In a striking advance towards utopian socialism, the Conservatives are about to give everybody £50 to get their bikes fixed.
Whatever you may think of Boris Johnson he did once ride a bicycle, and that’s the only plausible explanation of the latest Government lunacy. In a striking advance towards utopian socialism, the Conservatives are about to give everybody £50 to get their bikes fixed.
How to spend it? If you’re a regular cyclist, you’ll be happy to go into your local shop and say “do what you can for £50” knowing that bike mechanics like things to work and want to give you the best possible value for your hard unearned cash. The money is not really for you though. It’s supposed to encourage all those people, who’ve allowed their machines to decay unused in the back garden, to clean them up and become part of the new micro-mobility revolution.
“The scheme will be open to anyone who has an unused cycle in need of attention. The aim is to help them get it back on the road by providing £50 toward the cost of a service and repair, up to two cycles per household.”
anyone with an unused cycle in need of repair?
Perhaps it will work? In the spirit of “go to work, don’t go to work” people are being told not to use public transport, and while the polls suggest that many people want to ride their bikes more, the same data suggests that just as many intend to drive more. The latter is – of course – unsustainable. There will have to be some kind of restriction, but given peoples unwillingness to change their lifestyle, this may come with a severe political backlash.
I welcome the initiatives idealistic spirit but, for retailers, it may turn out to be a mixed blessing. At the moment we already have too much to do. Capacity is finite, especially in competent bike mechanics. There’s the problem of “bicycle shaped objects” and the shutdown has inspired much optimism among hoarders of corroded metal. A back of the envelope calculation suggests the money is worth £10,000 for every bike shop in the country, but will it be £10,000 of extra business or just extra bureaucracy and lots of unfixable bikes?
Regular riders will be cheered and encouraged by this unexpected gift. Get online now, tell your friends, your mum, your work colleagues! Share the joy!
We can unequivocally support the principle of new infrastructure for cycle-traffic. It doesn’t mean we have to use it.
In May 2020 it was clear there was a revolution happening. I didn’t expect things to develop so fast. We can’t go back. To borrow a slogan from Chile “we won’t go back to normal because normal was the problem.”The current calamitous pandemic has reminded us of some interesting things, including…
…there are more important things than – the previously sacred – ‘economy’.
…health is an issue of social justice.
…humanity has a dysfunctional relationship with the natural world or – to put it another way – we have a dysfunctional relationship with the World.
…our Government can move quickly when it wants to.
…our Government can spend freely when it wants to.
…pedal cycles are useful.
…pedal cycles are resilient.
Covid19 sparked a global run on bicycles. In Britain the boom started with budget bikes as bored, anxious people looked for ways to exercise away from their overcrowded, local parks. Fine weather, motor-traffic flowing like it was a Sunday in the 1950’s and clean air also helped.
The Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air(CREA) estimate that – in Europe, in April 2020 – improvement in air-quality resulting from CV19 lock-downs averted 11,000 pollution-related deaths.
Check our exclusive report from inside the great 2020 bike boom.
bike shop frenzy London, June 2020
The British bike sale boom continues with more costly machines – the cheap ones are all gone – as others reassess their future travel options.
The Government – understandably anxious to restart the economy – has a new imperative to get people out working – and spending – while keeping them from crowding inside trains and buses. Car sharing is problematic. Too much dependence on private cars will mean gridlock and a rapid resurgence of poison air.
There will be less compulsory travel associated with employment. The revolution has fast-tracked the ideas and practice of working from home and telemeetings. Andrew Adonis hasn’t twigged.
You have to be wary when words like ’emergency’, ‘temporary’ or – worst of all – ‘alternative’, are associated with cycle-travel, but – to take an early example – this Birmingham plan looks good, like a ten year wish-list accelerated by, and for, this revolutionary moment.
