Lorries and cyclists, then and now

I have just been sent the following by LCC:

Dear fellow cyclist,

Thank you all for signing and supporting LCC’s biggest ever petition. Over 10,000 signatures were presented to London Assembly members on Wednesday 18 May 2011 at City Hall.

We are really pleased with this progress, however the campaign still has a way to go. LCC urgently needs more donations to keep up the pressure. We are pushing for “on bike” training for lorry drivers to be approved nationally. Then we can urge all 33 London councils to deliver it.

Since I had handy the October 2002 London Cyclist, as I referred to an article I wrote in it in this post, I was leafing through that. In it is an article Be alert to blind ignorance, headed with this preamble:

Matt Seaton explains why both cyclists and lorry drivers need educating about each other's road requirements and practices, and considers the effectiveness of awareness-raising initiatives

Yes. The effectiveness of "awareness-raising" initiatives is very much the point. For I expect in every year of publication of London Cyclist, down more than 30 years, one could have found a similar article calling for these "awareness-raising" initiatives to educate cyclists and lorry drivers about each other's needs. This is one problem, like so many others in the relationship of UK cyclists to other road-users, that just seems stubbornly insoluble, despite all the campaigns and initiatives. If anything, the problem is getting worse. Lorries still account for a majority of cyclist fatalities in London, and, as Futilitarian points out, there is statistically no evidence of any increase in safety through larger numbers of cyclists on London's streets in recent times. (I dealt with the "safety in numbers" theory in an earlier post).

Here is a list of the sub-headings in the 2002 article:

Three mirrors not enough

Putting the stats into context

New awareness camapign

But do the initiatives work?

A change of emphasis

What more can be done?

It's a well-written article, but it all seems so wearyingly familiar. Plus ça change, c'est la même chose.

Well, now LCC is calling for on-bike training to be given to lorry rivers by London councils. As I understand it, even if completely implemented, that scheme would only get the training to those drivers who work for the councils, and maybe to council contractors as well. So not to the majority of HGV drivers, and not to the statistically most dangerous drivers, those of tipper trucks, skip lorries and cement mixers. I don't think it will make much difference, to be quite honest.

And what about all this other awareness-raising, on the other side: campaigns to explain to cyclists what it is like to drive a lorry, by, for example, getting them to sit in the cab of one, on one of these cycle "event days" that proliferate at this time of year? How many cyclists can such exercises ever actually reach? And isn't this tending to put the onus on the cyclist to get out of all possibility of danger, letting drivers "off the hook", ignoring the fact that many lorry deaths are caused by dangerous overtaking manoeuvres that the cyclist is powerless to prevent? (This is what I suspect, though it is an unproveable assertion, as, in such cases, the cyclist is dead, and can't give an account of what happened.) Isn't it all too close to vicim-blaming? Danny (Cyclists in the City) clearly had similar thoughts while writing his post of Tuesday but didn't put them so explicitly. For the truth is, the only way that cyclists can avoid all possibility of being crushed under a recklessly-driven HGV is to leave their bike in the garage and choose another method of transport. No amount of training and "awareness-raising" will protect cyclists from some combinations of hazards.


"Awareness-raising" is one of the great rallying-cries of what I called in a previous post "the environment-issue avoidance industry" that is much of British cycle promotion and campaigning. My question is:
Isn't this all part of a wrong approach, a demonstrably, over time, failed approach, putting all the emphasis on trying to get behavioural change though education, either of cyclists or of drivers, against all evidence that it just doesn't work?


That brilliant servant of the public health agenda, Dr Ian Roberts, of London's School of Hygene and Tropical Medicine, had this to say about road safety education and awareness-raising in a slightly different, but related, context, that of road safety in the Third World:

The problem for public health is that the safety policies the car lobby promotes are not particularly effective in preventing injury.

Their favourite policy is road safety education. Despite decades of evaluation research, safety education has never been shown to reduce road injury rates, a point emphasized by the WHO in the World Report on Road Traffic Injury Prevention. Road user education is favoured by the car lobby because it places the responsibility for road traffic injury squarely on the victim and has no impact on industry profits. Its primary purpose is ideological. It sends the message that road space belongs to drivers, and that pedestrians and cyclists must look out or die. This also applies to children, who account for 300,000 of the 1.2 million road deaths each year.

Awareness campaigns are another favourite. The [Global Road Safety] Commission is currently promoting the ‘Think Before You Drive’ campaign, supported by the Bridgestone Corporation, which reminds drivers to use child seats and seatbelts and to check their tyres. Sensible suggestions though they may be, such exhortations have no discernable effect on road safety. On the other hand, the campaign may improve Bridgestone's corporate image.

So, to return to lorries on the streets of the UK, and their interaction with cyclists, what else can be done, apart from education and awareness-raising? Well, we could start looking seriously at the infrastructure and planning. We could learn from counties that do this better (for example, The Netherlands, which has the best road safety record in the world). We could start to end the situation where cyclists are forced to share road space with big lorries because they have absolutely no alternative. We could put in place more advanced, safer junction designs where cyclists have separate phases and are not mixed up with HGVs doing turning manoeuvres in tight corners. We could take out lethal, cyclist-trapping guardrailing at junctions. We could restrict the movements of large lorries in our cities more, and enforce those restrictions rigourously, though technology. We could put in place schemes on a town and city basis for distributing goods in dense urban areas using the most appropriate vehicles for the purpose, co-ordinating deliveries between businesses, and putting them at times when they will pose least risk to cyclists and pedestrians.

