Up and down the A5

The A5 is the road running from Marble Arch in the centre of London to the port of Holyhead in Wales. Much of it is very straight, and identical with the Roman road from London to Wroxeter, known often by its Anglo-Saxon name of Watling Street. When it was completed by Thomas Telford in 1826, as a Government-sponsored project to connect the capitals of England and Ireland, it was, it has been said, the first great state-funded piece of civilian road-building in the UK since Roman times. As one of the oldest roads in Britain, and one of the longest and straightest in a nation of mostly wiggly roads, it has exerted a considerable fascination on all sorts of people down the ages. More or less immediately from 1826 it became identified closely with the migration of Irish people into England in search of work, and the section of the road in London, and adjoining districts, became the settling place of large numbers of them, in the suburbs of Colindale, Hendon, Cricklewood, and especially Kilburn, famous for its concentration of pubs along the Kilburn High Road section of the A5. Down to modern times, the Crown pub in Cricklewood (where Brent Cyclists meets in even-numbered months) was known as the hiring station early in the morning for casual labour, particularly for the building trade, traditionally Irish, but in recent decades more commonly East-European.

The famous Crown in Cricklewood Broadway, today gone quite up-market. John Betjeman praised its "terracotta shade".

From Marble Arch to Edgware, ten-miles to the north-west, the A5 is intermittently known as Edgware Road, interspersed with other designations, reflecting the character of local High Street that the road acquires as it passes through the various communities: Kilburn High Road, Cricklewood Broadway, West Hendon Broadway, Burnt Oak Broadway, Edgware High Street. The late Poet Laureate John Betjeman made a classic documentary in 1968 following the road as far as Edgware, available from the BBC here. It is still worth watching; it catches some of the fascinatingly decrepit, mis-planned character of the A5 lands in London then as now. Much, and also not much, has changed since Betjeman recorded his view of the post-war A5:

It almost makes you like planning, doesn't it, for the lack of it. Look! They've put a car park on the site. They needn't have taken it down at all!

(on the destruction of the Metropolitan Pace of Varieties, a Victorian music hall). He recorded his nostalgic view before the building of the concrete flyovers and gyratories on the A5 at Staples Corner, that destroyed the Old Welsh Harp pub and definitively ended the quasi-rural seclusion of the Brent Reservoir. The sign of the times that he did witness was the then brand-new office block Merit House, Colindale, from the top of which he viewed the vestigial Middlesex countryside. It is still there, a drab, unloved monument to its decade and to "planning" that dumped huge, isolated blocks in the middle of a low-rise decaying industrial suburban hinterland.

The Merit House office block that Betjeman visited in 1968 interrupts the car showrooms on the A5 in Colindale. Opposite is a building site that will soon be high-density housing.

In London, most of the length of the A5 is a local authority boundary. This has been the case since at least mediaeval times; the old parish boundaries were usually taken over as borough boundaries. From the southern end of Kilburn High Road to part of the way along Cricklewood Broadway the road forms the boundary between Camden and Brent. From there north to Burnt Oak it forms the Brent–Barnet border, with the exception of the Welsh Harp "village" area, where Barnet has taken the land on the east bank of the Brent Reservoir, so holding both sides of the A5 in West Hendon Broadway. From Burnt Oak northwards, the road forms the Barnet–Harrow border. This status as a borderland has undoubtedly contributed to the generally shabby, often hostile urban environment of the A5. No planning authority really cares that much about the town centres that have sprung up along the route. Responsibility for them is divided, and a general lack of collaboration and poor planning means they have a neglected, "wild-west" character. This is especially bad for the centres that are divided three ways: Cricklewood, divided one quarter each between Camden and Barnet, and half in Brent, and Burnt Oak, divided one quarter each between Brent and Harrow, and half in Barnet, but it also applies to Kilburn, Colindale and Edgware. The nicest part of the A5 is, I think, not coincidentally, Maida Vale, where Westminster rules both sides. Away from these crumbling Victorian and inter-war shallow linear town centres, the A5 has been the urban territory to which the ugly things that make money and have to be allowed to happen somewhere in London get pushed: the retail sheds, mega car showrooms, every type of automotive servicing works, industrial buildings, waste recycling.

A view of the A5 at Burnt Oak, looking south. This is motorland; nearly every block is occupied by some motor-transport-related business. Note the vast, unused pavements and lack of space for cycling.

For cycling in north-west London, the A5 is a critical artery, as it is the straightest route from all the suburbs along it to the West End, and also, due to severance by railways, bigger roads, and water features, basically the only possible route between those suburbs. As a trunk road, the A5 is completely bypassed by the A41. The A41 is the Transport for London (TfL) main route out of north-west London, and is far more suitable for lorries and coaches than the frequently narrow A5, which goes down to a total width of less than 9m (including pavements) at the pinch-point just south of the junction with Willesden Lane in Kilburn. But, of course, as nothing prevents long-distance through traffic from continuing to use the A5, despite its official "bypassing" by the A41, it is generally clogged with lorries, buses, private cars and delivery vehicles.

Notionally designated as the LCN+ (London Cycle Network Plus) 5 route by ex-Mayor Ken Livingstone's cycling development team, there is absolutely no meaningful cycling infrastructure along the whole length of the road in Greater London (unless you regard the very part-time and discontinuous bus lanes that cyclists can use as "cycling infrastructure"). There are a few blue signs giving mileages, and a few bike logos painted on the road in odd places. I spent a day, with other cycling representatives, some time about 2008, going up and down the A5 with consultants for the LCN+ and council officers, assessing what could be done to make the road better for cycling. None of our suggestions were ever acted upon. The money was wasted, or disappeared, and the project was abandoned. After Boris Johnson announced his replacement Cycle Superhighway programme, it was suggested that Cycle Superhighway 11 should be on the A5, but this was later changed to the A41 (and we still await for it to actually happen there).

Little came of the LCN+5 project on the A5 other than these blue signs. This picture, taken at the Capitol Way / Edgware Road junction, shows the demolition of the Boosey and Hawkes warehouse, opposite, the site now being developed for high-density housing.

The A5 from Edgware to Marble arch remains a long series of left-hook hazards for cyclists, with junctions apparently designed to put them in as much danger as possible. The few of them that use it do so because the Roman engineers and Thomas Telford between them knew what they were doing. They built not only a very straight, but a very flat road though quite a hilly area. All other possible routes from Edgware to the centre of town are not only longer but far hillier. So for cyclists attempting to do this journey, or sections of it, there is little other option. They must trade directness and flatness for the terrible environment.

The "high street" sections of the A5 are classic examples of the kind of chaotic UK street environment where everything is attempted to be fitted in simultaneously: shopping, parking, loading, pedestrian movements, bus stops, cycling, plus heavy through-traffic including freight, and it doesn't work very well.