There are good precedents for opportunistic exploitation of emergencies. The ‘ring of steel‘ around the City of London which appeared overnight in 1993, a response to Irish Nationalist bombing campaigns, had previously been proposed as a motor-traffic reduction scheme and dismissed by politicians as unacceptable.
Made of concrete blocks encased in plastic, the ring of Lego’s hasty introduction allowed for a ‘suck-it-and-see’ trial period and subsequent tweaks, which would have been impossible had it been approved, and executed in york stone. Its removal has never been a serious possibility.
The Boardman line – let’s hurry to restructure streets in favour of walking and cycling now. Then see how the new layout works, and whether to keep it – is persuasive. Boardman is always plausible. His achievements on and off a bike, his calm logic, stoicism and persistence in spite of personal tragedy make him a magnificent spokesperson.
Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.
We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.
In times like these solidarity and unity are important. If anyone* is in favour of progressive change lets stand with them in unity and solidarity. It’s good to be open-hearted. It’s wise not to be naive.
Adonis
Andrew Adonis is best known as advocate and apologist for costly, destructive, infrastructure projects that enrich construction companies. Predictably the fantasist is still talking up HS2 like it was 2019.
The original justification for HS2 was as replacement for a proposed third runway at Heathrow. Adonis – of course – has always wanted both. Even this patron saint of concrete and climate chaos is forced to concede:-
“I don’t think the third runway at Heathrow is now going to be built in the 2020s, maybe never.”
(Financial Times 01/05/2020)
Which begs the question, if we don’t need new airport capacity do we still need the doomed folly of HS2?
Adonis is currently in favour of new infrastructure for cycle-traffic. A subject on which he has some previous…
Should cyclists be allowed to use carriageway where there is a superhighway? Welcome views.
— Andrew Adonis (@Andrew_Adonis) September 20, 2017
You may consider 2007 ‘the olden days’ or ‘yesterday morning’. 2007 was the latest attempt to use Andrew’s argument to criminalise cycling on the highway. We can be optimistic that it was the last, but our enemies are tenacious as cockroaches, willing to retreat to avoid defeat, likely to return if we become complacent.
Some people like cycle-infrastructure because it makes cycling even more democratic, others like special tracks for bikes because they contain cycle-traffic and containment is necessary to protect their fantasies of universal motor-dependence.
Most of the new riders preparing for modal-shift grew up in a culture that relentlessly dangerised cycling, raised by parents who grew up before Mayer Hillman revealed that cyclist live longer. Some will be children who deserve to ride without having to engage with the complicated idea that not all adults are kind. We can unequivocally support the principle of new infrastructure for cycle-traffic.
We can unequivocally support the principle of new infrastructure for cycle-traffic without endorsing the erroneous idea that, when it comes from space previously open to all vehicles, it is providing ‘new space’ for cycle-traffic.
Risk assessment is a hot topic. To mask or not to mask? Dangerisation relies on bad risk-assessment. We can unequivocally support the principle of new infrastructure for cycle-traffic without forgetting the ancient truism that it may be quicker and safer on the road. Setting an example of good risk-assessment is also useful and important.
We can unequivocally support the principle of new infrastructure for cycle-traffic. It doesn’t mean we have to use it.
*The exception to this principal are facists and proto-facists but they usually prefer autobahnen anyway.
When I heard I was only allowed out to exercise once a day the chorus of this old heartbreak song popped into my mind.
You know there’s been a revolution? You know there’s been a revolution when the Government calls an indefinite general strike. All that’s left is to decide the winners and losers. The Dunwich Dynamo is two moons away, what will it be like in these post-revolutionary days?
In the current context – regardless of the detail of any regulation and guidance in existence on the fourth of July – it’s irresponsible to go beyond your comfort zone. In summer 2020 London, Essex and Suffolk are – alas – not soft country. If you are unsure of your ability to look after yourself stay near home.
Part of the original raison d’etre of the Dunwich Dynamo is to encourage people who like riding bikes but are intimidated by the idea of riding a ‘long’ way to be more ambitious. A function of the Dunwich Dynamo is to disclose cycle-touring’s dirty little secret…
…it’s not that hard.