Now this is all a bit more complicated than organising an event where cyclists are asked to get into the cab of a lorry. It takes more organisation, political will, money, planning, and time. And there will be those who will say, "Yes, but the infrastructure and planing changes take decades to make a difference, surely we should be doing now all that we can through education to reduce the number of these incidents in the short term?" The answer is that this is what we have been doing, for decades. simultneously with not making the changes that could, by and large, solve the problem for good. Might that be because campaigners have not lobbied consistently or hard enough for those changes, because they have been so distracted by the awareness-raising agenda?

Cyclists keep dying under lorries. How long before we change tack?

The dysfunctional system of coroners' verdicts

Campaigners for cycling and road danger reduction have often drawn attention to the problematic character of many verdicts handed down by the English coroners' courts, which have often seemed far too ready to dismiss as "accidental" deaths on the roads where there are many factors of contributory negligence including bad , dangerous and illegal behaviour by road users, and sometimes defects of road design and engineering which can also be pointed to as factors. The limited range of verdicts that coroners have available to them and the limited nature of their role means, that although their court is often the forum for the closure of official investigation and indeed official involvement in the death of a human being, the verdicts that they come up with seem far too often to in no way reflect the circumstances of the case and the avoidable contributory factors that make these deaths only very questionably "accidental", and as such contribute to an official culture of "sweeping under the carpet", where few lessons are ever learned and applied in such a way as to make these so-called "accidents" less frequent in the future.

Well my purpose in this post is to point out that this is an endemic feature in the English system of coroner's courts and verdicts, not one that is confined to road deaths. The same points can be made about deaths that have nothing to do with traffic. Road deaths are not a special case in the broken coroners' system. Here is a case reported in the Evening Standard today:

Anthony Soh, 18, a student at Imperial College, had been at an "all you can drink" promotion at the university bar before telling friends that he planned to jump into the lake in Hyde Park to celebrate the end of his exams.

The first-year mechanical engineering student was last seen outside the student bar in south Kensington on March 22. He told friends he was returning to his halls on the other side of Hyde Park.

A search was launched after he failed to attend lectures the next day. His body was found in the Serpentine two weeks later by a woman riding a pedalo.

In an online tribute, his older brother Jeff wrote: "Anthony was amazingly bright and ambitious... his energy was contagious."

At an inquest into Mr Soh's death yesterday, one of his friends told how the group had played a game where forfeits meant finishing a drink in one go. Mr Soh had to down a pint in 30 seconds twice. The Westminster coroner recorded a verdict of accidental death.

It seems to me that in this case the "accidental death" verdict, though in some sense a expressing a truth,  in no way does justice to the circumstances surrounding this young man's very tragic death. Here was a very young student, born in the UK but from a Chinese family, probably something of a fish out of water, still only in his first year at a British university, probably the first year he had spent away from home, probably unused to drinking large quantities of alcohol, still on the premises of the university, getting into a situation through the misuse of alcohol, almost certainly through peer pressure, probably involving older students, that lead directly to his death.

It sounds like blame can be directed in several directions here. In the first place at the managers of the bar, which was part of the university, and therefore, through them, at the whole university administration, for offering this crazy, negligently-unwise and dangerous "all you can drink" promotion just after the exams. In the second place, the students who Mr Soh was with, who organised and encouraged the stupid drinking forfeits game. The students at Imperial College are amongst the academic cream of Britain, some of our most intelligent youngsters. They should be more responsible than this. They should have taken better care of Mr Soh. And thirdly the friends who heard Mr Soh declare he was going to jump into the Serpentine and left him alone to walk across the park and do this, when it should have been apparent to them that he was in a state where he should not have been left alone. All these people had some kind of common human duty of care to Mr Soh which they failed to discharge. They were all  negligent, even if not criminally so, and somehow the verdict the coroner brings in should be able to reflect this.

Now, the reason I am pained by this case, and am mentioning it here, is that I studied at Imperial College for four years. I know the bar in question and I know the halls of residence that Mr Soh would have been walking to and the route he would have taken. I know that one of the most noticeable social features of Imperial College – I have been to other similar institutions and can make comparisons, and they are not all the same – one of the most noticeable social features of Imperial is the culture of alcohol abuse, of excessive drinking, that has long been part of the fabric life of that college and which neither the college authorities nor the student union do anything to try to stamp out. Indeed, quite the reverse, they profit from it. It seems to be connected with the laddish culture of a college that is devoted to science and engineering (the medicine is mostly on a different site, not at South Kensington, where this happened), subjects that, traditionally, attracted mostly men, so it was always (though it is changing) very much a male environment, socially dominated by sports (particularly rugby) and drinking. I can remember this culture of the drinking games from when I was there. I remember the people regularly going out of the bar blotto late at night and walking across the park and doing japes on the roads and going to swim in the Serpentine. This is a long-standing, entrenched culture. It was obvious to me at the time that people would die from it. One of my friends, one of the most enthusiastic participants in the laddishness, did die, though not there, but later, in a diving accident in Greece, which I also suspect, but cannot be certain, was related to alcohol.

The coroner in the case of Mr Soh should have pointed a finger of blame at Imperial College itself. A college of course cannot be held responsible for the misdemeanours of its students, but they can be held responsible for creating or tolerating an environment where the abuse of alcohol is very common and accepted and where the circumstances that lead to deaths like this become quite likely. If such a finger of blame had been pointed, if some kind of verdict could have been brought in that qualified the "accidentalness" with recognition of the official negligence that created the circumstances, then it would have become more likely that something would change in the future at Imperial. I don't expect the administrators of the college to be punished over such a case, but I would like them to be forced to think hard about their responsibilities to the inexperienced, immature young people in their care, and about what policies they can adopt to decrease the chances of deaths like this one. Then, as they say, the tragic death of "amazingly bright" 18-year old Anthony Soh will not have been in vain.

