More Brent pavement parking, and Exhibition Road

A correspondent living in Australia (it's nice to get an outside view from another Anglo-Saxon country), commenting on my last post, said:

I cannot believe the state-sanctioned dystopic practice of car parking on pavements.

That's a good way to put it. Parking on pavements is "dystopic" because it produces an ugly street environment, it damages the pavements, making them hazardous for pedestrains, it messes up the distinction between roadway and pavement, eroding, in the minds of motorists, the principle that the carriageway is the place for parking and the pavement (or sidewalk) the place for walking, and it leads to a chaotic situation where, in a place like north Brent, where parking pressure is very high, because of the urban density and the poor quality of non-motorised transport alternatives, people start parking their cars everywhere.

We see this in the euphemistically-named Village Way in Neaden NW10. This is the "spine" road in the rather un-village like residential area sometimes referred to as Neasden Village, a group of streets isolated from the rest of the borough by the North Circular Road to the east, the underground lines and depot to the south, the A4088 to the north, and the River Brent and the Grand Union Feeder Canal to the west. It is, as I pointed out recently, a deeply inaccessible place for those not using a car as their main mode of transport. This is another road in which Brent Council have designated on-pavement parking space using white lines and small blue signs.

Village Way, Neaden

Parking has only been permitted on the right-hand pavement in this view, but motorists have started parking on the opposite pavement as well. Parking is explicitly marked out on the roadway on the left-hand pavement, but they are parking on the pavement and the roadway as well, creating two lines of parking alongside one another. On the side-road off here, West Way, parking has been permitted on both pavements, so maybe that is why the motorists are thinking that they are allowed to park on all pavements in this group of streets.

West Way, Neaden

I think that when councils start down this "dystopic" road of confusing pavement with car-parking space, it just leads to a general erosion of respect for all pavements by motorists. It is analogous to that other shoddy, cheap practice councils employ, of creating "shared use" areas on pavements for cycling, which also erodes the sanctity of the pavements for pedestrians, leads to confusion and cycling on pavements where it has not been permitted, and fails to provide safe conditions for cyclists as well (particularly at junctions). That subject has just been covered nicely by the At War with the Motorist blog.

When I was active in Camden Cycling Campaign, we had regular meetings with councillors and officers in a forum called the Walking, Cycling and Road Safety Advisory Group. Being advisory, this group did not create council policy, but it had the potential to influence it. It was (and I presume still is) dominated not by cyclists, but by pedestrian and local amenity groups. There were always some conflicts of opinion between cycling and walking representatives, but one thing that all could agree on was the undesirability of parking on pavements. The view that this group consistently put to councillors was that, though the conversion of pavement to parking space was generally undesirable, should it be that certain streets really did have an unnecessary excess of pavement, and there was a politically impossible-to-resist local demand for more parking, then it would be preferable to rebuild the kerbs to transfer pavement space to the road, rather than marking parking on pavements.

I do not know whether this idea was ever formally accepted as Camden Council policy, but it seemed to have an effect. To have such a policy would immediately put a big damper on moves to transfer pavement space to parking, because to do it properly in this way would be far more expensive than painting lines, and officers would certainly think hard before recommending it. It does seem to be the case that Camden has far less pavement parking than Brent, and other boroughs, to this day, despite the huge inner-city parking pressure, so kudos should go to Camden Council for resisting the easy option of allowing motorists to take over the pavements. Camden also was the only council in London ever in a significant way to transfer road space to cycle tracks. Again, this was because Camden Cycling Campaign insisted that it did not want cycle facilities to be created at the expense of pedestrian space.

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One road where parking on pavements is impossible, because the pavements, in the sense of footways raised above road level, have been abolished, is the newly-rebuilt Exhibition Road in South Kensington. I paid a visit there this week to see how it is working. The results are rather different to what I expected. When it was being built, I expected the central line of pointed lamp columns to define the northbound and southbound carriageways all the way from Hyde Park to Cromwell Road. What has happened, rather, and I don't know if this was intended by the original designers, or was a later modification, or has just evolved, is that the road is in two parts, north of the junction with Prince Consort Road, and south of it. (I am ignoring the stub of Exhibition road south of Cromwell Road, which is effectively pedestrianised.)

There is a funny kind-of-roundabout at the Prince Consort Road junction, and, north of this, the two directions of traffic go on opposite sides of the lamp columns. South of it, both directions of traffic are on the east side of the columns. On this stretch, the west side is occupied with diagonal parking, Boris Bikes, and benches, with the space between all that and the building line acting as pavement. On the east side of the road the effective pavement all the way down is defined by the drainage grating and tactile surface, plus some trees and bollards. Though these features are present on the west side, they are only functioning to establish the effective pavement north of the roundabout.