The raft of ancillary events that nowadays support and profit from the annual pilgrimage; the Southwark Cyclist’s coach-convoy, daybreak opening at the Flora Tea Rooms, food and drink all night long, all along the road, have made the event even simpler for inexperienced riders.
This July these support events may not be legal, practical or profitable. It seems likely that these services won’t be available this year?
A ride from London to the Suffolk Coast alone – or in company of other household members – a swim and a ride home is an innocent pleasure.
If you want to ride a Dunwich Dynamo there are other dates close to the full moons on fifth of June, fifth of July, third of August, second of September and first of October. Temporal distancing will allow anyone who can ride an unsupported Dunwich Dynamo out-and-home from their safe-house, well within their comfort-zone, to enjoy this delight discretely – and discreetly – without adding to their own, on anyone else’s, risk.
By July I hope we may be permitted to ride with trusted comrades kept at a safe distance. Think of aerodynamics when calculating this – at high speed, in the plume of turbulence trailed by another rider – you may risk contagion at a distance considerably greater than an arbitrary two metres.
If you’re a hard rider feel free to do whatever you consider prudent. If you want to ride a Dunwich Dynamo don’t expect, or ask for, food, water, any pastoral or logistical support. And don’t get booked or arrested, unless you want to, in anticipation of an interesting court case.
The DD is a cycle-touring event. In it’s purest form cycle-touring is based on self-reliance and spontaneous decision-making. ‘Cancelling’ the Dunwich Dynamo is as preposterous as cancelling Christmas, Ramadan or Halloween. The idea that it’s even possible relies on the widespread misconception that somebody ‘organises’ it. It’s a tradition that belongs to everyone – including YOU – and is owned by nobody.
Next year the July full moon will be on a Saturday night.
Happy New Year, very late I know, if you’re following the Gregorian calender, slightly early if you’re Chinese.
The Advertising Standards Authority(ASA) have banned this TV advert “SEE CYCLIST THINK HORSE.”…
…because of five complaints. They ruled it was…
“…socially irresponsible and likely to condone or encourage behaviour prejudicial to health and safety.”
This is good news for those of us who look forward to the advent of bicycle paradise.
I’m still dreaming of being a cyclist. My chosen life-partner is a serial horse-owner, so this little motion-picture has particular personal appeal.
Were it not for those five complainants – if they aren’t ‘road-safety’ professionals then they must be ‘road-safety’ enthusiasts – I’d probably never have seen it. Now, instead of season on TV in Scotland, the Paddy-Power-Principal – that getting your promotional material banned is good for business – has given the ad legs. Cycling Scotland, producers of the film plan to appeal. This on-going controversy offers potential for grand, national* exposure.
There’s no rigorous data on the the relationship between cycle-helmet wearing and the frequency or severity of crashes, or between cycle-helmet wearing and the reduction or mitigation of injuries caused by crashes. This marginal issue has been discussed here before, when Wiggins weighed in with ill-considered – and rapidly retracted – remarks following the death of Dan Harris.
As there is no evidence, strong views on the subject are often questions of faith. Messing with people’s faith can make them touchy
Attempts at normalising hard-hats for general cycling offer us a chance to coolly ask interesting questions…
Where does the danger come from?
Who is threatening who?
..and to assert the main public-health implication of crash-hats for general cycling.
If a crash-hat makes somebody feel ‘cool’, fashionable, stylish – and hence more likely to travel by bike – that hat can help them live longer.
If it makes them feel ‘dorky’ or freakish, and hence less likely to travel by bike, they are likely to die sooner.
If the ASA are worried about health and safety where’s the roll-bar on Mercedes and why is the driver not wearing a hard-hat and goggles?
The truth that people who ride bikes live longer has been understood – by academics at least – for more than twenty years. There is still work to do to push it into the realm of common-knowledge.