Here is some more about Anthony Soh, written by his brother:

Anthony was amazingly bright and ambitious; he always looked to excel, and was passionate about mechanical engineering. His mind was full of creativity and he was always experimenting in all aspects of his life from tic tacs to magnets, in martial arts and in engineering. He was always one step ahead of the game when it came to mechanical engineering, before KERS in formula 1 had come out, he had already thought of the idea of storing wasted energy in a car from coasting (when your foot is off the accelerator) in the form of electricity to be used (aged 15). He also had a passion for magnets and had experimented with devices to shoot out metallic objects using magnetic energy by the age of 14, which came to be known as a 'rail gun' a few years later. His prediction that electric cars/motorbikes would dominate future travel at the age of 16 is also looking to come true... In my eyes, he was a true genius and we had always had a pact to start our business as the three of us...

LCC gets the wrong image

I have been unusually complimentary about the London Cycling Campaign recently, agreeing with its statements and praising its doings (except for the new logo and website design which I have criticised as looking like something to do with giving blood). So... now to redress the balance. Ha.

The cover of this month's London Cyclist magazine is terrible. It projects all the wrong messages about London cycling. I showed it to my partner, and she agreed with me: it looks aggressive. Everything about the picture is wrong. The bike is wrong, the bloke is wrong, the clothes are wrong, the shades are wrong, the pose is wrong, the angle is wrong, the background is wrong, the sky is wrong. It's totally the wrong image for a campaign devoted to promoting urban utility cycling for all. It's technically a good photograph, but a very bad photograph for the purpose.

The image reinforces all the worst stereotypes of cycling being about macho men dressed in special clothes racing about on slick, pricey, non-utility bikes. What LCC should have done, which they rarely do, is to use a picture which is topical to current campaigns or to concerns of cyclists in London. So, cycling on Blackfriars Bridge would have been and ideal subject, or, more positively, in the City, the City having shown some sign of adopting pro-cycling policies recently.

The reason they have used this picture is because it accompanies their article on testing "road bikes", That's sports cycling jargon, which means, for the uninitiated, racing bikes. But that's not explained, it's assumed knowledge. Inside, it says:

Generally regarded as the lightest and nippiest of rides, a good road bike will serve as commuter workhorse during the week and sportive warrior at the weekend. 

Will it really? No mudguards, lights or rack. Is that really a useful bike for the typical commuter? I'm not going to go all Dutch-fundamentalist on this. I don't insist on a chain guard, dynamo, integral locking, skirt guard, and impossible-to-tip-over stand. But I would like something more than a bare-bones bike appropriate to doing a time trial on to be promoted as a good "commuter workhorse".

I have long wondered why the UK bike trade insists on trying to provide the wrong bikes to virtually everybody except a few cycle sport enthusiasts. Surely they should be able to see what side their bread should be buttered. Surely they should be able to see that the market for practical general-purpose bikes should be vastly larger than that for specialist sports machines. But they stubbornly go on trying to market the wrong products for the usage to which most people wish to put bikes. I really think this is a significant factor in the failure of the UK to achieve a real cycling culture.

But, apart from all that, this bloke on this bike does sit oddly next to the cover headlines, particularly the "20's Plenty" campaign. OK, what he is riding and what he is wearing is not important, he is a cyclist, that is the main thing, therefore part of the solution to the UK's transport problems. But if you are going to have a campaign message about the desirability of creating slower, more liveable streets, I just don't think it helps to use an aggressive image that seems to be about sport and speed. It will not help "win friends and influence people" outside cycling's current ranks.*

This is almost as bad (but not as ludicrous as) Brent Council's attempt at promoting its cycling credentials on this page where it advertises its winning a paltry £300, 000 of "Biking Borough" funding from TfL:

Brent Council has won funding of just under £300,000 from Transport for London (TfL) to develop and promote cycling in the borough. Brent Council has a target to increase cycling from just over one per cent currently to two per cent by 2014, and a further three per cent by 2026.

Cycling has health and environmental benefits for the borough and is already a high priority in the council's Sports and Physical Activity Strategy. The council submitted a funding application request in March and has been awarded £294,500 under the Biking Boroughs scheme. 

As part of the GLA's commitment to cycling, Biking Boroughs aims to encourage people to cycle more in outer London. TfL hopes this will be achieved through, for example, improvements to roads and facilities, cycle training, better security and cycle promotion.

This text lies under this amazing image, which I have not altered in any way:

This is their image of "biking" in the "Biking Borough". Is this meant to represent cycling on the North Circular Road? Why are the cyclists squashed, with non-round wheels? Are they going so fast that effects of relativistic physics are taking hold, with distance being contracted in the direction of their motion relative to the observer? (In fact, no, the distortion is the wrong way.) Cycling at close to the speed of light would indeed be a good way in which cyclists could ensure their own safety on the North Circular. Perhaps it is the only way to do it. In this way cyclists could ensure they had got all round before the motorists had even seen them, as the motorists would be seen frozen in time, virtually unmoving, in the cyclists' frame of reference. And if a collision did occur, the motor vehicle would come off very much the worse, what with the relativistic mass factor gain the cyclist would achieve at near light-speed, giving him a huge momentum. He would just slice through the car.

Well, I can laugh at Brent Council's webmasters, because they are amateurs (when it comes to cycling). After all, they see so few ordinary cyclists in Brent, particularly in north Brent, where the council offices all are located, that they could be forgiven for not knowing what one looks like. But LCC should know what it is doing with these things. Look at, by contrast, the images the Cycling Embassy of Great Britain has been using on its website.