Exhibition Road west side looking north from the Science Museum

Exhibition Road west side looking south from the Science Museum

Exhibition road east side looking south from the Henry Cole wing of the Victoria and Albert Museum

The whole thing seems to me to be complex, cluttered, and, well, pretty much as far from a "naked street" as it is possible to get. There clearly is still "carriageway" and "footway" here, they have just been marked off in an unconventional way. There is no "sharing" between pedestrains and motorists, to speak of, and the normal relationship between motorists and cyclists prevails, though the street is more pleasant than it used to be because of the 20 mph limit. The funny roundabout where the road-use changes, but without the lining and signing one would expect, causes drivers a lot of doubt about what they are supposed to be doing here. Such confusion is held to be a good thing by some of those arguing the Shared Space line. This thinking however, as I have pointed out before, as well as having a "black is white" quality, is at variance with the European road safety mainstream, as summarised in the EU's PRESTO Cycling Policy Guide (p 18):

Creating recognizable and comprehensible traffic situations is essential for safety. Consistent design solutions on roads with similar functions (in terms of road hierarchy) makes potential conflict situations more predictable for cyclists and other users, while also inciting everyone to behave more predictably.

Of the many blogposts to appear commenting on the new Exhibition Road, one of the most memorable was that by Londonneur, who compared the paving to "a giant Argyle sock laid down in the road". The price of this Argyle sock, and oddly placed benches and parking, was around £30 million. I reckon that should have been enough, alternatively, estimating at £7 million a mile, for one high-quality, capacious, safe, segregated cycle highway right across central London from Paddington to the City: just what Camden Cycling Campaign proposed 14 years ago, with their Seven Stations Link idea, the only part of which that was ever implemented (in badly compromised fashion) being the cycle track through Bloomsbury. Think how that scheme would have transformed London if carried out in full.

Then again, the Dutch built the longest cycle bridge in the world, the Nescio Bridge (to British designs, ironically), in 2005, for less than £10 million at today's prices. So we could have had three of those across the Thames for the price of Exhibition Road. Think of what that would have done for cycling in London. We continue to wait for a proper cycle route across London, and for safe river crossings for cyclists, while extraordinary sums are spent on odd, bodged public space "transformation" compromises like Exhibition Road, Piccadilly and Haymarket (£14 million), and the next one the Mayor intends, Euston Circus (cost unknown).

Next Saturday, thousands of London cyclists will congregate in the middle of London to tell the next Mayor that they want Streets as safe and inviting for cycling as those in Holland. It's pretty obvious that we have both the money and the space in London to achieve this aim, and in a relatively short time too. As always, we await only the political vision.

Sustainable safety, Dutch and British-style

David Hembrow and Mark Wagenbuur have announced their intention to "call it a day" on their famous and influential cycling blog View from the cycle path, which, perhaps more than any other journal or piece of work published either electronically, or in print, has encouraged supporters of cycling in the English-speaking world to start to think differently about utility cycling, and has spread understanding of how the Dutch have actually achieved the safest cycling environment and highest transport share for cycling in the world.

I can understand why David and Mark should want a rest. Writing an accurate, high-quality blog for a long period is extremely demanding and time-consuming. Their new posts will be much missed, but their archive of posts will continue on-line as an invaluable resource for cycle advocates, transport planners and engineers around the world. Their last post to be written (though not, apparently, last to be published) is one of the best and most important of all. Entitled Campaign for Sustainable Safety, not Strict Liability, it again busts one of the great international myths about the Dutch cycling culture, explaining the true nature of Dutch liability law and its true influence on cycling conditions in the Netherlands (which is slight), before explaining the Dutch policy that needs to be understood and campaigned for elsewhere, the real basis of the Dutch road safety record: Sustainable Safety. I urge you to read it, and to pass it on to all those interested or involved in the area.

I've mentioned Sustainable Safety here before. It's based on five principles, that Wagenbuur goes into in detail in the second part of the article:

1. Functionality of roads
2. Homogeneity of mass, speed and direction of road-users
3. Predictability of road course and road-user behaviour
4. Forgivingness of the road environment and the road-users
5. Awareness of the road-user

Of these, the one that perhaps needs most absorbing outside the Netherlands, because it is so foreign to the way things are done on the roads in most other places, is the second principle: that of homogeneity of mass, speed and direction of road-users. In simple physics terms, homogeneity of mass, speed and direction of road-users means that the chances of crashes that have serious consequences are minimised because, in a given space, all the "vehicles" (and that term includes, here, pedestrians) have similar mass, speed and direction, therefore little kinetic energy relative to one another, and they therefore cannot do much damage to one another if they come accidentally into contact. Sustainable Safety, is, in a way, the simple, common-sense acceptance of the facts that humans are fallible, and that accidents do happen, but that it is possible to engineer an environment in which those accidents are rarely disastrous.

The desire for homogeneity of traffic is thus the basis for the Dutch bias towards separating out the classes of road-users, motor vehicles, bikes, and pedestrians (and in some cases buses, trams, lorries, motorcyclists and mopeds) in their own spaces, to minimise the damage they can do to one another in the event of a crash, and, where such separation is not possible, to ensure that no road-users have enough energy (through their speed, energy being proportional to speed squared) to risk serious damage to others. The homogeneity requirement essentially determines what the vast majority of Dutch roadscapes, streetscapes and townscapes actually look like.

