose of exercise'. At the time, this meant walking and horse-riding. When the villas around the park were built, it also provided access to them. When the wealthy who lived there aquired motor cars in the 20th century, of course they started using those on the Outer Circle. Because the Outer Circle remained connected to the roads around, via seven gates, it became a convenient cut-through for anyone using a motor car. There was no way to separate the cars of those who lived there from people passing through. Though the gates were closed late at night, and signs were put up banning commercial vehicles (but taxis were never banned), the Outer Circle became a rat-run, a dangerous and unpleasant barrier within the park, that greatly reduced its effective area, both through the noise and pollution experienced near the road, and because the road cut off the circle of the park outside it from the main body.

I've been campaigning to reverse this undesirable situation, with many other local people and groups, since around 2004. Note that I have not so far mentioned cycling. Though the traffic does make cycling on Outer Circle a far less pleasant experience than it should be, and it is not at all a suitable environment for family cycling, as this video demonstrates, and Camden Cyclists have been campaigning for the removal of through-traffic from the Outer Circle for many years, the argument has never been primarily about cycling. It has been to restore the Outer Circle and park to its rightful and proper purposes, as laid out by John Nash: an area for recreation and exercise, not traffic. An area free from noise and pollution. A park. The Outer Circle is needed for motor access to car parks, the zoo, to premises around the park, but it is not nededed as a through-road. It is closely paralleled by other roads that through-traffic should be using instead: Park Road (A41), Marylebone road (A501), Albany Street (A4021) and Prince Albert Road (A5025).

Finally, we now have a solid plan that will achieve our goal. The plans for Cycle Superhighway 11 (CS 11) from Portland Place to Swiss coittage, though falling short of the route we were previously promised, all the way to Brent Cross, at least in this phase, solve the problem of Regent's Park traffic to a considerable extent. They propose the closure of four of the gates: Macclesfield Bridge (Avenue Road),  Hanover Gate, York Gate and Park Square East and West, for most of the day, as shown below.

The other major element of this plan is a proposal to completely re-design Swiss Cottage gyratory system. This is another thing that so many in the borough of Camden and beyond have looked forward to for a very long time. All routes to the south of Hampstead and West Hapstead converge on this junction, with has long been a barrier to creating a decent cycle network in Camden. The plan for this horrible, filthy 1960s sea of traffic isolationg the famous Swiss Cottage pub and the Odeon Cinema is that it should be removed entirely. The bulk of the traffic will be taken down an A41 made continuous, and two-way, on the west side of the current gyratory, while the eastern side, outside the Hampstead Theratre, the theatre school and the library, will be turned into a bus-only road, with wide pavements, trees down the middle, and segregated cycle tracks. This will be a massive environmental transformation of the area, and one for which many people have fought hard for a very long time.

How the CS11 plan will replace a sea of traffic with an oasis of calm at the north end of Avenue Road

The section of Avenue road south of Adelaide Road will not be car-free, but it will become far less convenient a route for general traffic, as to reach it traffic from the north will need to turn left from Finchley Road and then right. Furthermore, for most of the day, it will not give access to Regent's Park or towards the West End. It will represent a legely pointless detour for those who do not have specific business in Avenue Road or adjacent residential roads. We will see an end to so much traffic from the north, Finchley Road and Fitzjohn's Avenue, bombing past Swiss Cottage and into Regent's Park via Avenue Road. That traffic will largely stick to the A41, where it belongs.

The scheme is far from perfect in my view. We need the closures of the gates to be full time (there is an exception betwweren 11am and 3pm) and we really need the southern part of Avenue Road more fully closed to traffic (traffic can still turn left or right into Prince Albert Road under these plans) as there is only room for painted (mandatory) cycle lanes on the southern part of Avenue Road, not for segregated tracks, as we have seen on other recent Cycle Superhighways. However, this scheme gives so many of the big wins that campaigners (not just cyclists) have been looking for in this part of London for so long, we all need to support it. It represents a brave move by Boris Johnson, Transport for London, and Camden Council.

But the forces ranged agains CS 11 are strong. There has been a major campaign against it mounted by NIMBYs and those wedded to motor vehicle domination of London, with its attendent epedemics of pollution, isolation, exclusion and inactivity. 2400 people have signed a petition agains CS 11:

Furthermore, local papers have uniformly been reporting CS 11 negatively, in terns of 'howls of protest' supposedly emanating from many and various quarters: to give a flavour of the nonsense that's being spread here's extracts from some articles:

Clive Beecham, chair of the St John’s Wood High Street association said the plan to restrict vehicular access to Regent’s Park from 11am-3pm would create “traffic chaos” as drivers looked for alternative routes.

He said: “By redirecting traffic through St John’s Wood what you are doing is storing up traffic chaos for the next ten to 15 years. 

“If they shut off Avenue Road it will be a complete nightmare. As residents we should have the right to use the route through Regent’s park.

 He added: “It’s also going to be the worst possible thing for the High Street because the impact of traffic in one area is like a domino affect on others. As a community we need to rebel against it.

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Stephen Lewis, who lives in Lyttleton Close, Swiss Cottage, said bicycles could be like “cholesterol clogging up London’s arteries”. 

“If London were a human body, it would be facing an invasion of cholesterol which threatens the arteries,” he said. “In this case, for cholesterol read cyclists. We are slowly being strangled by measures implemented to facilitate the journeys for cyclists but at the cost of slowly squeezing out other road users.”

Swiss Cottage resident Ian Braidman said: “St John’s Wood and Primrose Hill, to the east and west of Avenue Road and Finchley Road, will become a rat-run for cars endeavouring to escape the traffic congestion this is designed to create.”

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Actor Tom Conti, who is campaigning against the project, told the West End Extra: “It will cause mayhem. The whole area will be destroyed – but it will not happen. We are going to make this a national issue. A bike lane from Portland Place to Brent Cross will be absolutely massive. There will be a solid queue to Hatfield. Cyclists should be made to pay road tax. If they want a special road, they should have to pay for it. 

“This is the beginning of some kind of Soviet idea to ban all vehicular traffic from London.”

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There's loads more like this, and it's not just the reporters on the local press, or fossilised white males breathing petrol fumes who are opposed. A group calling itself 'NW8 Mums; a community for all our mums' (seemingly without irony) has published this exhortation:

We cannot understand how this scheme was ever even thought of, let alone that it might be allowed to go through. We must all work hard and together to make them see sense and drop it, before all our lives are ruined.' 

Worse, Westminster Council seem to be doing all they cvan to stop the plan. They have organised higly biased 'public meetings' where offiers have briefed against TfL's plans and have given no real platform for the supporters of CS11, who have been howled down by angry mobs. Westminster's Councillor Robert Rigby has said at one of these meetings, as reported by my correspondent (and this is likely to be the official view of Westminster Council):

· Residents do not believe the results of modelling [TfL modelling that demonstrates little increase on traffic on other local roads]. 

· The Outer Circle can accommodate all road users. 

· If a cycle track can be created along Birdcage Walk, despite heritage considerations, something could be done for cyclists on the Outer Circle [Note he doesn't explain what]. 