I like convertible cars, they’re not pretending to be practical. One of the draws of an automobile is that it allows its user the chance to privatise an area of public space. A convertible can be broken into with a Stanley knife and is clearly meant for frivolous applications. Choosing a convertible is a step away from the kind of agoraphobia that makes people irrationally afraid of cycle travel when the dangers of other modes are treated more fatalistically. It’s driver may be a victim of motor dependence but at least they’ve decided to get rid of the roof, who knows where that process might end?
Of course demanding the Advertising Standards Authority consider actual evidence is faux-naïf. They are referring to the Highway Code as arbiter of what is safe and healthy and – as noted here before – Highway Code, the Road Safety industry are cultural phenomena desperately striving for some kind of technical validation.
*A sublimimal horse-related reference for Unionists. Those who favour independence for Caledonia make it grand INTERnational exposure.
Sunday April 27th found the junction of Broad Lane and Tottenham High Road bustling with men in fluorescent pyjamas.
A couple of years, ago on arrival in my new neighbourhood, I noted that the local the junction of St.Annes, Hermitage and North Grove…
…local junction was ripe for a redesign.
Imagine the surprise – on Monday 28th April 2014 – to find a gap cut neatly in the guard-rails blocking the southern end of North Grove?
The footway is already designated ‘shared use’, and level with the carriageway, so riding deferentially across it is now easy and legal; happy days.
I don’t know who undertook the small but important task making the northern arm of the junction permeable for cycle-traffic? Despite some big talk in the comments of a previous post, suggesting guerrilla action…
…it seems most likely – and most optimistic – that this small step, toward bicycle paradise was undertaken by contractors working under instruction of the London Borough of Haringey.
I’ve sent a note of congratulation to the council member for that ward, who also happens to be the ‘cycling champion‘ for the LBHaringey. Acknowledging good work is always polite and politic.
This is not the only good news from N15. The small hours of Sunday April 27th found the junction of Broad Lane and Tottenham High Road bustling with men in fluorescent pyjamas. Helpfully these industrious munchkins had fired up a portable LED matrix to inform passers-by what they were up to.
I thought about hanging around to become the first person through when they moved the cones, but my bed was calling, so – in traditional random push-bike style – contented myself with being one of the last naughty riders to go East on Broad Lane illegally.
Transport for London – who administer these trunk roads – have allowed their contractors a long time to return the roads of the Tottenham Hale one-way system to a default setting. This is customary. Works that involve changing the highway pattern almost always drag on for months and years, even though it’s possible – when deemed necessary – to make extensive changes at very short notice. Older readers may remember the famous ‘ring of Lego‘ that went in – pretty much overnight – twentysome years ago in response to Irish Republican bombs in The City of London.
There’s a conspiracy theory that suggests works like these are deliberately allowed to drag on for months so that anyone disadvantaged by the changes forgets what it was like before the prolonged digging and re-jigging started. The theory suggests that, if the works last long enough, relief when they do finally end will be enough to obliterate any nostalgia for the old system; that months of cones, congestion and temporary traffic lights will obscure the difference between the past and the future. Blurring this distinction also inhibits those who much prefer the new arrangements from demanding more civilisation. When people notice change it reminds them that how things are is not how they’ve always been, and not how they always have to be. For clock-watching traffic engineers that may smell like trouble.
Conspiracy theories are always over-optimistic – they contain the idea that somebody somewhere knows what they’re doing – but they can be a useful tool of analysis. With their unenviable task, resolving conflicting demands and aspirations within finite space and green-time, it’s not really surprising if highway engineers, planners and politicians endeavour to keep the focus on technicalities. How, and for whose benefit, we organise our public space is a political question, but it suits those who plan, build, maintain and administer our highways if this truth remains obscure.
How streets are laid out, how people are encouraged to use them can be treated as a technical problem with solutions. It’s also useful to think of it as a political contest with winners and losers.
