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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

· The Outer Circle can accommodate all road users. 

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

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

· No account has been taken of HS2. 

· Closing the park gates is a step too far.

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

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

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

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

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

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

*She may not really be called that.

Taking the lane: a personal history

This post will not be the one that you thought it would be from the title. The title was suggested to me by a tweet from @AlternativeDfT whose inspiration I hereby acknowledge. Here is is:

THIS is what real "taking the lane" looks like, not some temporary mirage dependent on a driver's temperament. Taken for good!

He's referring to this picture of the very first cyclists to use the East-West Cycle Superhighway currently under construction on the Thames Embankment in London.

Picture by @beagleldn

I was originally going write a kind of review post called  Reflections on reaching 500,000, marking the half million page views of this blog, but we have gone a bit beyond that now. I have not had time to comment on many of the recent developments on cycling in London, but I thought I would try to summarise the state of play now as I see it, how far we have come, how we got there, and where we are going: a big task, necessitating an unusually long post. The account will be, of necessity, quite personal. The quote from @AlternativeDfT contains, of course, an ironic reference to the technique of 'vehicular cycling' as taught in various manuals, but that won't actually concern me here. The picture of the East-West Superhighway in action at last, combined with @AlternativeDfT's concept of Taking the lane – for good rather summarises all I have been trying to achieve in over 20 years of cycle campaigning in London, hence the title. This blogpost is a kind of summary of the whole blog so far, over five years.

Camden experiments and the early London Cycle Network
My main campaigning objective, as you will probably know if you have read earlier posts, has always been to get London to build a world-class network of segregated and largely-car free cycle infrastructure that will enable mass utility cycling. I became convinced that this was the correct direction in which to go in the late 1990s, mostly through discussions with Paul Gannon in the Camden Cycling Campaign, a branch of London Cycling Campaign.

Our successes in CCC in that period were the construction of the Royal College Street segregated cycle track (the first one), and the east-west cycle track through Bloomsbury, as I have described before. These were early examples of taking the lane, in the sense of my (@AlternativeDfT's) title. We got Camden council to remove lanes dedicated to motor traffic on the road, and just give them to cyclists. This was a big step forward from previous London Cycle Network concepts of painting lanes on the road that drivers could still physically drive on and park in, or confusingly painting cycle symbols on largely unadjusted bits of pavement, which was, and tragically, still remains, one of the government's (the Department for Transport's) main recommendations to local authorities for cycle infrastructure.

The original Royal College Street cycle track in Camden, photographed soon after it was built in 2000

I authored a piece in the LCC magazine, London Cyclist, with Paul Gannon, published in the October 2002 edition (you can read it here), in which we went through the whole argument about the need for high-quality segregated cycle routes to change the reality and perception of safety of cycling in London and readjust the demographic balance of cyclists to make it more like that found in the Netherlands and Scandinavian countries in order to make high levels of utility cycling (which I would define as a modal share of all trips above 10%) a practical possibility. We used graphs, figures and international comparisons, and we showed pictures of good and bad segregated cycling schemes in London, pointing out the errors that cause failure of some schemes. We also discussed the need for more and better training of cyclists, that would need to take into account the skills required for using a proper cycle network in a city of mass cycling (not just teach cyclists how to defend themselves against drivers on the roads), and the need for changes to the UK legal framework to balance it more in favour of the rights of vulnerable road users. But we were rather clear that the most productive thing campaigners could do at that moment was to campaign for more high-quality segregated cycle tracks on the roads. The key to the problem was taking the lane.

This was all pretty revolutionary stuff at the time; though not novel – other authors, notably academics like John Parkin, had written similar things before, but it was unusual find these ideas advocated in grass-roots cycle campaigning at that time, I don't think any other article had every been published on similar lines in London Cyclist (which had been published since the 1980s), and such view were very widely attacked by other campaigners. Nevertheless, it was all an extension of other developments that had already been occurring: some moves, from as early as the1980s, to establish a London Cycle Network that would, as David Hembrow would now say, unravel cycle journeys from busy motor routes in London. We can see some of these early attempts in a classic film now on YouTube: GLC Cycling for London from 1984 shows examples of cycle crossings of main roads, no-entries with exceptions for bikes and other early attempts to allow cyclists to thread a path through relatively traffic-free minor roads that was not possible for motor vehicles. Interestingly, many of these facilities still exist today, virtually unaltered, including the so-calle Ambassadors Route, which is shown. It has long ceased to be known by that name, but still runs from Albert Gate in Hyde Park to Chelsea Bridge.



These early network attempts were pretty limited because they tended to run out of ideas in the many places in London where main routes could not be avoided, particularly on and approaching crossings of the Thames and other barriers, they did not deal with major junctions very much nor physically reallocate any space on crucial main roads, they were built to low capacity standards, and they were sparse, soon exhausting the practical possibilities for running useful cycle routes entirely on the network of back-streets. Nevertheless, by the early 2000s, despite the slowdown in building them caused by the abolition of the Greater London Council (which produced the film), but because of the persistence of local campaigners, like us in CCC, trying to improve standards and ambition from the various borough councils that took over responsibility for the cycle network from the GLC, they had certainly made an impact. Cycling in London was on the rise, reversing the downward trend of the post-war period up to the 1980s, and in the same issue of London Cyclist that I already mentioned, October 2002, in which Paul's and my article appeared, we find this letter to the editor, which I urge you to read in full.

Well, perhaps it's a bit overstated, but I find this quite moving, coming as it does in the same issue in which Paul and I laid out the rationale of the segregated tracks we had been developing, and which Mike Aitken had already discovered and been so pleased by, and to me it's an important piece of evidence as well. It coincides with my view that the beginnings of a cycle network that had been developed in London by 2002 were actually effective in promoting journeys by bike, particularly in central London – even poor cycle facilities do have some positive effect – and it opposes the view that I have often heard stated, particularly by Roger Geffen, policy officer for CTC, that the moderm upsurge in cycling in London was independent of any provision, and particularly occurred without the provision of segregated space. I hold it did not. Segregated space and almost car-free space as part of the network was developed from the 1980s onwards, mostly by allowing cycling in the parks, on bits of embankment and towpaths, by providing cycle-specific connections which allowed these spaces to be utilised and accessed from the road network, and by means of minor road routes facilitated by the types of means shown in the GLA video and referred to in the letter.

This, remember, was the period before the congestion charge, and a period when Inner London was still depopulating, and an increase in cycling could not be attributed to increasing population density. Counts of cycles on screen lines provide the most accurate figures for cycling, and the data shows that cycling into central London was on a clear upward trend from the mid 1990s, and into inner London, increasing from 2002. The early, poor London Cycle Network did actually, to an extent, work, and our work in adding into it the first substantial, properly segregated on-road routes in Camden (which got extended a bit into Islington as well, but sadly not Westminster) enhanced it considerably, though only very locally, so you would be lucky to find yourself, like Mike Aitken, in the position where the new routes helped your commute.

I went into, in my earlier article, why the Bloomsbury route never achieved its potential, as it was compromised and mis-constructed into a space half the desired size. Basically, in this period, few politicians, and perhaps even fewer cycle campaigners, believed there was actually any demand for cycle routes like this. There was a belief that they would not be used much, and certainly they would not fill up. Paul and I were not surprised, but virtually everyone else was, that the Bloomsbury route was full to capacity from the day it opened, and remains so today.