· Pollution will get worse, both on main roads and on side roads. 

· No account has been taken of HS2. 

· Closing the park gates is a step too far.

Local politicians are hearing the noise and nonsense arguments from the opponents of CS 11 too loudly. This has to be challenged, or the scheme will fail. London Cycling Campaign, Camden Cyclists, and the others who support CS11 and  traffic-free Regents Park, including Camden Friends of the Earth, the Canal and River Trust, and Westminster living Streets, have decided enough is enough, and we are organising a protest to make some noise in support of cycling, CS11, a clean, green park, and less domination of NW London by motor traffic.

The protest and ride is at 6:00-7:0pm tomorrow, Friday 11 March, starting at Park Square East. Everyone is welcome on bike, foot, wheelchairs, or mobility scooters. Bring banners ands make a noise. We will be riding slowly a circuit including Park Square East and West, Outer Circle and Marylebone Road.

If you can come, and also if you can, be absolutely sure to fill in the consultation by 20 March. Don't only to only tick the overall/first section “support” button, but also tick Swiss Cottage support, gate closures, Portland Place segregated tracks etc., support specifically. More responding hints from LCC here.

We know that proper, serious, cilty-changing cycle schemes are massively popular: witness the 60-80% approval ratings for the consultations on vareious sections of TfL's East-West Cycle Superhighway, currently cutting a dramatic swathe through Parliament Square. But they also create fear, noise, and misguided panic in a place that has been so long in thrall to the car and the concept of engineering the environment around it, rather than around people on foot and bike.

Protest, ride, write to the papers, lobby your councillors, answer the consultation, and help make London a little bit more like the clean, civilised New Renaissance city that visionary architects and planners of the past, like Nash, and Christopher Wren before him, dreamed of. Please support CS11.

Here comes Madge!* Cycling infrastructure and roads reclaimed from motor traffic help all those who are excluded by a motor-dominated transport system, not just 'cyclists'.

*She may not really be called that.

Time to Stop the Killing

Tomorrow, Monday, sees a vigil and die-in at Bank junction in London at 5:30pm to mark the deaths of Ling Tao, killed there on 22 June by a tipper truck, and Clifton James, killed the night before on Forward Drive, Harrow by a car. There has already been a large protest at Bank organised by London Cycling Campaign on Wednesday morning. Whether or not you went to that one, I urge you, whatever your usual mode of transport, if you are interested in making London a more civilised city thast tries harder to protect its people from the dangers of the roads, to attend the vigil and die-in tomorrow.

I've attended this year two similar events in London organised by the group Stop Killing Cyclists. This group has developed, under the leadership of the admirable Donnachadh McCarthy, into a powerful and well-organised 'conscience' for road safety in London, operating in the capital in a complimentary manner to the London Cycling Campaign, separate from it and with different methods, but similar goals. Where we used to get ghost bikes placed by a few anonymous souls at the site of a cycling fatality, and little else, we now get a significant demonstration with speeches from the relatives of bereaved and from campaigners, and then a protest that involves people lying in the road with bicycles for several minutes. We now have this very time there is a cycling fatality in London. It is systematic, and London's authorities now know it will happen every time, and that the movement is likely to grow until these unnecessary deaths stop.

I did not attend the event that marked the death of Esther Hartsilver in Southwark on 6 June, so I'll not discuss that one here, but I will write about the previous two Stop Killing Cyclists events, both of which I attended, commemorating Michael Mason and Moira Gemmill, as they illustrate starkly and respectively the twin issues the UK must address to make cycling (and walking) safe: road justice and infrastructure.

Michael Mason was given fatal injuries on 25 February 2014 by a driver on Regent Street who simply ran him over from behind. He was a cyclist with half a century of experience doing everything right, and he was just struck down on a busy central London street by a driver who just claims she 'didn't see him' and can't explain why. The police believe they have insufficient evidence to prove a charge of causing death by careless driving, and so no action has been taken against the driver at all. No case has been sent to the Crown Prosecution Service.

It would be had to imagine a clearer case of failure of road justice. The Metropolitan Police's response to a complaint over their failure to prosecute shows their mentality: rather than taking an objective view, they themselves construct a one-sided 'case for the defence', seeking to try to invent inadequate and incoherent reasons why the driver 'did not see' Michael Mason, whose visibility was was obvious to witnesses, rather than putting the case before a jury to decide. They say (my comments in italics):

• Mr MASON (Deceased) was wearing dark clothing, the collision having taken place during hours of darkness. (Irrelevant. He had bright lights)
• An independent witness at the scene (Neil TREVITHICK) stated that with the sea of brake lights, flashing lights and movement it would be difficult for a driver to pick out anything. (What? 'Sea of lights and movement'? This is what a busy shopping street is always like in the early evening. This is what road users have to cope with all the time. Drivers have to have adequate sight and responses and control of their vehicle and their speed must allow them to react to everything occurring on the road. This is a pathetic attempt to abrogate responsibility from the driver. It might be something that a non-expert accidental witness might come up with, but it has no place as a justification in a police report.)
• CCTV traced corroborated how busy the area in general was, with both motorists and pedestrians. (Same comment as above)
• All witnesses traced could not describe in any detail the lead up to the collision. (Irrelevant. As they were not involved in the collision, this is no surprise.)
• Mr MASON was not wearing a cycle helmet, the cause of death being head injury (A helmet may or may not have saved his life, but this is irrelevant to deciding whether the driver was culpable for the collision that killed him.)

Of  course a jury may have taken the same view as the police, but at least a trial would have tested this view. The view will probably now be tested by a private prosecution of the driver by the relatives of Michael Mason, that is being funded by the Cyclists Defence Fund, to which I urge readers to donate. If this is allowed to stand without further legal or political challenge, the position seems to be that any good and responsible cyclist cycling in every way within the law can just expect to be be killed by a driver running them over from behind, there need be no rational explanation of the incident, and the driver may just walk away from such a killing with no legal procedure following and a blameless record.  The implications are quite horrific for all who cycle on our roads.

Stop Killing Cyclists vigil for Michael Mason in Regent Street on 13 March

The vigil in Regent Street on 13 March saw Michael's daughter give a moving tribute to her father and an account of the desperate situation for the family that the police's unfair and unbalanced treatment of the case has created. There were also speeches from Donnachadh McCarthy and Nicola Branch of Stop Killing Cyclists, Cynthia Barlow of RoadPeace, Caroline Russell of the Green Party and Roger Geffen of CTC. Following this the police facilitated the protesters to lay themselves and their bikes down in the street for two minutes. Here is part of Donnachadh's speech:

Sadly police incompetence in this case continued beyond this point. An announcement that had been made that the the case was in fact going to be referred to the Director of Public Prosecutions, which was seen as most likely a response to the protest and publicity, was then reversed, without apology, and with a further effect on the family that can only be imagined.