But, strangely, straightforward as this all is, there is a huge amount of misunderstanding and misrepresentation of Dutch traffic safety principles in other counties. There is something of a propaganda campaign in the UK, and possibly elsewhere, by some people, to try to convince others that the basis of Dutch road safety is precisely the reverse of what it actually is, that it is actually about mixing up different types of road users as much as possible. Consider this, from the blog of Angela Saini, a science journalist who has just made a programme for BBC Radio 4:

For the last few months I've been asking traffic engineers and scientists whether it's possible to rebuild the streets in a way that might make us safer, happier and generally nicer people. The linchpin of this idea is an increasingly popular (if controversial) concept known as Shared Space, which is a way of designing streets without segregating road users. Essentially, everyone is encouraged to use the same street at the same time... there are no pavements as such. Pioneered in Holland, it seems to be working over there by slowing down drivers and making all road users more aware of each other. And it's since been imported all over the world.

And this is from the BBC webpage on the programme, to be broadcast today Tuesday 3 January at 21:00 and tomorrow, Wednesday 4 January at 15:30:

The early roots of this innovative concept lies in the work of the late Dutch traffic engineer, Hans Monderman. A passionate advocate of shared space, Monderman and colleagues started small - more than twenty years ago, converted an intersection in the northern Dutch province of Friesland from a conventional signal-controlled intersection to a brick-paved street, giving equal priority to cars, people and cycles. The idea was that people would use their own minds in navigating the streets, building their own informal traffic rules. Research has shown that these kinds of shared spaces automatically reduced traffic speed to under 20 mph - the threshold at which the chances of being severely injured in a road accident plummets. This highly counterintuitive approach - increasing risk decreases accidents is finding favour (albeit slowly and not without opposition) all over the world.

Today, Monderman's vision can be experienced throughout his Dutch province of Friesland, no where more so than in Drachten, an unassuming town that until recently was famous only for being the home of the Dutch electronics giant Philips. Drachten's shared space schemes (and those of its near neighbours) now attracts a regular pilgrimage of engineers and planners, from all parts of the world - Australia, Japan, Britain, South Africa, India and even Colombia.

Now this is all a load of cobblers – except perhaps the statement about the "centre of pilgrimage" – insofar as an impression is being given that shared space is quintessentially Dutch, a significant part of Dutch thinking on planning, an expanding movement in the Netherlands, or a thing that the Netherlands is actively exporting. In fact, shared space has been a very limited experiment in the Netherlands that runs contrary to usual Dutch practice, it has not been popular there, and it is not much known or discussed in the Netherlands. Drachten is a small place (population 45,000), and only a small area of the centre of the town has received shared space treatment.  Other Dutch examples of shared space consist of the odd street, square or precinct, set within the normal Dutch mode-segregated street environment. (And by the way, another thing wrong in the quote is that Drachten is not "home" to Philips, Philips' HQ is in Amsterdam).

Interest in Monderman's ideas has come very much from outside the Netherlands, not within. Marttijn Sargentini, the bike cheif in Amsterdam, and thus a very important Dutch traffic planner, far more important than Monderman, told CTC's Cycle magazine (October 2007):

I'd never heard of Hans Monderman or "shared space" until all these foreign visitors came here and kept telling me about them. Here in Amsterdam we are very clear – for safety, for speed, to give an advantage to the bike, we aim to separate wherever possible.

The Dutch are always experimenting with urban design, and shared space has been a minor experiment there that is getting blown out of all proportion by foreigners who are not seeing the wood for the trees, they are not observing basically what normal Dutch street design is about. The answer Angela Saini's opening question is, obviously, "no", it's not possible to rebuild streets in a way to make us generally nicer people – what a silly idea. Sustainable safety is not about making people "nice". People are as people are, they are human, but design can minimise risks by taking their frailties and real behaviours into account.

Shared space in the UK has been mostly promoted by the architect Ben Hamilton-Baillie, who seems to have made it his trademark. According to a BBC news story on shared space in Ashford, Kent, where pedestrians have complained that the new design leaves them feeling exposed when crossing the shared space roads:

Ben Hamilton-Baillie, the architect behind the scheme, said the point of the shared space was so that pedestrians and drivers interacted and negotiated for space and right of way.

He said that although that may not be easy or comfortable for the pedestrian it did appear to work.

"So far it looks as if there has been a significant drop, particularly in more serious accidents, maybe as much as 75%," he said."That doesn't necessarily translate into how people feel when they cross the street, but the reduction in speed has been the most important single element in transforming what was an unattractive concrete collar surrounding Ashford into a civilised part of the town centre itself."

I beg your pardon? Shared space "may not be easy of comfortable for the pedestrian"? I though that it was supposed to benefit pedestrians! I though it was supposed to give them more freedom! I thought that was the whole idea of it, Mr Hamilton-Baillie!