We fondly hoped that such immediate success, and particularly with a route in quite an 'iconic' location, known to many Londoners, by the University of London and Dillons (now Waterstones) University Bookshop, the concept would rapidly spread, and other boroughs would build similar routes. But things are never quite as simple or as easy as this. Lack of borough resources no doubt played a part, in the era before the GLA and TfL were established, and lack of coordination between the boroughs and relevant leadership within them, but certainly a factor was the continued division amongst cyclists, within the LCC and CTC, and local groups, as to the in principle desirability of segregating cyclists from motor traffic. To say this today will sound strange to many, but the poor quality of information available at that time, in this largely pre-internet age, and climate of misinformation, spread by the likes of the American author John Forester, and his UK equivalent John Franklin, about the nature and results of segregated cycling systems across the world, which was widely manifested in what Paul Gannon has described as a counter-evidential 'campaigners' groupthink' within cycling organisations, where you wouldn't really be accepted socially unless you toed a certain philosophical line – the integrationist, pro vehicular cycling line according to the gospel of Frankin and Forester – resulted in it being very difficult for those cyclists (probably always a quiet majority), who felt instinctively that what the wide public really needed and wanted was to be able to cycle in a motor-free environment, to express that view wihout being shouted down, demeaned, or told they were ignorant of all the 'facts' and 'research'.

A period of stasis and ineffective campaigning
So history moved on. Tony Blair gave London a government again in 2000, and Ken Livingstone, previously leader of the Greater London Council, which had begun the London cycle Network in the 1980s, became Mayor. But Livingstone, a non-cyclist and bus enthusiast, never understood cycling, and his re-warmed cycling programme, called LCN+, soon ran into the sand, not being not based on the type of understanding we had been trying to promote in Camden for the need for demographically inclusive cycle facilities, nor backed by the political will to tackle the difficult places, the big, unavoidable roads and junctions, ther Niagaras and vortexes, in Mike Aitken's terms, that remained huge barriers everywhere, in places like Elephant and Castle, Swiss Cottage, Kings Cross, Bank and Bow. The concept in LCN+ was still one of basically trying to connect up backstreets, but, as I said, the easy possibilities for this had really been exhausted already in the first LCN building phase. Far more significant were other things that happened in this period: the introduction of the Central London congestion charge in 2003 caused a massive transfer of private car journeys directly to the bike, as the graph above shows. Ken's enthusiastic extension of the bus lanes (shared with cyclists) no doubt helped a bit for cycle commuters travelling at peak hours when the lanes were in operation and free from parked cars (though junctions remained dangerous). The 7 July 2005 bombings of the tube and bus network also seemed to cause some people to start cycling as a permanent lifestyle change, and the changing demographics of London, with an inflight to the inner city, reversing decades of exodus, probably enhanced the trend.

It was clear by the end of Ken's period in office, 2008, that a change of direction was needed if any cycle growth momentum was to be sustained, and the new Mayor, Boris Johnson, who was a cyclist, proposed the Cycle Superhighway project to replace an abandoned LCN+: a 'network' or twelve radial routes into central London from the suburbs, mostly on major roads controlled by the Mayor's transport organisation, TfL, not by the boroughs. I put the word 'network' in quotes, as it was not a network, the routes failing to link up in the centre. Moreover, the whole conception of the routes was, as I commented at the time, 'calamitously inadequate to the task', with little segregation, routes largely using busy bus lanes, and parked on much of the time, and lethal junctions. (Literally lethal junctions, as people soon started to get killed on Superhighway 2). Unfortunately the LCC went through a period, at this time, of ineffectual campaigning and weak leadership, with a chief executive, Koy Thomson, who believed in not criticising the authorities too much for fear of being excluded from influence and negotiations, and having no desire to take the membership on to the streets and protest, or otherwise be seen to be 'too militant'. 

The defective design of the Cycle Superhighway at Bow that resulted in three deaths

There was also the issue in the background that LCC, and even more so CTC, had never grappled with the segregation issue. They did not really know what they wanted as organisations, in terms of policy for accommodating cyclists in the transport network, at a very fundamental level, so couldn't argue for any coherent alternative to mis-concepts like the first generation cycle superhighways. There was a fear of confronting the division that existed, which resulted in a kind of paralysis. Also, there was the concept of not 'dangerising' cycling, which was highly prevalent, and generally corresponded with an anti-segregation stance. We couldn't campaign for safe facilities because we couldn't talk about the danger that existed, for fear of putting off new cyclists, which was believed to be counterproductive, since it was felt that there was 'safety in numbers' rather than in properly-designed infrastructure. These beliefs came very directly out of the Franklin-Forester 'religion'. I've taken on this belief-system in this blog several times, and a nice recent article by As EasyAs Riding A Bike does a good job (again) of demolishing this nonsense. But at one stage in Koy Thomson's LCC, campaigners were actually told not 'to use the D word' in their public pronouncements!

Enlightenment
But times they were a-changin'. The dark ages of the lack of information about how segregated cycling actually worked in the Netherlands, Denmark and so on were being swept away by blogs like and A View From the Cycle Path, Copenhagenize and others you can see in the sidebar of this blog. Home-grown London blogs like Crap Cycling and Walking in Waltham Forest, Cyclists in the City and iBikeLondon proved a significant force to mobilise a new movement, and the Cycling Embassy of Great Britain was formed to spread information about good and effective cycle engineering practice in the UK, and campaign for its implementation nationally. A new, dynamic CEO of LCC, Ashok Sinha, decided that the organisation needed to organise big, clearly directed campaigns, involving mass protests on the streets, as well as lobbying all the levers of power. The Tour de Danger, breaking the taboo on 'the D word', around all the worst junctions in London, was one of the first of these mass protest rides, organised initially by bloggers, and then endorsed by LCC, who did organise the string of protests at Blackfriars, covered in early posts on this blog. Also, significantly 2011, Sinha decided to consult the LCC members, the ordinary cyclists of London, directly, on what they actually wanted the organisation to campaign for in the run-up to the mayoral election of 2012. I proposed that they should be asked whether they wanted to campaign for segregated cycle routes like the Camden ones, for more taking the lane. As I expected, they massively concurred.

The Big Ride organised by LCC to promote its Love London, Go Dutch demands before the May 2012 mayoral election

This campaign was styled under the slogan Love London, Go Dutch,  and a set of demands was put together and promoted in 2012 in a manner that  made it very clear to the candidates for mayor that London's cyclists were a substantial, committed and united lobby who were demanding space to be taken from motor vehicles on main roads and physically reallocated to cycling, primarily for the benefit of the vast number of people who could cycle, but refused to do so under existing conditions. So successful was the campaign that all the mainstream candidates signed up to the demands, though I was sceptical about the true commitment of Boris Johnson to the programme. After his re-election (very marginal, in which the votes of cyclists could have made difference), things moved slowly, and there was talk of a new programme and a new person to take on a job as the Mayor's Cycling Commissioner, but little apparent action through the remainder of 2012. In October of that year I met the journalist Andrew Gilligan at a conference on Love London, Go Dutch organised by LCC and the Dutch Embassy with participation from TfL and the DfT. He asked my opinions and I emphasised to him the need for high-profile, effective segregated cycle tracks on London's main roads. I think he was already convinced of the case for this. When asked what was the one scheme that could make the biggest difference, I said the most obvious and easiest 'big win' was a segregated route along the north side of the Thames, on the Embankment. I may not have been the first to suggest this to him, but I can thus possibly claim some parentage to the East-West Superhighway.

Three months later, in January 2013 it transpired that Gilligan was the Mayor's Cycling Commissioner. In March he produced The Mayor's Vision for Cycling in London document that made promises pleasingly close to the Love, London, Go Dutch campaign demands. Critically, the Cycle Superhighways were to be upgraded and re-planned to the standards demanded, with large-scale segregation, and a grid of routes in central London was to be created to connect them up. The healine scheme was to be the route on the Embankment that I had suggested, styled Crossrail for the Bike  extended east and west from Barking to 'the western suburbs'. So clearly the Camden-pioneered programme of Taking the lane had been re-started after a decade and a half of delay.

