Resistance to change

Towards the end of the Ranty Highwayman’s excellent summary of a recent Institution of Civil Engineer’s lecture in London about cycling infrastructure, he makes an interesting observation, based on the two talks given by TfL staff during the evening –

TfL is in turmoil over providing for cycling, but not wanting to reduce unrestricted access for vehicles – something has to give, even on a street by street basis.

I assume he got this impression from the way the two TfL speakers emphasised ‘competing demands’ on the road network. In particular, Michèle Dix – the managing director of planning – stated that there ‘aren’t enough roads’ in London to meet all the demands being placed on them, and concluded her talk with a mention of how TfL are looking at ‘the business case’ (the very expensive business case) for burying major roads in the ground.

The background to this is that TfL’s roads are at capacity. Anyone who watched the BBC’s Route Masters programme earlier this year would have seen how even minor incidents cause complete chaos. One of the traffic managers featured in the programme professed his own amazement at the amount of motor traffic they manage to push through London’s roads.

The calls for Space for Cycling have to be seen against this background; one of motor traffic capacity stretched to breaking point. Any ‘extra’ demands placed on the network are a serious headache – this is presumably why Dix was talking about there not being enough roads, and building new ones (even putting them underground), at a lecture about cycling infrastructure.

These recent Tweets  also caught my attention –

@thebikeshow @VoleOSpeed @citycyclists I’m on the LCC group for better junction and I have given up on anything significant happening

— Shaun McDonald (@smsm1) October 25, 2013

@thebikeshow @VoleOSpeed @citycyclists TfL feel that motor traffic flow is far too important thus blocking any significant improvements

— Shaun McDonald (@smsm1) October 25, 2013

Of course the problem here is that TfL continue to see cycling as something ‘extra’ to be accommodated, rather than a way of relieving pressure on the network by shifting motor vehicle journeys to more efficient modes. This is an attitude shared by the Mayor himself; earlier this year, he was interview by BBC Newsnight, as part of their feature on Britain ‘Going Dutch’. He stated

Of course I believe in segregation, where it’s possible to do. But we don’t have – in the centre of London particularly – enough roadspace to consecrate entirely to cyclists.

Ignoring the fact this simply isn’t true, this comment is revealing, in that it demonstrates the Mayor’s failure to grasp that if you genuinely don’t have ‘enough roadspace’, it’s all the more important to make more space-efficient modes of transport attractive and obvious.

I think it is this failure to see cycling as the solution, rather than as a problematic ‘extra’ demand on the network, that explains both these kinds of comments, and also the attitudes exhibited by both Mayor Johnson and Sir Peter Hendy (the Transport for London Commissioner) last week on matters of cycling safety.

Interviewed by BBC News following a coroner’s investigation into the deaths of two cyclists on Superhighway 2, Hendy insisted that

The primary cause of the terrible accident for poor Mr Dorling was that he and the tipper went through a red light. We do need to make sure that road layouts are safe – as safe as they can be. We’ve altered it once, and no doubt we’ll alter it again.

The BBC’s Tom Edwards challenged him on this point, arguing that in this particular case the lights were irrelevant, as, ‘red or green’, Brian Dorling would have been in precisely the same dangerous position when both he and the lorry progressed through the junction. Hendy was adamant –

No. If you cycle or drive through a red light you’re likely to have an accident.

There’s not much to say on this, beyond the fact that Hendy is wrong, and Tom Edwards and the Coroner are right. If the lorry driver and Brian Dorling were both progressing through the junction on red, then they could just as easily have been in identical positions with respect to each other if they were moving under a green signal. The same terrible result would have occurred with both moving through the junction legally. Hendy is obviously an intelligent man, so this point can not be lost on him.

His willingness to maintain the red light violation as ‘the primary cause’ smacks of deliberate obfuscation of the issue; a convenient way for Transport for London to avoid admitting that their design is at fault, and also to limit the scope of calls for redesigns across the rest of the TfL network.

We’ve seen before how both Boris and Transport for London are keen to focus on mistakes by either drivers or cyclists as the reasons for deaths and injuries on the roads, and this latest response falls into this same pattern. Blaming people is convenient, because it means that little has to change. The roads can stay the same; no space has to be reallocated for cycling; no cycle- and pedestrian-specific crossing phases have to be added. The emphasis instead is on education and training – trading places events, posters, and more ‘awareness’ are relatively cheap and easy ways to respond, and don’t involve disruption to the road network.

It’s this attitude that lies behind Boris’s infamous assertion that major gyratories in London are fine to cycle around ‘if you keep your wits about you.’ By implication, the responsibility for safety lies with the individuals using the roads, not with the people who design them. That comment was made nearly two years ago, but in spite of all the fine words in the Mayor’s Cycling Vision document published earlier this year, it doesn’t seem that Boris’s outlook towards cycling has changed all that much. That document contained this inspiring passage from Boris, in the Introduction –

we must now greatly increase our provision for cyclists – and, above all, for the huge numbers of Londoners who would like to cycle, but presently feel unable to.

Yet the evidence available at the moment suggests a deep unwillingness – both on his part, and on the part of TfL, which he controls – to adjust London’s road network in favour of cycling, and more precisely, in favour of this excluded group.

At Mayor’s Question Time last week he made some comments that suggest he has completely forgotten the language of the Mayor’s Vision. Quizzed by AM John Biggs about whether the desperately poor Superhighway 2 would now be converted to a fully segregated route, all the way from Bow Roundabout to Aldgate (in other words, to make it suitable for all potential users, not the current small group of the fit and the brave), Boris responded,

This is always going to be an extremely difficult challenge for us on the streets of London, and no solution will ever be perfect. We will do our best, we will invest what it takes, but I can’t guarantee to Londoners that we are going to be able to produce segregation everywhere that it is desired. I’m afraid that is simply not a realistic objective, just because there isn’t the roadspace to do it.