I can't understand what the point of shared space is supposed to be. The benefits claimed for it seem to be illusory, as Hamilton-Baillie's words, if accurately quoted, seem to confirm. What are the actual better outcomes of shared space as opposed to segregation? Hamilton-Bailie here seems to retreat from any idea that shared space should feel pleasant for vulnerable road-users, to a claim about merely reducing casualties, and a claim that what he has created is somehow more "civilised" than what used to exist. I have heard this word used before by a shared space adherent, it is a favourite word of theirs: geographer John Adams used it once in Camden. It is meaningless, an expression of mere personal aesthetic preference or prejudice. How is this Ashford design "civilised"?

If pedestrians feel uncomfortable and unsafe, as they seem to feel in the Ashford shared space, then they will avoid it, and they will avoid crossing the road there (and particularly vulnerable people like the blind, disabled and elderly will avoid crossing the road there), and so casualty figures might well go down. But that's the easiest way to reduce casualties, and the worst: just frighten the vulnerable away, those who are most likely to have accidents, just exclude the non-motorised, not by law, but through intimidation. That seems to be the British version of Sustainable Safety: a kind of quasi-voluntary apartheid.

You see this in UK cycle route engineering as well: you build something so fantastically dangerous that few people on a bike will ever use it, so there cannot be many cycling casualties, because there are few cyclists, and the safety record for cyclists looks good. Something like this, a crazy cycle crossing of a motorway-type road in the Bikeless Borough of Barnet, North London, which has only ever killed one cyclist, and frightened most of the rest of them away. A good safety record: British-style Sustainable Safety in action.

Byng Place and the influence of the anti-infrastructural “Shared Space” movement

Apologies for a long post again. This post started as merely a codicil to my last one, on Camden's cycle tracks, which was suggested to me by photographs I took on Wednesday showing how a short section of the Bloomsbury cycle track has suffered a totally unnecessary and counterproductive makeover since it was first built. The post then developed into a long essay on Shared Space.

My last post discussed at some length the problems and opposition that the campaigns to implement the London Borough of Camden's segregated cycle tracks in Royal College Street and Bloomsbury had to overcome. The opposition from taxis drivers one might have expected. But I also discussed the opposition from some cyclists. There were (are) two strands of thinking here, really: the first, that the cycle tracks would necessarily be so poorly implemented that we shouldn't bother. This argument is best addressed by demonstrating examples of best-practice internationally. However, there was, and is, also a more fundamentalist objection, which some cyclists actually do put forward: that cycling is best and most efficiently done in an environment containing motor traffic. This strand of thinking, exemplified in the writings of John Forrester and John Franklin, is unpicked in Paul Gannon's essay Segregated Facilities:

His [Franklin's] response was that he was describing how Dutch cyclists often report having problems with motor vehicle traffic when they come to the UK. This was what he meant by a lower competence. But this, and other discussions with people who oppose segregated cycle facilities, show just how much people misunderstand the reality of cycling in places such as the Netherlands...

There is a deep rooted, unquestioned assumption here – namely that the key cycling skill is about dealing with motor vehicles. The argument becomes a circular one – the skill that matters is dealing with motor vehicle traffic, ergo anything that reduces the relative significance of that skill is undesirable....

I suspect that the fear of segregated facilities is really a fear that hard-won, highly-valued skills of handling all those motor vehicles will be become less important.

But another strand of opposition to these tracks has been different again. This has sometimes come from cyclists, but more typically from architects and self-styled “urbanists”, who believe that the well-tried, tested and proven Dutch model of separating out cyclists, pedestrians and motor vehicles in their own spaces is inferior to their favoured theory of Shared Space, where all three groups intermingle and negociate harmoniously in a suitably-designed environment. This is the point of view that I will deal with in the rest of this blog post, demonstrating the results of the interference of the anti-infrastructural Shared Space movement on a small part of Camden's Bloomsbury cycle track, in Byng Place, WC1.

Now I have to say here that I am totally unconvinced by the arguments of the Shared Space movement. I can think of so many counter-arguments to the whole Shared Space concept, I find it hard to know where to begin. But I will try.

Shared Space advocates think that the model of segregating different modes of transport is inferior to that of integrating them in the same space. But in what sense it is really held to be "inferior" I find it difficult to fathom, in that I find it difficult to see any evidence-base supporting the Shared Space theory that demonstrates in any concrete respect better outcomes – be they social, transportation, health, safety or economic outcomes – for Shared Space as opposed to segregation.  Segregation for cycling (and I know some people dislike that word, but it is a clearly-defined term, so I will continue to use it), segregation for cycling, in its Dutch and Danish and North German forms anyway, is about prioritising the bicycle. By definition, Shared Space cannot prioritise anything – so is it not, by definition, a fundamentally weaker method of promoting sustainable transport?

I feel much of this may really come down to purely personal aesthetic choices and value judgements. To support this idea I will give you the story of John Adams and the Bloomsbury cycle track. Professor John Adams is a well-known proponent of Shared Space in the UK – to be precise, in Camden, at University College London, where he teaches geography. Interestingly, this is right next to the Bloomsbury cycle track. So when Adams talked to Camden Cycling Campaign in 2005, it was interesting to hear what he said about this. Some of what he said is in the report on the CCC webpage, but this also covers many other topics on which he spoke, and some of what he said on the cycle track issue was not reported there, but I noted immediately afterwards in an email to to the CCC Yahoo! group.