At its October 2013 AGM, LCC further solidified its policy on physical provision for bikes, mostly through the efforts of its dynamic new Board member and Chair of its Policy Forum, sociologist of transport Rachel Aldred. The elected Policy Forum had been established at the initiative of Ashok Sinha a year earlier, to sort out the thorny issues I have dwelt upon above, but it had been initially chaired by Hackney anti-segregationist Oliver Schick, so had made no progress. Influenced by the Dutch standards being promoted by the Cycling Embassy of Great Britain, the Policy Forum now proposed to the Campaign that the bar for segregation to be demanded on cycle routes was to be set at 2,000 vehicles per day and 20mph. The AGM accepted this policy proposal, along with another from me on Uniformity of Provision, designed to put an end to two-tier network thinking and official discrimination that traditionally operated through providing for different notional 'types' of cyclists differently, so setting-up unacceptable choices between safety and convenience.

Proper standards and gradualist change
The new standards LCC adopted in 2013 meant that without speeds of 20 or lower plus very low motor vehicle volumes (generally only attainable on roads closed to through motor traffic), the campaign would henceforth not except as adequate route implementations those which were not physically segregated by some means or another. This was, at last, the clear and definitive endorsement of the policy I had been seeking since before 2000. The long internal arguments were over (in LCC, if not in the national organisations CTC and Cyclenation), and we could campaign unequivocally for what we needed for inclusive mass cycling. One novel means of segregation was being experimented with in Camden, where the Royal College Street track was rebuilt in 2013 with lightweight segregation on both sides of the road, to allow a capacity increase of at least 33%. This was another significant bit of taking the lane. Hard to recall now, but before 2000, Royal College Street was a three-lane one-way motor racetrack. In 2000 we took one lane from the cars, and in 2013 we took another. It is now one lane for cars, still one-way, but transformed out of all recognition from 15 years ago: a testament to, and a proof of the effectiveness of, visionary, but gradualist, campaigning.

The Royal College Street light segregation rebuild in 2013

LCC launched a further big campaign for the 2014 local elections in London entitled Space for Cycling. This was based on the polices adopted in 2013, and the idea spread to other parts of the country, with CTC and Cyclenation endorsing a national campaign along the same lines. So now the cycle lobby nationally was asking protected space on main roads and through major junctions, another landmark whose significance will be appreciated only a few people who have been involved with this over a long period. To those who became involved only more recently, it will just seem reasonable and expected. Back in London, it was satisfying to the the designs produced in September 2014 for the East-West Superhighway (as Crossrail for the Bike was subsequently renamed) and North-South Superhighway as being pretty much as ambitions as I would have liked them to be. We were to get, at long last, after all the protests, segregated cycling on Blackfriars bridge, a huge amount of motor traffic space was to be removed in the Blackfriars area to be given to the intersection of the two flagship segregated routes ('shockingly different' was how Cyclists in the City described the visualisation of this), and a high-capacity segregated route was to be driven right through that horrible gyratory Parliament Square and past the Houses of Parliament themselves. If we had believed in Camden in 2000 that our Bloomsbury route was a high-profile one, that would achieve a step-change in thinking as to what was possible for cycling on the streets of London, then this would be ten times more so.

I've already reviewed the problems and hold-ups and inevitable dissapointments that have accompanied the first two years from the publication of the Vision, and I don't need to go through that again at the moment. A huge battle for public opinion in the consultation on the E-W and N-S Superhighways was fought and won. Even in the week of writing this, on 18 August 2015, it has been announced that the London Taxi Drivers Association is trying to stop completion of these routes through the courts, though construction is well underway, and part of the E-W route is already being used by cyclists, as we saw in the picture at the top of this essay. This challenge will, I predict, fail, but it emphasises the battle that we still face in taking the lane, and probably always will.

Under construction
What do we have happening in London now? I can't cover it all, but we have construction of the East-West and North-South Superhighways, with the parts already consulted on due to be completed in Spring 2016. We haven't had plans for the full originally-promised Crossrail route from the 'western suburbs' (wherever they might be) to Barking, and I sense backsliding on this, on which we need to be very vigilant as the 2016 Mayoral elections approach. We have construction also ongoing of a pretty good looking Cycle Superhighway 5 between Oval and Belgravia, via a segregated two-way track on Vauxhall Bridge, which is already open. This should make an end of the Vauxhall Gyratory nightmare once and for all, and another landmark here is the first genuinely purpose-built, high quality piece of space reallocation on a Thames bridge. Though CS5 is intended to go to New Cross, however, we have not yet seem detailed plans for the rest of it: furthermore, the City of Westminster have not clarified how it will run north of Vauxhall Bridge, so these are more issues on which to be vigilant.

Current construction work on CS5 at Oval (photo by @cyclistsinthecity)

Some upgraded segregated sections of Superhighway 2 to Bow have just opened. I haven't experienced the route myself, but here is as early account. This route still clearly has major gaps and dangers that TfL has not presented satisfactory proposals on. But progress is being made on this notorious route; the cycle space is gradually being physically taken from motor vehicles.

New segregated section of CS2 with separated traffic light phases for motors and bikes, photo by@AViewofLondon

Separately from the Superhighways programme, as part of the Central London Grid (first proposed by LCC), Camden has been extending the segregated route on Royal College Street down Pancras Road, using stepped cycle tracks similar to those employed on Old Shoreham Road in Brighton. This work is also ongoing. Camden has plans also to create segregated tracks in both directions on Delancey Street, which will link the northern end of Royal College Street westwards towards Primrose Hill and Regents Park – a much needed part of the network jigsaw that I first proposed a long time ago, but TfL buses seem perversely to be creating problems with this plan.

New Pancras Road stepped cycle tracks, picture by Camden Cyclists

Camden, still the leading borough for cycle tracks, has plans for more stepped tracks on Gower Street (also in fact an indirect result of a suggestion I made, though the solution they are working on for Gower Street and Tottenham Court Road is not as good as the one I advocated, which would not have involved undoing the one-way system for cars). Work on designing signalisation to separate the cycle flows from motor flows on the five signalised junctions on Gower Street (similar to what has been done on CS2, above) is, I hear, ongoing. Further down the pipeline is work to create a proper cycle route on that busiest of central London cycle corridors – Bloomsbury Way, Theobalds Road and Clerkenwell Road – a concept that has been dubbed the Clerkenwell Boulevard. The boulevard concept is as yet only an idea from campaigners, originating with Andrea Casalotti, but it is being seriously investigated by Camden Council. It is a critically-needed part of the Central London Cycle Grid, linking the ends of the various Superhighways and other routes and creating a second east-west axis after the Embankment Superhighway. The boulevard would need to be implemented by Camden and Islington councils with TfL co-operation.

Consultant John Dales presents possible plans for a segregated Clerkenwell Boulevard at a Camden Cyclists meeting

And there is more in Camden. Finally the Bloomsbury route (or Seven Stations Link, the name we gave the route when we invented it in Camden Cycling Campaign in 2000) is to be upgraded to the capacity it so desperately needs. The plans are for the current two-way track on the north side of the road to become the eastbound track, with a new westbound track on the south side, and a whole motor lane removed from most of the route with one-way arrangements for motor vehicles that will minimise through-traffic and conflicts at the junctions, as described in detail here. So, another object lesson in how progress can be achieved: as at Royal College Street, a two-way track on one side of the road can, when the demand has been undeniably demonstrated, be easily upgraded by adding another track on the other side and making the original one-way, removing another motor traffic lane or a parking lane. Just as we predicted that the Bloomsbury route would be at capacity as soon as it was built, which it was, so I predict that the East-West and North-South Superhighways will be at at capacity as soon as they are built. And I think we can see how that will need to be resolved by the next Mayor.