An echo of his comments on the BBC’s Newsnight programme. Biggs clearly wasn’t having any of this –

On CS2 there is the space on the highway to provide for segregation, and I think that that would make sense. I’m particularly struck by the comment from the Coroner… that the CS2, with its design, creates a false sense of safety, or security, for cyclists, who see the blue markings as an indication that they’ve been thought about, and that they have the right of way, where in some circumstances they don’t.”

Biggs is right. There is an enormous amount of space along the entirety of this section of Superhighway 2 to create safe, dedicated space for cycling, rather than meaningless blue stripe that forms nearly the entirety of this route at present.

This road is four lanes wide, with a wide central median, and with very wide footways – something has to give if Transport for London (and Mayor Johnson) – are actually serious about cycling becoming a safe and attractive option for all Londoners, rather than just paying lip service to it.

But Boris’s response to this point was, frankly, abysmal.

Look, I totally accept that the way you have framed the dilemma is completely right. The dilemma is, could we have a system in London where, on lots of these roads – and CS2 is an example – you created a segregated cycle lane…. The difficulty is that in many cases… you take away a huge amount of road space and you perhaps don’t even deliver the safety improvements that you desire. Because – speaking as a daily cyclist – I think that one of the problems that I think many full-time cyclists have with the segregated option is that they don’t actually always use the segregated gullies. And I’m not convinced that it would be the knock-out solution that some people suggest it would be.”

Extraordinarily Boris is using the low quality of the ‘segregated gullies’ that do exist in London – the ones that are not attractive for ‘full-time cyclists’ like him – as the very reason for not doing things properly. Of course if people avoid ‘segregated gullies’, that is because they are not good enough.

This isn’t the first time that Boris has used crap provision in London as a basis for arguing that busy roads, with multiple lanes full of heavy traffic, are where people might actually prefer to be. The chutzpah is astonishing. It’s his job to sort out that crap provision, not to use it as an excuse for doing nothing. People in London should not have to choose between unpleasant, traffic-filled roads or deeply substandard infrastructure – yet Boris appears to be using the existence of the latter as a reason to avoid doing anything about providing an alternative to the former.

Later in the Question Time session, AM Jenny Jones drew Boris’s attention to two new schemes, the Cobden Junction in Camden, and the Tottenham Hale gyratory. She referred to the removal of cycle lanes on the High Road – I think she actually meant to refer to the situation on Broad Lane.

On this point, Boris responded

Speaking as a cyclist, [the removal of the cycles lanes] would be a good thing, in my view.

This is on a road that carries a large amount of motor traffic, including a high proportion of HGVs and buses. Once again Boris – deliberately or otherwise – is using his own personal standard of what is is acceptable as the basis for what universal cycling provision should be.

All of these noises – coming both from the Mayor and Transport for London – are deeply unpromising. They want to keep the status quo.

Space for cycling confirmed as separation from motor traffic

The AGM of the London Cycling Campaign on Saturday saw a series of important motions being passed – ones that will serve to define how the LCC formulate policy, and what they will campaign for. Indeed, the motions that were passed set out fairly explicitly what ‘Space for Cycling’ (or #Space4Cycling, if you prefer) actually means in practice. I think they are massively significant. You can read these motions here. Motion 3 – ‘When do we need protected space for cycling?’ – was proposed by Rachel Aldred. It’s quite clear from looking at it that it amounts to a call for Dutch-style separation across the cycle network in London. The demand is that nobody will have to cycle anywhere in motor traffic travelling at above 20mph, nor – crucially – should anybody be expected to share the same space as motor vehicles on a road or street carrying more than 2000 Passenger Car Units (PCU) per day.

PCU values for different vehicle types. For more explanation, see Rachel’s blog

If a road has a speed limit higher than 20mph, or if it carries more than 2000 cars (or rather fewer lorries, buses or coaches) per day, then physical separation from motor traffic is required. Both of these criteria are ‘tipping points’ in their own right. That doesn’t mean that cycle tracks – or forms of light segregation – have to be employed. Measures could obviously be taken to remove motor traffic from a given street, so that the PCUs per day value falls below 2000. This could take the form of filtered permeability, or opposing one-way systems, to cut out through traffic. If this can’t be achieved, then physical separation from motor traffic is an absolute requirement. In practice, I think this kind of policy would result in a very ‘Dutch’ looking cycle network, with cycle tracks on main roads, and barely any physical segregation at all on the minor road network of residential and access streets.

Amsterdam street with measures to remove motor traffic. No physical separation required

Even what resemble main roads can be acceptable without segregation if through traffic is removed

But on streets which carry significant volumes of motor traffic, physical separation is an absolute requirement

In other words, Motion 3 is recognition that Space for Cycling amounts to separation from motor traffic, wherever you choose to cycle. It recognises that fear of motor traffic is one of the most significant barriers to cycling, and that to create safe, pleasant and comfortable conditions for cycling you have to minimise the amount of interaction with that motor traffic. Motion 5 – proposed by David Arditti – was also significant. It argues for uniformity of cycle provision, for all categories of user. David himself has set out why this is so important in a blog post of his own, one that makes the case so clearly there is little point expanding on it here, except to say that his motion explicitly rejects the two-tier style of cycling provision that trades off safety against convenience, and in practice results in awful compromise that suits nobody.

What catering for ‘different cyclists’ looks like. A substandard cycle lane, and a shared use pavement alongside it. Enough.

Someone – I forget who, sorry – pointed out to me that it is quite remarkable that a cycle campaign is even having to pass a motion like this. It should be completely obvious that we need cycle infrastructure that is simultaneously suitable for both the fit and the fast, and also for the young, the frail, and the elderly, rather than two sub-standard compromises tacked together. David’s vigorous and eloquent defence of his motion drew one of the most stirring rounds of applause of the day, and I’m pleased to say it was carried overwhelmingly.

Rachel’s motion was subjected to more opposition, initially some ‘procedural mischief’ from Oliver Schick, who pointed out that her motion contained reference to a document that was not included in the AGM papers (an objection that carried little weight in light of the fact that the AGM had, moments earlier, voted to approve the accounts, which were not included in the AGM papers), and then from a proposed amendment (Oliver again) suggesting that reference to protected space be removed, and replaced with a reiteration of the importance of 20mph limits across London. This amendment was overwhelmingly rejected, and the unamended motion was passed almost unanimously.