Adams said of the Bloomsbury Cycle Track:

"Whatever its other merits, no-one could claim it is attractive"

and of the Bloomsbury streetscape:

"It is my ambition to civilise it to a level where segregation will no longer be needed "

So there you have two purely arbitrary value judgements: a cycle track is "unattractive" (though it certainly is, in another sense, "attractive" to the hundreds of cyclists who use it every day) and it is, in some mysterious way, "not civilised" enough for Adams. Not a very scientific position from the Professor of Geography, it seems to me. Rather, this is pure prejudice.

The cycle track in Torrington Place WC1: "not attractive" or "civilised" according to John Adams, but "attractive" enough to the large numbers of cyclists using it.

After Adams stated that the the cycle track was "not attractive", I objected to this passing of a purely subjective aesthetic judgement on a piece of functional engineering that is there to do a job. I asked the Camden cyclists at the meeting to vote, by a show of hands, whether they thought the road had been made more or less attractive by the installation of the cycle track. Most people thought the road had been made more attractive. But Adams then, objecting to my formulation of the poll, asked rather if we could not have a choice between those options and his ideal solution, which he described as a thorough mixing of all three modes without segregation, but with greatly reduced and calmed traffic. Many people supported this.

This brings me to another objection to Shared Space. It is ahistorical, and politically naive. What Adams was asking for was a vote on something that was never on offer, and could never be on offer without a powerful political movement to make it so. He had no mechanism to offer for how this greatly reduced and calmed traffic environment could be achieved by the methods of Shared Space alone.

What I mean by describing it as "ahistorical" is that Shared Space offers no explanation of how things came to be as they are now. It therefore is unconvincing in its assertion that the problems that we have on streets, with all their modern infrastructure, can suddenly be solved merely by removing the infrastructure and leaving the street "naked". For the infrastructure we have evolved to solve perceived problems. Why should putting policy into reverse-gear and going back to a mediaeval street not result in just all the same problems that the infrastructure developed to solve? Proponents of Shared Space claim it is "all in the design", but, quite frankly, I can't see that design is that powerful. Engineering and laws and their enforcement are powerful, coloured paving slabs are not. And I think the evidence of the performance of Shared Spaces and Naked Streets that have been implemented supports me in this.

Paul Gannon, again, puts the "ahistorical" argument powerfully (this post is lengthy but worth reading in full). It is, in his view, all about power:

The facts of power and status on the roads - which people understand tacitly - is what lies behind people saying that cycling is dangerous. The effectiveness of the cavalry attack depended on the horse and rider, individually or in a mass, approaching at a high speed and with weight. If a square of soldiers could withstand the shock of the attack, they could survive; if they dithered and cowered, or as individuals, they never stood a chance. The psychological component of the weapon was intimidation, playing upon the natural human inclination to get the hell out of the way when a half a ton of fast-moving mass is coming straight at you. The modern equivalent of the charging horse is the motor vehicle (and not just the 4x4) because it uses the same effect as the charger to establish its priority by fear of ‘flesh to metal interaction’.

This can be seen by referring to the recent discussion about pedestrian priority at junctions, as per Highway Code, and vehicle priority, as per reality. Pedestrians did not give up that priority willingly, saying to car drivers, ‘no, no, you go ahead, please’, but in stepping back from potential bodily damage from an approaching mass, eventually established the ‘standard’, with only a fossil memory somehow still preserved in the Highway Code.

The simple fact of the matter is that people do not want to have to be put in the position of constantly having to face the life and death decision of "Do I carry on or give way?". When the odds are so heavily against you in the event of an error (in terms of asymmetric physical consequences for cyclist/pedestrian and vehicle driver), factors of power are unavoidable.

Crossrider has, more recently, taken a very similar line:

Sharing is a great concept, but it presupposes that the parties sharing are more or less equal in power, and there isn't one group of bullies in the playground that are so much bigger and tougher than the other kids that they are able to intimdate their way to the lion's share of what's on offer.

The reason pavements work is everyone is of more or less equal strength and weight, and each individual is usually not capable of inflicting much damage on another (at least, unintentionally)....

As soon as you introduce cars into the shared space, the dynamic changes. Even if most drivers act with care and consideration, it only takes one or two before pedestrians are anxiously looking about, grabbing their childrens' hands and scurrying to the side the every time they hear a car engine. So you get a 'scared space', not a 'shared space'.

I'm going to suggest that shared space is actually a nonsense concept. It's used to justify spending a fortune on York stone slabs, granite setts, and generally digging up the road and giving it a makeover to keep highway engineers in a job. All you really need to do is get rid of the traffic. 

Adams, and also another "expert" on the urban environment who I heard talk recently, Andrew Cameron of WSP Group, who gave one of the Movement for Liveable London's Street Talks at the Yorkshire Grey pub, are believers in naked streets: in reducing signage and clear instructions to road-users in order to introduce chaos and uncertainty deliberately into the street environment, in the belief that this is actually desirable, to make road-users more careful and considerate. They talk about a "good chaos". But what is this, and does it really happen when soft human beings and hard metal masses on wheels are mixed up together chaotically?