Campaign video to show the need for upgrade of the Tavistock Place Cycle Tracks from Camden Cyclists on Vimeo.

Out in the north-west suburbs, where I live, we have seen no promising developments as yet. We await the advent of Cycle Superhighway 11, to run largely on the A41 from the West End to Brent Cross. We have not seen any plans for this so far, but it has to be of comparable standard to the Superhighways being built elsewhere in London. It must be at the very least a fully segregated two-way track on one side of the road (I favour the east side) achieved by removing one whole lane of motor traffic on the southbound side of the road. Nothing short of this will do, and I'll be watching this very closely. All we have seen so far has been some consultation by the City of Westminster on their proposal for painted cycle lanes on Avenue Road, between Swiss Cottage and Regent's Park. This will not do, and I strongly hope it will not do for Andrew Gilligan as well.

Looking forward with realism

I've made all the foregoing sound like a great success story, from my point of view, but I remain cautious. We are still a world from the comprehensive 'go anywhere' all-abilities cycle network we need in London to turn it into a world-class cycling city. I've already had the disappointment of expecting the manifest good of the cycle tracks implemented in Camden in the early 2000s to be rapidly understood and replicated all over London, only to find the project stalls for a decade and a half due to many other factors. I have ceased to believe there is any automatic route to progress, and that everyone else in the capital will suddenly see the light and start demanding this infrastructure in their neighbourhoods in a way that politicians find impossible to resist. The forces opposed to us remain very strong, and we are only a very small distance towards our goal. Progress after the current flurry of building, corresponding to the end of Boris Johnson's mayoralty, could yet stall with his successor, and we could be left in limbo for another decade. I now believe that every meter of new segregated space for cycling will continue to have to be fought over tooth-and-nail for the forseeable future.

I do believe that the current generation of segregated cycle routes, once completed, being much higher profile than those which we achieved in Camden 15 years ago, will make it obvious to far more people in London and the UK more generally that this is a means of achieving more pleasant and more efficient streets for everyone – cyclists, public transport users, pedestrians, business owners and motorists – whose results are superior to those produced by any other means: by that I mean, superior to the results achieved by mere implementation of lower speed limits, or superficial redesigns, such as Shared Space schemes. Another point is that, whenever we get a success in implementing a segregated cycling scheme, in my experience some foolish person always pops up to say "You did not ask for the right thing, you should have got elimination of all motor traffic on this road instead". Now it should be noted that usually this person never successfully campaigned for his preferred solution anywhere, nor discovered the real political and practical difficulties inherent in his idea, but has an unrealistic concept of the political process of negotiation over the use of street space, and no concept of a network of where the motor vehicles need to go.

I have always believed in putting forward ambitious, game-chaging concepts that will inspire people to see how our streets can be used in new, better and more efficient ways, and this was why I supported or proposed Royal College Street, the Bloomsbury Route, the Embankment route and so on. I have continually, in this blog, told campaigners not to 'fight over scraps' or make demands which are too small to make a difference or inspire anyone; this has been a guiding principle of mine. But I am also a realist, and no fundamentalist ecological anti-motor campaigner. I don't think cars, vans, lorries and buses will ever be eliminated from London, not in the lifetime of anyone now living, at least, I don't think they will be eliminated even from central London, and I don't really think they should be, either. They have many uses. They have become essential to our system of living. We can get a better balance incorporating them, but we cannot eliminate them. There will continue to need to be a practical working network of roads for motor vehicles, allowing access to all properties, throughout London, for all the future that I can foresee. Our cycle network proposals need to take this into account and allow it to be. All the schemes and proposals that I have mentioned and supported allow this. 

Going back to those early days in Camden Cycling Campaign in the 1990s, one of the main arguments that Paul Gannon was advancing at that time, which didn't seem to have occurrent to anyone in UK cycle campaigning before, was that segregated cycle tracks, with continuing motorised use of the rest of the road, are really the only way to square the need for workable dedicated cycle space with the need for taxis, buses and delivery vehicles to continue to be able to operate on necessary through-routes. The argument for cycle tracks, as opposed to fully closing roads to motor vehicles, has aways been an utterly pragmatic one. However ambitious the plans have seemed, the intentions have been limited and pragmatic. I've never set out to solve all the problems inherent in the use of motor vehicles with proposals for cycle infrastructure, and I've not set out to redesign the entire urban transport jigsaw. I've not set out to change the world, only to achieve the limited objective of getting more people enjoying the experience of riding bikes. I've set out to import the best bits of the cycling systems of places that seem to do it well, like the Netherlands and Denmark, but I've not claimed that they offer all the solutions to transport or environmental problems.

What we need to be asking for next

So, where now for the campaign? We've established clear principles for what we would like to see. We've largely ended the internal arguments within the cycling world that blighted the earlier years of my history here. We have a programme ongoing from the Mayor for the upgrade of the Cycle Superhighways, and from some boroughs for the construction of some other routes, to fairly good standards. We have new junction designs being tried out that aim to eliminate turning conflicts between bikes and motor vehicles by separating flows in time that cannot be separated in space. We have some sensible design standards for the new cycle facilities in London, and some good people in place in TfL. We are starting to learn from the Dutch experience, from the nation so far ahead of the rest of the world on these concepts, but we have many elements that are obstinate to learning, There are many in the GLA and Transport for London, and many in more in the boroughs, who are in positions of power and do not believe in the cycling agenda at all. To get building started on the East-West and North-South Superhighways was a huge battle for the progressive elements in the GLA and TfL. We will need to convince the next Mayor, elected in May 2016, to continue, improve and extend the programme, to spend more on cycling, and spend it efficiently and productively. We need an extensive and intensive network, and we need the quality, simulataneously, to achieve our objective of 'mass cycling'. We need to make the next Mayor understand that, want that, and be committed to that.

But we also have huge problems in the division of responsibility in London government. We have a Mayor with very limited powers over roads (though he controls the funding of changes on them) and we have 32 boroughs of diverse political and philosophical complexions that control most of the network. We have odd bodies like the Royal Parks, the Crown Estate Paving Commission, the Canal and River Trust, and the Corporation of London, that control bits of territory – roads, paths and open spaces – all over the place, having the arbitrary and democratically unaccountable power to scupper the Mayor's cycling schemes. The Mayor very nerarly had to use his ultimate power, through the Secrtetary of State for Communities, to remove control from one of the boroughs over a section of road on the East-West Superhighway, in order to get that route agreed, and the Royal Parks continue to stand in the way of a sensible solution to the Superhighway in the Buckingham Palace area, and also threaten CS11, which will need to use a (closed) Outer Circle of Regent's Park. 

TfL needs more powers over roads in order to implement a complete cycle network, without a doubt, but this is not within the Mayor's power to grant. It will require lobbying of the government to achive this, and at the moment it looks unlikely, with the continuing lack of leadership and stick-in-the-mud attitude to cycling from both the Department for Transport and the Department for Communities and local Government. Maybe we can somehow get the London MPs cross-party to propose extra powers for the Mayor and TfL, but this looks a long shot.