The excellent ‘space for cycling’ campaign is currently releasing lots of energy. Enabling many people to make small efforts is more productive than stakhanovite labours by a few. If you haven’t yet taken the time to fill in the boxes and alert your local candidates do it now. It only takes a couple of minutes.
I have a small quibble with ‘space for cycling’ as a slogan. Does it reinforce the popular misconception of cycling as a problem, yet another demand on public space? As arguments against engineering the World to accommodate and encourage motor-dependence become better understood and more popular there’s a reactionary tendency to see cycle-traffic as another interest group at odds with ‘motorists’, or ‘pedestrians’, or ‘bus passengers’.
On roads subject to motor-traffic congestion – in urban and suburban Britain that currently means pretty much all roads – cycle-traffic produces space. When you’re riding along and somebody with a potentially higher speed is being momentarily delayed by your presence – when you’re presence is producing a convergence between their maximum speed and their average speed – you’re releasing capacity. Bursts of speed waste space.
If you want to travel by bike gyratory systems are a nuisance.
They mean you have to…
…travel further
…deal with junctions with more lanes and higher traffic speeds.
They encourage the operators of motor-vehicles to go faster and take less care.
They make navigation more difficult.
Research showing busy one-way roads, roads carrying heavy flows of motor-traffic, are less convivial places to live dates back to the 1970s.
Getting rid of one-way streets…
…is good for residents and traders.
…means finding bus stops is simple.
…is good for bus passengers.
…make it easier to cross roads on foot.
…is good for local motor-traffic.
Getting rid of one-way systems is good for everybody except the people who manifest as through-motor-traffic, who contribute nothing to the local environment and economy but noise, severance and toxic polution.
Cycle-traffic is not another dish on the menu it’s the mainstay of a whole new cuisine. Building broad alliances against one-way operation marginalises those still clinging to the unrealisable fantasy of universal personal mobility via motor cars.
It’s too early to assess the value of the new two-way Broad Lane, it will take six months for things to settle down and folk to get used to it. It used to have three traffic lanes in one direction, now it has one in each. The 20 mph speed limit is unenforced except by fat grandads on bikes who don’t mind being used as traffic calming. However when I was spinning along it yesternight I had to ring my bell at a young fellow crossing the road while reading his smart phone.
The most pressing short-term needs are, explaining to people who use motor-vehicles on public roads why people on bicycles need to claim time and space, and encouraging bicycle users to take enough time and space to be safe.
The statistical anomaly, that half the killings of cycle users in London, in 2013, were packed into fourteen days last month put the issue of motor-slaughter right up the agenda.
For a while no news or current affairs show on TV or radio was complete without a spot on the dangers of cycling. The resulting surge in demand for specialist commentary led to heavy squad-rotation. Not even the estimable C.M.Boardman MBE can be everywhere. I consequently got to spout opinions on BBC London Radio.
Some of the calls from members of the public are suitably random and there are moments when I start to ramble but it’s nice to air lunacy in public. In a mad World sanity can be a dangerous affliction.
Three things to remember in these crazy times.
People who travel by bike live longer.
People on bikes getting run down is not – primarily – a bicycle story. It’s a story about the dangers of motor-traffic in public space.
The most pressing short-term needs are, explaining to people who use motor-vehicles on public roads why those on bicycles need to claim time and space, and encouraging bicycle users to take enough time and space to be safe.
Is this woman broke? Samantha Cameron without mudguards.
Perhaps the strangest elements of this sudden squall were the comments of Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, also on Radio London?
He seems oddly confident that the only significant reason a normal person would ride a bike is because they can’t afford to get around any other way. In the same interview Sir Bernard had already discussed the onward ramifications of the Andrew Mitchell swearing saga, which has a toff trying to ride a bike at its centre. He must have meetings with Boris. I’d be surprised if he doesn’t know senior police colleagues who use a bike to get to work.