There was a Street Talks meeting organised by the Movement for Liveable London in April on The roles of place and movement in creating successful high streets  in which one of the contributors, Louise Duggan, of the Greater London Authority, spoke of the conflicts between the "place and movement" functions to be managed in London's high streets. I asked if there should not be, in preference to the permanent toleration of poor public spaces and a continued stream of pedestrain and cyclist casualties, a long-term policy to remove  these conflicts as far as possible. I was thinking of streets like Kilburn High Road and the other"high street" sections of the A5, where local authorities' intermittent attempts to create a better environment always seem to meet a sticky end because they cannot resolve the fundamental conflicts between the arterial, business and social functions of the road. In short, if the road continues to carry masses of heavy traffic, it cannot be a nice place to be. Ms Duggan responded that she did not think it was possible to separate out the functions of roads and streets (so she has obviously a limited knowlege of how they do things in other places), and, even more startlingly, stated that conflict that was one of the things that people liked about cities and attracted them to them. This caused some amusement, or amazement, in the audience.

Kilburn High Road (Google Earth photo) at a quiet time. The cycle logos do a lot of good.

About a year ago I attended a meeting to look at some new plans, the latest in a long sequence I have witnessed over the decades, jointly put forward by Brent and Camden, in yet another attempt to "improve" Kilburn High Road. Yet again it was a proposal to mess about with kerb lines, number of lanes, and junction arrangements, with, in this case, the addition of some kind of median strip in some places. Of course, there was no dedicated space for cycling in the plans, and nothing that would actually reduce the through-traffic. The planners had come up with some curious designations for the road they were dealing with: arbitrary subdivisions of what is actually just a long, continuous slug of two, three and four lane road lined with shops. There was a "northern gateway", a "cultural area" (because there is a well known fringe theatre there, the Tricycle), a "secondary town centre shopping area" , a "primary town centre shopping area", and a "southern gateway". Nobody locally would have recognised these designations, the person drawing the plans had just made them up. I said, well, OK, if this is what we want, let's actually have these separate areas. Let's turn these sections into separate areas of street that traffic, apart from buses and bikes, cannot move between. It could be done with a combination of mode filters and one-way sections and circuits using other streets. We could eliminate the heavy through traffic. Then we could genuinely create these areas with separate character and function. But we can't do that if everything else is over-ruled by the need to have heavy car and lorry traffic thundering through night and day. That is what fixes the character of the High Road, overwhelmingly, and makes these fanciful designations, and attempts to create an improved environment, in the end, a bit of a nonsense.

Needless to say, that suggestion went no-where. The A5 is a big road for through-traffic. That's how it is, and nobody but me could conceive that that could ever be changed, within the bounds of political reality. Strangely, though, some years back, Kilburn High Road was actually completely closed to traffic for about six months (I may remember this wrongly, but it was for a substantial length of time) for reconstruction of the bridge across the West Coast Main Line. And, strangely enough, it became a pleasant, thriving and bustling place at that time (apart from the difficulty pedestrians and dismounted  cyclists had with passing through the narrow gap in the building work that was left for them), and the economy of the area did not collapse. In fact the shops appeared to do well. Most of the time there actually seem to be utility excavations on Kilburn High Road which reduce the number of lanes or cause alternate working using temporary traffic lights. Yet the idea of permanently severing the general through-traffic artery of the A5, and forcing that traffic to use the six lane A41 (which was purposely widened in the 1970s exactly to make it that principal traffic artery through north-west London), seems to be inconceivable.

So we just have an endless succession of minor schemes down the years to tweak a very ugly, and dangerous, borderland environment, that never tackle the central issue: that if we want proper town centres, if we want vibrant commercial districts and good public, social spaces, then most of this traffic cannot remain here. We get tree planting, we get benches, we get weird new lamp columns designed by the art students, we get more bollards, we get railings put in, then railings taken out (according to the fashion at the time), discontinuous, ineffective bus lanes put in, bus lanes taken out again (according to the political fashion of the time), and the environment of the A5 remains as it always has been: noisy, dirty, dangerous, shabby, and unappealing.

Cricklewood Broadway, slightly wider than Kilburn High Road but just as congested and chaotic, with sheep-pen crossing for pedestrians and a mass of railings to prevent them from crossing in wrong places. The railings, however, provide the only available bike parking. Note the roadworks, seemingly ever-present, taking out lanes on the High Road or the Broadway.

Kilburn High Road is too narrow to support separate cycle tracks while maintaining the two-way general traffic flow, but it is a critical section of road which makes the point, that I am always stressing, that we need to sort out the purpose of our city streets. We can't have critical streets which have so many functions in conflict, and putting in the sort of cycling infrastructure that will support mass cycling, in the Dutch sense, requires that we tackle this issue of purpose first of all, determining where the priority cycle network, the priority bus network, and the general traffic network will be, and separating them by route in places where separation on the street is not possible, as in Kilburn High Road.

In Maida Vale it is a different story. The road has excess width, and, since Kilburn High Road is the bottleneck, space here could easily be reallocated to cycling, were the political will to do it present in Westminster Council. General traffic does not need more than one lane in either direction, as it will just come to a grinding halt again on Kilburn high Road, going north, or on Edgware road, going south. Maida Vale and the Westminster Edgware Road suffer, like all roads in Westminster, from a stupid excess of signalised junctions, which make a journey down them, by any mode, extraordinarily inefficient and tedious. The Dutch only use signalised junctions as a last resort; they close far more side-roads off than we do, to restrict and rationalise the through-traffic network and make it more efficient, with fewer delays. Westminster puts traffic lights everywhere, to cause maximum frustration to all road users and create the least efficient surface transport network possible.

Broad and elegant, the long series of traffic light delays known as Maida Vale, City of Westminster

The chaotic character of the A5 so familiar from Kilburn High Road and Cricklewood Broadway, is soon re-established in the southernmost, Westminster section of Edgware Road, between Maida Vale and Marble Arch, where the lack of space to cycle in is compounded by the junction restrictions and one-ways which seem designed to make it almost impossible to access form the A5 areas more pleasant for cycling, such as the Hyde Park cycle paths or the Grand Union Canal. The junction of Edgware Road with the slip roads leading to Marylebone Road and the A40 (at Edgware Road tube) is the biggest hazard for cyclists on this stretch. As I pointed out before, Westminster's proposals for the "Central London Cycle Grid" absurdly try to circumnavigate this problem rather than deal with it.

Looking northwards up Edgware road towards the Marylebone Flyover. No space can be found for cycling here, obviously. The Cycling Grid proposes an impractical "Quietway" detour round the junction.