Having established the principles, I believe the campaign needs next to become one on the scale of the vision. Even without new powers for TfL, that body has in its power, if the next Mayor so wishes, to implement the type of solutions we are seeing on the latest Superhighways, or on Pancras Road, Gower Street etc, on every road it controls in London. We need to demand an end to main roads in London that do not provide practical separated space for cycling usable by all; Space for Cycling should not be restricted to a few arteries, it needs to become the standard, through a massive programme of progressive upgrading of the whole TfL-controlled network, that will, of course, need to deal with the remainder of the dangerous junctions as well. At they same time, the next mayor will need to cajole the boroughs into implementing similar solutions on all of their main roads and junctions, providing the necessary funding for them to do so. It's a tall order, but I have said we need to be ambitious, and this is what I think we need to be asking for in 2016: a programme of installation of cycle tracks on all TfL-controlled roads, plus strategic borough roads as well. In this context, the feeble and inefficient Quietways programme, re-cooking the old LCN concept, can probably be allowed to wither and die by the next Mayor.

The TfL route network, in red, shows the very minimum coverage that we need to start to achieve a segregated cycle network on London's main roads; eventually we will need segregation on all the white roads (borough A roads) as well.

Of course we need more than this; we need local rat-runs cutting, we need lots of traffic taken out of town centres and out of residential areas, we need better routes through parks, and the rest of it, but the demand for the tracks on all the main roads is a simple, comprehensible and saleable one, achievable, I believe in the medium term (say less than 10 years), and it would bring far more benefits and raise cycling levels faster than any other possible change. And it is not a fantasy, it's what they have in Copenhagen, I've seen it, and it works. Of course, if we demand it, we won't actually get cycle tracks on all  the main roads, but getting the next Mayor to be working towards that objective would get us an awfully long way.

Does campaigning work?

I've laid a lot of stress here on what actually happened in the campaigns over cycling in London over the last two decades, as I saw, and I've often been accused of over-esimating the impacts of campaigns, by some in the cycling world who seem to want to regard us as powerless pawns in the face of some vast, faceless bureaucratic government machine that does what it wants, serves its own interests and does not listen to special-interest voluntary group very much – well, not in this field anyway. In this narrative, something called 'culture' or 'tradition' determines what sort of society and infrastructure we get, this traps us in certain patterns of behaviour, and there isn't a heck of a lot we can do about it. Well, this is a matter of personal temperament and attitude, clearly, and there is certainly something in the 'bureaucratic barriers' narrative. I have often railed against these myself. But I give this account as I experienced things, and my experience was very clear. Before 1998 and the start of the Camden experiments, no cycling campaign group in London asked clearly for Dutch-style segregated cycle tracks on roads. Camden Cycling Campaign decided to do so, as a policy, going far out of line with what the rest of the UK cycling world was up to at that time. We asked for them, and, strangely enough, after a determined campaign, we got them. Of course they weren't done exactly right and we got less than we demanded, but we got enough to work and demonstrate a principle, and now those pieces of infrastructure form a basis that is being extended in all directions, as well as having the original parts upgraded.

By exact parallel, it was only when London Cycling Campaign took on the historic divisions over the segregation issue, put the issue to votes, and formulated clear policy on the matter (which some strongly disagreed with, and continue to do), and launched an energetic campaign, mobilising the membership and a wider part of the public in favour of this new vision, that, lo and behold, an initially very sceptical mayor bowed to the pressure and started to build what we wanted. I should not neglect to mention the influence of other, allied but separate campaigning groups in all this, particularly the 'pop-up campaign' Londoners on Bikes, which worked to take the Go Dutch message to politicians in the 2012 London elections, CyclingWorks, which did a tremendous job mobilising big employers in central London to come out in support of the 2014 Superhighway plans, and Stop Killing Cyclists, which continues to organise protests in the wake of deaths. I've also mentioned the national organisations CTC and CycleNation coming round to a similar agenda, the Cycling Embassy of Great Britain, founded to promote that agenda nationally. In addition there has been significant support from the mainstream press, particularly the Evening Standard, which has adopted a very pro-cycling tone in recent years and been a strong supporter or the new Superhighways, and The Times, with its Cities fit For cycling campaign. 

During the period I have covered social media became very significant in enabling the rapid organisation of protests, drawing in people who would not have been part of paid-up organisations. All these movements and opinion-formers, including the blogs and other social media, have supported each other in enabling the changes we are now seeing, but that the people at the centre, the existing and organised cyclists in London, decided exactly what they wanted to see, and decided to act on it, has, in my view, been decisive. The challenge now is to broaden the base of support massively; we need to get not only existing cyclists, but parents, teachers, academics, religious leaders, trade unions, mother' unions, old peoples' organisations, neighbourhood groups, amenity groups, disabled groups, and so on, on our side. CyclingWorks did a tremendous job getting businesses on our side, and that's a model that needs to be extended and followed up in other ways, particularly as the infrastructure starts to extend further out into the suburbs, where the views of employers become less important, but those of other groups more so.

In many ways our democratic process is broken, and broken into many pieces in London, with so many bodies having authority, and the ability to block change in certain areas. Some of this we cannot overcome now, but we can sometimes use this fragmentation to our advantage. There are always lots of people to whom we can appeal, who potentially have influence. If the councillors won't co-operate, one can try appealing to local MPs. If they are not interested, the London Assembly Members might well be, or even MEPs. It is possible to contact the Cycling Commissioner, and though Boris himself can be difficult to get hold of, he has various deputy mayors and assistants. There are usually potential points of pressure, and if you only have the Green Assembly Members on your side, you probably wont get very far, though they may make some noise. On the other hand, a broader alliance involving politicians and officials in different bodies and from different political or practical backgrounds might well provide the critical mass to move things forward.

"The argument your city is not like #Amsterdam is invalid. Neither was Amsterdam." Change takes work. 

A relevant  tweet from @TodUrbanWORKS, right-hand photo by Thomas Schlijper; note, in passing,  how successful here was the conversion two-way to one-way flow for motor vehicles, while many in London currently advocate the reverse, rather than reallocating more space to sustainable modes.

Conclusion: some campaigning principles

• Ask for big enough changes to make an obvious difference to the environment for everyone. Try to find out what best practice is, ask for that, and keep asking for it at all stages of the lobbying and negotiation process. What you get will probably be compromised, but if the starting point was good enough, the final result will be good enough to make a difference. Don't be under-ambitious or think "We'll never be given that". Note, for example, how the solution for the intersection of the East-West and North-South Superhighways at Blackfriars that the Mayor went for actually turned out to be more ambitions than any campaigner had asked for. The things you are compromised down to in the end are capable of improvement later, when the climate of opinion has improved, as with the widening Camden cycle tracks.
• You have to take account how all the other transport modes and legitimate business and residential activities on the road are going to operate. There is no point crusading for a solution which is going to be widely unacceptable. You have to develop the ability to distinguish between the visionary, which is eminently practical and can prove popular once a certain conservatism has been overcome, and extreme, impractical and fundamentally unpopular solutions that will be perceived as anti-car, anti-choice, anti-business, or anti-pleasure.
• Once you have a valid, practical and saleable solution, all objections should be analysed, questioned and shown to be weak or groundless. The variety of these is never-ending, and more will always be invented, from golf balls to bombs, but these can be shown up as mere irrational resistance to change, and most people have the good sense to be able to see this. The public can be trusted perhaps more than you think. Don't dismiss any population, anywhere, however it may appear from the outside, as being 'irredeemably wedded to the car'. Scratch the surface, and you find the most car-oriented people generally would like to be able to cycle their children to school, and they'd like their granny to be able to cycle to the shops like she used to, if they can see a feasible way of doing it.
• Officials tend to want to keep doing the same things they have always done. Though nothing is actually telling them they cannot do what you are asking, they will invent reasons why it can't be done. Appeal to politicians at all levels and in all parties to make the officials work for them, as they are supposed to do, and not dictate their own agenda.

You may need to wait many years for it to finally pay off. But hopefully, one day, you'll be able to say, like Mike Aitken of Brighton, in his 2002 letter to London Cyclist:

Then in a blinding epiphany I realised: I had designed this route! This was the London Cycle Network in action, which I and thousands of LCC members had argued for over two decades.... 