Motion 4 – proposed by Mustafa Arif – amounted to an endorsement of these demands (and indeed of Space for Cycling in general) as the LCC’s campaigning strategy for next year. It was a very tiring (and argumentative) day, but a productive one.

One anecdote to close with. As I left the building, a well-dressed man with a Brompton, wheeling it along the pavement with his companions, asked me ‘what was going on in there?’ He had caught sight of the dozens of Bromptons stacked up inside the entrance. AGMs are obviously not everyone’s cup of tea, but from our brief conversation it was apparent he had no idea that the London Cycling Campaign even existed. The LCC only has 12,000 members, so there is huge potential for growth in membership, if the positive campaigning messages now being developed reach these kinds of people. And not just that, there’s huge potential for change, full stop, if the wider public can be shown that cycling is a viable transport option for them if the conditions are right, and if they can be shown what a difference mass cycling can make to the quality of where they live. I think the motions passed at the weekend are a big step in the right direction.

Ben Hamilton-Baillie and motor traffic

Last night I attended a talk given by Ben Hamilton-Baillie in Eastbourne. I didn’t really learn very much, because the talk was very similar to the ‘stock’ talk he has presumably given on numerous occasions before – the one you can find in many places on the internet.

He charmed the audience with amusing anecdotes about silly signs, and the general absurdity of our urban environment, with photographs and snippets that have featured heavily in his previous talks. The same case studies featured heavily too – Seven Dials in London, Ashford, Exhibition Road, Poynton, New Road in Brighton, as well as the same thought experiments, like the ‘ice rink’ example.

It was really interesting to see how the people in the room were swept along with his vision for making our towns and cities better places. The videos and photographs of attractively paved streets contrasted starkly with the guard railing, the excess clutter and deeply ugly British streetscapes we are all so familiar with.

In some cases this involved a little sleight of hand. Pictures of the ‘former’ Exhibition Road, where huge numbers of people were crammed on to tiny pavements, hemmed in by guardrails beside a vast expanse of tarmac, were contrasted with the new Exhibition Road. Or rather, with artist visualisations of the new Exhibition Road, in which pedestrians frolic happily across the entire width of the road, and motor traffic is somewhere in the background.

The reality – a carscape, with pedestrians, err, hemmed in at the sides – was not shown.

What is curious is that, as these kinds of examples show, Hamilton-Baillie must be acutely aware that motor traffic makes our streets unpleasant, yet reducing or removing motor traffic never seems to appear as a strategy. In an hour-long talk, there was no mention of actually physically reducing the amount of motor traffic travelling along urban streets. He was even asked, at the end of the talk, what his ‘top criteria’ for the success of urban realm schemes were. He replied that you shouldn’t clutter up your streets with guardrail, or with signalling and posts, and you should avoid using one-way streets, before moving onto general principles of design and organisational skill, and political vision. Mention of removing or reducing motor traffic came there none.

The most telling statement of the evening – for me at least – was

We need to reassess what we have to sacrifice in order to accommodate traffic.

Which begged the obvious question – why continue to accommodate traffic in the first place? Because all the most attractive and pleasant urban streetscapes I know are ones where motor traffic is either non-existent, or greatly reduced – be that at a street level, or across a town or city centre.

It is still possible to drive around the centre of Utrecht for access, but motor traffic has been largely eliminated here. It has not always been this way.

We can see this in action on Exhibition Road, where – as I have pointed out before – the pleasant bit to the south of the A4, where through traffic has been cut out, stands in stark contrast to the traffic-filled section to the north. Reducing motor traffic is one of the essential components of creating more attractive urban areas, yet as far as I can tell Hamilton-Baillie never discusses it.

I think this is part of the reason why his strategies are so popular with councils up and down the country – they don’t really involve changing the status quo, at least as far as how journeys are being made is concerned. The street will look nicer, and it will be undoubtedly more pleasant for pedestrians (and probably for people driving too), but the thorny issue of how people are actually travelling within towns is not really tackled. Radical change does not appear to be on the agenda – instead the existing situation is prettified, and made less intolerable, but people will continue to drive around within towns, much as they did before.

Another telling pair of slides that Hamilton-Baillie often uses – and indeed used again last night – are the contrast between an ugly streetscape, full of traffic engineering overkill, and his paradise, where the street is uncluttered, with people mingling with motor traffic.

The ugly ‘before’

The attractive ‘after’

When I look at these illustrations (which are featured on Hamilton-Baillie’s own site) I can’t help but notice that the way people are travelling about hasn’t changed at all, and indeed that the apparently attractive ‘after’ streetscape is still unpleasantly choked with motor traffic.

Surely in this kind of environment – a public square, in the centre of a town – we should be actively discouraging people from driving, and making the alternatives like walking and cycling the attractive and obvious alternatives? Indeed, striving to create public squares that are not full of private motor cars?

I didn’t get a chance to ask Hamilton-Baillie a question at the end of his talk – there were many other hands up in the audience, and I had to catch a train to get home. I suppose I would have asked him why, when all the ugliness, blight, deaths and injuries he rails against in his talks are the direct result of an excess of motor traffic in our towns, he never talks about tackling the problem at source. It seems an extraordinary oversight.

What ‘robocars’ tell us about British cycle campaigning

There was a flurry of discussion at the end of last week about what the emergence of ‘robocars’ – shorthand for cars that automatically drive themselves, without any human input – might mean for how we design for cycling, prompted by Carlton Reid’s piece in the Guardian (and a more lengthy one on his own site).

The debate coalesced around two alternative visions of the future. In one version, eliminating driver error, and making vehicles behave ‘perfectly’, would mean that separating cyclists from motor traffic would no longer be necessary. All that effort being put in to creating safe and inviting conditions for cycling is redundant. In Carlton’s own words –

Many bicycle advocates believe we’ve started on a Dutch-style 40-year trajectory to getting segregated cycle paths almost everywhere but driverless cars will be here long before the end of that. Why build bike lanes when robocars and driverless trucks will be programmed to know all about space4cycling?