South of the Marylebone Flyover, we are in the final stretch of the A5, "little Arabia", where the latest hazard I have come across, on top of all the buses, lorries, black cabs and white vans, is the inconsiderately-driven electrically-assisted rickshaws, broadcasting loud Arabic music, darting across the road unpredictably to collect passengers from the next hookah joint, particularly at night. These surprisingly powerful, fast-acellerating vehicles will catch you unawares if you have not experienced them before; you cannot outrun them on a normal bike.

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Five miles to the north-west, the A5 beyond Staples Corner West, the flyover-equipped intersection with the North Circular Road between Cricklewood and Hendon, is a very different kettle of fish again. Frequently very wide, with huge acreages of excess wasted pavement filled with clutter or used for car parking, unnecessarily wide vehicle lanes, and service roads used mainly for even more tiers of parking, it could in most places easily accomodate high-grade Dutch-style cycle tracks, were the road to be totally replanned and rebuilt between the building frontages. The Space for Cycling Campaign asks by Brent, Barnet and Harrow LCC groups for the wards adjoining the A5 are uniformly, and rightly, for protected cycle tracks on the road. But with division of responsibility between the three boroughs, Brent and Harrow Labour-controlled, Barnet Conservative, what chance of such far-reaching change being achieved? It would have to be energetically driven by the Mayor and TfL to have any chance of happening. In fact they would have to take control of the process, and probably take control of the road, to ensure any uniformity of execution. There is nothing in the history of the Cycle Superhighways, TfL's recent attempts at priority cycle routes on main roads, or the Mayor's Vision for Cycling that indicates this might happen. But there is the space; it could be a show-case of what London might achieve for cycling.

Typical character of the A5 north of Staples Corner. Looking south from Burnt Oak Broadway, Merit House is in the distance. Note the huge total width of the road, the chaotic street furniture, wasted pavement space, car showrooms and betting shops (typical occupants of this stretch). This is a section which was prettified by Brent just a couple of year ago, with repaving and more bollards and trees. It's still a wasteland.

Of course, any improvements to cycling either in the northern or southern section of the A5 in London would run into the conundrum of what to do with the motorway-style intersection with the North Circular Road at Staples Corner West, essentially unaltered since it was built in the early 1970s: a junction that makes absolutely no concession to cycling, as the first half of this excellent video by Londonneur tells you.



Bow Roundabout in East London has received huge publicity for its terrible design that has resulted in three cycling deaths on Cycle Superhighway 2. Staples Corner West doesn't get this publicity, though it is a very similar design of intersection, with much the same problems, because there's no cycle superhighway here, nor is there ever likely to be one, and cycling levels are very low, suppressed by the barrier of the North Circular that the video speaks of. There are few casualties, because there are not the cyclists here to get killed and injured. It is so dangerous, cycling is almost non-existent in the suburbs from here outwards. I am statistically certain of this. I often cycle into the West End on the A5, a journey of 10 miles from my house, and I place the game of counting how many other cyclists I see. In the middle of a weekday, it is usually between 12 and 20 cyclists in 10 miles, and some of these will be on pavements. Probably 17 of the 20 will be seen on the five miles of the A5 that I cycle south of Staples Corner. There's no sign of a cycling revolution in these parts, and it's easy to see why.

Pathetic, confused two-tier cycle "infrastructure" on the southbound A5 slip road leading to Stapes Corner West. The A5 flyover is to the left. The North Circular flyover overlies that. But despite being a three-level junction (four if you count the walkways), so space for cycling can be found on any of the levels.

Cyclists have been campaigning for a safe crossing of the North Circular on the A5 at Staples Corner West for at least 30 years. Here is the evidence for that statement, for which I am indebted to Dr Robert Davis, now Chair of the Road Danger Reduction Forum, but at that time representing the West London Division of the British Cycling Federation, now British Cycling.

The letter and map above were sent by Robert Davis to the then Secretary of State for Transport as part of correspondence following the death of Eileen Leane in 1984. She was killed at Staples Corner trying to cycle between her work in Colindale and home in West Hampstead on the only possible route. It is seen that the Department of Transport, which at that time controlled the North Circular Road and the junction (now controlled by TfL), showed no interest, and refused even to attend a meeting at the site. Davis comments:

Essentially we were told to work this out with the Boroughs, and that new crossings (I don't know which ones they meant) across NCR would make things safer for cyclists.

Such new crossings were never built, neither did the boroughs of Brent or Barnet ever do anything. Precisely nothing has been happening here for 30 years. Something is on the cards today,  but it's not what anyone, apart from mega-developers, asked for. Hammerson, owners of the Brent Cross Shopping centre, are pushing for the "regeneration" of a vast area of Cricklewood/Hendon south of the North Circular and east of the A5, connected with plans to enlarge their shopping centre just north of the North Circular. To get as many cars as possible into this without backing-up in large queues on the approaches to Staples Corner, they want TfL to build a huge new gyratory system uniting the Staples Corner East junction (the start of the M1 and intersection of the North Circular with the A41) with Staples Corner West. Those few cyclists who today brave Staples Corner West either cycle illegally on the tortuous pedestrian footbridges, or they use the low-level signalised roundabout that interchanges with the North Circular, or they use the Bow-style flyover on the A5, braving the high-speed merging traffic on the slip roads linking to the roundabout. Most seem to do the latter, as the most efficient option.

Southbound slip-road out of Staples Corner West, looking north. The A5 flyover is to the left, the North Circular flyover crosses over that at the top. The miserable pavement cycle track is part of a very poor east-west LCN route; there are no cycle facilities on the commuting axis of the A5.

As Brent Cyclists have pointed out, the plans to create this mega-gyratory junction at Staples corner will make a terrible situation even worse, and will even further suppress cycling in outer north-west London. The possibility to take the lower-level route on the signalised roundabout when cycling southwards will no longer be present, that route will lead into the mega-gyratory interchanging with the M1, and no other credible method has been thought up by the developers or TfL of getting cyclists from one part of the A5 to the other. It will be "flyover or die" on the A5 flyover... or maybe both. Brent Cyclists wrote to the Development Director Jonathan Joseph earlier this year suggesting some possible solutions to the problem, including signalising a cycle track at surface level through the junction, tunnelling, or new clip-on cycle flyovers attached to the A5 flyover.

Brent Cyclists' concept for a cycle flyover to bypass the slip roads at Staples Corner West, and clip on to the central section of the A5 road flyover. This may not be the best, or a viable solution, but it is a constructive suggestion.

Jonathan Joseph's dismissive reply said the following:

We agree that your second suggested solution of signalling the cyclists through this junction at the lower level would not be viable due to not only the resulting significant delay to other traffic... but also lack of space at this level.