The vigil and die-in held on 20 April for Moira Gemmill was even more impressive. Moira,  an acclaimed museum designer distinguished for work at the Museum of London, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Royal Collection was the fifth cyclist to be killed riding in London in 2015, the fifth to be killed by an HGV, the fourth by a construction lorry, and the fourth woman. There was an additional big issue in this case, though, apart from the usual one of the danger of lorries and their drivers' blind-spots and the apparent statistical extra vulnerability of female cyclists. The Millbank and Lambeth Bridge roundabout, where the crash occurred, is known as an especially dangerous junction.

Crashmap.co.uk for Millbank and Lambeth Bridge junction, crashes 2005–2113. 'Too many incidents to display'

If you have ever tried cycling round this roundabout you will know why it is one of the most dangerous in London. It has heavy traffic volumes and is a terrible design that encourages speed and aggression. It was identified as a junction requiring urgent work by Transport for London in 2012. It was also a focus of a conference in October of that year nearby at Church House in Westminster entitled the Love London Go Dutch Cycle Conference, sponsored by the Kingdom of the Netherlands and involving the London Cycling Campaign, Dutch consultancy firm Royal HashkoningDHV, Transport for London and others, and attended by then Under Secretary of State for Transport Norman Baker.

There was a working party consisting of campaigners and Dutch and British roads experts sent on the morning of the conference to examine the Millbank roundabout and come up with better designs. The better design proposed was a Dutch-style roundabout with a priority cycle track and parallel zebra crossings. There was discussion on this in the afternoon. I remember the bafflement of the Dutch representatives who couldn't quite understand the objection to their tried-and-testyed standard Dutch design from elements of the local contingent that it would not be able to cope with the number of vehicles that the roundabout currently does. They understood that to create a safe cycling environment and an attractive city for walking you have to reduce traffic to reasonable levels with designs not calculated to maximise motor throughput! They couldn't, at a fundamental level, understand why people would actually wish to have in the historic centre of a city and close to a world heritage site a motorway's worth of polluting, noisy, aggressive, fast and dangerous cars and HGVs.

Transport for London subsequently went away on worked on designs for the roundabout, and came back with something one-one much liked. It was a classic two-track provision compromise with shared pavements for "less-confident cyclists" and on-road cycle "awareness-raising" markers for the others, with raised tables under zebra crossings at the entrances and exits. It was roundly condemned by LCC and the Cycling Embassy of Great Britain (but not by CTC, who seem to think "tightening-up corner geometries" was all that was required).

TfL's 2012 design for Millbank roundabout

It appears Westminster council had their own reasons for opposing TfL's proposed changes, though what their argument was never publicly made clear. TfL announced finally that they would not processed with the proposed changers, and would not do anything else to the roundabout in the short term, but that they would trial a Dutch-style roundabout at the Transport Research Laboratory in Berkshire. The trial roundabout was indeed built in Berkshire in 2013, but no results from this trial have yet been published. Following the publication of The Mayor's Vision for Cycling in London in March 2013, Andrew Gilligan, the Boris Johnson's Cycling commissioner, often publicly suggested that temporary emergency changes could be made to known danger-spots for cycling on the road network, but no such action was ever taken, anywhere in London. There was clearly a lack of political support for this common-sense view.

The memorial for Moira Gemmill at Millbank roundabout

I can't report on the speeches that were made at the vigil and die-in for Moira Gemmill on 20 April, as the demo was so huge I could not get within (amplified) earshot of them. During the die-in the entire junction became a human and bike interlaced carpet, the low spring sun shone, and the tulips in the centre of the roundabout went a deep shade of crimson. There was a special quaity of silence, and this brief tweet with accompanying picture I made seemed to strike a popular chord, as it had 126 retweets and 47 favourites.

Genuinely amazing scenes. Lambeth Bridge #MoiraGemmill #StopKillingCyclists

Sea of cyclists on the Millbank roundabout commemorating Moira Gemmill during the die-in on 20 April. Maybe Westminster or TfL thought that "Dutch-style roundabout" meant planting lovely red tulips on it.

 Hints are about now that Millbank roundabout may finally get a re-working as part of the Mayor's 'Better Junctions' programme, but that cannot now happen before 2016, and in the meantime it remains as deadly as ever.

Another junction that is well known as dangerous is the complex Bank intersection in the heart of the City of London. Bank junction has been admitted by the local authority, the City Corporation, to have "One of the poorest road safety records in the City, particularly in relation to injuries to pedestrians and cyclists" and they further, shockingly, state  "The junction does not work well for any mode of transport" Their head-scratching has been going on over this since at least October 2011, with seemingly no end in sight. The City have an extraordinarily leisurely project timetable in which

Our next task will be to build a computer traffic model to assess what is likely to happen if traffic is prevented from crossing the junction for example in certain directions or times of day. Information from pedestrian and cycling movements will also help to develop solutions. This is likely to be a big piece of work and will take some time to complete but it is very important to have credible options for alterations to the junction. We hope to have this work completed by early 2016.

So that's just building this model by early 2016. No actual building of anything on the ground. The latest from the Corporation suggests they will not have finished building whatever new design they eventually come up with before 2020 or even 2021!

Mark Treasure asked in July 2014:

Rather than just building a hugely complex model from scratch to find out what happens when a junction is closed to motor traffic, couldn’t the City just do it, on a trial basis? If the result is genuine chaos, then the trial can quickly be abandoned. 

There are good reasons for thinking a trial of this kind – closing roads at Bank temporarily – would not result in chaos. The main one is that the area is ringed by major arterial roads, composed of London Wall to the north, Aldgate and Tower Gateway to the east, and Upper Thames Street to the south.

All are designed to carry large volumes of motor traffic, and all lie very close to Bank itself. These are the roads that should be carrying through traffic; the area around Bank should, realistically, only be carrying private motor traffic that is accessing the area. Certainly, the Bank junction should not be carrying through motor traffic in an east-west direction, as there are two major roads to the north and south – just a few hundred metres away – that were built for this purpose. 

So – why not just try this? Try it now, rather than spending eighteen difficult months building a model from scratch. You’ll get results that correspond to the real world, and much more quickly!

One can draw a sharp contrast between the London approach and that of New York under Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, with her mantra "Do bold experiments that are cheap to try out". While New York is certainly not yet any kind of cyclists' or pedestrians' paradise, the radical changes achieved in locations like Time Square and Broadway with quick and temporary infrastructure used to experiment with concepts that can later be made permanent represent a possibility that seems anathema to the lumbering structures of London government.

While these structures, the boroughs, the City Corporation, TfL, and the Department for Transport, continue to quibble, delay, and argue about what should be done to known dangerous junctions, the dead bodies metaphorically pile up. Ying Tao, a 26 year-old management consultant was crushed at Bank last week, the eighth cyclist to be killed in London this year, the seventh by an HGV, the sixth by a construction lorry, and the sixth woman. About 12 hours earlier 60 year-old Clifton James became the second male cyclist to be killed in London this year, dying from head injuries caused by a car on Forward Drive, Harrow, a bad suburban rat-run on which traffic regularly exceeds the 30mph limit, furnished with two confusing mini-roundabout junctions on which drivers often fail to give way to cyclists. This death is quite local to me, and in fact I have written about the corridor on which Mr James was killed before, pointing out the uselessness of painting "awareness-raising" cycle symbols  on rat-run urban roads. It's funny how these places that the cycle campaigners and bloggers keep writing about as dangerous but which don't get changed are the places where we see the deaths.