Perhaps Sir Bernard is suggesting it’s poor people on bikes who get killed because they don’t have the social-presence of patrician fellow-travellers? Consider poor Francis Golding, run down where Theobalds Road meets Southampton Row, 08/11/2013, died three days later, a lauded professional, also plenty old enough to qualify for free travel on tubes and buses.
I don’t know Sir Bernard personally but feel safe to assume that he’s no mug. You don’t rise from a humble background to become the country’s foremost peeler by being dumb. Why did he spout nonsense?
The idea that cyclists are reluctant victims of want is attractive to authoritarians. People voluntarily on bikes reveal the limits of the dominant theory of post-Thatcher Britain; that the only things that really matter are earning and spending. When our rulers witter on about ‘hard-working families’ they don’t mean ‘work equals force times distance’, they’re not thinking about people who’d rather waste time refurbishing an old bike than earning cash to buy a new one, or growing vegetables on their home patch, rather than purchasing ‘cheap’ those trucked in from distant lands. Our rulers definition of ‘work’ is restricted to paid employment, they’re talking only about economic activity. As Mayer Hillman observed, bicycle travel is a free-lunch you get paid to eat. By gaining satisfaction from something that is free-at-the-point-of-delivery folk using bikes reveal that right-wing theory – however useful – is only a theory.
Andrew Gilligan has boasted about riding his bike while wearing headphones, Boris once referred to using a phone while riding as ‘a free-born Englishman’s time-hallowed and immemorial custom’. Despite this they can’t admit that – while naughty cyclists may be an annoying, amenity issue – it’s the routine use of motor-vehicles that kills cities. They have to go along with the prevailing analysis that cycling is the problem, motor-dependence the default. To do otherwise is heresy.
Last Friday evening as I tooled by Manor House a collection of plods were congregated around the lights, on what looked like Operation Safeway duty. As a person of dignity in later middle-age, going to London for a night out, I was wearing black shoes, black trousers, a black jacket and a black hat. My leather gloves were brown. I was in good time and ready – if given unsolicited advice by any public servant on the absence of colour in my costume – to point out that the 3 watt generator, mit Standlicht vor und hind, on my bike was working fine, that the (mitchellesque expletive deleted) Queen of England travels in a black car, that I’d been riding these roads since their mothers were virgins and if they want to change the law of the land, to make clownish attire compulsory for bicycle users, they’d best start a campaign in their own (mitchellesque expletive deleted) time, not waste mine. They let me pass unmolested, which was probably best for all concerned.
Check the reversible rear-hub? Paul Smith stylish since the ’50s
Sir Bernard’s flat Sheffield accent reminds me of a recorded voice currently ringing round the Design Museum in Bermondsey, Paul Smith CBE from Nottingham. The show “Hello, my name is Paul Smith” explains how one person can keep a handle on a global brand. It’s not about bicycles but they run though it like the pin-stripe in a sober business suit, a sober business suit with a flamboyant paisley-print lining. The show’s not about bicycles but they pepper it’s content as…
…ubiquitous everyday conveniences.
…glorious, poetic symbols of transcendence and human potential.
While Bernard Hogan-Howe’s comments are a futile attempt to turn the clock back to the days of the vanishing tribe, when a bicycle was a – best-forgotten – symptom of austerity, the Paul Smith show heralds a future where human-powered mechanical travel is the default, non-walking, mode, the logistical skeleton of a World infused with peace, freedom and joy.
Bernard and Paul have things in common. They both left school and went to work without higher education. Hard graft has taken them to the top. They retain their accents. The puckish Smith is a decade older yet seems more youthful. What’s his secret?
Moving the furniture, the kerbs and the lines on the highway may mitigate the threat of motor-traffic 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.
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.
Stratford High St. among the Bow Back Rivers
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.
Are ‘Cycle-Superhighways’ a new category of municipal displacement activity? Containment Infrastructure?