...Segregated flyovers would be less convenient for a longer distance cyclist than simply using the current road flyover. Those cyclist [sic] who are on leisure trips could leave the A5 north of Staples Corner and travel along new north south routes within the Development and re-join the A5 to the south, or vice-versa. So there is likely to be limited use of the new flyover structures which could only be provided at significant cost.  

Perhaps some form of segregation over the flyover could be considered by TfL working with the London Boroughs of Brent and Barnet who share responsibility for this route and the existing road flyover.

Let's leave aside the Develpment Director's complete failure to understand the need for safe and convenient infrastructure to allow ordinary people to use bikes to undertake short utility trips: for a child attending a school in Hendon to cycle there from a home in Cricklewood only two miles away, for example. It's not his job to understand transport. He has people to advise him on that, but, when it comes to cycling, they clearly do a bad job. The main point is that, once again, as for the last 30 years, those campaigning to for safe cycling on the A5 are pushed from one authority to another, from pillar to post, no-one takes responsibility, and nothing is done. In February there was some publicity from an announcement of Boris Johnson promising to "rip out 33 gyratories" including Elephant & Castle and Swiss Cottage. A closer look at the announcement shows that it is not actually a clear commitment to "rip out" anything, merely to "deliver substantial cycle infrastructure improvements at 33 locations", which could turn out to mean anything, or nothing. I'll believe any of it when I see it. "ripping out" the Swiss Cottage gyratory, on the A41, has been talked of for at least 20 years in my memory, but there has never been enough agreement between all interested parties for anything to actually happen. Meanwhile, there has been no publicity for this plan to create a huge new gyratory on the A5, that will further cripple cycling across north-west London.

If cyclists used this new gyratory, they would not only be taking a very convoluted way round, compared to using the direct and almost flat A5 flyover, they would be mixing with traffic getting on and off of the M1 and the six-lane A41 on a multi-lane system that would probably make Elephant & Castle, London's most statistically dangerous junction for cycling,  look tame by comparison. The routes through the new development, mentioned by Joseph, will not work either, as they will involve convoluted ramps to get over the North Circular, they will be very indirect compared to taking the straight line of the A5 that the Romans gave us, and they will have sections mixing cyclists up with pedestrians (yes, these are the cycle infrastructure proposals for a brand new development on brownfield land where many of the roads will be rebuilt from scratch). These alternatives will not work, and cyclists will not use them; I can guarantee you that, from having looked at the plans. Neither TfL, nor the Cycling Commissioner, nor the developers, nor the boroughs, have any credible plan by which ordinary utility cyclists will be able to cycle along the line of the A5 after this development is built. It is appalling.

Following the Brent Cross Cricklewood developers' cycling "alternative" to the A5 would take you far off your desire line for most journeys that currently use the A5, and eventually, after you had surmounted the ramps over the North Circular and all the shared-use obstacles put in your way, would dump you on the unpleasant rat-run of Claremont Road, with its congested junction with Cricklewood Lane. And you'd now be on the wrong side of the Thameslink Line, if you were trying to get to the West End or Kilburn.

Appalling, of course, if Brent Cross Cricklewood is actually built in the way now envisaged. Again, redeveloping this area has been talked of for decades, with no action. The current plans have been "called in" by Eric Pickles, Secretary of State for Local Government, so he has the final say over what happens (though this might not be significant). I've heard talk in the GLA of "re-masterplanning" the area again, so the developers may not get what they expect at the moment. It is quite strange that TfL seem to have been so accepting of the proposals thus far, considering they will not only block cycling, but mess up the bus routes up and down the A5 (a very major bus corridor), by forcing the buses to waste minutes going round this new mega-gyratory as well. It's almost as if TfL haven't really studied the implications of what they are being asked to build. I don't expect anything to happen here in the near future.

What is happening now, however, is a huge expansion of housing on, and close to, the A5 north of Stapes Corner. Colindale and Burt Oak are earmarked in the Mayor's London Plan as major areas where new housing growth is expected, and at the same time much of West Hendon is being rebuilt, and areas of north Cricklewood along the A5 (seemingly unconnected with the "regeneration" plans). Much of the length of the A5 between Colindale and Burnt Oak town centres is currently a building site, and what is being built is huge blocks of flats, on the site of old industrial and warehouse land. This area of London, which previously consisted mainly of areas of semi-detatched housing with large gardens separated by extensive industrial and brownfield areas, is going to have a far higher population density than ever before, and yet the transport infrastructure is not changing. The Northern Line (Edgware Branch), which provides the main service for these areas into town, also known as the "misery line" because of its bad performance, low capacity, slowness, and outdated equipment, surely cannot be improved enough to cope with a greatly increased demand. In any case, it only provides for radial journeys; orbital journeys have to be made by car, bus (very slow) or bike. There seems no chance of trams or light rail coming to North London, following Boris Johnson's cancellation of Ken Livingstone's Kings Cross tram restoration scheme (which was not on this axis anyway), and campaigners have so far fought in vain to get orbital light rail included in the Brent Cross Cricklewood regeneration plans.

Huge new housing blocks currently going up on the A5 between Colindale and Burn Oak town centres: on the left, redevelopment of the former Wickes site, on the right, of the former Boosey and Hawkes warehouse.

Drawing of what's being built on the site to the left of the picture above

How are all these people who are going to move in to the area going to get around? Even more polluting buses on the A5, stuck in the queues? More cars in jams at each signalised intersection? With no meaningful space for cycling planned, despite the obvious wasted space on the A5, and no cycle-friendly junctions, I can't see cycling growing to make any significant contribution. There's a housing plan, but no transport plan to go with it, that I can detect. We are currently building to European inner-city densities here, but without providing European-style transport solutions. The A5, axis of all this redevelopment, remains as grim and shabby as ever, a monument to borderland neglect, split governmental responsibility, market forces short-sightedness, public authority issue-avoidance, community disengagement and mis-planning.

As John Betjeman said 46 years ago,

It almost makes you like planning, doesn't it, for the lack of it.

Broad, shabby, little-used pavement on the A5 in the wasteland between Cricklewood and Staples Corner. Any legal cyclists on the road are squashed into narrow lanes here and passed with inches to spare in quiet times. In busy times they are stuck in queues unless they bunny-hop the kerb. 

Musical chairs are no way to run a railroad

So Justine Greening was Transport Secretary for about five minutes before being replaced with Patrick McLoughlin. I am sure she just about got to understand her brief before being turfed out, aparrently because as a West London MP she was likely to represent the veiws of her constituents, who of course do not want more runways at Heathrow, and it seems to be becoming creeping, unofficial government policy to have more runways at Heathrow.