I feel there is something in the argument that we could, without loss, reduce the marking and signage on UK roads. British roads are certainly far too marked-up. They are the most marked-up and cluttered with signs and symbols and painted lines in the world. The roads that I observed in Hami, Xinjiang, China, (with segregated cycle/moped tracks), were almost totally devoid of give-way lines, lane markings, and such like, but appeared very safe. However, the Chinese did segregate two-wheelers from other traffic, in this particular town anyway. And of course, I haven't seen their KSI stats, if, indeed, this closed regime publishes such things. So this observation doesn't prove much.

Cycle track/service road and street in Hami, NW China. No white lines in sight.

I have also observed the ancient walled cities in Morocco,  where there are no pavements or kerbs of any kind, all space is shared, and there is just a slow milling mass of animals, humans, motor vehicles, bikes, carts etc. all day. This is Shared Space. But it is also an under-developed country. And again, we don't have their danger statistics. So I doubt how much we can learn from examples like this in the UK. In an advanced industrialised country, we need to prioritise some things over others to meet the twin goals of maintaining both speed and efficiency of communications, and encouraging people to take more environmentally-friendly options where they are practical. We need to consider how best we can do this, and ensure social equality at the same time.

Here's an example which may appear irrelevant, but it shows these relationships in action. When I visited rural areas in eastern USA, I noticed that railway (railroad) lines don't have controlled level crossings with roads, and it doesn't seem to cause disasters. In the UK, level crossings have gates and are controlled by signals. But in the USA, rail services are slow, and most people there prefer to travel by car or by air. My point is that not segregating can be environmentally counter-productive. We in the West cannot in general go back to the kind of "primitive" society I saw in the ancient walled cities of Morrocco, and it is what might be termed "Shared Space romanticism" to think that we could. There are also issues, as my partner Helen would point out, of inclusion for disabled people. She would not enjoy the "primitive" streetscape in her wheelchair, and would not be happy to have our street in Edgware made a "naked road".

Now I have observed examples of Shared Space in continental cities that appeared to work very well. But they have been a particular type of place. They have been the centres of old cities, in locations that are "final destinations" in themselves. Like the market square in Münster, Germany's leading cycling city. This is surrounded by quite an area of Shared Space streets. But the important point here is that this is a destination, not a place of throughput, not a route. And motor traffic is very low here, reduced to essential access, because this is the very epicentre of a city design that has been developed, in recent years, to minimise motor traffic in the centre by the provision of ring-roads to take the traffic elsewhere, by a network of segregated cycle tracks to encourage cycling in the city, and by a road system that makes it very difficult to drive and park in the centre. So the Shared Space of the square only tops-off this regime, so to speak, it doesn't generate its own environment. I would be fearful of this kind of Shared Space just plonked down in the centre of London, on a through-route (as indeed they are trying to do at Exhibition Road, South Kensington).

Shared Space in the market square, Münster, Germany.

Here's another example of a seemingly successful Shared Space street (well, shared-ish, in this case), from the old town in Geneva. Here the cobbles have been carefully done so some semblance of the concept of a pavement and carriageway has been retained, yet so has a "mediaeval" feel, in this very narrow street from which, again, all but essential motor traffic has been excluded. But the same applies here as for Münster. It's the epicentre of a big area that has had a comprehensive stack of measures applied to to eliminating motor traffic. There is plenty of segregated infrastructure, for bikes, trams, cars and pedestrians elsewhere in Geneva. Oh yes, the Swiss are very hot on segregation of the modes in general, on the through-routes.

Shared Space in Geneva old town

Segregated cycle track to the right, and segregated tram track to the left, on a main road in the outskirts of Geneva

It is important to for UK audiences to assess how important, in reality, the Shared Space concept has been in generating cycle cultures in Europe. It has not been at all important. In the October 2007 issue of CTC's Cycle magazine there was an article about the continental, mainly Dutch, cycling experience. It mentions Hans Monderman's concept of Shared Space, but also interviews Martijn Sargentini, bike chief in Amsterdam, a very important person. He says:

I'd never heard of Hans Monderman or "shared space" until all these foreign visitors came here and kept telling me about them. Here in Amsterdam we are very clear – for safety, for speed, to give an advantage to the bike, we aim to separate wherever possible. On some routes we now need broader paths to reduce cycling congestion.

So the ongoing thrust of Dutch cycling policy continues to be the segregation of cyclists from other traffic. No case can be made that the success of any of the major high-cycling cities in Europe has anything significantly to do with Shared Space. And our resident English cycle blogger in The Netherlands, David Hembrow, is none too keen on the examples of Shared Space he has come across:

For me, cycling in places like this is the closest I come in this country to the conditions in cycle unfriendly towns of the UK where cycling is a fringe activity. I find I am happy to be out of it and back on the normal Dutch provision...

In my view, Shared Space is the one real mistake that has been made in the Netherlands. It's not liked by cyclists, and it really doesn't work well for cyclists.