The At War with the Motorist blog is on about the same thing:

None of this is to denigrate racing cycling and mountain biking and the people who enjoy those activities. I am merely indifferent to them, just as the average car driver has no interest in formula one, and the average pedestrian would guess that “bagging a munro” has something to do with the waste products of canine digestion. Only with bicycles do you get magazines that put a feature about olympic athletes next to a news item about commuter infrastructure. And that’s all part of the problem.

It is indeed. The word "cycling" in English, unfortunately, means simultaneously two completely different things: the sporting activity, and the mode of transport. The same is not true of the words "driving" or "motoring". The confusion this engenders in the mind of what used to be called, back in the days when printing was black and white, "the layman", is very sad. It really holds back utility cycling in the English-speaking world. Utility cycling in the English-speaking world needs to keep explaining itself. Because a picture is worth a thousand words, getting the pictures wrong makes that task a thousand times harder.

*This paragraph is a change to the one I originally wrote which caused some, justified, criticism, in the comments.

Concert this Saturday in East London

Woodford Symphony Orchestra will give the first performance of my work Woodford Suite (Op 42) at a concert this Saturday, 25 June at 7:45pm, at Barnado's Church, Barkingside, Essex IG6 1QG.

Also in the concert will be:


Borodin: In the Steppes of Central Asia

Smetana: Vltava

Holst: Suite in E flat

Weber: Overture Der Freischütz

Woodford Symphony Orchestra is a largely amateur group that gives concerts in the Borough of Redbridge.


The concert is in aid of Saint Francis Hospice. Tickets are £8 or £7 (concessions) or £3 (children under 12). Includes a free glass of wine.Tickets available on the door. Box office and enquiries: 020 8504 7783 or 020 8519 6491.

The venue is a few minute's walk from Barkingside Station on the Central Line. You can see the church opposite as you reach the end of the Station Approach, but (annoyingly) you have walk a long way round to get into it, turning right on to Tanners Lane and walking  past the modern (concrete) Barnado's HQ to get to the entrance to Barnado's Village and into the church.

View Larger Map

So if you like classical music and have nothing else to do on Saturday evening and are within reach of East London, it would be lovely to see you. The concert is in aid of a good cause.

The press and political will

The Sunday Times article which was the source of a brief quote in my last post, which was taken from the LCC blog, from the Corporation of London's Assistant Director for Planning and Transportation, Iain Simmons, on the high levels of cycling now found in the City of London, is now available more or less in full on Cyclists in the City. That blog also points to an anti-cycling rant in the same edition of the same paper penned by that "national treasure" Jeremy Clarkson. I think the first article talks its subject up, and I am not sure that all the statistics quoted are robust or say what is claimed; nevertheless, it is a basically sensible article on cycling, in the same edition of the same paper as a stupid article on cycling. The writers in a given newspaper do not all have to have the same outlook on a particular subject, but they usually do. This is therefore interesting as it shows The Sunday Times, and probably therefore the whole Murdoch stable of papers, which are very influential, at a turning point in their attitude to cycling.

Because it is the habit of the press to simplify issues, it is characteristic of their attitude to a particular issue or group that when it shifts, it tends not to shift slightly, it flips totally, almost overnight. The Sunday Times is the stable-mate of The Times, a paper that thought it a sensible idea to publish Matthew Parris' notorious article What's smug and deserves to be decapitated? during Christmas 2007, where Conservative MP turned funny-man Parris suggested, in a not very joking tone, that cyclists should be murdered by the stringing of wire across roads at neck height, not realising that similar incidents really have happened. Parris apologised after being engulfed in the storm of protest that he seems to have had no inkling would follow from this, and the Times published a counter-attack from Alison Steed four days later. The Murdoch papers have a history of being virulently anti-cycling. The Sun, I seem to remember, was a leader in attacking as "barmy" ideas for harmonising road crash liability regulations across the EU, proposed by the previous government, that would have helped cyclists. The campaign caused the government to back down.

Until about five years ago the London Evening Standard was also virulently anti-cycling. Cyclists were always "two-wheeled terrorists" who didn't pay "road tax", broke every law in the book, endangered other road users, and needed licensing, in the old Standard. Camden Cycling Campaign started a web-page entitled"four -wheeled terrorists" (now gone)  to try to counter. Then, as cycling in London inched to just a slightly higher level of prominence, particularly following the real terrorist incidents in London, the perspective of the Standard flipped totally and became, by, and large, gushingly positive about the contribution of cycling to London, supporting the bike hire scheme and most other pro-cycling moves.

A couple of examples from last week:

Evening Standard Tuesday 14 June 2011: Now even Lord Tebbit can get on his bike

Cabinet minister Sir George Young, the "Bicyling Baronet", urged parliamentarians to ditch their cars and taxis for two wheels.

"It's fantastic news that the Mayor is finally bringing his bikes to Parliament," said Sir George, Leader of the Commons. "I would encourage all MPs and peers to try them, and if they enjoy cycling, to go on to purchase their own bikes.

There's no faster, cheaper or greener way to get round."

And an editorial paragraph a few pages later commented wryly:

There's a new rack of Boris Bikes outside Westminster: an unrivalled opportunity, them, for MPs to lead the way in adopting this health, environmentally friendly means of getting to work. We look forward to seeing Communities Secretary Eric pickles leading the way.

[Pickles is famously obsese. He is also no friend of the environment: one of his first acts after being appointed to his current post was to nod through the appalling Brent Cross Cricklewood development proposals, against all the guidelines laid down by his own department. Mind you, anyone who is attacked by Alan Sugar* can't be all bad.]