Much was made, in London cycing circles, when Greening was appointed, of the fact that a photo existed of her on a bike, taken when she was a subject of Wandsworth LCC's Movers and Shakers project to get leading community members on bikes.* Well, much good that did. But I suppose they had to try. As the Cycling Embassy of Great Britain had to try, when it sent her a letter welcoming her to her new portfolio last October, and suggesting, of course, she look at the untapped potenial of cycling in the UK. Now they will have to send a letter to the new man, but I'm sure it won't need to be adjusted much, as little has changed.

It is this kind of administrative insanity, as well as the kind of smaller-scale administrative insanity that I described in my last post, that tends gradually to sap the determination of those who campaign for saner transport policies in the UK. The "churn" of cyclists on the roads is often discussed, but it is linked to another "churn", that of people willing to campaign on the issue, when they see this game of mad musical chairs, when all the effort they had put into trying to convince one policitican of their case is largely thrown away as that politician is propelled elsewhere, or into obscurity, before they have had time to even attempt to change anything in the status quo.

Continually changing the peronnel at the top of government sounds like a recipe for radicalism, for continual shaking-up, but in reality it is quite the reverse. It is a recipe for nothing ever changing, a recipe for mainntaining the status quo in a very conservative country, because nobody who has the power to change anything ever understands properly the things they might change and what the consequences might be while they are in a position to make change, so basically very little does get changed, apart from administrative structures (for the NHS, local government, watchdogs, regulators, the railways etc.) which get changed with wearying frequency. But changing these does not change fundamentals.

Politicians respond to the mood of the media and what they perceive as the populatr zeitgeist, but beyond that, beyond progressing towards any more rational, evidence-based policy making, there is little hope in a system as short-term as ours. For as soon as they realise things might not be as simple as they first thought, hey presto, a new man or woman is in with all the popular prejudices and misunderstandings that have to be corrected once more. I quote a Tweet from railway journalist Keith Barrow:

Germany has had three transport ministers since 2002, so has France. Britain now on No. 8. No wonder transport policy is a mess.

I have no idea what former Chief Whip Patrick McLoughlin's views on transport are. He could be very enlightened for all I know, so I can't criticise him personally. But I can find nothing to say that he has ever taken much interest in the subject, though he was a junior minister for aviation and shipping under Margaret Thatcher for three years 20 years ago.

The last Transport Secretary we had who actually did anything much was Andrew Adonis, who decided to build a high-speed rail line at least as far as Birmingham (welcome to the Europe of the 1970s, Britain), and, to his credit, actually cycled round London trying out the cycle parking at all the mainline stations, condemning it as inadequate, which did lead to some improvements.

Justine Greening made no impact at all. I recall reading an interview with her in The Standard when she was appointed, and people on the greenish side of politics were being quite enthusiastic about her, because she had once been photographed on a bike. But it was obvious from this article that she had no vision for her new post. Her big idea seemed to be flexible use of the M4 Olympic Lane. She joined in the popular campaign against Westminster Council extending parking charges to weekends and evenings, not condemning it outright, but in a mealy-mouthed, coded way (Westminster subsequently dropped the plan). She never condemned nor contradicted the rhetoric of her predecessor, Philip Hammond, on the War on the Motorist. I considered blogging about her, but never bothered. On her watch, plans for large-scale road building revived (though it seems likely that the Chancellor was the main one behind that).

I'm not sure that any Conservative Transport Secretary is likely to do much differently. Most people consider that the big transport issues are Heathrow (or other airports near London), high-speed rail, and motorways, not how our children get to school and housewives (or husbands) get to the shops, and ministers absorb that popular concept. That priority needs to be inverted if we are to get joined-up transport policy making for the long-term social, economic and environmental good. The millions of unnecessary sub-two-mile car journeys should be the top priority for any new Transport Secretary to address.

*Update: I have been informed that that photo was not in fact taken as part of the "Movers and Shakers" project, but on an earlier occasion during a Bike Week treasure hunt on Putney Embankment. This does not alter the thrust of the post though.

Livingstone comes out in favour of a people-friendly Elephant & Castle, and Cross River Tram

Anyone who has seen much of London must know that the Elephant & Castle roundabout is one of the most physically ugly places in London. And anyone who has tried to cycle or walk there must know that it is one of the most profoundly unpleasant places in London to cycle or walk. Mayor Boris Johnson is blocking plans to remodel the Elephant & Castle northern roundabout to make it better from pedestrians, cyclists and the local community generally, and improve the tube station, adding escalators to increase its capacity, because to do so would "interfere with the traffic flow". Traffic meaning "motor traffic", the only kind of transport that TfL, under Johnson's leadership, believes deserves any priority. The needs of motor traffic, in Johnson's London, must take precedence over walking, cycling, and the tube. As Val Shawcross, Labour AM, says:

The Mayor's 'smoothing traffic flow' policy means not taking any road space from traffic at all, even when there is huge demand from pedestrians".

Elephant & Castle gyratory system, one of the very nastiest bits of London (picture from www.london-se1.co.uk)

Now, Ken Livingstone's record on cycling provision when he was Mayor of London was not exactly stellar, his main project being the awkwardly-named, and poorly-conceived, "London Cycle Network Plus", which was actually a retreat in ambition from the earlier London Cycle Network project, and which, lacking strong political support or drive, achieved very little. But Livingstone at least talks the language of localism and people-friendly, rather man motor-dominated, city planning:

If you have a system where the next Elephant & Castle is like the old one – built so that people can belt through in their cars – it's a community that will never really come to life.

What you want is a scheme where people can cross the road and cyclists can go round, so it's not somewhere people pass through and the shopping precinct is just for the poorest people who can't afford to go somewhere better.

You actually want a genuine community, and no-one ever built a community around a miniature Formula 1 track.

Livingstone, in his first term as Mayor, introduced the Congestion Charge, which kick-started the modern expansion of cycling in London. Johnson rolled the Congestion Charge back, abolishing the Western Extension. During Livingstone's first period in office, 2000–2004, the cycling casualty rate on TfL roads fell substantially. The most likely reason for this is the expansion of the bus lanes on TfL roads at this time. Since then, there have been no further improvements. Johnson, with conservative councils such as Barnet and Westminster, has been cutting the bus lanes back, and, where they remain, allowing motor cycles into them.

Livingstone proposed linking Camden Town and Brixton with the Cross River Tram, which would have brought this most progressive and intelligent form of mass surface transport back to London for the first time in over 50 years. One of Johnson's first acts as Mayor was to cancel the tram, wasting the millions of pounds that had already gone into its planning. Livingstone has committed to re-instating the tram project.