I loved every one of them (even the dispatch riders). Sobbing by a blue cycle post in Mayfair, it was like Mandela walking free all over again.

The Mayor's Vision for Cycling in London: 18 month assessment

I last wrote extensively on The Mayor's Vision for Cycling in London shortly after it was announced, in March 2013. We are now 18 months on, so I thought I would try to assess 'how it is going'.

A reminder: the Vision is aiming for a doubling of cycling in London over 10 years, achieved mainly through these four programmes:

1. Cycles Superhighways (Including the E-W "Bike Crossrail")
2. The Central London Grid
3. Quietways outside Central London
4. Outer-London mini-Hollands

About £900 million was earmarked for spending over 10 years on these, but only £370 million was expected to be spent by May 2016, the rest of Boris Johnson's tenure as Mayor, with the rest being dependent on the wishes of whoever is elected to replace him.

Now the first thing to say is that the rate of progress has been disappointing. Summer is the usual time for spades to be put in the ground for major work on the roads.  I thought a year would be adequate for Transport for London to put their plans in place and assemble the correct staff, and that we would probably see something happening this summer. But summer passed, and nothing much happened, except a draft of the much-delayed, and in the event exceedingly lengthy and somewhat un-focused London Cycle Design Standards document was released for consultation. (See the excellent Cycling Embassy response on this.)  The Cycling Commissioner, Andrew Gilligan, has been giving talks everywhere, and press releases have been common, but there's been no spades in the ground. What has been built in the last 18 months was either in train before (as was the Cycle Superhighway 2 extension), or the result purely of a borough initiative (as was the rebuild of the Royal College Street cycle track).

On the other hand, though it is getting going painfully slowly, there are signs of a seriousness to the project that go far beyond what we have been used to seeing before in the politics of UK cycle provision. I have, for example, actually watched (sad, benighted creature that I am) the examination of the chief officers of the project, including Gilligan and Lilli Matson, TfL's Head of Delivery Planning, by the GLA's Budget Monitoring Subcommittee. It is very clear if you watch this that we are in a rather different world to the borough Town Hall meetings of old where a 'Cycling Officer', a rather unimportant council employee who happened to be quite keen on cycling, would turn up before a few pretty uninterested councillors in a dirty yellow lycra suit and explain how he proposed to spend a few thousand pounds on painting some lines on pavements. Now, we have people establishing the serious business case for the expenditure, monitoring and auditing by actual outcome, of how many cycle journeys are generated, for hundreds of millions of pounds spent across a city of 10 million people. This is a hard-headed world which is little to do with wanting to 'look green' or create a bit of good PR with 'cyclists', but everything to do with keeping a major city moving and keeping it in business, and spending public money sensibly and effectively.

So what of the four programmes? In brief, if you haven't got time to read further, I'd say this: The Cycle Superhighways are now looking quite promising as the standards, programme and timetable for them is becoming clear. The timetable, nature and likely ultimate success of the Central London Grid is much less clear, and that is because TfL doesn't control most of it, the boroughs do. The programme for the Quietways is becoming slightly clearer, but the standard of implementation is in doubt. There seems to be a problem with people understanding the nature of the Quietways; Andrew Gilligan seems to have to keep explaining it again, and that must be his fault for not being clear enough from the start. The mini-Hollands still have not progressed sufficiently to draw any conclusions.

Superhighways

According to Gilligan at the budget subcommittee, around half of the total budget for Superhighways (£209m) is scheduled to have been spent by May 2016. The initial four superhighways that were created by painting the road blue – CS2 from Stratford to Aldgate, CS3 from Barking to Tower Gateway,  CS7 from Merton to The City  and CS8 from Wandsworth to Westminster are promised to be re-engineered 2016. However, the only one for which we have seen plans is the notorious CS2. These are being consulted on currently (ends 2 November), and look worth supporting, containing a large element of segregation, though the solution for Bow Roundabout is still sub-optimal, and a further round of improvements here is promised at a later date.

Then there are the two 'new' un-numbered Superhighways, known as the East-West (previously 'Bike Crossrail') from Tower Hill to Acton, and the North-South from Kings Cross to Elephant & Castle. These are due to be completed by May 2016, except for the Westway section of the East-West. They are being consulted on now (here and here). You should act quickly to respond, if you have not already done so: consultation closes 2 November. The plans have been well-received by campaigners and bloggers, being again for mostly segregated tracks achieving a generally high standard of provision and capacity. These new Superhighways also meet two of the main criticisms levelled at the original Superhighways plan: that the routes didn't go into the centre, and they didn't connect up. These two Superhighways will cross at Blackfriars north junction, though they will be at different levels there. They will be connected by a major junction remodelling, converting one of the current slip-roads off the bridge into the connecting two-way cycle track. Construction of all this will mark the final success of the Blackfriars campaign that this blog covered extensively in 2011.

What LCC demanded in 2011

What is now being offered. Sustained campaigning and protest by thousands of people put this on the table as a realistic possibility.

The plans for the East-West and North-south Superhighways are really not complete at all. The North-South, in particular, seem not to deserve its name, as it is just a 'stub' compared to the far more important East-West, and most of what has been planned is south of the Thames, further emphasising the Superhighway network's already very strong south-of-the-Thames bias. Far from getting anywhere near 'north' London, it peters out in the backstreets of Clerkenwell's existing Seven Stations Link (London Cycle Network Route 0) in the Ampton and Cubitt Streets area, seemingly baffled by the King's Cross Gyratory. It could connect with Camden's proposed route on Midland Road up towards Camden and Kentish Towns ultimately, but still it seems disappointing in concept compared to the East-West route: we might have expected a high-profile main road route up at least as far as Kings Cross. However, let's not be churlish: with a good segregated cycle track on Blackfriars Bridsge, we could finally declare the Battle for Blackfriars won.

There are still big gaps in the East-West plan, mostly concerned with the Royal Parks. What to do at St James's Park and in front of Buckingham Palace still has not been decided, though the suggestion of replacing the horse ride by Constitution Hill with a cycle track is a good one. Andy why, at the chaotic Wellington Arch, why do TfL propose 'a larger shared space to replace sections of grass to provide more space for pedestrians, cyclists and horses'? Why not just have clear dedicated routes so everybody knows where they are? Using the Carriage Drives in Hyde Park is a good plan, as they don't get disrupted by the park's frequent commercial entertainments, but these sections have not been designed yet. Different options are given in the Lancaster Gate area, and the idea for using the elevated A40 Westway to Acton seems still sketchy: further consultation on this is promised in 2015.

On the other hand, the plan for The Embankment, Bridge Street and Parliament Square is a clearly-defined game-changer: a high-capacity, high-profile two-way cycle track driven right past the Houses of Parliament and across the formerly intimidating and hostile gyratory of the Square. For this section alone the plans would deserve massive praise, and the scale and ambition of the East-West and North-South Superhighway concepts overall demand that all who are interested in the environment of the city and its transport network, whether they cycle or not, show their support.

Of the other Superhighways, CS5 Belgravia to New Cross is supposed to be finished by the end of 2015, and there may then be an extension east of New Cross. The plans for extensive segregation of the inner section, Belgravia to Oval, were consulted on this Summer, and look quite good. The outer section will use semi-segregation, we are told, but the exact character of this does not seem to have been decided.

CS1 City to Tottenham will not be on the roads originally planned, it will be on smaller roads, and possibly built by Autumn 2016. CS11 from Regents park to Brent Cross is also due to be finished by Autumn 2016. It depends on Westminster and the Royal Parks agreeing to the closure to through-traffic of the Outer Circle. It will thence run up Avenue Road, Finchley Road and Hendon Way, but we have see no plans for this so far.