He concludes

If cars no longer kill us we will be able to use the roads again, without fear. Bike paths? Where we’re going we won’t need bike paths, as Dr Emmett Brown might have said.

The other version of the future is considerably darker.

A more dystopian [vision] involves platoons of speeding robocars making roads even more deeply unpleasant and motor-centric than they often are today. Pedestrians and cyclists may have to be restricted “for their own safety.” After all, if you knew the tipper truck barrelling towards you will automatically brake if you wobbled out in front of it, you’d have little incentive to stay in the gutter and every incentive to play one-sided chicken. Claiming the lane would take on a whole new meaning as cyclists blithely blocked robovehicles. The authorities would be put under immense pressure to stamp out jaywalking – and jaycycling

In this dystopia, anyone wishing to ride a bike would be confined to separate routes, unable to use the roads because of the inevitable consequences of vehicles being forced to stop, or slow, as people walking or cycling meander around in their way. If robotic motor vehicles are to make progress anywhere, then cycling will have to be banned on the roads.

It is hard to muster much interest in this speculation, principally because – for reasons that we will come to – it has very little relevance for the kind of policy we should be formulating on cycling. In fact, the only real source of interest in this topic is how revealing it is about the preoccupations of cycle campaigners – their inability to move on from the concerns they have always had, and their blindness to alternative realities.

The rise of mass motoring in this country pushed cycle campaigning into two specific areas of concern. The first was to resist the impudent, newly-arrived motorist, who was quickly taking over the pleasant routes cyclists had previously enjoyed (the road network that was formerly free of motor traffic). This meant objecting to calls for cyclists to be placed on a separate network, in an (as it turned out, futile) attempt to keep the existing road network suitable for anyone who might wish to ride a bike.

The second area of concern – closely tied to the first – was about getting motorists to behave; to drive slowly and carefully, everywhere, and especially around people cycling and walking. Indeed, it was strongly believed at the time that a separate network for cycling would not be necessary if the increasing numbers of motorists appearing on British roads could just be forced to comply with the existing laws. This letter, written by the Secretary of the Cyclists’ Touring Club, G.H. Stancer, to the Times in 1935 captures both these attitudes quite succinctly.

The obviously fair solution to the problem of the roads is to take effective steps for the removal of the dangerous conduct that leads to the accidents rather than to try to remove potential victims while allowing the danger to remain. If the existing laws were rigidly enforced and dangerous conduct by any class of road user eradicated, it would be possible for all sections to share the highways in safety and good will. 

I have covered this period of history in some depth in a previous piece, an article which argued that British cycle campaigning has struggled to separate itself from these historic attitudes about retaining the road network, and about getting motorists to behave, so that separation would not be required.

And, lo and behold, it is precisely these same two attitudes that have emerged in the recent debate about ‘robocars’.

At long last, decades after that initial 1930s dream, the motor vehicles on British roads could actually be driven perfectly. Might it be the case that, in Stancer’s words, ‘it would be possible for all sections to share the highways in safety and good will’, now that driver misbehaviour could be eliminated? Or, alternatively, could these ‘robocars’ be the  winning justification for the motoring lobby’s sinister plot to push cyclists from the road, ‘for their own safety’?

It’s almost comical how cycle campaigning has failed to move on from these twin preoccupations, to the extent that, in 2013, discussion about ‘robocars’ continues to be framed in precisely the same terms that it would have been by cycling enthusiasts with large moustaches, way back in the 1930s.

To ram home the irrelevance, you only need to consider how people who cycle in the Netherlands might view the arrival of robotically-driven motor vehicles, given that the question of whether Dutch cars are driven by robots, or by fallible humans, has very little bearing on the quality of the Dutch cycling experience.

Interactions with motor vehicles are rare indeed when you make journeys by bicycle in the Netherlands, a point that David Hembrow has repeatedly made, and I have in a recent post. I cannot imagine Dutch bike riders getting particularly exercised about who is driving motor vehicles, when direct encounters with motor vehicles during a particular day can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

There’s an even more recent example in the form of this excellent Streetfilms report from Groningen.

The film shows hundreds of people cycling in different locations – in the city centre, on residential streets, along cycle paths and tracks. Yet in the entire fifteen minute film, there are only five or six direct interactions with motor vehicles. What difference would ‘robocars’ make to the quality of cycling in Groningen? A barely perceptible difference, if any difference at all.

This is why the debate about ‘robocars’ and what they might mean is completely irrelevant, at least in the way it is currently being presented. For it is being argued that if motor vehicles are perfectly driven, then there is no need for separation. But this betrays the long failure of British cycle campaigning to consider the importance of subjective safety, as well as objective safety. What keeps people from cycling on the roads is not bad driving, but the sheer volume of interactions with motor traffic.

This was brought home to me on Saturday in Leicester, where – by and large – the motor traffic around us was driven pretty well (with the inevitable odd exception). It was, however, still unpleasant cycling in it, even for ‘hardened’ cyclists, even if none of the vehicles were being driven in a substandard fashion, let alone outright badly. It is fear of motor traffic in general – not fear of bad driving – that is is the major barrier to cycling in Britain, a point that appears to have been missed, again, in the ‘robocars’ debate.

The Dutch have cracked this problem, by creating a subjectively safe and pleasant environment for cycling, away from motor traffic. It doesn’t really matter who is behind the wheel.

Wimbledon Fire Brigade speak out

From the Wimbledon Local Guardian –

A motorist has suffered life-changing injuries after he was crashed into by an HGV. The man, believed to be in his 30s, was severely burnt when he became trapped inside his Nissan Qashqai shortly before 7pm Friday, October 11, in the car park of Sainsbury’s in Merton.

The London Fire Brigade (LFB) were called to help rescue the man, who had been burnt, and had major breathing difficulties. Aided by the Helicopter Emergency Medical Service, they were able to free the man in about 60 seconds.

An LFB spokesman said: “Due to the nature of his injuries, which are going to be life-changing, we had to quickly extricate the casualty from the vehicle.