And:

Evening Standard Thursday 16 June 2011: Cyclists using Olympic lanes risk £200 fine

Campaigners warned people could be discouraged from cycling to the Games. Jim Walker, chairman of the London 2012 active travel advisory group, said he wanted to see people encouraged to cycle or walk rather than having their memories soured by being stuck in traffic.

And, again, an editorial comment on the story over the page. The Standard thundered:

First it was black cabs; now we are told that cyclists too will be banned from using the Olympic lanes. This is a nonsense. The games were supposed to promote grassroots sport and exercise. International Olympic Committee bureaucrats might prefer near-empty roads. London doesn't work like that. We will get them to the Games on time. But they should share roads with cyclists.

Now here they have gone off a bit at a tangent, as the Olympic lanes are in the middle of the roads, so cyclists wouldn't generally want to use them anyway. But it's all part of the Standard's new found unstoppable enthusiasm for cycling in London, as any search of their website for "cycling" will show. Their past violent hostility to those on two wheels is totally effaced and forgotten.

In the internet age the influence of the printed news media is not as great as it was. But the attitudes of the papers are still a good bellwether of wider opinion, and of political will. Here I come to the point of my post. As cycle campaigners, we are constantly wondering, "How can we generate the political will to put into place the measures that we know will achieve a mass cycling culture?" In the UK at the moment, this seems a world away. But, like the attitudes of the papers, political will tends to be all-or-nothing. Like trying to push a vast ship down a slipway into the water, once it goes, it goes.

Enrique Peñalosa, former Mayor of Bogotá, is a man who knows a thing or two about politics. He said recently:

Politicians love to hear from constituents, especially if they think there are votes in it for them - even more so if they think there are lots of votes in it for them. Political will is like a tea spoon floating on a cup of coffee - cyclists, constituents, campaigning groups must lobby their politicians drop by drop by drop till that spoon sinks: until the political will to equalize the city is there.

So that's it. Political will is like a teaspoon floating in coffee. So put the pot on, and write a letter to your MP.

*Alan Sugar said Eric Pickles was "another pointless politician doing yet another menial administrative job that could be done by anyone that has been educated in any vague sort of half coherent English" – which Sugar clearly hasn't been, as it should be "anyone who has been educated..."

Paris, London, and meaningless consultation

Stabiliser has visited Paris, and his write-up of the state of cycling there contrasts somewhat with mine posted here not long ago. His study was clearly more extensive than my brief impression, and shows considerable development in conditions for cycling in certain places, with well-designed segregated tracks on some streets, and part-time closures to motor vehicles on others, which seem to be boosting cycling. I am happy to admit that I was wrong on how cycling is developing in Paris.

Meanwhile, in London:

The Corporation of London's assistant director for planning and transportation, Iain Simmons said "On some roads such as Cheapside cycles account for more than 50% of the traffic and these numbers are going up and up every year. 

Cycles account for up to 42% of traffic on Southwark Bridge, 35% on Blackfriars Bridge and around a quarter of all traffic entering central London in the morning peak hour according to TfL monitoring.

This reinforces an opinion I have put forward before, that if we are going to have a "cycling revolution" at all in the UK (and the word "revolution" can be taken in either of two possible ways, as "dramatic change" or "uprising"), it's going to start in the Square Mile, as unlikely as that may have seemed a few years ago.

At the moment, Transport for London, despite its ludicrous hype on cycling, is actually doing everything it possibly can to make cycling in London more dangerous, prompting complaints direct to transport minister Norman Baker. He sounded terribly neutral when he spoke to the Parliamentary Cycle Group:

The government wants to provide the framework to allow local authorities freedom to provide for the transport choices of all people.

But we need some clarity about that framework from the government. LCC is absolutely right (except they get details wrong) to say that:

DfT ministers should make it clear that the Transport Management Act [they mean the Traffic Management Act 2004] should no longer be used to block local policies aimed at reducing road danger and increasing cycling. In London hundreds of proposals to reduce danger for cyclists on the London Cycle Network and the Cycling Superhighways [they mean Cycle Superhighways] have been over-ruled in order to maintain motor vehicle capacity.

That's it. Many cycle activists have essentially given up responding to TfL's and their borough's meaningless "consultations" on cycling schemes because, in recent years, everything they have suggested has been met with the response: 

Sorry, that's not possible because of capacity constraints – capacity has to be maintained because of our duty under the Traffic Management Act to keep the traffic moving.

This argument has rendered the Mayor's Cycle Superhighways programme lame and purposeless, though it continues to limp on pathetically, wasting millions of pounds of public money on a combination of pointless consultation and the laying of blue surfacing that wears off after less than a year due to being driven all over by cars, taxi and buses. 

But this is not just about TfL. Many, if not all, London boroughs, and local authorities round the country have been interpreting the Traffic Management Act to mean that "motor traffic must be given as much space and priority as possible". And yet, arguably, the original intention of the Act was totally the reverse, as the Act was at pains to specifically recognise as "traffic" pedestrians and cyclists. 

Quite honesty, what the original intention of the Traffic Management Act was is not clear to me, but its effects have been very damaging. The government needs to sort it out.

Cycling: lets get a little less "eco" about this

Though one tries to be independent as a blogger, and express original thoughts that have not been voiced elsewhere, occasionally a contribution to a particular subject comes along that just has to be highlighted, and basically, just relayed, as it seems to critically elucidate a vital issue which has always lurked just below the surface, with nobody really laying out before where the problem lies.