I've written also before (2011) about King's Cross, where the same type of cycle fatality has been repeated in the same place, likewise (2013) the Holborn gyratory. While we have seen tinkering, we still have seen not seen substantive changes that remove the specific dangers in these locations. It is all getting quite tedious.

I was speaking to a friend yesterday who is a professional scientist and a cyclist, but not involved in cycle campaigning. He asked me, "Why can't we analyse the incidents in which cyclists die, and put in place measures that prevent the repeated occurrences of the same kind of incident? There is a body of information out there, there must be inquests on every death, why isn't this used more systematically?" Why indeed. I've written long ago about how our system of inquests in the coroners' courts is treated as a mere ceremony of legal closure typically achieving little in road death and other cases. More enlightened societies, like Sweden, have a 'Vision Zero' concept where they do attempt to carry out an investigation, analysis and remedial process systematically for every crash, with the ultimate aim of reducing road deaths to zero.

In the UK it seems priorities lie elsewhere. The best way to challenge this is to make a big fuss on the streets after every death until priorities do change. The stark language of the "Stop the Killing" movement takes its cue from the successful Dutch 'Stop the Child Murder' campaign of the 1970s. I believe we will eventually succeed with this in the UK as well, but we are far behind. The more people we get to events like tomorrow's vigil, the more publicity we generate, the harder time we  give the politicians and civil sevants responsible for the current mess, the sooner we will approach our own Vision Zero and also make London and other British towns and cities safe, pleasant and attractive place to cycle and to walk.

There is a more detailed history of the Millbank roundabout saga by Alex Ingram here.

Protest at 6pm tonight at Kings Cross

I don't have time to keep this blog up to date with developments much anymore, but historically I did cover, and try to promote, the "flashride" (originally called "flashmob") cycle protests that started in London on 20 May 2011 at Blackfriars Bridge. These did a lot to move cycle safety up the London political agenda, and were more effective than many years of organising petitions, letter-writing, and polite diplomacy from London Cycling Campaign, although the immediate objective, a safe design for Blackfriars Bridge and its junctions was not achieved, and has still not been.

Despite this rise in the political prominence of the cycling issue, there is still very very little tangible progress on the ground in London. The Mayor's Vision for Cycling was published 17 moths ago, and a greeted it quite enthusiastically, but with substantial concerns and caveats. These now seem to have been very well-founded. Since then, no cycling infrastructure, resulting from that vision, of any substance, has been built at all. One wouldn't have expected things to start at once, of course; plans need to be laid, people put in place, and things need to be done in a sensible order. But that should only have taken about a year. The summer is when things are built on the roads: if much was ever going to happen, we would expect it to be happening right now, in a very obvious way. It isn't.

I'll have to do a longer post on what appears to be going wrong with progress on implementing the Vision at some stage soon; however, my purpose now is to note that there seems to have been no fundamental change in attitude at Transport for London towards bicycles as transport. There are certainly some good people working at TfL,  and I don't doubt the sincerity of Andrew Gilligan, the Mayor's Cycling Commissioner, but it is clear that the message of the Vision just hasn't got through in practice to most of the people to whom it needed. So we still see consultations on major schemes for junctions and stretches of roads controlled by TfL where fundamental design change is needed in favour of safe cycling, and where TfL is deluged with informed and precise responses from lobbyists for cycling telling them exactly what they need to do, and yet these demands are swept aside much as they would have been 10 or 20 years ago.

The Kings Cross junction is a high-profile case in point. This should have been one-of TfL's highest priorities for installation of high-grade cycle infrastructure, whatever the effect on motor vehicle flows, because of the number of cycling fatalities that have occurred there (three that I know of in eight years, the last of whom was Min Joo Lee (Deep Lee), killed at the same spot in identical circumstances as another cyclist 14 years earlier).

There is indeed a scheme on the table for significant and expensive and disruptive remodelling of the junction. For cycling, however, it amounts to a pretty old-style feeble paint job that does not provide the physically separated space and separate, direct signal phasing we need for truly safe and inclusive cycling through this horrible junction.

TfL's proposals

As the estimable maidstoneonbike says,

There are some improvements to the current situation. For example, a widened cycle lane, the addition of ASLs in some places, and a tiny bit of segregation. But while these are improvements, these will only improve conditions for vehicular cyclists, and will not attract new cyclists.

He has his own worked-up plans for a proper, high-quality inclusive cycling alternative design, which you can see on his blog.

So once again, London cyclists need to take direct action to show the powers-that-be that progress on safe cycling in London for all is too slow, too half-heated, and that we can't accept this green lipstick on a pig at King's Cross and similar junctions. Tonight's protest has been organised independently from LCC, but I have no hesitation in supporting it, and I will be there. It starts at 18:00 on Kings Cross Square, and sets out at 18:15 on this route.



There is more information on a Facebook page. If you can get there, please respond to this late plea, and do add your presence on foot or on bike to help us make an impact. If Transport for London discovers that they get disruptive, media-savvy and politically challenging protest every time they approve a scheme like this that falls so lamentably below the aspirations of their own Mayor's Cycling Vision, maybe that will have an effect. I can't guarantee it, but it is the best I can suggest until we have the next election for Mayor.

Space for Cycling Ride

In all the excitement and controversy around Royal College Street, I forgot to mention the London Cycling Campaign's Space for Cycling protest ride outside Parliament tonight, Monday 2 September. Come if you can; meet 6:00pm for a 6:30 start, Jubilee Gardens on the South Bank.

The House of Commons will be debating the Professor Phil Goodwin's Get Britain Cycling Report, the first time they have debated cycling in the chamber for a long time (decades).

But the protest has been made even more important by the government having already pretty much totally rejected the recommendations of Get Britain Cycling. Though the CTC "welcomed" the government's response, in its usual pathetic manner that makes in totally unworthy of the claim to be "the national cycling charity" (and which fits appropriately with its backing of the horrible victim-blaming Niceway Code campaign in Scotland, which is setting cycling back years in that country, and its hypocritical infrastructure denialism, particularly in the context of childrens' cycling), other commentators are agreed that the government's response amounts to a brutal statement that Britain will not be a cycling nation in our lifetime. See particularly the Cycling Embassy of Great Britain's condemnation of the DfT's response:

The response states that 'the Government is committed to turning Britain into a cycling nation to rival our European neighbours', but evidence for this commitment is entirely lacking....

The DfT cannot continue to mask its failure to engage seriously with cycling as a mode of transport with their list of miserable sums, wasted on another small scattering of badly conceived and executed projects....

....The Department for Transport was asked to take a lead - but they have refused to be pinned down. Instead of demonstrating the vital leadership on technical expertise and national policy-making that the All-Party Parliamentary Cycling Group requested, they have stuck to their failed ‘strategy’ of drip-fed, inconsistent funding, spread around with no overarching rationale. 