Another point I have noticed about Shared Space is that many of its proponents are pretty vague on what it actually is. In the real world, the rhetoric on Shared Space and Naked Streets leads to three possible physical outcomes, which I will designate here as:

1) Strong Shared Space, 
2) Weak Shared Space, and
3) The Naked Street that is actually no different to what we had before.


1) Strong Shared Space 
This is where all the kerbs have been removed, so there is no pavement. This is what, I believe, we are due to get in Exhibition Road. This is the type that really put the willies up the disabled and the blind.

2) Weak Shared Space
This is where there is a shared cycle path and pavement, and a kerb of some description between that and the road. This is an arrangement guaranteed to annoy pedestrians and to make cyclists opposed to the concept of cycle paths, if there is any significant level of cycle traffic, which, of course, is exactly what we are aiming for as cycle campaigners. As I will show, this is what has been done on part of the Bloomsbury cycle track, and here, on a strategic cycle route, it is A Bad Thing.

3) The Naked Street that is actually no different to what we had before
This is when a certain amount of repaving, putting up of "artistic" street lamp columns designed by students at the local art college, and a little bit of street furniture removal has been performed, but we are left with pedestrians on the pavement and (most) cyclists and cars on the road, with a kerb separating them, as we normally have in the UK. This is a description of the much-hyped Naked Street development of Kensington High Street.

Kensington High Street, courtesy of Wikipedia, photo by Tom Graham. This Naked Street looks to me exactly like the motor-dominated environment we had before

And so, on to Bloomsbury. In 2006 Terry Farrell, the most influential architect in London, and an adviser to Boris Johnson, was commissioned by Camden Council to write a document called Bloomsbury: A Strategic Vision. This, far from being strategic, just proposed a cosmetic revamping of a few streets, some of them in Shared Space style. In the artists' pictures in the report, pedestrians were shown skipping in carefree manner on the roads of Bloomsbury, or enjoying a continental café culture there. But, strangely, there was no mention of how all the through-traffic would be removed from the streets. There was also no recognition of the fact that a strategic, high-use cycle route ran through here, the Seven Stations Link, or LCN Route 0, as I described in my last post.

Typical picture in the Farrell report on Bloomsbury showing the concept of Shared Space: but where's the traffic gone??

The Farrell report recommended destroying the highly-popular segregated cycle track through  Torrington Place, Byng Place, Gordon Square and Tavistock Square, built only 4 years before at great expense, and replacing it all with Shared Space. Worryingly, the case put forward was purely an aesthetic one, just like John Adams' arbitrary aesthetic view of the same track, not one based on safety or on promoting cycling. The cycle track was in fact an irrelevance to Farrells. They hadn't even understood what it was for. And nothing in their plan actually took motor traffic away.

Torrington Place. Farrell's plan was to replace all this with Shared Space, without removing all those cars

As soon as the Farrell plan appeared, it was praised by certain cycle campaigners who had never liked the concept of the segregated Seven Stations Link in the first place. Camden Cycling Campaign (CCC) fought the Farrell plan and largely won, probably because lots of other locals, businesses and groups thought it was daft as well, and objected, and because there was not the money to implement it – though I am not sure it is entirely dead even now. Little of the Farrell plan has been implemented, but one short section of the Seven Stations Link (LCN Route 0), Byng Place, was changed. Farrell's original plan proposed Strong Shared Space here, no kerbs at all, but Weak Shared Space was implemented: the original, clearly demarcated, green asphalt cycle track designed by CCC was removed, and a strange, bleak, puzzling expanse of tiles was put in its place, at a slightly higher level than the cycle track connecting to it at each end. Some benches were placed on this expanse. Similar tiles were used on the roadway, but at a lower level.

This picture shows the green track outside the University of London Union building. This is what Byng Place was like before the makeover (I don't have a photo of Byng Place before the makeover.)

Torrington Place by ULU, looking towards Byng Place

And this shows the new design of Byng Place looking towards Torrington Place, with the strange expanse of paving, and the benches. Notice how pedestrians have an enormous pavement here anyway, and don't need the "expanse". What on earth was the point of this? What has it achieved?

Byng Place Shared Space with Boris Bikers

What it has in fact achieved is confusion. Here are two hapless pedestrians wandering on a strategic, high-volume cycle route.

Pedestrians on Byng Place cycle route

I overheard the conversation of these pedestrians after I took this photo. They had noticed the cyclists zooming past their ears at 15–20mph and were palpably disturbed. "How were we supposed to know this was the cycle path?", one said. "We can see it is green over on that side, and over on that side, but why does it disappear here?" I spoke to them and tried to explain that the cycle track used to be continuous, but that some clever architect had not thought it attractive enough, and had decided to replace it with this grey paving that was designed deliberately to confuse road users and create "good chaos", but I knew what I was saying would make no sense to them. It made no sense to me. Shared Space, I am afraid, makes no sense.