These are my thoughts on reading this invaluable contribution to the cycling infrastructure debate from David Hembrow. Hembrow lays out a number of common objections to the construction of quality cycle infrastructure that originate in supposed concern for the environment, and shows, though, basically, the application of common-sense, how invalid they are:

I was told as a child that money "didn't grow on trees". However, the one thing which certainly does "grow on trees" is of course trees themselves. Cutting urban trees and replacing them causes only a temporary change.

Eventually, any urban tree will become too large and need replacing. This is an ongoing process in all cities. To bring forward the replacement of a few trees to enable construction of top class cycling provision benefits the environment.

This issue has been floating around in my mind for many years as a campaigner for better cycling provision in London. A shibboleth-like "preservation of trees" argument has so often prevented changes to the roads to benefit cyclists and pedestrians. It has, in my experience, really been a major factor in preventing progress on better streetscapes and urban designs in the UK, because it has been an argument that has tended to be accepted by both "green" campaigners and those who wish to prevent change for the better, hence it has been effectively unanswerable, and the result has been a log-jam in altering the built environment to benefit cyclists and pedestrians. And yet, as Hembrow remarks with childish simplicity "One thing that certainly does grow on trees is trees themselves".

Other areas Hembrow deals with in his post are drainage, and its relationship to laying cycle paths with proper surfaces, and lighting. Another, that, I would add, is "disturbance to wildlife". These are all arguments that have, in my experience, been used to scupper pro-cycling and pro-walking proposals in London. The striking thing is that these arguments are not, typically, used to successfully prevent road-building, road-widening, construction of car-parks or other commercial or industrial development of land in cities. 


Why not? The answer goes to the heart of how our society thinks about cycling and walking. They are not regarded as serious transport. They are not regarded as a seriously productive part of the economy. Hence they are not regarded as a high economic priority (and see this fascinating post on the At War With The Motorist blog on how the economic contribution of different transport modes is currently officially being measured by our Department for Transport – it is horrifying). 


Because of this, infrastructure plans that will benefit cycling and walking are easily derailed by flimsy arguments dressed-up in ecological terms that are really just part of the great local government tradition of "creatively finding reasons to do nothing". In contrast it is widely accepted, by public and politicians alike, that "serious" infrastructure projects like new roads and railways and new housing or industry have to be driven through at the expense of some alteration to the natural environment. The alignment of pro-cycling and pro-walking campaigners, typically, with the wider environmental or green movement, facilitates this status-quo reinforcing situation. They themselves are often genuinely not sure what is "best for the environment" in the long term, with all these competing arguments. And so they too are likely to err on the side of caution, of not wanting to change anything.


Now, don't get me wrong here. I am not arguing for indiscriminately cutting down mature trees here there and everywhere, or casually paving over remote and undisturbed Sites of Special Scientific Interest, or lighting up the New Forest with laser beams (though the last really is what Southampton City Council wanted to do – and for no good reason!) But I am questioning the way competing considerations are often balanced up, particularly in the context of the dense urban environment of London. I am suggesting that the result of this balancing up is often not to produce, overall, long-term, a "green" result at all, but quite the reverse. Some examples, all from north-west London, may help to explain my case more clearly. 


In 2009 I was asked to look at plans for a new section (one of the last to be built) of the "London Cycle Network Plus", in Harrow. This was to be on heavily-trafficked main roads just south of Harrow Town Centre: Kenton Lane, Tyburn Road, and Lowlands Road. Now, in fact, Harrow LCC have a much better idea for where the cycle route E-W through Harrow Town Centre should go, but I am leaving that to one side. This was the alignment of the LCN+ route that the council wanted, on these cycle-unfriendly, not very wide, main roads that basically form a bypass to the town centre, and connecting two gruesome giratory systems, the Northwick Park roundabout and the  Lowlands/Bessborough Road roundabout. The only redeeming feature of this route is that it has some quite nice parkland on both sides of the road.

The plans the officers came up with showed the kind of classic "bitty" mixture of on-road and off-road cycling provision, that I have already criticised as ineffective in this post. They had sections of advisory cycle lane (the kind with dashed lines that motorists are allowed to park in), sections of off-road segregated track, and sections of shared-use path with pedestrians in the parkland by the south side of the road, alternating few times (I can't recall the exact details, and the don't matter) in a distance of little more than 1km. I tried to explain to the officers why this would not work: how short sections of off-road path are not worth cyclists getting on to and off again; how it is safer and more efficient to stick to the carriageway; how, for cyclists not confident enough to cycle on main roads, these little bits off-road will do them no good, and tend to create more illegal cycling. What would work in this location, we (I , the Harrow Cyclists representative and the CTC rep) argued, would be a consistently off-road cycle path (bearing in mind there was no chance that the (then) Conservative-run council would allow the loss of space for cars that mandatory cycle lanes on the road would entail).

The reason they could not do that? Trees. Mature trees in the way, trees that are a distinctive part of the Harrow landscape. Now, these issues are always difficult. These trees are indeed nice ones. This parkland with its trees is indeed a nice feature of Harrow town centre. But only relatively, only because the planners have made such a complete balls-up of the rest of Harrow town centre, covering it with elevated roundabouts, flyovers, concrete multi-storey car parks and cathedralic shopping centres.

Herein lies the rub. In case like this, there has been decades of destruction of the traditional characters of our English town centres by insensitive, commercially-driven, motor-centric planning. Where a little nice bit is left, everybody wants to preserve this. This might also be a good place to put a bike path. But, no, now you cannot alter anything in the landscape to make the bike path practical, because we have wantonly destroyed so much in the past, that now this landscape has to be fossilised. It cannot now be touched. So cycling again gets the back end of the deal. Cycling was not catered for when the big changes to the urban fabric were made, in the 60s, 70s and 80s, and regret at the cataclysmic mistakes of that era now paralyse thinking over optimising what remains. A "preservation mentality" prevents consideration of proper cycling infrastructure, and so the motor-dominated environment created in the late 20th century continues to rule.