In 2008, after he was elected, Johnson produced a policy document called Way to Go!: Planning for better transport. It was clearly written by him personally; it was written in his "inimitable" style (which in fact is highly imitable, if you have seen Jon Culshaw). It talked in glowing terms of advantages and possibilities of the bike, borrowing an LCC slogan, "the cycle-ised city is the civilised city". But not everybody at the time was taken in. In this document, after describing, in glowing terms, the environmental transport achievements of the Livingstone era, Johnson stated,

The question now is not how to demolish that policy, but how to develop and improve it.

I remember that Oliver Schick, of LCC and Hackney Cyclists, commented at the time that this was a bizairre choice of phrasing. For, asked Schick, why would he put it like that, if "demolishing that policy" not exactly what Johnson was thinking of doing?

This was a perspicacious observation. For "demolishing that policy" is precisely what Johnson has done. He has replaced it with the car-centric policy of "smoothing the flow" and the equally car-centric TfL Network Operating Strategy that is currently up for consultation.

Johnson's only cycling achievement has been the launching of the Barclays Hire Bikes, which was supposed to generate 60,000 trips per day, but has only generated 25,000 in reality, and was, in any case, a project that was started by Livingstone. I do not count the dismally failed Cycle Superhighways a cycling "achievement".

Perhaps it was inevitable that Johnson would never be able to understand the argument for proper cycle infrastructure, for as he said, in Way to Go!,

I love my bike, and in the moments when it is not raining in London – 94 per cent of the time – I simply can't understand why people would want to use any other method of transport.

If he is the type of cyclist who "simply can't understand why people would want to use any other method of transport" – and there are a few more of those who responded to my post Cycling is dangerous – then he is the type who can't understand why most other people would need a revolution in conditions on the roads in order to persuade them to cycle. Livingstone is not a cyclist, he is a public transport fan. Nevertheless he does seem to have some grasp of what the problems are with cycling on London's roads at the moment, that prevent 98.5% of the population from doing it.

You could respond to TfL's consultation on its Network Operating Strategy. The deadline is tomorrow, Friday, and the Cycle of Futility blog has an excellent "crib sheet" on what is wrong with the strategy (short answer: everything) and suggestions on how to respond. I can't help thinking, though that such consultations are pretty much bureaucratic paper exercises, done because the law says they must be done, which don't much affect what happens. For what happens on the streets of London in the future will be politically directed, by the Mayor, whoever he is, and it is the views and policies of the mayor, not the bureaucrats' Operating Strategy, that will determine whether we get a filthy, noisy and dangerous city designed primarily for motorists, or a safer, cleaner, more pleasant one one that balances up the needs of all citizens more fairly. I can't help thinking, therefore, that those who care about these issues might better spend their time, rather than responding to probably irrelevant consultations, in starting to work to ensure that someone other than the present incumbent is returned at the mayoral election in May 2012.

Conflicts of interest and conflicts of policy

Recently I spoke to someone who I thought might be in the LCC. The person in question confirmed that they had been in the LCC, but, since they were now working as a transport planner for a London borough, had left, as it could be construed as a "conflict of interest". I have been turning this small point over in my mind. The borough in question has a policy to increase cycling. Explicitly, it's in their transport plan. LCC's objective is to increase cycling. So how can there be a conflict of interest? Where can the conflict arise? Would it be a "conflict of interest" for a local authority transport planner to be a member of the AA, or of the CTC, or of Living Streets, the pedestrians' lobby group, or a public transport users' group, or, indeed, a local residents' association? If a transport planner is working for a council that is actually trying to make things better for cyclists and boost cycling, doesn't it positively make sense for them to be in an organisation where they will get a better idea of what cyclists are saying and demanding? Does it necessarily alter their professional objectivity and independence? They could, after all, be reading all the cycling blogs, like this one, which nobody would know they were doing, and which, in general, reflect more strident views than LCC does. There is something odd about this, but I can't quite pin it down.

Quite disconnectedly, I came across a section of The Guardian for Wednesday (I didn't buy it). This is 4  broadsheet pages devoted to the question of "What can the UK do about growing traffic congestion?" "Produced in association with TomTom" (suppliers of traffic information/satnav systems), and containing a half-page ad for them, plus numerous mentions in the text, this supplement contained not one mention of cycling or walking, and few of public transport. Surprise, surprise, the methods of dealing with congestion that were being focussed on were, apart from the suggestion of road pricing, all concerned with high-tech traffic information management  using the kind of technology TomTom supplies. And the focus of the road-pricing discussions were not really on reducing motor traffic, but rather, on using pricing as a mechanism to distribute it more efficiently.

In this supplement is a column written by Conservative transport minister Mike Penning. He writes:

The government recognises the importance of addressing the environmental impact of road use. But, rather than drive the motorist out of the car, we want to drive the carbon out of the car. We are making that areality with measures to support the purchase and use of ultra-low carbon vehicles, like our Plug-in Car grant and Plugged-in Places scheme.

So, there you have it. The government does not have a policy to "drive the motorist out of the car". Which I presume means they have no policy to reduce car use. It doesn't mean they have a policy to increase car use, or to allow car use to increase, but one would have to ask the minister about that. Clearly no policy to reduce car use, only to de-carbonise the car. I am sure I don't have to explain to anybody who knows any science at all what the problem is here: that, if he is talking about electric vehicles, as he seems to be, the carbon issue is not dealt with, but merely transferred back to the power station stage. So unless a huge increase in nuclear generation is being proposed, and I haven't heard the government saying that since Fukushima, how does this help with CO2? It doesn't, but nevertheless the we are heading for a huge expenditure (I don't use the word investment) in on-street electric vehicle charging points: money that could have been used to provide safe cycle infrastructure.

Penning's background, according to Wikipedia, is in the army, as a firefighter, in business, and in political journalism. So not a scientist, then. He was in the past associated with the far-right anti-EU Tories who had the whip taken away by John Major. So, also, not a person likely to be influenced by how they sort transport in continental Europe.

I have long believed it a serious problem with Britain's democracy in this science and technology dominated world, where a fair level of scientific understanding is necessary to appreciate many of the most important issues, pre-eminently, global warming, that so many of our MPs are drawn from the professions of the law and journalism, and so few are scientists or have degree-level scientific training. Anyway, whenever you hear this government make any pronouncements on the environment, transport, cycling, or walking, bear this key fact in mind: they have no policy to reduce car use.

Conflicts of interest, conflicts of policy. As Enrique Peñalosa, former Mayor of Bogotá, said in a talk recently in London,  "Choosing between a city friendly to people or a city friendly to cars is a conflict". Perhaps what's wrong in the case of the person who feels there is a conflict between membership of a cycling organisation and being a publicly-employed transport planner, is that it really is a conflict, because the government really doesn't believe in reducing the role of the car in our country – and that leaves no room increasing the role of the bike.

