It’s crazy days for bollard fanciers down here in the lower Lee – or Lea – Valley.
Tottenham Hale – where people used to holler over the marshes to hail the ferry – is enjoying its own, protracted, ‘Day H’.
The original ‘Day H‘ was the third of September 1967, when road traffic in Sweden switched from travelling on the left – in the British style – to using the right, like the Germans. In Tottenham we’re not switching sides but an extensive – fashionable in the mid-Twentieth Century – one-way system is being slowly returned to the direct, default setting. Happy days.
Downstream – where the A11 runs over the Bow Back Rivers – and travellers once used the straight ford through the swamps between Bromley-by-Bow and Stratford, there’s a new and novel street design that’s interesting, nice and funny.
A sight-seeing trip round the soon-to-be-former Tottenham Hale gyratory system is part of my current daily routine and last week I took the first possible opportunity to check-out the new extension of Cycle-Superhighway 2 on Stratford High Street. Exciting times.
An early visit to both is recommended, and for those unlucky enough to live beyond the catchment area of the mighty Lea – or Lee – there’ll be more on all these modifications here soon. But first consider this sad site, a sorry reminder of the context and limits of infrastructure changes.
The floral shrine is memorial to Tamika Malo who was run-down and killed on Lordship Road – a residential street – in Stoke Newington, London, N16 last month. The crack in the wall…
…is where the saloon car hit. The damage, and witness accounts in the local press, strongly suggest that poor Ms. Malo was struck while on the sidewalk. This wouldn’t be too exceptional. Public-health statistics are always elusive but the best estimate seems to be that somewhere around 10 per cent of the people killed or seriously injured by crashes, while walking, are on the pavement.
In its very early years the London Cycling Campaign had a slogan ‘cycling is political’. It’s a welcome development that – thirty five years later – the slaughter of people travelling by bike is now a subject of political discourse. These deaths are now recorded and discussed in greater detail, than those of slaughtered pedestrians; an inequity that tends to reinforce the popular misconception that cycle-travel is wildly dangerous.
Let’s not get into the slippery issue of the relative hazards of walking and cycling. Public-health statistics are elusive. It is worth noting that the two are roughly comparable.
Nowadays there’s lots of talk about the potential value of – what are colloquially referred to as – ‘segregated cycle facilities’. This form of words is problematic, ‘segregated tracks’ are always shared with others, on low-powered motor cycles and scooters, in motorised wheelchairs, skaters, skateboardists and often pedestrians and their dogs. It’s worth remembering that in Germany and the Netherlands the market for utility bikes is currently swamped by electric-powered bikes. In this context ‘segregated’ is shorthand – or euphemism – for ‘physically separated from heavy motor-traffic’. In this period in history taking the fact of motor-traffic for granted is never progressive.
Ms. Malo was killed while using a footpath physically separated from heavy motor-traffic. Moving the furniture, the kerbs and the lines on the highway may mitigate the threat of motor-traffic. It can change the way people think about public space. It can change the signals given to people about what they’re supposed to do and how they’re supposed to do it. It reminds people that how we live now is not how we used to live or how we’ll live in the future.
Reconfiguring streetscapes and highways may be useful and necessary but if we want to solve – rather than ameliorate – the problem, these measures only make sense as part of an exit-strategy from motor-dependence. The problem is not technical it’s political.
I’ve been watching Olympopolis – nestled in the Lea Delta – for years. I’ll be paying for it for the rest of my life so am compelled to wring-out every possible drop of entertainment. Riding around, as it slowly opens, is a bizarre experience. Like recovering from a nasty bump on the head. Trying to reconcile what is, with memories of what used to be. Some of the boulevards have parallel, Northern European-style rad-weg. Sections of which probably qualify as ‘protected from heavy motor-traffic’.
The metre-thick concrete bund is to stop cars, vans, trucks, buses or motorcycles crashing off the bridge on to the railway beneath. Temporary shelter for anyone on the side track is – no morbid pun intended – just a spin-off.