Staff from Wimbledon Fire Station said motorist safety has become an increasing problem. The spokesman said: “There is a big problem with motorists at the moment generally.

“There are so many motorists on the roads that we have had a number of incidents ourselves with fire engines and recent months. What they do is drive alongside lorries and really get themselves into places they just should not be. They are not respecting the road are getting themselves into dangerous positions. If there is a lorry there just stay back.”

The spokesman then added

“But obviously that’s completely irrelevant to the case you have asked me to comment on, in which a man has been injured through no fault of his own. I have absolutely no idea why I decided to start wittering on about motorists in general, leaping to conclusions, blaming them for the injuries they are suffering. Maybe I have some kind of problem.”

Firefighters from Wimbledon, along with representatives from Halfords, will hold a safety workshop for motorists in December outside Morrison’s in Wimbledon. Motorists will be able to sit in the fire engine to see what the view is like from the driver’s seat in an exercise aimed at reducing injuries caused to them on the roads.

Short bike trips

On one of my recent posts Chris left the following comment, principally about the  inconvenience of riding a bike for short trips.

What I don’t understand is why people would actually want to cycle for journeys under 2 miles?

By the time you’ve got your bike out of wherever you keep it locked up, cycled to wherever you’re going, found somewhere to lock it up and removed your pump, spare tube and other bits and pieces (I wouldn’t expect to find them still on the bike when I got back in London if I didn’t), it’s probably just as quick to walk, and you don’t have the hassle of a bike to worry about.

I can see the benefit when you’re going shopping and will be carrying heavy bags back, but other than that there seems to be lots of asking how we get people to cycle these short journeys, but very little asking why they would want to in the first place?

I love my commute – and at 18 stone and 5’10″, I’m not your stereotypical weekend racer Mamil – because it gives me an opportunity to exercise on at least a couple of days a week which I wouldn’t otherwise get, but once I’m at work (in Central London), if I’m going to visit a customer within a couple of miles of the office, it would never occur to me to take my bike. If it’s raining, I’ll get a taxi, but if it’s not, then I’ll walk. The last thing I want is the hassle of not knowing if I’ll be able to find a secure place to lock my bike when I get there, or the worry during the meeting of whether the saddle (or potentially the bike itself) will still be there when I get out!

Chris will probably be a bit horrified, but I often use my bike to travel very short distances indeed – less than a hundred metres.

I’m not stupid, or wasting my time. The reason I cycle for these short distances is because it’s simply ridiculously easy for me to do so. I can make the transition from walking to cycling – and vice versa –  in a matter of seconds.

I was going to try and explain how with words, but decided to make a short video instead. Because it makes it a bit more obvious.

My bike doesn’t really require anything of me, beyond a key. I don’t need to wear any special clothing, or equipment, that needs to be taken on or off. I just ride it in whatever I happen to be wearing, which will be ordinary clothing, appropriate for the time of year. I don’t need to take anything on or off the bike either – beyond unplugging the chain when it is locked with it – because everything that’s needed is a permanent part of the bike, like the lighting, and any storage. I don’t carry spares, or tools, because I don’t need to. There’s nothing to go wrong – the bike is built to be as tough and as indestructible as possible.

If I’m just popping into a shop, I can park it right outside, which is obviously very convenient – I can step straight onto the bike as I come out of the shop. Anyone trying to steal it will have to carry it away. If I’m away from the bike for longer periods (like work, or an evening out) or if it is out of sight, I will obviously lock it to something. The chain is wonderful for allowing you to improvise with street furniture that is close to hand, unlike a D-lock, which requires a degree of faffing and an appropriate object to lock to.

So – that’s why I ride a bike for very short trips. I’m definitely not the only one…

Supermarket shopping in the rush hour in Utrecht. Nearly everyone was coming and going by bike – because it’s just as easy as walking. Doubtless some very short trips are being made here, as people travel from shop to shop, or cycle home

Kevin Hickman has written eloquently about short bicycle trips already. You can read more about my bike here

Helmets, and James Cracknell’s brain

James Cracknell was struck by a petrol tanker travelling at high speed in July 2010, while he was cycling in Arizona. This incident has converted Cracknell into one of the most prominent advocates of cycle helmets in Britain, apparently on the basis that the helmet he was wearing at the time ‘saved his life’.

The following extract is from Cracknell’ autobiography, Touching Distance, recounting a ‘piece to camera’ he did for the Headway brain injury charity. The words are those he used in the video.

‘Last year when I was cycling across America, a truck’s wing mirror smashed into the back of my head at seventy miles an hour, knocking me off my bike and on to the road. My brain swung against the front of my skull as it hit, causing severe damage to the frontal lobes of my brain.

‘When I came out of intensive care, I wasn’t me any more. All of my friends and family told me that my entire personality had changed. My short-term memory was gone. I couldn’t make decisions. Had no motivation.

‘But I was lucky. I was wearing a helmet. If I hadn’t been, I’d be dead. Doctors say in time I should hopefully make a good recovery. I’m already back on my bike. Some cyclists will never ride again. I make the choice to wear a helmet. If you do too, please send this one to a friend.

‘I’m nearly James Cracknell. Use your head. Use your helmet.’

I hope it was a powerful message. I wanted to do everything I could to support such a worthwhile charity. It was designed to educate people into protecting their heads or influence others to persuade their friends and family to cycle with a helmet. I also wanted to do something positive to mark the anniversary of the accident.

From this account – his own – it is clear that the injury to Cracknell’s brain was the result of it rapidly accelerating within his skull, and hitting it.

What effect did the helmet he was wearing have in lessening the effects of this injury, and indeed preventing death? Well, we have information from Cracknell himself that the helmet he was wearing at the time he was struck by the wing mirror ‘was shorn in two’. (This description of what happened to the helmet is consistent with the many other accounts given by Cracknell and his wife). So it split on impact, and did not deform.

This means it did next to nothing to lessen the acceleration his brain received within his skull – which we have been told, again by Cracknell himself, caused his brain injury. Cycle helmets are designed to deform, and so lengthen the period over which deceleration occurs – much like the crumple zone of a car.