A second case: on the border between the boroughs of Brent and Barnet exists a reservoir, variously known as the Brent Reservoir or the Welsh Harp (from the name of a pub which used to stand where the River Brent drained into the reservoir, but which was demolished in the 1970s to make way for the concrete jungle of the Staples Corner road junction). The Welsh Harp reservoir was created in 1835 as a header water supply for the Grand Union Canal. It is today surrounded by a mixture of public open spaces, industrial land, and housing. It is hemmed in with major roads on three sides: the A5, the A406 (North Circular Road) and the A4088. These roads and their major junctions to the west of the reservoir at Neasden and to the east at Staples Corner, which reached their modern form in the 1970s, make the reservoir and its open spaces quite inaccessible by any means of transport, but particularly by walking, cycling and public transport. They also cut off the open spaces on the north side from those on the south side. There is furthermore a lack of paths across these open spaces.

Neasden Recreation Ground by the Welsh Harp Reservoir, Brent: an under-used public space with a lack of suitable paths for walking or cycling, hemmed in behind the North Circular Road, reachable only via footbridges, from one of which this picture was taken. The dam is in the background, with Kingsbury Church beyond.

Looking the other way from the same vantage point: the community-severing A406 North Circular Road

The lands around the reservoir are administered partly by Brent, partly by Barnet, and partly by British Waterways. These bodies are supposed to co-operate in managing the reservoir lands through the Welsh Harp Management Committee. The land at the west end of the reservoir, near the dam, is occupied by various sailing clubs. These have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo of limited public access to the reservoir lands. British Waterways will not allow the use of the dam as a walking or cycling route, though it would be extremely useful as such to allow journeys avoiding the horrible A4088 Neasden Lane. The unconvincing argument given for this intransigence is "security" – despite the fact that dams all over the country, and, of course, abroad, are used as walking and cycling routes. The overall effect of this is that the reservoir lands are extremely under-used and do not make the contribution they should to the public amenity of north-west London. People in NW London who wish to find a traffic-free cycle circuit in a park for leisure or family cycling or for teaching kids to ride have to go the south-west London, to Richmond Park, to do this. There is nothing for them in north-west London, an area containing maybe 5 million people.

It was suggested, as long ago as 1994, that a footpath should be created all the way round the reservoir, linking up the severed open spaces (the idea of cycle paths was not around at that time). The idea of a cycle and walking route around the reservoir was again put forward by Brent Cyclists in 2010. This idea has been rejected by the Welsh Harp Management Committee, both on grounds of cost (as usual), but also because it is claimed that cyclists and walkers close to the reservoir would disturb breeding wildfowl.

Now, I don't know what these wildfowl are. I don't know how special there are, exactly where they are, or if it is really true that a walking and cycling path round the reservoir would of necessity disturb them. It has not been demonstrated in detail to me, and so I have my doubts. Could not a path be routed to be sufficiently far from them not to trouble them? If not, could not some land be taken off the industrial premises, that hem the reservoir in quite closely at certain points, to take a path sufficiently far away from them? If these are not possible, and if their habitat must be damaged, could not another habitat be created for them elsewhere to compensate?  Even if none of these things can be done, is it reasonable that the breeding of these wildfowl in the middle of an urban area at an artificial reservoir take precedence over developing low-carbon leisure and transport choices for 5 million people?

Staples Corner. I think the breeding wildfowl are supposed
to be somewhere in the greenery to the right.

Well, is it? It is not an easy or obvious choice, but why shouldn't the reservoir lands be used to try to create pleasant and useful routes for walking and cycling that go a small way to undoing the car-dependency in the local population fostered by this car-centred infrastructure that has been used to hem the reservoir in?  On either side of the Welsh Harp, the concrete jungles of the Neasden junction and Staples Corner testify to the failed urban transport concepts of the Motorway Box era, cutting communities off from one another and forcing everyone into cars in order to get around, creating a brutal environment for anyone who tries to travel under human power. As in the Harrow case, the cause of cycling is stuck between the two apparently immovable barriers that none of this motor infrastructure can be altered now (it would cost far too much), and the bits of space that remain, and happen to have attracted the odd breeding fowl, or grown a big old tree, are considered too fragile to alter.

I think what is going on in these cases is that actually an exaggerated importance is being given to one small aspect of the natural environment as it is, that is being used as an excuse for no change. So there remains no-where to teach children to cycle, and no route to go for a decent walk before having to cross a huge road, that you have to do by climbing stairs up to a desolate walkway, and then down again on the other side, or alternatively by diving down some rank underpass. So the car-dependency is not challenged, so nothing is done to counter the ever-increasing pollution and noise (which can't be doing these trees or wildfowl all that much good). We have an eco-logjam where the small remaining green bits of the city do not seem to be usable for cycling, and Harrow, Brent and Barnet continue to make their disproportionate contributions to global warming. How much good is that doing to wildfowl, either at the reservoir or anywhere else in the world?


In The Netherlands, they do recognise that there is pressure on urban environments, and things are sometimes in the wrong place in towns and cities, and sometimes you do have to create significant temporary disruption in order to move things and re-arrange the urban elements, to create better choices for transport by foot, bike, boat, and even car. They are not afraid of spending money on this, and it doesn't seem to cause them big political problems, or problems with an ecological or preservationist lobby. Why not? Are people there just used to taking a broader, more longer-term, more holistic view of the issues?