French affairs

Having just visited Geneva by train, I have passed through Paris. There is much more to say about cycling and public transport in Geneva, which is very interesting, and less well-known to UK audiences, so more on that later, but for now some brief observations on Paris.

When I first visited Paris in the early 1990s, there was little cycling there, comparable to London at the same time. Then came a certain amount of segregated infrastructure, mostly created with the aid of strips of rubber bumps in the road to semi-segregate the space, later came some better segregated tracks, and in 2001 the Velo scheme, which I saw the very beginnings of, at a time when something similar was first being mooted for London. I noted at the time that the Paris hire stations had often been located to take advantage of the segregated tracks, of which there were far more than there were (or are) in London, and that this was a significant factor in their success as I observed it. Nobody else discussing the subject in the UK seemed to be aware of this factor. I more recently wondered whether the London scheme would succeed by comparison, both on the grounds of lack of infrastructure, and the demographic differences between central London and central Paris, central Paris being far more residential.

It seems that my caution was too great, to the extent that the London hire scheme does seem to be succeeding to some extent on its own terms, though TfL are desperately talking it up all the time and not talking about the fact that it has never achieved the number of trips that was anticipated for it.

I last visited Paris in 2009, and was struck buy the way cycling had taken off there, some years down the line from the commencement of the velos. This seemed to be despite the fact that the city remained basically cycle-unfriendly, with little space for bikes, high traffic volumes and speeds, a lack of infrastructure, compared with the conspicuously cycle-friendly north European cities, and a preponderance of one-way streets from which cycles were generally not excepted, thus making for round-about journeys. At that time, Paris seemed to have pulled significantly ahead of pre-Borisbike London in cycling terms.

Visiting Paris, albeit briefly, again now, my subjective opinion was that cycling in Paris has not advanced over the last few years. It seems to have flatlined. The fashion for the rubber studs seems to have gone and some or all of these semi-segregated tracks have been removed. The have not been replaced with anything better, and nothing substantially new has been introduced to improve the attractiveness of cycling. In other words, the gains that accompanied the introduction of the velos have not been sustained because there has not been an aggressive programme of continual improvement of the cycling environment. The gains from the hire scheme have run their course.

Chaotic streets scene at Paris's Gare du Nord: could be London's kings Cross, Paddinigton, etc. etc. Quality space could be made for cyclists here, but hasn't been, and there are no cyclists to be seen

This is undoubtedly what we will see in London without a significant change of policy from TfL and the government (which looks unlikely). With the current failure to invest in serious improvements to the cycle environment and infrastructure, symbolised by the senseless Cycle Superhighway concept and the even more senseless Biking Boroughs, coupled with Boris’s dual mad ideas of “treating all modes equally” and “smoothing the flow”, which both amount to de-prioritising walking and cycling, we will see, at most, another year of increasing cycle use, with the introduction of casual usage of the Boris Bikes, and then we will see cycling in London flatline at below a 2% modal share. London needs to learn from places where cycling and walking policy is working, such as Copenhagen, Münster and Geneva, not from places where it is not, such as Paris and New York, easier though it may be to relate, conceptually, these cities to London.

On the public transport front, Paris clearly leads London. They have had the investment over the long term that London has not. I saw from this poster in the RER (urban and suburban rapid transit trains) that they are now having a public debate on new orbital suburban rail lines for the Paris region. 

Poster advertising public debate in Paris on new suburban rail options

Orbital suburban rail is the most yawning gap in London's transport network, particularly north of the Thames. The last orbital rail lines to be built in central and North London were the Circle Line of the Underground, and the North London Line (now branded as part of the London Overground), both completed before 1910. Obviously, London has expanded hugely since 1910, and both these orbital lines are now much too far inside the metropolis to be considered "suburban" links. Bizarrely, the rail network of North London has in fact not changed significantly since the suburban Underground lines were completed, before 1940. Since then, the outer London suburbs have been excellently connected to the centre, but disconnected from each other, the only public transport between them being the buses. The excellent London branch of the Campaign for Better Transport (the charity previously known as "Transport 2000") has come up with a well thought-through idea for a North and West London Light Railway, but neither TfL nor the DfT has shown much interest in it, which is sad. The failure to create serious public transport infrastructure in the outer London suburbs serving modern needs, which are as often for orbital journeys as radial ones, particularly north of the Thames (south Londoners at least have the London Tramlink) is a significant contributory factor to London's environment falling behind that of its peer cities in Europe. While the massively expensive Crossrail project trundles on, to be completed – when? – I haven't the slightest idea, London's first attempt at the concept of putting full-size trains underground for a long distance (and it only essentially duplicates the Central Line of the Underground with more capacity), Paris has had lines A and B of the RER since 1977, and line E, the fifth line, was opened in 1999.

Line D of the RER at Gard du Lyon: double-deck underground train: London has nothing to match the spectacular scale of the engineering of the RER

On a lighter note, on my journey back to England, I noticed that Eurostar’s free magazine, called Metropolitan, is advertising the World Naked Bike Ride under What’s on in London (perhaps it shoud be what’s not on.). They translate “in your birthday suit” as en tenue d’Adam ou d’Ève. In a sensible mention, they point out the serious purpose of the event, to highlight cyclists’ vulnerability on the roads. No equivalent event in Paris is mentioned. (I note that the London WNBR this year has the semi-official stamp of "Team Green Britain". Does that mean we will be seeing the Transport Secretary of the Climate Chage Secretary on it? Probably not.)

As one speeds through northern France, towards the tunnel, the flat landscape is dominated by electricity pylons: a transmission grid probably taking part of France's nuclear-generated electricity to England; since Mrs Thatcher's privatisation of our electricity supply, the French state company EDF (Electricité de France) seems to have taken over a large share of our supply. As one emerges from the tunnel in Kent, the landscape is dominated by huge multi-layered barricades of steel fencing around the tracks, built to keep illegal immigrants out. France – a nation of transmission; England – a nation of barricades.

No cycling in lift

My partner Helen captured this on her phone in a lift in Coventry station. The sign in the middle says "Riding of Cycles Prohibited". Cyclists here in the UK are used to encountering "No Cycling" signs everywhere, but this really takes the biscuit. If you are not allowed to cycle in a lift, where are you allowed to??!

It reminds me of the developers of the Brent Cross Cricklewood Development who, in early discussions with Brent Cyclists and others, proposed the idea of a cycle route through their site that would be linked to the road (the A5) via a lift. The general ridicule which ensued from this cased them to back down and propose a spiral ramp (another poor solution). But that they could even conceive of such a thing shows how unbelievably far from understanding utility cycling many of the most powerful people in Britain are.