The Mile End Road – the A11 – is in the news because two inquests coincided last week. They enquired into deaths at either end of this corridor.
The word ‘tragedy’ is over-used but that’s what these awful mishaps are.
The two deaths have circumstances in common – people travelling by bike, going ahead at junctions, knocked down and crushed by left-turning trucks, a well documented systems-failure. In these specific cases the crashes aroused further interest because – since 2011 – this section of the A11 has also been ‘Cycle-Superhighway 2′(CS2), a new flavour of highway design that consists mostly of bright blue surface treatments along the left of the carriageway and some direction signs.
Giving evidence PC Simon Wickenden of the Metropolitan Police Traffic Unit suggested that the presence of ‘Cycle-Superhighway’ stripes may have contributed to the slaughter by encouraging riders to travel too far to the left and by giving them an unjustified sense of security. The coroner – who dealt with both cases – has criticised the Superhighways. Her report is published today. TfL have eight weeks to reply.
Two useful principles when riding on roads shared with other traffic…
…control the space around you.
…pick a line that minimises conflict with traffic trying to go in other directions.
At times these principles can contradict. It’s easier to control space when you ride close enough to a kerb, or other linear barrier, to prevent people in cars or trucks passing on one side. This allows you to pay more attention to what’s happening on the other side; but if – for example – you’re approaching a junction where you want to go ahead, and the leftmost lane is used by traffic planning to turn left, taking the second lane will reduce conflict with left-turning traffic, but also make it harder to control the space around you because – once you’re in the second lane – other traffic can pass on either side.
The decision-making process can be more important than it’s outcome. When you’ve a definite idea of what you’re doing it’s easier for other people to discern what you’re going to do next. The blue stripes have no legal weight. Anyone using any vehicle can use that space but their presence encourages bike riders to follow them even if they’re not the safest, or most convenient, path.
The tendency of riders to follow the blue stripes reduces uncertainty. Uncertainty keeps people alert. The stripes discourage communication – looking and signalling – between road users. Communication keeps people awake and encourages them to look out for each other.
The Cycle-Superhighways are an initiative of Transport for London(TfL) who are responsible for the Capital’s major road network. Other roads are administered by local Boroughs. TfL answers to the Mayor. The Cycle-Superhighways were proposed by Ken Livingstone and are being implemented under the aegis of Boris Johnson. The stated aims of the Superhighways are “to improve cycling conditions for people who already commute by bike, and to encourage new cyclists”.
The coloured tarmac certainly offers superficial validation of the idea that cycle travel is welcome on these routes and they mostly follow radial, main roads – which makes sense, not only do these follow the level, direct desire lines, they’re the ones TfL controls. The ambiguous and legally worthless, Cycle-Superhighways are a product of the era of mixed messages but classic ‘Alibi Facilities‘ they are not.
Boris’s political place-man Kulveer Ranger who oversaw their first phase – but has since moved on – defended the blue stripes against early criticism.
“To reinforce safety we wanted to define where other road-users could expect cyclists to be.”
And the big beast himself, reworking the mantra…
…around 45 seconds:- “This is somewhere where motorists can expect to find cyclists.”
Now I don’t know where these jokers have been living for the last ten years?
Stating the obvious, for their benefit, the answer to the question:- “Where on the streets of Inner London do you expect to find cyclists?”
Is – of course – “everywhere.”
Indeed an unspoken corollary of their slogan might be:- “Don’t expect to find cyclists on the bits of the Mile End Road that aren’t blue.”
It’s instructive that the Cycle-Superhighway initiative came in as TfL were also engaged in ‘smoothing the traffic’. Perhaps we have a new category of municipal displacement activity, a reaction to the rising tide of bicycle madness:- Containment Infrastructure?
Subsequent to two death crashes in two weeks at Bow Flyover late in 2011 the design of CS2 was modified. During one of the many consultations on the scheme a colleague observed:- ‘They should paint the whole road blue, or none of it.’