Back to north-west London, and a third and final example, which demonstrates another type of problem that often confounds attempts to create off-road cycle routes in our cities. If we can't have a decent-length cycle route round the Welsh Harp, what about having it a bit further east, on Hampstead Heath? Well, Hampstead Heath is ruled by the Corporation of London, though it is geographically in the boroughs of Camden and Haringey. The Corporation is not a democratic body: it consists of City-types "elected" by the bosses of City firms. Why should they govern this area of open space in north London (and other scattered open spaces, such as Queen Park in Brent and West Ham Park in Newham)? Well might you ask. The reasons are diverse historical hang-overs, not good ones. Mrs Thatcher gave Hampstead Heath to them when she abolished the GLC. Anyway, they run the heath through their Heath Management Committee, which is advised by their Hampstead Heath Consultative Committee. This latter body is dominated by local residents groups, which consist of the wealthy owners of large houses which abut the heath. They are the people who make the roads around Hampstead, Highgate and the heath congested and dangerous for cyclists when they are in their cars, but, when they want to go get out of their cars and go walking on the heath, they consider it rather as most people do their back garden. They do not want to meet cyclists there.


Some limited shared-use paths for cyclists, which do not connect very well, were introduced on to the Heath by the GLC and preserved by the Corporation. There has been an endless campaign by Camden Cycling Campaign, occasionally abetted by Sustrans, to try to get more useful cycle paths on the Heath, which has been blocked down many years by the Hampstead Heath Consultative Committee and the Heath and Hampstead Society. This amenity group contains people very wedded a fiction that they decorate with the Latin title rurs in urba, drawn from the 19th century act that brought the Heath into public ownership, that means that the Heath is considered to be a bit of the countryside in the city. I have pointed out to them that if it really was countryside, they wouldn't be able to walk all over it, but this doesn't seem to cut much ice with them. They claim that cycling is too dangerous on the Heath, that more of it it would result in lots of injured or dead pedestrians (but why doesn't the existing cycling do this?), and that the paths are too steep and too narrow for cycling. They claim even if more cycling did not cause injuries, it would worry pedestrians and put many off from using the Heath entirely.

Many of the people who argue like this want to remove cycling from the Heath entirely. The often say they are "pro-cycling", but that they believe the cycle paths should be on the roads surrounding the Heath. These roads are of course narrow arteries full of large volumes of fast traffic going round the Heath. The Heath is even crossed by two busy roads: North End Way and Spaniards Road, but this does not seem to alter their rurs in urba concept, whereas, apparently, connected cycle paths would shatter it. Obviously they have never been as far afield as Richmond, or even Hyde Park.

One answer to the claim that the shared-use paths are too narrow is to suggest building new, dedicated cycle paths. But this suggestion drives these self-appointed guardians of the Heath to a new level of fury. The Heath should not be urbanised, they say. It should not be "covered in concrete", and it should not be made part of the transport network. Cycle paths would be the thin end of the wedge. The next thing would be motorways and housing estates being built on the Heath, destroying its delicate habitats, ruining it for everyone. This is exactly what the Heath and Hampstead Society, they say, has been fighting for 100 years to prevent.

Again, a "preservation of the natural environment" argument is very dubiously used to prevent the creation of useful cycle routes: places where families with children could cycle without quickly coming the the end of the path and a barrier created by a fast, busy road; places where children could be taught to cycle. In this case, the argument is clearly hysterical and used by those who are more motivated by their own narrow local interests than a broad environmental agenda. A compounding factor is the lack of democracy in the governance of the Heath.

So, the relationship of the "cycling as transport" lobby with environmentalism can be a troublesome one. We emphasise the "green" credentials of cycling, but cycling is in fact technology, and part of the industrialised society. It is just another technological solution to the human desire to move further and faster. In the move to promote cycling as "low carbon" transport, we can generate dubious alliances: as I pointed out in an earlier post, Team Green Britain, supporting cycle events such as Bike Week and even the London World Naked Bike Ride is a branch of the nuclear power industry (EDF Energy).

Team Green Britain promote cycling with a heavy "reduce your carbon footprint" message:

Gareth Wynn, Group Director, 2012 Programme at EDF added “As the first Sustainability Partner of London 2012, EDF Energy founded Team Green Britain to help Britons reduce their carbon footprints ahead of the Olympic and Paralympic Games. Travelling contributes significantly to most people’s carbon footprint, but cycling is a low carbon way to get around, plus it can be enjoyable and help you get fit at the same time. We’re hoping that Team Green Britain Bike Week will help people get back on their bikes, helping them reduce the carbon footprint of their travel in the long term”.

In my opinion this is the wrong way to promote cycling. In my opinion, virtually nobody starts cycling because the wish to reduce their carbon footprint and be more "green". Look, I am as concerned about carbon footprint as anybody: I am so concerned about my carbon footprint  that I spent £650 of my partner's money recently taking a train to Geneva (first class), when I could have flown (economy class, also at her expense) for £150. But even I, paragon of environmental virtue that I am, did not start cycling in order to save the planet. I started as a child as a means to gain independence. I started again as an adult as it was a cheap and efficient way to get around London (at a time when there was less traffic than there is now). I think we have to treat the people whom we want to get cycling as normal, selfish humans. I think we have to "sell" cycling to them on the basis, primarily, of convenience and economy and fun (so we have to actually make it convenient and fun, so that means getting the infrastructure right first), and, perhaps secondarily, though this comes some way behind, on the basis of health and fitness.

Ultimately, in both promoting, and providing for, cycling, the "less green" approach may be the one we need to get the ecological benefits we wish for in the long term.