Polystyrene-based helmets protect by absorbing the energy of the impact through compressing the polystyrene. If the polystyrene has broken into pieces but not compressed, it has failed. Yet ironically we mistakenly believe that the broken helmet saved us.

So given the nature and cause of Cracknell’s injury, there does not appear to be any reasonable basis for his claim that his helmet ‘saved his life’. His helmet split, and failed, and did not protect his brain from the acceleration that damaged it. This is not the fault of the helmet. They are – quite reasonably – not designed to protect a human head from these kinds of impacts.

The question is why Cracknell is choosing to argue that it did – and indeed using his incident as a basis for arguing that we should persuade our friends and family to always ‘protect their heads’, rather than campaigning to keep fast heavy objects away from those heads.

Broad Lane – the great TfL supertanker ploughs on

Rachel Aldred blogged last week about Transport for London’s proposals for Broad Lane in Tottenham, pointing out that this wide three lane road is going to be reduced in capacity to just a single lane in each direction – but without any separation for cycling from motor traffic included in the proposals. I headed up there on Thursday to take a look around.

Anyone who thinks London is a ‘cycling city’ will quickly have their illusions shattered as soon as they venture into areas like this in Zone 3. Just twenty minutes or so from Bloomsbury – where there are at least a relatively high number of people riding bikes – you arrive at Seven Sisters, where anyone cycling is vastly outnumbered by huge numbers of people travelling in private cars.

The A10 High Road at Seven Sisters

The proposals for Broad Lane are just one part of a large TfL scheme to restore what was a big system of one-way roads – the A10 High Road, Monument Way and Broad Lane – to two-way running for all traffic.

The Tottenham Hale proposals

The A10 here has already been returned from one-way flow northbound (with a contraflow south-bound bus lane) into a two-way road for motor traffic. But it’s quite obvious that cycling has been completely ignored in the ‘improvements’ that are already in place, despite a vast acreage of space available.

Count the lanes. Six, plus space to play with in the form of hatching, and gigantic pavements.

The proposals for the A10 did include a two-way cycle track, albeit one that is marooned on the inside of the pavement, that gives up at every single junction, and reverts to messy shared use at each signalised crossing.

The usual rubbish off-carriageway ‘infrastructure’

However I saw no sign of any cycle tracks here, despite this section of the works being largely complete.

Looking north on the A10. Gleaming new road and new pavement, but no cycle provision here

There is a bus lane, but this is not an enjoyable place to ride a bike, particularly as the buses are travelling as fast as everyone else – 30mph – and will squeeze past you in the bus lanes. And the junctions – where the bus lanes disappear – are terribly designed, as far as cycling as concerned.

The new junction with Monument Way. Looks fun, doesn’t it?

This is what we have come to expect from Transport for London – huge sums of money being spent on new schemes, without any serious thought for anyone who might choose to ride a bicycle. What is deeply worrying, however, is that there doesn’t seem to be any sign of this great big supertanker even beginning to alter course. The proposals for the Broad Lane section of this gyratory are an example of the TfL machine just ploughing on as before, with no thought for cycling as a mode of transport, despite a huge, huge opportunity to do something significant on this section of road.

The whole of Broad Lane is, at present, a three lane one way system. It’s awful. The shops and dwellings along it are blighted by roaring motor traffic.

As already alluded to, TfL will be reducing this three lane motorway to just a single lane in each direction, and introducing a 20mph limit. The pavements will be wider, there will be speed humps installed to slow traffic, and there will be new zebra crossings. These are undeniable and substantial improvements for people walking in the area. But as far as cycling is concerned, this scheme is yet another gigantic missed opportunity.

With the removal of a vehicle lane, there is clear scope to reallocate the space that will be gained to a protected cycle track in each direction. This is especially true on the eastern section of Broad Lane, where there currently exists a (deeply substandard) two-way cycle track, alongside the pavements and the three carriageway lanes.

When this road is reduced to two lanes, surely there will be space for cycling?

The original proposals for this scheme (now lost in the internet, but retrieved thanks to a commenter on Rachel’s blog) actually retained this cycle track, alongside the reduced number of lanes for motor vehicles.

As crap as it is now, but at least demonstrating that TfL did acknowledge separated cycling along this stretch of road, and that cycle tracks could easily be constructed properly here

But at some stage in the consultation process, someone at TfL has evidently decided that attempting to separate cycling from motor traffic on Broad Lane is no longer necessary, and that 20mph limits will suffice. Despite the consultation proposing that the changes will ‘make the area more accessible for those walking or cycling’, this cycle track is being removed, and there will be no dedicated space for cycling on what will undoubtedly remain a very busy road.

What the section of road photographed above will now look like, in the current consultationWide pavements alongside a two-way road

So despite the very poor quality of the existing cycle track, I think it is quite clear that these changes will actually diminish the attractiveness and accessibility of the eastern section of Broad Lane, for anyone riding a bike.

I counted roughly 30 vehicles a minute travelling along the road when I visited during the middle of the day (I took a short video, which you can see here), which amounts to around 1,800 vehicles an hour, at off-peak (and accords reasonably with the daily flow of 37,000 vehicles measured along here by the DfT). This volume may be reduced slightly by the changes to two-way running, but certainly not to a level where expecting anyone cycling to share the carriageway would be appropriate or reasonable.

There are industrial estates and retail parks along Broad Lane itself, which will inevitably mean that HGVs will continue to use it in significant numbers, along with buses and plenty of private motor traffic. I spotted several HGVs emerging from side roads as I visited the area.

The composition and volume of traffic travelling along Broad Lane is not likely to change significantly, and yet a scheme that purports to improve conditions for cycling is proposing to push people who currently cycle on a track, away from heavy traffic, into precisely the same space. It’s staggering.

The cycle track – as you can see from the picture above – is already being dug up and replaced with a wide pavement.

The cycle track is disappearing

This won’t even be a shared use pavement – you will be expected to cycle on the road, with the lorries.

What’s actually quite upsetting is that demand for cycling is already visible at the margins here, despite the atrocious conditions.