The car park (also the cycle lane) on Waterloo Bridge, exemplar of the contempt in which the safety of cyclists is held by the City of Westminster, the Department for Transport, and the government.

And the next cycle protest...

The next protest, for your diaries, should be a major one. This Wednesday, 22 February, a "flashride" will take place in Westminster, to hopefully increase awareness amongst our MPs, the evening before their debate on The Times's Cities fit for cycling manifesto, of the strength of feeling on the subject of cycle safety. We hope to show MPs how many people are highly dissatisfied with the past performance of parliament and successive governments on the issue.

Meet at the bottom of Duke of York Steps (between Waterloo Place and The Mall) at 6:15pm for a 6:30pm departure. The ride will go via Trafalgar Square, Whitehall, Parliament square, Lambeth Bridge, Westminster Bridge and Birdcage Walk before returning to Duke of York Steps. It is being supported and promoted by London Cycling Campaign, the Cycling Embassy of Great Britain, and all the major London bike blogs. It will be an orderly ride and protest, with the collaboration of the police, and will be safe, non-confrontational, and fully-marshalled. The media should be there. Do try and come. The more people we have, the bigger the impact. Particularly if you don't cycle regularly, if you would like to cycle in London but are too worried by the conditions, come and add your presence. We want people of all types, ages, and walks of life, to send a message to our MPs that we want cycling to be normal. And if it is to be made normal, it has to be made safe.

Come, preferably, in ordinary clothes. Don't let non-cycling MPs get the impression it just them again: a separate breed, other people, in funny clothes and plastic hats. I reckon cycling protest will make more impact the more ordinary the cyclists look. But that's just my idea. Come however you like; just come. Help keep up the momentum generated by The Times campaign. Even if you think they haven't got their campaign exactly right (few cyclists would agree they have, though probably few of those same cyclists would be able to agree on what an "exactly right" campaign would be), support the protest (and write to your MP as well if you have not already done so) as the best chance for many years of getting some change for the better for UK cycling. The symbolic media and photogenic impact of a Parliament Square filled with cyclists should not be underestimated.

As others have pointed out, the last time MPs debated cycling properly was 1996, when there was supposed to have been established a National Cycling Strategy which would get 10% of journeys by bike by 2012 – this year. The strategy totally failed, of course, as cycling is currently at about 1% modal share nationwide – slightly lower than it was in 1996. The reasons for that failure have been extensively analysed on this blog before. We may see failure again, of course, but somehow things look more promising to me this time round. There is a much wider understanding now of exactly what the problem is (it's subjective safety), and what the solutions are: thanks to better availability of information, better campaigning, by the organisations mentioned above, and just experience. And there is greater imperative from the high cost of fuel, the high human and economic cost of casualties, and the costs of an obesity epidemic. There also seem to be more influential people cycling than there were in 1996, though this is largely an inner-London phenomenon.

Meanwhile, it is reported that

David Cameron will hear radical ideas for making Britain’s cities safer for cyclists at a Downing Street conference tomorrow.

Architects, planners and designers from around the world will suggest ways to improve overall city design.

Sounds good. But the report continues:

The urban design conference will serve to underline the appreciation inside Downing Street for Scandinavian policymaking in general and Danish popular culture in particular.

Speakers include Bjarke Ingels, a Danish architect whose innovative designs include the “8 House” development in the Danish capital, built in a figure eight, with a cycle path and pedestrian walkway that winds up to the 10th floor.

Carlo Ratti, an Italian architect and engineer and senior Fulbright scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will talk about the “Copenhagen wheel”. The device, fitted to the back wheel of a bicycle, stores electricity when the cyclist brakes and releases it to help to climb hills. Connected to a smartphone, it can also tell the rider about traffic and pollution.

Oh dear. A lot of geewhizzery. OK, there may be some value in these ideas, but they remind me of a phrase (to change subjects totally) near the beginning of Gordon Jacob's classic textbook for composers Orchestral Technique: "We are more concerned here with what might be called the roast beef of scoring rather than the confectionary". Unfortunately it sounds like this urban design conference will be about the "confectionary" of its subject rather than its "roast beef". It sounds like it may not be sufficiently concerned with the basic, mundane, established urban design principals that have allowed cities across Europe, led by those in the Netherlands, to open up a huge gap with those in Britain over the last 40 years in terms of their cycle and pedestrian-friendliness.

What the conference should be about is the kind of straightforward stuff that As Easy As Riding A Bike covers today, in an excellent explanation of how the Dutch signalise segregated cycle tracks at junctions to completely separate cycle and motor traffic flows. They've been doing this for decades, but almost nobody in the UK seems to understand it. Even "the UK's National Cyclists' Organisation", to judge from this page on their site, is thoroughly clueless in this area. I don't think we particularly need the futurism of some fashionable Danish architects if we are to get Cities fit for cycling, we need the boring, basic Dutch past first.

Dutch "simultaneous green" junction for bikes and pedestrians, Assen

Today's Bikes Alive protest

I merely quote their press release, putting in links:

TRANSPORT FOR LONDON RESPONDS TO KINGS CROSS JUNCTION BIKE SAFETY CONCERNS - BY MAKING IT WORSE

Bikes Alive, the recently-formed network of cyclists who are taking non-violent direct action to defend themselves against traffic violence, returns to the lethal road junction outside Kings Cross station at 6.30pm on Monday evening, 20 February ... as Transport for London (TfL) starts work to change the junction for the worse. Cyclists and pedestrians will enforce another one-hour go-slow at the junction outside Kings Cross station.

Work to re-align some kerb lines and remove a traffic island will increase the flow of motor vehicles through a key part of the junction, introducing new dangers for cyclists. (For more detailed information on this, see the discussions on these two web pages.)

Bikes Alive - which works with other vulnerable, non-motorised road users - is pledged to continue to take action until the balance of power on London's roads is changed. Current policies of Transport for London (TfL) prioritise the speed and volume of motor traffic over all else, even though many of the cars on London's roads are there for no reason other than the selfishness of the driver.

Councillors from both boroughs which cover Kings Cross (Camden and Islington), and well as local cycling campaigns and community groups, have been calling for safety improvements at Kings Cross for years. The London Assembly has repeatedly called on mayor Boris Johnson - who is in charge of TfL - to act. But all to no avail. Hence the need for cyclists to take direct action to defend ourselves.

Bikes Alive demonstration today

I have received the following, which I merely pass on, without much comment, save to say that I do not find it surprising that when we have the situation, which we do, in London, where cyclists are being killed and seriously injured on a regular basis at known blackspots, and it is widely acknowledged by most parties that a large part of the problem lies in the bad road designs, which are known about, and have often been commented on even by professional engineers and consultants employed by various bodies, and yet these designs are not changed, over years and decades, even when the same type of serious incidents are occurring in the same places in the same way repeatedly, whether at King's Cross, or at Bow, or at Elephant and Castle, or at Blackfriars, or at Edgware, or numerous other locations across the capital, where the solutions are known but simply not applied, because other priorities are prevailing, then many cyclists will feel that there is no alternative than to take this sort of action, and that this sort of action is justified.