If the ambition is to validate cycle travel, to encourage riders onto the road without increasing complacency or limiting the options for cycle-traffic how about taking inspiration from the mysterious markings on Mare Street E8?
It’s a mistake to ever imagine that an organisation like Tfl speaks with one voice.
this campaign contains some useful messages
There isn’t anything good to take from the waste and horror of motor-slaughter but it’s worth noting that current coverage of the deaths on CS2 is different from, and more intense than, anything we could have expected during the era of the vanishing tribe. In former days disasters like these were ignored, or told tersely with a ‘what-do-you-expect-if-you-ride-a-bike?’ subtext.
Motor-traffic in general, the haulage business in particular, kills people. They kill people at a rate that would be a national scandal if any other source – bad food hygiene? enemy action? unmanned level-crossings? – were responsible.
Nowadays reportage on the slaughter of people using cycles may be more humane, with voices of bereaved friends and relatives, victim’s biographies, to transcend the statistics and reveal the true stories of suffering and loss, but it still tip-toes around the central issue. These stories are about trucks not bikes.
Mainstream discourse still likes to hint that those who travel by bike are head-in-the-clouds idealists while treating fantasists who imagine you can reduce traffic jams by constructing highways as exemplars of cool rationality
As predicted last week the Government has preempted the current All Party Parliamentary Cycling Group inquiry by announcing £62 million of funding for ‘pro-cycling measures’ in England excluding London.On the subject of the APPCG transport minister Norman Baker said of its co-chairs Ian Austin MP (Labour, Dudley North) and Julian Huppert MP (Liberal Democrat, Cambridge) “They’re both cycle enthusiasts but they’re also realistic”.
Norman Baker – centre – being realistic and risking sunburn.
Norman Baker – centre – being realistic and risking sunburn.
Picture from the Guardian
Mainstream discourse still likes to hint that those who travel by bike are head-in-the-clouds idealists while treating fantasists who imagine you can reduce traffic jams by constructing highways as exemplars of cool rationality, even though the blind faith that building or widening roads relieves motor-traffic congestion went underground with a stake through it’s heart in 1994. The killer report was funded and published by the Department of Transport but perhaps their copy’s fallen down the back of a radiator somewhere?
Big ticket infrastructure – for example – a £32 billion, or probably more, railway line, whose economic justification is based on the assumption that you can’t work in a mainline train carriage, is regarded as a critical national policy issue, while English provincial towns and cities have to bid for modest ‘Cycle City Ambition Grants’, in a contest that can only have 2 or 3 successful candidates.
Distributing funds by ‘inviting bids’ and holding a beauty contest is wasteful and divisive. It might be a lot to you or me, but in national public-spending terms £62 million is half a peanut.
At the turn of the Century cycle-travel accounted for just 0.02% of all trips in Seville – now 7% of journeys are made on a pedal bike.
A highlight of the first session of the All Party Parliamentary Cycling Group(APPCG)’s ‘Get Britain Cycling’ inquiry was Dr. Lyn Sloman describing the rapid – in local-government terms at least – transformation of the city of Seville in Andalusia now acclaimed as the ‘cycling capital’ of Spain.
the example of Seville
Starting from a very low base – at the turn of the Century when cycle-travel accounted for just 0.02% of all trips – now 7% of journeys in Sevilla are made on a pedal bike.
In 2010 I rode across Iberia – on the way to Fes taking as direct a route as possible across the corrugations of Andalusia, passing the delightful towns of Andújar, Baena, Cabra, Olvera and Ronda to hit the Mediterranean coast at the mouth of the Hozgarganta river. A slightly easier route, in terms of hills and navigation, might be to run down the Guadalquivir valley via Cordoba – with the added bonus of the chance to check-out Seville’s network of bike paths and ancient city centre – and then to proceed to the ferry-port of Tarifa – or Algeciras – via Jerez and Cadiz?
…local junction was ripe for a redesign.