Then this also puts me in mind of Boris Johnson's ludicrous Thames cablecar project, that, unbelievably, looks as if it might really be built (I'll believe it when I see it). This has been well-critiqued here. Boris finds it too difficult to get the tubes to work well (they operated without problems on all lines for only one day last year), or to build cycle highways that bear the slightest relation to that name or are of the slightest use, but thinks it is a good idea to spend more money than it would take to fix these problems on a techno-folly on an epic scale that will do nothing for the basic transport needs of Londoners. Unfortunately it looks as though construction will be started this year, so it would be too late for Ken Livingstone to stop it, were he to be re-elected in 2012.

Cycle campaigning moving up a gear – flashmob and the Cycling Embassy

It has been an interesting couple of days in cycle campaigning for me, having attended two unique events.

The first, on Friday, was the "Flashmob" protest at Blackfriars Bridge. Accounts of this event have been published on ibikelondon, Dave Hill's Guardian blog, and Cycalogical.

In what may be a significant change of tactics, London Cycling Campaign organised this quick-response protest against the intransigence of Transport for London's highway engineers, who seem determined, under Boris Johnson's direction, to make life worse for everybody who walks and cycles in London. The issue has come to a head in repeated attempts to re-design Blackfriars Bridge and the junctions at either end of it. A temporary scheme, corresponding to the redevelopment of Blackfriars Station, has been in place recently, with a 20mph limit on the bridge. Cyclists have now become the majority of the traffic on the bridge in peak hours. TfL's proposed redesign takes the speed limit back up to 30mph, gives cyclists paltry 1.5m painted cycle lanes, and makes the right turn towards the City at the north end very difficult, amongst numerous other backward steps for non-motorised road-users. The issue has been treated extensively here.

The London Cycling Campaign has previously adopted an extremely conciliatory, kitten-like attitude to the Johnson administration, which has been systematically making London's roads worse places to walk of cycle, with its policy of "smoothing the flow" (of motor vehicles) and generally bowing to the motoring lobby. This is despite Johnson being a cyclist, and introducing the Hire Bikes (which were an idea of the previous mayor). Johnson's flagship cycling policies, the inaptly-named Cycle Superhighways and the Biking Boroughs, are both scandalous, confused and mis-conceived wastes of public money.

A young participant on the flashmob ride: emphasising the demand for London's streets to be made safe places for all to cycle

Pushed, I rather suspect, buy the harder attitude of some of the cycling bloggers mentioned here, LCC on this occasion, for the first time, exploited both its own channels and social networking ones to mobilise cyclists for a one-off street protest. Cyclists took up a whole carriageway and cycled at snail's pace across the bridge and back before a brief demo at TfL's HQ Palestra House on the south side. The event was not unlike the long-standing Critical Mass rides that occur once per month in London and similarly obstruct normal traffic flow, but this was an obstruction with a more specific purpose.

In my opinion, LCC, despite being quite clear about what it does not want in places like Blackfriars, is still a bit ambiguous about what it does want on busy roads like this, and this is not helping its campaigning. I don't think the focus on the 20mph limit ("Keep it twenty" was a chant head at the flashmob) is the right one. Even with low speeds, large volumes of aggressive motor traffic tend to push cyclists out unless they have protected space. I don't understand why the first chap interviewed in the video on Dave Hill's Guardian blog (who is not a spokesman for LCC, but an independent blogger) pointedly avoids endorsing the interviewer's suggestion of "segregated lanes for cyclists", preferring the vague formulation "space for cyclists". Space for cyclists needs physically protecting if it is to have the level of subjective safety necessary to attract more of the type of traffic shown in my photo, whether the limit is 20 or 30. Generous segregated cycle lanes (more correctly termed "cycle tracks") are exactly what this bridge would have in any city in The Netherlands or Denmark, and in many other cycle-friendly cities in Europe.

Continuing this theme, on Saturday I attended the second meeting (and the first outside London) of the newly-formed Cycling Embassy of Great Britain (CEoGB). This curiously-named embryo association of like-minded people is the start of something I have long believed we needed in the UK: a national campaign for high-quality, effective cycle infrastructure.


Now we do have many national organisations that advocate for cycling already in the UK, such as the CTC, Sustrans, British Cycling, and the Cycle Campaign Network, also known as Cyclenation, as well as LCC, which, despite being "local", is large enough to have a national influence, so why the need for another one? Basically, because none of these have ever campaigned consistently for what we really need to achieve high cycling levels in the UK: high-quality cycle infrastructure. That cycling will never move beyond its current totally marginal position in the UK transport landscape without serious engineering measures to facilitate it, separating it from the fast and heavy motor traffic that intimidates most potential cyclists off the roads, is utterly obvious to me, but seemingly not to most who have made policy in these organisations in the past. A new organisation is necessary because these organisations have failed to perform this vital function over a long period (more than 120 years in the case of the CTC), and they probably will not start to do so without some external pressure. In trying to represented the interests of their members, who are, broadly, touring cyclists in the CTC, sports cyclists in British Cycling, and commuters in the LCC, these organisations have lamentably failed to capitalise on the potential for utility cycling to be made mainstream in the UK with the right conditions.


The CEoGB is to be a group:

free from the burden of history, legacy and ties, created to work in partnership with fellow organisations and charities in Great Britain, mainland Europe and around the world trading ideas and experiences in how to promote cycling and make cycling infrastructure work in urban and rural contexts

Its purpose is to research internationally-proven, effective cycling solutions and lobby for them to be introduced in the UK. It has to be a campaign at a national level, because efforts to improve cycling conditions at a local level in Britain are so often stymied by inappropriate national traffic standards, laws and regulations that are ill-adapted to creating an attractive cycling environment. The CEoGB's focus will be, distinctively, on high-quality infrastructure as the key to achieving increases in cycling, not on training, regulation, and behaviour-change, the areas that have been favoured by previous cycle campaigns. The failure of these campaigns is sufficiently indicated by the modal share that cycling has in all journeys made in the UK today: about 1%, compared to 30–40% for the highest cycling countries.

The CEoGB started as ideas on the web, and in blogs. These ideas are not new. Many of them were propounded in Camden Cycling Campaign (CCC) when I was involved with it in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The CCC at that time successfully campaigned for some of the best cycle infrastructure ever introduced in London, but political will ran out and, stymied by the local administrative disconnects in London, it was not extended far enough to make a great difference. The CEoGB has now come off the web and is a real pressure group, a determined group of intelligent and informed people. It seeks not to supplant any existing cycle campaigns or organisations, but to add something new and essential to the cycling landscape. I think it represents an idea whose time has come.

"Ambassadors" from the CEoGB gather at Manchester Piccadilly on Saturday before exploring the local cycle facilities