PRESS RELEASE – Friday 30 December 2011

Issued by Bikes Alive

NEW CYCLISTS’ CAMPAIGN CALLS FOR “NON-VIOLENT SELF DEFENCE” AGAINST MOTOR TRAFFIC IN LONDON

– 9 JANUARY ACTION ANNOUNCED

Cyclists and other non-motorised road users suffer death and injury (not to mention being delayed, poisoned and terrorised) by the selfish, anti-social (and frequently illegal) behaviour of motorists – despite the fact that much of the traffic in urban areas like London is completely unnecessary. In the case of private cars, much of the traffic is there for no other reason than the selfishness of the drivers concerned.

The situation on major roads and at major junctions in London is exacerbated by the policy of Transport for London (TfL), which prioritises the speed and volume of motor vehicles above the safety and sanity of everyone else.

Since polite meetings and symbolic action are having, on their own, too little effect, some cyclists now plan to take non-violent direct action to defend themselves and other vulnerable road users.

The first such (publicly announced) event will be at the lethal junction outside Kings Cross station (where York Way meets Pentonville Road and Euston Road) at 6pm on Monday 9 January 2012. Bikes Alive is calling for cyclists and pedestrians to take steps to forcibly calm the traffic there for one hour; if there are enough participants, the Kings Cross one-way system will be closed down from 6pm to 7pm that evening.

Unless TfL agrees to change its priorities as a result, Bikes Alive will endeavour to organise regular road closures, with the aim being to completely close down Kings Cross for at least one hour every week until TfL comes to its senses.

For more details of this plan, see bikesalive.wordpress.com; or e-mail bikesalive @ london.com

Albert Beale, on 020-7278 4474, has agreed to deal with media enquiries about this for Bikes Alive.

Change may be on the way at King's Cross, but it needs to be the right change for cyclists

The Christmas Vigil at King's Cross to remember the 16 dead cyclists, and over 60 dead pedestrians, in London this year (with many more seriously injured), and to demand action from the Mayor and TfL to reduce danger on London's roads, took place on Tuesday, and was well-attended, well-organised, brief, poignant, and to the point. A model of a dignified public protest on a serious issue, it brought together grieving relatives of those killed, members of the London Cycling Campaign, RoadPeace, Living Streets, Transport for all, and many other individuals who feel passionately about the issue. Politicians who attended included Jenny Jones, the Green mayoral candidate, and London Assembly Members Caroline Pidgeon (Lib Dem) and Andrew Boff (Conservative).

The vigil

Here is Caroline Russell of Islington Living Streets speaking at the vigil:



And here are Mark Ames (ibikelondon) and Mustafa Arif, Board Member of LCC:



There seems to have now been a reaction to the Kings Cross safety campaign (and to the Bow campaign) from TfL. Yesterday (22 December) they published the following media release:

TfL to carry out a strategic review of the Kings Cross road network during 2012

TfL has today announced details of a strategic review of traffic movements through the Kings Cross area.

The review, which will begin in the spring of 2012, builds on previously agreed work to review traffic speeds through the area.

The study will consider how all road users, especially vulnerable road users such as pedestrians and cyclists, travel along the TfL and local borough road network around Kings Cross.

The findings will enable an informed discussion regarding the future of the Kings Cross gyratory system and the aspiration to return it to two-way working.

TfL intends to discuss the scope of this work with both Camden and Islington Councils in the New Year and will commence the study in the spring.

TfL has also now completed its initial review into the proposed Pedestrian Improvement schemes at three junctions outside Kings Cross station, in particular considering the location at the junction of York Way and Grays Inn Road where there was a fatal collision involving a cyclist in October.

The pedestrian improvement scheme has been developed and agreed with Camden Council following earlier reports by TfL identifying the need for enhancements at busy junctions around the station, helping pedestrians move more safely through the area.

The scheme, which will deliver wider pavements, reduced street clutter and new advanced stop lines for cyclists around Kings Cross station, has been reviewed to see if any further changes were possible prior to commencement of main construction in January.

York Way

Although there will be no significant changes to the original scheme in the short term, TfL will be further widening the approach to York Way junction to provide additional space for road users and cyclists through the junction.

Work will begin during the Christmas period and TfL has committed to delivering the pedestrian improvements by April 2012, ahead of the London 2012 Games.

However, TfL will include the York Way junction within its ongoing cycle safety junction review to identify, discuss and plan further improvements.

Were any potential options to be identified which would benefit all road users, TfL would look to install these after the London 2012 games.

Work on these improvements will start during Christmas between 28 and 30 December, to take advantage of the reduced traffic flows during the festive period. TfL will be working on site 24 hours a day where possible and lane closures will be in place outside Kings Cross station while these works are carried out.

When main works begin in January 2012, TfL will work overnight to deliver these improvements where possible to minimise disruption to people travelling through the area.

Leon Daniels, Managing Director of Surface Transport at TfL, said: 'Any fatal collision on the Capital's roads is one too many and the Mayor and TfL are determined to work night and day to reduce that number.

'We will be working closely with all partners to carry out a strategic review of how traffic moves through the area. However, we have an important commitment to provide pedestrian improvements around Kings Cross station ahead of the London 2012 Games. Work will begin to deliver these during Christmas while we continue to investigate further changes at this location.'

Notes to Editors:

TfL had committed to deliver the schemes before the London 2012 Games in view of the increase in pedestrian movements around Kings Cross during the Games

TfL continues to investigate making improvements to the junction at Bow roundabout and has now identified potential options for improvements. Detailed modeling and design is now being carried out and more details will be available in the New Year, when TfL begin discussing the improvements with key stakeholders and cycle groups

There seems to be a significant change of language and tone from TfL here, compared to previous statements on this and related issues. The wording

consider how all road users, especially vulnerable road users such as pedestrians and cyclists, travel along the TfL and local borough road network around Kings Cross 

contains a different emphasis from previous statements which, in the last few years, always talked about "reflecting (or balancing) the needs of all road-users" It seems as if the (justifiably) emotive vigils and other campaigning actions (such as the Blackfriars Flashrides and the Tour du Danger) at the various dangerous junctions have rattled TfL. They have noticed that their language of "balance" between provision for road-users of totally different levels of vulnerability is at odds with what a lot of ordinary Londoners are thinking and saying. One can only applaud Leon Daniels stating now that "Any fatal collision on the capital's roads is one too many".

Another new thing here is talk of an "aspiration to return it [the King's Cross gyratory] to two-way working". TfL has consistently insisted in the past that it was not possible to remove the gyratory. Any big changes are being put off until after the Olympics; still, it looks like TfL have been stung by criticism arising from the death of cyclist Min Joo Lee (Deep Lee), about their unwillingness to make space for cyclists in Grays Inn Road and York Way as part of the current changes, because they are in such a hurry to get these done in time for the Olympics. As the Camden New Journal reported a couple of weeks ago:

On Monday night, Kenji [Hirasawa, boyfriend of Deep Lee] listened patiently in the Town Hall chamber – a perfect picture of dignity in his blue suit with top shirt button done up – as council officials argued they were mostly meeting cycle safety targets in a presentation of endless graphs and pie charts.