CS4 Tower Bridge to Woolwich is supposed to be finished by 2017, and a new (so far un-numbered) Superhighway is planned on Lea Bridge Road in connection with the Waltham Forest mini-Holland project. CS9 which should have gone from Hyde Park to Hounslow has run into opposition from the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. It looks like TfL will only be able to progress the sections in Hammersmith & Fulham and Hounslow, and the timetable for these is currently unclear.

That's a total of twelve Superhighways, the number originally projected, though they are not all in the originally projected locations. The original CS12 Angel to Muswell Hill and CS10 Hyde Park to Park Royal have been abandoned. CS10 is supposedly replaced by the East-West route on the A40, but this means, with the original CS11 alignment having been moved east, from the A5 to the A41, that Brent, quite an inner borough (though technically an Outer London one) will have been completely left out of the Superhighways programme.

I have to say I take all TfL's projected completion dates with a massive bag of salt. We were told, after all, in late 2012, that CS5, 9, 11 and 12 would be launched in 2013. Well, clearly the rethink on the whole nature of the CSHs after LCC's Go Dutch Campaign and the appointment of Gilligan as Commissioner caused that three-year delay. But the longer timescale is for the best if what we get is actually good. The designs we are seeing now show a step-change in quality from what we were offered before. Problems tend to come at a few places at big junctions where there is slightly too much emphasis on mixing and sharing with pedestrians: we need separation and clarity to allow flows of both cyclists and pedestrians to continue to grow and co-exist in harmony. We need efficient cycle routes and we don't want pedestrians to get intimidated. But the basic battle for space and separation from heavy flows of traffic seems to have been won.

Central London Grid

The Grid is the name given to the combination of Superhighways and Quietways in Central London. We have a map of the Grid, and we have the Superhighway plans so far as they go, and we have solid proposals for some of the Camden routes, but that seems about all. We have little indication of the standard that the boroughs other than Camden will apply to the Quietway routes. We have had one Quietway proposal from Southwark (QW2) in detail, and this has been criticised in detail elsewhere, with suggestions for how it could be better. It seems likely to fail LCC's criteria of vehicle flows below 2,000 PCU per day and speeds under 20mph with the design that has been proposed. It seems that the problem is political will from the borough to cut the minor-road rat-runs (like Tabard Street, which is parallel to the A2 and should not be a through-route), and it looks very likely that this kind of issue with the Grid Quietways will be repeated more widely unless Boris Johnson and his aides can somehow bring more persuasion to bear on these boroughs.

Current Central London Grid plan

I've written about the inadequacy of many parts of the Grid plans before. The problem is basically one of the Mayor trying to promote changes on roads he doesn't control. One answer would have been for him to have included more TfL roads in the Grid. Kensington and Chelsea is most obviously not playing ball, and Westminster's commitments remains very vague, which is deeply worrying since, as can be seen, much the largest part of the Grid is in Westminster. The general lack of concrete plans by the boroughs for implementing the non-Superhighway elements of the Grid at the moment makes it look very likely that little of the Grid will have progressed beyond the paper stage by May 2016.

Quietways outside Central London

The Quietways beyond the Grid area are a separate funding stream for TfL, and this also is the only source of funds for new routes (or upgrades of old ones) for the boroughs that lack mini-Holland funding (that is, most of the outer boroughs). Sustrans was put in charge of doing the initial planning of these Quietways, and immediately there seemed to be divergences of opinion over what the scheme really was about. The emphasis in the Mayor's Vision for the Quietways was on 'low traffic back streets and other routes', but it also stated:

Where directness demands the Quietway briefly join a main road, full segregation and direct crossing points will be provided, wherever possible, on that stretch.

We will use judicious capital investment to overcome barriers (such as railway lines) which are often currently only crossed by extremely busy main roads. Subject to funding, land and planning issues, we will build new cycling and pedestrian bridges across such barriers to link up Quietway side-street routes.

This was always going to be a prescription that was hard to apply in many places in Outer London, where 'low-traffic back routes' are not very available or useful, and therefore the joining of main roads might not be so 'brief'. I pointed out last year how the level of funding allocated to these routes did not suggest that many intractable problems that require heavy engineering solutions, such as the mess of railway and main road corridors that makes the centre of the Borough of Brent quite impenetrable by bike, could actually be solved within the limits of this programme. It soon became clear that Sustrans and some people in the boroughs were interpreting the Quietways as being necessarily, and thus limitingly, on quiet roads, and being necessarily low-intervention, which is, of course, what the name does suggest. However, Andrew Gilligan had repeatedly said that where no satisfactory back-street route exists on the desired alignment, Quietways can be on main roads, and they can be high-intervention, i.e., physically segregated. This raises an unanswered question of how bad the backstreet route has to be before the backstreet idea is abandoned. The other question which remains unanswered is the same as for the Grid: how prepared will local councillors be to actually cut the rat-runs to make back-street routes attractive?

The planning for the Quietways, so far as it has got, seems to have been rather secretive, and LCC has only with difficulty managed to compile this plan, low-res version below, of roughly where the first routes are currently proposed to go.

It appears that this map shows the very most that will be achieved by May 2016. It will be seen that Andrew Gilligan's early concept of naming routes after tube lines that they follow has been abandoned, except for the Jubilee Line Quietway. This one seems a poor shadow of what he promised last year, when he spoke of a route from Central London to Wembley. Here is is shown stopping short of the North Circular, at Dollis Hill. The fact that there is a serious intention to extend it beyond the North Circular is indicated by an announcement of funding for a new cycling bridge over the A406 in Brent (and also another in Redbridge), but the timescale for these larger Quietway interventions seems to be beyond this mayoral term.

The Jubilee Line route, like CS11, depends at its southern end on the Royal Parks and Westminster agreeing to the closure of Regents Park to through-traffic. Through Camden the route, oddly, is only one or two blocks away from CS11, and then it follows an old LCN route in Brent, which requires more mode-filters and reversal of priority at junctions with other minor roads if it is to be made much more attractive than it is now. There's no guarantee of local councillors agreeing to measures like this, and little the Mayor can do to make them. So the worry is about standards. It's all very well to draw these lines on maps, but if the routes are fiddly to use, and traffic levels remain as they are at the moment, and on many roads, such as Maygrove Road and Chapter Road on the Jubilee route, cyclists just get squashed into tightly-parked narrow corridors with cars trying to get past them, then the Superhighways will prove far more attractive to all cyclists, of whatever level of experience, than the Quietways, which were supposed to be the routes 'particularly suited to new cyclists'.

Chapter Road, Brent, as it is at the moment, part of the the proposed Jubilee Line Quietway.

Perhaps the most serious problem for the inner Jubilee Line route occurs where it meets West End Lane, West Hampstead, which it has to follow for a short while to connect between side-streets, because there is no other way to cross three railways. Traffic on this road is far above a 'quietway' level, but there is also no space for segregated lanes, and no realistic political prospect of closing this quite important local through-route to motor vehicles. Sustrans' proposal for this location has been a fanciful 'shared space' repaving, rejected by Camden Cyclists, rightly, as quite beside the point. This situation points to a fairly deep conceptual problem with the Quietways. Andrew Gilligan wrote in the Mayor's Vision that the Quietways would exploit London's 'matchless network of side streets, greenways and parks'. Where are the links in this network, exactly, and how should conflict be resolved at places like West End Lane?