These two schoolboys were heading north with their two friends (I failed to photograph both pairs riding like this). Ordinarily they would have been on the cycle track, but as that is being dug up and removed, they were using the coned-off section of the road. In a few weeks’ time they will face the choice of cycling on a pavement, or riding with the lorries.

In fact all the cycling I saw on Broad Lane was on the pavement.

Instinctively some might brand this kind of behaviour ‘anti-social’, but the tragedy is that if these people had a safe and attractive place to ride their bikes, they would use it. They wouldn’t choose to use pavements where they have to share with pedestrians.

Unfortunately I suspect the outcome of the changes on Broad Lane will be to continue to push people who want to ride into conflict with pedestrians. Space is being taken away from motor traffic, but it is not being used productively or sensibly.

Three lanes will go down to two, but there will be no space for cycling

Will people ride in the volume of motor traffic shown in these pictures? Or will they continue to ride (illegally) on the wide new pavements? I don’t think it’s difficult to discern the answer.

Demand for cycling in London will continue to be suppressed by schemes like this. Roads that carry tens of thousands of vehicles a day will not suddenly become attractive to ordinary people – let alone the children who attend the primary and secondary schools on and around Broad Lane – merely with the addition of a 20mph speed limit and some speed humps. Physical separation is needed, and yet on a road where that space is being taken away from motor vehicles, it is not being sensibly reallocated. The evidence of this scheme – and others like it – suggests that cycling remains an invisible mode of transport as far as TfL is concerned. When will this change?

The consultation runs until 18th October – have your say here

On training

Some back-and-forth on Twitter throughout this week about, allegedly, ‘training versus infrastructure’ (an imagined opposition which I hope this piece will set to rest) has prompted me to attempt to formalise the thoughts on training that have been floating around in my head for the past year or so.

I live quite close to a primary school. Every summer, towards the end of the school year, the pupils are taken out onto my road – a fairly quiet residential street, although still open to through traffic – and are given what looks like Bikeability Level 2 training. About thirty of them – one of the later years in the school, by the looks of it – on their mountain bikes, in the obligatory fluorescent vests, practising turns in and out of side streets.

What effect this has on cycling levels to and from the school is not immediately apparent to me. It is rare indeed that I see a child cycling to it. Perhaps one child, once or twice a week, either on the pavement with a parent riding opposite them on the road, or on the road itself, with a parent acting as a ‘guard’. There are – naturally – a huge number of car trips to the school, at least fifty both in the morning and the afternoon, although plenty of children are walking, or using scooters on the pavement. Cycling, however, is pretty much non-existent.

This is not all that surprising. To get to the school, you will have to cycle on busy main roads, at around half past eight in the morning. These roads are not pleasant, even for me, especially at this time of day, with dense streams of motor traffic and awkward junctions to be negotiated, so expecting children to cycle on them is pretty unimaginable. The natural alternative is to use the pavement, but this is inconvenient, and the option of pavement cycling seems to have been replaced by scooters, which are slower, and seem to allow parents to keep pace, on foot.

So the cycle training the children are receiving is a bit like teaching them how to paddle a canoe on a river, while the river itself remains subjectively hazardous – perhaps it has nasty sections of rapids, or some crocodiles in it. Very few parents are going to be willing to let their children loose on these kinds of rivers – with rocks and crocodiles – regardless of how much canoe skill they have, or how well trained they are in dealing with rapids and crocodiles. They might be highly adept at splashing through the wilder sections, or staring down the crocs, and their parents might be fully aware that paddling to school down the rapids past the crocodiles is statistically very safe, and that the children are actually adding years to their life, but it is simply unattractive (I’m not the only person making these kinds of observations).

Another anecdote.

My partner is not trained. She can ride a bike, but not very well, having essentially not ridden one since she was a child. She would almost certainly struggle with some of the basic elements of Bikeability 1, like riding with one hand, or riding ahead while looking behind.  Yet on both the visits we have made together to Utrecht in the last few years, she has been able to ride straight across this large and busy city, almost anywhere she wanted to, with only a little encouragement from me. Her lack of ability was no barrier to riding on any kind of street, because she was separated and insulated from motor traffic everywhere we went. This is despite only two days’ worth of riding in the last twenty years. It is this quality of the environment that explains why you see thousands of very young children riding around this city, independently.

I don’t think willingness to ride without any training whatsoever is limited to my partner. On both of the ‘Skyride’ events I went to this year, in Southampton and in London, I saw very young, wobbly children riding around with everyone else. Their parents were happy to let them ride in these kinds of environments because they were safe, despite their evident lack of competence.

Indeed, I expect many thousands of people on these rides were ‘incompetent’ (in the sense of not having the training or ability to ride with motor traffic) yet were still happily cycling around without incident.

What does this tell us about the relative importance of training, versus the quality of the physical environment? (Please note – as will become clear – that I am not attempting to put the two into opposition). Well, no amount of training is ever going to persuade a considerable proportion of the British population to share roads with motor traffic, whereas, by contrast, a safe environment enables people to cycle anywhere they want to, without training.

In making this kind of comparison, it is certainly not my intention to disparage training. It serves many useful functions, one of the foremost being a ‘coping strategy’ for riding on British roads, and for keeping people who currently ride safe. To give just one example, despite believing myself to be fairly ‘advanced’, I picked up a useful tip when I did Bikeability. I had fallen into the habit of waiting close to the centre line when I was waiting to turn right at junctions, and this gave drivers (bad drivers) an opportunity to turn right alongside me, potentially causing a collision. My instructor told me to wait more centrally to prevent this kind of driving.

That’s not all. Training is also an important way of keeping children ‘in contact’ with the concept of cycling, even if they never venture out onto the roads. Their parents may in all probability have given up cycling, but training in schools will keep cycling on the children’s radar.

In addition, the (admittedly very limited) research on cycle training in Britain seems to suggest that it is effective, at least for those people who are already minded to volunteer for it. And, long-term, it is quite easy to see that training should form part of the school curriculum as it does in the Netherlands. Dutch children are all given essential instruction in how to use their roads, and even have to sit an exam. There is a Dutch Fietsschool.