A TfL representative insisted that introducing a cycle lane at the junction would “cause considerable queues”, stressing that there was “limited time” to conduct a review of the proposed changes for the junction because of a “commitment” to make them in time for the Olympic Games.

And Caroline Russell mentioned at the King's Cross vigil that cyclist Leslie Michaelson was killed in exactly the same way as Deep Lee at exactly the same spot, 14 years ago.

So now TfL have decided that it is possible to modify the current plans, to be implemented by April, specifically

further widening the approach to York Way junction to provide additional space for road users and cyclists through the junction

 – whatever that confused-sounding wording means. Cyclists are "road users": are they making space specifically for cyclists, or not? It sounds even less hopeful where they go on:

However, TfL will include the York Way junction within its ongoing cycle safety junction review to identify, discuss and plan further improvements.

Were any potential options to be identified which would benefit all road users, TfL would look to install these after the London 2012 games. 

So we have more of the suspicious old language about "benefiting all road users", which has always, in the past, meant not looking after the vulnerable ones.

So what should be done? It has been suggested that there should be a segregated cycle lane installed at the north end of Grays Inn Road, to protect cyclists at the point where the deaths have occurred, but actually I cannot see how this could work. In the diagram below (reproduced from TfL's plans for the junction from before the latest announcement), the place I presume it would go I have marked with the red cross.

From TfL king's Cross consultation leaflet

A lane in this location would not work because cyclists aiming for it would get cut-up from the right by traffic trying to get into the westbound lanes leading into Euston Road. It would create exactly the same difficulty as does the segregated cycle lane on the Bow roundabout – creating an extra-difficult thing for cyclists to get to that would slow them and modify their road positioning in such a way as to make them more vulnerable to the left-hook. There would still be a battle to get into lane in Grays Inn Road. The Dutch would not do anything like this. No, to make this safe for cyclists, the whole thing needs to be rethought on "Dutch" (or Danish) lines. The stop lines for the Grays Inn Road lanes going both north and west need to be brought back to before the point at which the lanes split, so that all motor traffic exiting Grays Inn Road can be stopped at once. Then a segregated lane on the left hand side of Grays Inn Road could work, because cyclists could be put through the junction (in various directions) on a signal phase of their own without conflicting with any other flows. This style of engineering at a major, "difficult" junction in Copenhagen was recently described on the Danish Cycling Embassy site.

Many will rejoice at the hint that TfL may consider, in the longer-term, removing the whole, complex Kings Cross gyratory system. I would caution that gyratory-removal does not necessarily produce good cycling conditions. We have recently seen a major gyratory in Pall Mall and Piccadilly removed, with extremely poor results for cyclists. Gyratory-removal is not a cure-all for car-sick, cycle-excluding road-design. It does not even come close, if done badly, that is, if it is done without a central concern for the subjective safety of the cycling experience. Unless cyclists are given clear space on main roads, in the wording of LCC's Go Dutch campaign, unless, in other words, their space is dedicated and properly protected, then cycling in these roads will never feel safe enough for most people to consider cycling there.

The worst possible results for cyclists from gyratory-removal come when new two-way roads are created, as in Pall Mall and Piccadilly, where the lanes are narrow and there is no space for motor vehicles to overtake cyclists when the traffic is flowing, hence cyclists are forced to act as "rolling speed bumps", a very intimidating experience for all but the most hardened vehicular cyclists, and not a role anybody would like to see their child or grandmother play. And when the traffic is not rolling, cyclists are just stuck in the fumes, unable to get through, or tempted to cycle on the pavement. All this may be slightly safer, but is no more appealing and efficient for cycling than the old gyratory arrangements – which is why such changes will not get many more cyclists on the streets, will not reduce motor traffic volume much, and will probably lead, a few years down the line, to the authorities just saying to themselves: "Actually, why don't we try one-way traffic again, we will be able to increase capacity that way and reduce congestion and pollution", and so the gyratory system of traffic-planning fashion will continue to spin.

If you look at cycle-friendly major cities, such as Amsterdam, The Hague, Utrecht, Copenhagen, even Stockholm, Munich and Berlin, you will not see the general removal of one-way systems for motor vehicles. What you will see are comprehensive bypass networks for cyclists, so cyclists are not put through these systems, jostling for space with cars and lorries, as they are in London. There is even a case to be made that one-way systems for motor vehicles are more or less essential in getting them out of the way of cyclists on many streets in dense centres, and for creating long, inconvenient routes for cars and short, convenient routes for bikes, which is one method of prioritising and encouraging cycling.

So I think it is a mistake for cycle campaigners to regard the removal of one-ways and gyratories as a real end of campaigning in itself. There are probably a hundred different possible solutions to the King's Cross traffic mess, but I am sure that the only ones that will make the junction attractive for cycling will be the ones that separate cycle space from motor space comprehensively, and, where those spaces must overlap, separate the cycle and motor flows in time. Whether the roads are one-way or two-way is not exactly the issue.

So apposite are the comments of Deep Lee's boyfriend, Kenji, on King's Cross, as quoted in the Camden New Journal article, I'll end with some more of them:

I grew up in Shinjuku, the busiest area in Tokyo. I never heard that such a dangerous junction existed in that city. The council had given a presentation about how the Town Hall was generally meeting its targets and complying with standards. It is just their normal job and duty – it is nothing special to show off like that. For me, because of their laziness, my girlfriend is killed at the junction.

.....

I will be so ashamed that Deep Lee was killed at this junction if I am a member of Camden Council or TfL. This area is known as a blackspot for cyclists. It is so shameful that there exists such a name of a place in Camden and in London, one of the most developed and advanced cities in the world.

It is indeed shameful that this situation has been allowed to continue for so many years. When TfL asked Kenji if the ghost bike could be removed, he told them to "Sort out the junction first".

And kudos to Lib Dem mayoral candidate Brian Paddick, quoted in the same article as saying:

It is better that we have to wait for five minutes in a car than have someone killed.

Candles at the Kings' Cross vigil

-----

While congratulations are due to racing cyclist Mark Cavendish for winning BBC Sports Personality of the Year, the idea that this could somehow lead to a new respect being shown to everyday cyclists by motorists on the streets of the UK is, of course, absurd. After all, the award has been won by cyclists in the past with no such effect. Such an idea can only be entertained by those who try to promote any solution for generating a cycling culture other than the only proven one, safe cycle infrastructure.