As Easy As Riding A Bike blog has recently reviewed a Shared Space Street in Horsham, Sussex, and also given it a thumbs-down:

By my estimates, pedestrians outnumber vehicles by around 30:1. Yet the two vehicles that drive down the street – albeit reasonably carefully and considerately – completely dominate the environment. There is, ostensibly, an equality between what I dislike calling ‘road users’ in this shared space, but unfortunately some road users are more equal than others. Can we honestly say that East Street is ‘shared’, when the minority mode of use hogs it?

.... Motor vehicles are taking over. They are systematically destroying the pedestrian-friendly furniture. They are increasingly clogging up the street, and making pedestrians more wary of having to deal with ‘traffic.’

One thing I notice in the discussions of the Shared Space proponents is that they are aware of many of the objections that people raise to the concept, the objections you have read here. But there is an apparently emotional attachment to the concept, what I have called Shared Space Romanticism, that leads them constantly to be searching, seeking, for that magical Shared Space solution that will give true Shared Space but without all the downsides. From Reinventing Urban Transport:

Could shared-space design be modified to retain a sense of 'subjective safety' for pedestrians and bicycle users WITHOUT giving motorists too much confidence about their right-of-way? Can the vulnerable street users be given safe havens without prompting motorists to get complacent and assume they will stay within their designated spaces?

Are Dutch-style bicycle paths really not compatible with a shared space? Are protected pedestrian crossings? 

In places that are candidates for shared space treatments, we really want a calm environment that makes people feel very comfortable walking and cycling. We want motorists to proceed with caution and to feel uncertain of their right of way in locations where sharing the streets is important. But we actually DON'T really want vulnerable road users feeling vulnerable or facing uncertainty about their safety.

Can we get such a 'best of both worlds' outcome?

Philosophically, this is very reminiscent of old-style Soviet communism: a romantic attachment to an ideal that could never quite be made to work out properly in the real world, but which kept inspiring adherents to try harder to make reality match the "true, pure theory".

And on the webpage referenced above there are some more good public comments on Shared Space. One of them:

The shared space concept seems to me to be using fear of hitting people as a mechanism for traffic calming. I would rather use trees or other obstacles to calm traffic, rather than a kid in the road.

And another:

I live in Germany. The street I live in has recently been turned into a "shared space" place. It's actually quite appalling. No-one has any idea what to do. It's only about 30 metres and on the boundary of a pedestrian area, so a lot of pedestrians think they're in a mall and can safely walk out into the middle of the road, and then so many people just end up confused and quite probably scared. I hardly think that is the intention of "shared space", scared pedestrians.

A lot of the cars that drive down the street are coming out of a carpark. The street is one-way; they follow the signs to a carpark, and when they leave they have to turn right and go through the unfamiliar shared zone. They're often confused and drive cautiously. Mission accomplished.

Then there's the regulars. Most of them treat it not much differently than they treat the clearly separated road before it. They drive just as fast and in the inimitable style of German drivers leave almost no margin for error. Again, I hardly think this counts as achieving the desired result.

The net result is that pedestrians have to keep out of the way of cars, except that they don't have the confidence of knowing that this particular area is out of the way of cars.

When visiting relatives in Holland, they complained about exactly the same things. It makes pedestrians feel unsafe, it's confusing. How can that be a good thing?

When I heard about the idea, I thought it sounded pretty good. Now I have experienced it, I don't think it has any value at all. There's plenty of better approaches to traffic calming.

Shared Space was invented by Hans Monderman. According to this biography:

Although Monderman has been championed as a traffic engineer who revolutionized the profession by designing streets not just for motorists but for pedestrian and cyclists, he always remained a car-lover who relished tooling around the backroads of Holland in his green Saab.

Whatever "tooling" means...

My final summary of the arguments against Shared Space is as follows:

1. It doesn't achieve the objectives of prioritisation of desirable modes of transport that need to be fulfilled in an industrially advanced but sustainable society and economy; it is historically and technologically naive in believing that desirable outcomes can be achieved just by the removal of infrastructure;

2. It doesn't provide a mechanism or real political movement for challenging the dominance of the car in cities: it is overly theoretical and idealistic, and doesn't address real issues of power and intimidation;

3. It doesn't take into account the views of the vulnerable, such as the frail, blind and disabled; It risks the motorised (or cycleised) intimidation these groups, and others, in its search for the elusive ideal Shared Space environment;

4. It doesn't recognise that many people do not want to have to "negotiate" for space and safe passage: they wish to be protected by infrastructure and by laws;

5. There are no, or few, good, generally-recognised successful examples of shared space;

6. Where there are apparently successful examples, a good case can be made that the success was actually down to there never having been much motor traffic in the first place, or down to motor traffic removal through other measures;

7. There is a lack of good demonstrable examples of Shared Space actually having increased walking or cycling by itself.

The danger of introducing "good chaos" into the street environment is that you introduce, well, just chaos, where the weak lose out. This is the reverse of civilised progress. Chaos is what physicists call Entropy. The Third Law of Thermodynamics says that Entropy always increases. Well, perhaps it increases a little bit more when we have the Shared Space brigade in charge. Me, I would prefer a rational, orderly society, with activities so far as possible occurring on infrastructure designed to take them. Is that too much to ask?