When people like me make negative-sounding noises about training, they are not arguing against the concept. They are arguing that training, as things currently stand, is not likely to do much to address the current extinction of bicycle use in Britain, and that a focus on training, at the expense of infrastructure that would make certain styles of cycling redundant, is damaging. While cycle training helps people who are already confident, or already inclined towards cycling on roads, it is almost certainly not going to overcome the fundamental barrier of subjective safety that stops the vast majority of British people from cycling on a day-to-day basis. We should be adjusting the physical environment so that the kind of assertiveness and negotiation that forms much of the training undertaken in Britain should not even be necessary.

I know that many people involved in cycle training hold precisely this view. However, it is undeniable that cycle training in Britain is unfortunately bound up, to a greater or lesser extent, with the ideology of Vehicular Cycling. I don’t mean the practice of vehicular cycling, by which people like me quite sensibly mitigate the risk posed to them by drivers, through positioning and technique. I mean the ideology that asserts that cyclists are traffic, and that they belong amongst motor vehicles, and should not be separated from them on infrastructure like cycle tracks, which would represent a ‘surrender’.

The cycle training manual, Cyclecraft, is, of course, written by Britain’s most prominent Vehicular Cyclist, John Franklin. It contains plenty of useful advice, but that does not alter the fact that Franklin is hostile to the concept of cycle tracks and paths, and the separation of cycling from motor traffic. Franklin’s ideology – that the right to continue cycling on all of Britain’s roads should be a top priority – stands in direct opposition to the kind of environment and training that you find in the Netherlands, one where many of the skills taught through Bikeability are redundant. Cyclecraft itself contains the remarkable assertion

no alternative to the general road network has yet been devised which is as safe or advantageous overall for cycling

which even a cursory visit to the Netherlands will show to be complete nonsense. (I have also mentioned before how Franklin – and similarly-minded campaigners – think Dutch riders are somehow incompetent because they choose not to ride in British conditions.)

Franklin’s views are, in turn, remarkably closely mirrored by some in the upper echelons of cycle training in Britain, who – like him – believe that Dutch-style infrastructure will lead to a ‘de-skilling’ of people cycling; who believe that the road network is universally the best place for cycling and should not be ‘surrendered’; and who also subscribe to the more general view that cycle training – along with other interventions such as 20mph limits and better driver behaviour – will render Dutch-style separation from motor traffic unnecessary.

I suspect that there is a good deal of projection going on here. Because these individuals see training (combined with other interventions) as a way of actually avoiding the need for cycle tracks, when they see discussion of Dutch-style infrastructure, and how people can use it without necessarily needing to be trained, they are naturally inclined to think that it is training itself that it is under attack. This is because they themselves have set up training as a way of rendering cycle tracks unnecessary; their gut reaction is therefore to imagine that promotion of segregation is, conversely, an assault on training.

But this is a mistaken opposition. The country that separates the most, trains the most. The actual dispute here is about the kinds of roads we want to see, and how we design them for people who ride bikes.

It’s not about training.

An outbreak of silliness in Brighton

The proposed roll-out of 20 mph limits on residential streets in Brighton has been greeted with such a storm of wailing and gnashing of teeth you would think that the council had decided to ban motoring completely.

The immensely daft Unchain the Motorist lobby group (‘Unchain the Motorist’? Really? ‘The motorist is born free, and everywhere he is in chains’?) has been set up to oppose, and indeed overturn, Brighton’s 20 mph limits. They have a better solution – ‘appropriate speed limits’ and ‘road engineering to safely allow for the free movement of traffic.’ In other words, the kind of engineering that has done so much to destroy our towns and cities as amenable and attractive places.

They are quoted in this newspaper article as stating that these slightly lower speed limits – which, to repeat, will only be in effect on residential streets – represent

a declaration of war on motorists.

Seriously? What? Travelling slightly slower on residential streets amounts to a ‘declaration of war’? Get a grip.

The silliness extends to the Tourism Alliance – a group representing many major attractions in the city. They are supporting ‘Unchain the Motorist’.

The Tourism Alliance backed the group and renewed calls for a park and ride scheme.

Chair Soozie Campbell said: “We are not convinced that reducing speed limits to 20mph right across the city is the optimum solution to improving road safety and there are certainly better ways to reduce carbon emissions. Studies have shown that if traffic is held in a slow moving queue for any length of time 30% of journeys will be abandoned. That means 30% fewer car loads of customers coming into the city centre at peak trading times.”

Boggle.

Firstly, why would 20 mph limits on residential streets create ‘slow moving queues’?  Queues are caused by an excess of motor vehicles, not by speed limits. Raising the speed limit from 20mph to 30mph would not have the magic property of making queues disappear.

Secondly, what possible ‘studies’ could be claiming that if ‘traffic is held in a slow moving queue for any length of time 30% of journeys will be abandoned’? Any length of time. If drivers travel slowly for five minutes, 30% of them just give up and go home? What does this even mean? It’s complete gibberish.

The final bizarre twist is that the GMB and Unite unions have decided to lend their support to ‘Unchain the Motorist’, paying for adverts in the local newspaper condemning 20mph limits. The reasoning of the GMB’s Mick Hildreth is just as impenetrable as that of the Tourism Alliance’s Soozie Campbell. He states

“A complete 24 hour 20mph speed limit across the whole of the city will leave drivers distracted from where a 20mph speed limit is vitally important such as hospitals, schools and residential streets.”

Never mind that a blanket 20mph limit ‘across the whole of the city’ isn’t even being proposed. The argument here is that a speed limit of 20mph on residential streets will ‘distract’ drivers when they are travelling past a school at 20mph, unlike driving past the school at 20mph while some 30mph limits exist elsewhere in the city.

Right. That makes sense.

The reality is that people opposed to 20mph limits on residential streets in Brighton either haven’t understood the policy or its implications, or they just want to carry on driving as fast as they currently do. Scrabbling around for nonsensical justifications is only making them look silly.