A discreditable transition

Last Friday's mass protest rides on Blackfriars Bridge were the biggest cycling protests the UK has ever seen, so far as anyone can discern. Estimates of number on the 6pm LCC flashride vary from 500 to 1000, but it appeared to be at least 1000 to me. The bridge was packed with cyclists, who rode slowly from the south to the north bank and then back again between 6:15 and 6:45pm. Most of these then cycled along Upper Ground to the Critical Mass meeting point by Waterloo Bridge, and about 7pm, a huge stream of cyclists consisting of the combined groups went back up Upper Ground and slowly crossed Blackfriars Bridge again on the Critical Mass ride. I stood at the southern end of the bridge with the cyclists stopping the flow of traffic from the south, having the traditional banter with the black cab drivers, with their usual sprightly repartee, such as, "You're not allowed to hold me up, read the f---ing Highway Code!" and "You say you want safer roads, well why don't you all wear f---ing helments!"(that one is a favourite of theirs, of which the logic seems to them unimpeachable), for the duration that it took to get all these cyclists through, and I thought there must be at least 2000 cyclists in the protest at this stage. They could not all fit on the bridge at once.

The Blackfriars flashride heading south, with a foolish motorcyclist trying to push in

Nice slogan on Gerhard's bike

Video of the southbound flashride by smsm1986 on YouTube

Aerial view of the protest, on ITV's London Tonight

The Critical Mass proceeded through the City of London and north-east, via Old Street, into the borough of Tower Hamlets. This is not an area that I and the Vole cycle to very often, and the Vole was intrigued to encounter a remarkably similar-looking rodent about 5 metres long painted on an exposed internal wall of a demolished building.

A meeting of rodents in Tower Hamlets

I haven't been on a Critical Mass for many years. I noted how for many of the young male participants, it is a kind of "extreme sport". They relish holding the traffic at the junctions, and the argie-bargie with the taxi drivers and other motorists, often seeing to obstruct motorists trying to get in and out of side turnings quite gratuitously. The colourful cavalcade, which included some bizarre bikes and get-ups, wound back westwards through Bethnal Green and back to the City, where I left it, diving into Bank tube with the Brompton and Vole.

Bank tube station at 9 pm was certainly a different experience to the same place at 6 pm. At the earlier time, it had been so horrendously packed, strained and over-capacity that it took me about 10 minutes from getting off the train to get out of the station. The only practical method was to climb up all the stairs – quite an effort with the folded Brompton. As I came out, I saw they had closed the station to incomers, as the situation inside had become quite impossible. And this I presume was a normal Friday 6 pm at Bank Station, with nothing special going on. This set me thinking how the growth in commuting cycling into the City in recent years must be in large part due to the horrendous conditions on public transport. It is clearly not due to work by Transport for London or the City Corporation in making cycling conditions any better. So we have a "cycling revolution" in London that, in so far as it exists at all, is due to "push" factors rather than a positive "pull" to cycling, which is not all that healthy. It may be a benefit to the city that more people are cycling (at least on the main commuter routes, if not elsewhere in London), but it would be nicer if people were choosing to cycle because cycling itself is pleasant. Otherwise, it is doubtful whether the Utilitarian "Sum of Human Happiness" is being increased.

The protest was covered well in the Evening Standard (thanks in no small part to a canny press release put out by the Cycling Embassy of Great Britain, who officially supported the protest, the only national cycling organisation to do so (CTC, where are you?)) and on BBC and ITV news.


The BBC new item on the Blackfriars protest, uploaded to YouTube by grsmith06

BBC had the better coverage, giving airtime to Mark Ames, of the ibikelondon blog, and also Publicity Officer for the Cycling Embassy, who cogently explained the issues over Blackfriars. The TfL view came from Ben Plowden. Ben Plowden is TfL's "Director of Better Routes and Places". His previous title at TfL was "Director of Intergrated Programme Delivery", which job involved "bringing together key projects including walking and cycling, road safety and smarter travel". Ben Plowden is not to be confused with the environmentalist Stephen Plowden, best known to cyclists for his work with Mayer Hillman on slower speeds. Ben Plowen is clearly not interested in slower speeds (any more), despite his present and former Orwellian job-titles at TfL. For here, in this BBC news item, he is claiming that the Blackfriars scheme, increasing the number of vehicle lanes and raising the speed limit from 20 to 30 mph, is somehow all being done for the benefit of pedestrians using Blackfriars Station!

People in public life often make political transitions, for example, MPs who "cross the floor" of the House of Commons. But few can have made such a discreditable transition as Ben Plowden. For he was the first Director of the Pedestrians Association (now Living Streets), heading that organisation from 1997 to 2002. In 2001 he said "We are trying to make streets places people can enjoy." Presumably by "people" he did not mean "motorists who want to drive at speed". Carlton Reid has highlighted some of the other things Plowden said when he was in that job. And yet now, this same Ben Plowden is seriously telling us that because the 20 mph limit on Blackfriars Bridge was only put in place as a temporary measure to facilitate the lorries making deliveries to the building works at the station, it is now a good idea to raise the limit back to 30.

It is hard to know where to begin with this argument. The point is that though that may have been the reason it was actually done, there are many other reasons why it was a good idea and should have been done anyway – as must Plowden know, from everything he said in his earlier job. And the changes that have taken place since have re-enforced the need for the lower limit, not removed the need for it. The increased cycle traffic since the limit was introduced, doubled since 2006, and now the largest part of the peak-time traffic on the bridge, perhaps in part because of the lower speed limit operating on this bridge, is a huge argument for 20 mph being kept – as is the history of cyclist deaths on the bridge when it had the higher limit – as is the huge increase in the number of pedestrians entering and exiting Blackfriars Station, which TfL is expecting to be 58% of the total number of people going through the junction in the future. How are these pedestrians going to benefit from a higher speed limit on the bridge and more traffic lanes? Plowden is talking dangerous nonsense, and with his intelligence and his background and experience, he must know it. How else, then, to describe the behaviour now of this erstwhile pedestrians' champion than "discreditable"?

Of course, I don't know what goes on behind the closed doors of TfL (and they are very closed to cycle campaigners). It could be that Plowden still secretly holds all the beliefs that he once espoused, and is fighting desperately to get a more progressive policy out of the motoring dinosaurs at Palestera House, "towing the line" in order to hold on to his job, because he believes he can do more by staying in there and fighting for pedestrians' rights than by walking out. It may be he thinks that TfL's policies towards non-motorised road users would be even worse without him there to act as a counterbalance. Maybe one day, in the distant future, he will write his memoirs, and tell us all about this terrible time in his life, when he was so torn between expediency and belief.

But it doesn't look like this. It looks as if TfL is as pro-car and anti pedestrian as it could possibly be, with Plowden in charge of  the laughably named "Better Routes and Places" (is Blackfriars held to be one of those?). For another example of this, see TfL's determination to harry and incommode pedestrians by introducing widely the Pedestrain Countdown system on signalised crossings, discriminating, as the Green Party's Jenny Jones points out, against "less agile Londoners and people with children". For yet another example, see TfL's horrific designs for the new Henley's Corner in Barnet. If Plowden is really fighting the pedestrians' corner in TfL, he is failing totally. If he had the slightest consistency or integrity, he would resign from his job, telling the world the reasons for his going. His present position gives a depressing example of conduct in public life – a career gone sadly awry.