Again, the most advanced of the Quietway plans seems to be CS2 in Southwark and Greenwich, which Gilligan has indicated will be delivered by 2016 subject to planning permission for a new path along the railway past Millwall Football ground. Bits like this could prove to be good and could justify the name 'Quietway", but examination of the map above will show that, in general, Sustrans have not succeeded in identifying the apocryphal 'matchless network of side streets, greenways and parks', because, of course, it is not a continuous network, and could never be made into one within the constraints of the funding offered, not to mention the realities of local politics. The concept is not entirely without merit: it is not that different to the orbital Green Routes plan of Copenhagen that I covered in my blogpost on that city. The political climate there, however, is sufficiently different, through cycle culture being sufficiently established, that the complete removal of traffic, parked and moving, from minor streets, and their conversion to genuinely green pathways does really occur. It is hard to see that happening immediately in many places in the London suburbs.

On a pessimistic assessment, it looks like the Quietways could become just a third attempt at the London Cycle Network (following Ken Livingstone's failed LCN+ project), on very similar routes: a byword for complex, inefficient, out-of-the-way routes that most cyclists will avoid and which will not significantly encourage cycling in Outer London, where encouragement is most desperately needed. What I would really have liked to have seen would have been a far better-funded equivalent of the Superhighways project specifically targeted on strategic main road sections in Outer London that would often be orbital, not radial routes. There are one or two projects coming from the boroughs that do approximate to this: there is currently a consultation out from Hounslow on possible cycle tracks on Boston Manor Road, the A3002, with proposals that look really rather good. I think this kind of thing, solving specific outer borough link problems, is likely to prove a more effective expenditure of funds than the very distributed low level of funding not achieving consistent high quality that is possibly emerging as the pattern for the Outer London Quietways.

Mini-Hollands

Three mini-Hollands were selected this spring: Enfield, Kingston and Waltham Forest. The following description is taken directly from the TfL site:

Kingston
A major cycle hub will be created and the plaza outside Kingston station will be transformed. New high-quality cycling routes will be introduced together with a Thames Riverside Boardway - a landmark project which could see a new cycle boardwalk delivered on the banks of the river. 

Enfield
The town centre will be completely redesigned with segregated superhighways linking destinations, three cycle hubs delivered across the Borough and new greenway routes introduced. 

Waltham Forest
A semi-segregated Superhighway route along Lea BridEnfge Road will be developed as well as a range of measures focused on improving cycling in residential areas and creating cycle friendly, low-traffic neighbourhoods.

These are funded to the tune of £30 million each. The Enfield project seems to have proved most locally controversial, with shopkeepers mobilising against it, and the Enfield Cyclists organising a counter-campaign of demonstratively spending money in shops to try to prove the power of the 'pedal pound'.

The most actual action so far has been seen in Walthamstow, where a series of temporary experimental road closures were put in and then taken out again. This is like the '20 bollards' game, where you have only twenty bollards to distribute around your town, and you need to position them to most effectively reduce rat-running traffic to create useful new cycling and walking routes and enhance local life. Again, reaction has been mixed, but there seems a lot of positivity around the Waltham Forest mini-Holland, and campaigners seem to think it has a good chance of being accepted by the community, and forming a good template for other Outer London town centres in the longer term. But broadly, because the selection process took so long, not enough has actually happened in the mini-Hollands yet to write much about them. 

The selection procedure itself, the holding of the competition, was I think one of Andrew Gilligan's aims, successfully completed. It did get some previously pretty cycle agnostic, or even hostile, local authorities to start seriously thinking about radical change to kick-start more cycling in Outer London, lured by the cash promise, and the fact that the subject seemed to be suddenly in fashion, and that this was the project of a Tory mayor, potentially outflanking the Left on a 'green' issue. It remains to be seen whether anything from these unsuccessful mini-Holland bid plans will see the light of day; Gilligan has promised in letters to the boroughs that some projects will be pursued, and has budgeted for a number of mini-Holland 'consolation prizes' to finance the best ideas that came out of the competition in the non-winning boroughs, including the two new bridges across the North Circular I have already mentioned. Implementation of these however seems to be beyond 2016.

Conclusion

How to summarise? It has been difficult writing this post. I have started several times, and had to rewrite because of new developments and announcements. The Mayor's project is now gathering pace. A couple of months ago I would have made a much more negative, perhaps slightly bitter, assessment of where it had got to, compared to the promises of the Vision document. But now we have seen more of the new Superhighway designs, we can see that our campaigning over the last four years or so has been a success: it has produced a mind-shift in the ambitions of the people tasked with designing cycle facilities in London. The mind-shift of course has not spread to many local politicians, who have direct control over most of our roads, and therein lies the rub. There is plenty more campaigning that needs to be done, in fact, there will never be an end to it, as David Hembrow points out from the example of the apparently miraculous Netherlands. LCC had exactly the right idea with its Space for Cycling Campaign for the local elections: taking very specific demands for each ward right to each local ward councillor and candidate. This did have an effect, rather like the mini-Holland competition process, of making a few more people think properly about the issues, or at least start listening to the arguments, for the first time, though I don't expect miraculous results from it of all the ward 'asks' actually being delivered in the next few years. It was a stage in a process.

London's cycling revolution will certainly spread from the centre outwards, and the Superhighways will carry it to the suburbs. In the foreseeable future it will remain quite limited, though. The target of 5% mode share by 2025 might well be achieved, but this would still leave most Londoners out from the benefits that cycling can provide, which is rather sad, and it will also limit the success of the city overall. We've see a tremendous reaction from business leaders to the Superhighway proposals, and it's been found that a vast majority of ordinary Londoners support them as well. I always expected this kind of reaction to visionary, transformative proposals for our streets; I have said repeatedly in this blog that this is what would happen if you put to people a striking, coherent vision for change. I said this was why we in the cycling world should stop messing around asking for scraps that nobody really could see the point of, and should start to think far bigger, about what a real cycling and linked quality of life revolution would look like in London. There is now a growing realisation that London needs to compete with other world cities in terms of the quality of life it offers to a highly mobile skilled workforce. Competing on salaries or low levels or either personal or corporation tax is not enough. It is this economic driver that is increasingly recognised, and will increasingly be recognised, as the impetus for change.

This should encourage Boris Johnson and his aides and officials to become even more bold in laying down the infrastructural basis for the cycling revolution before he leaves office. We need all the other Superhighway plans quickly, and we need top quality maintained at the difficult places with many competing demands. We need better control and more up-front leadership over the Central London Grid and the Outer London Quietways to prevent any money being wasted on cosmetic projects which fall short of the best standards. We need the Royal Parks Agency, the Corporation of London, the City of Westminster and Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea to come unambiguously on board and we need to find ways to put pressure on the from every angle, from residents, businesses and commuters, to do so. We need flexibility over the definitions of the various projects, so it is clear to all that we can have segregated tracks funded on long stretches of main road in Outer London, and this in fact becomes a thing that is expected. We need the major essential linking infrastructural elements such as the new North Circular crossings delivered more quickly. We need more funding for Outer London and plans for a second round of mini-Hollands after 2016 to start to develop a real usable cycling grid outside the centre. Finally, the Mayor and GLA need to get a grip on miscellaneous 'third-party' development projects, such as, in my part of London, Brent cross Cricklewood, and Old Oak Common, and ensure that everything built in them meets the Cycling Level of Service  in the London Cycle Design Standards. There should be no question of more major road junctions being rebuilt in London without high-quality cycle provision.

There is progress, but the gap between London and the best places for cycling in world continues to grow. We continue to lose further generations of children to cycling. We continue to see illegal levels of pollution in our city, and massive levels of pollution-related disease. We need to be sober. Cycling appears quite popular at certain places and certain times in London, but we're really still in the remedial class of world cities for cycling. Cycling still hasn't made the breakthrough to become the obvious method for most people to consider for short, routine journeys. Our roads still feel, and, are, far too dangerous. We need to continue to demand far more. We can't let up.