The revenge of the inanimate object

Last year I wrote about the mysterious case of a bollard in Wimbledon that had the temerity to make drivers crash into it.

Almost unbelievably, the council had placed a bollard in a position where drivers cutting the corner, driving on the wrong side of the road, and not looking where they are going, would inevitably strike it. Inattentive, unobservant and hasty drivers are being unfairly punished – and put at great danger – by these menacing stationary objects.

It seems the menace is not limited to south London. A bollard in north London, on Camden Road, also has a fearsome reputation for making drivers crash into it.

A WOMAN was airlifted to hospital after her car flipped over at one of Camden’s most dangerous junctions on Tuesday. The driver, in her 20s, had to be cut out of her car and was treated for minor injuries after the crash at the Camden Road junction with Brecknock Road in Camden Town.

The dramatic scene was a repeat of an accident this time last year when a car overturned at the same spot, leading to calls for safety measures to be put in place. Witnesses said it was the 10th crash at the junction this year and that accidents happened on a “weekly basis”.

Patrick O’Kane, 52, who was watching from the Unicorn Pub opposite, said: “The car went straight into the concrete island in the middle of the road. She didn’t see it, because only a few weeks ago another car crashed into it and knocked the yellow boulder off the top.”

Yes, the driver didn’t see a hulking lump of concrete in the road, because the enormous garish yellow beacon that normally prevents drivers from crashing into garish yellow beacons had been crashed into by a previous driver.

Here’s the offending object –

Just as in Wimbledon, it seems the island has been put in place to protect pedestrians waiting to cross the road. But honestly, who cares about them, when inattentive drivers – ordinary, hard-working drivers – are at such great risk of flipping their cars over when they don’t look where they’re going?

Quite what the ‘safety measures’ that are being demanded would constitute is difficult to grasp. I can only imagine it would involve the removal of anything a driver might ever crash into, or the coating of every single object in gaudy reflective paint.

The driver speaks out –

A BARRISTER who had a lucky escape after her car flipped over a traffic island on a road with a ­his­tory of traffic accidents has warned that cutting basic costs could have left her paralysed.

Carolyn Blore Mitchell, 51, who had to be cut out of her overturned car and airlifted to hospital, did not see a concrete island in the middle of Camden Road, Camden Town, because, it is claimed, the bollard there had not been replaced after the last accident.

She said: “It’s lucky I wasn’t driving my old car, which was 11 years old. Who knows if the airbags in that would have cushioned me from the windscreen. If my face had been mashed up then TfL really would have had something to answer to and they wouldn’t have scrimped on simple jobs like this again.”

Quite right. Illuminated keep left bollards should be replaced the very second someone crashes into them, not just to stop people crashing into them, but to stop people crashing into the kerbs underneath the bollards, which the bollards are designed to stop people crashing into.

And thank heavens this driver had chosen her car with better airbags, so she can crash into things with relative impunity (risk compensation, anyone?).

Ms Blore Mitchell said: “If this many people have had accidents there then it’s not just me, it really is Camden’s collision corner. The last person who crashed before me was a cab driver, someone who was a very experienced driver.”

It’s not just you – it was also a taxi driver, who, as we all know, are never in a hurry to get anywhere, and are always patient and attentive.

She added: “There were no signs warning anyone of this island slap bang in the middle of the road. At the very least it should have been painted a different colour so it didn’t just blur into the road.

Perhaps, as well as warning signs, there should be bollards – pre-bollards? – alerting drivers to the presence of a bollard further down the road? Good idea.

“If they had just replaced the bollard as they should have, then we could have saved all the time and money for an air ambulance, an ambulance, two fire engines, police time and the whole road closed off all afternoon, which must have cost the public thousands of pounds in total.”

Yes. Replace bollards when they get crashed into by drivers, so drivers don’t crash into them.

Or – this might sound radical – drivers could not turn across junctions on the wrong side of the road, and look out for objects that might be in their way?

No, that would never work.

Sustrans’ “Connect London”

There was some excellent news over the weekend, with the opening of the Two Tunnels route in Bath. The huge turnout, with people bikes and on foot eager to use this excellent new route into the centre of Bath, demonstrates that safe, pleasant and useful  infrastructure is in great demand; demand that is being suppressed by current conditions for cycling.

Picture via Ely Cycling Campaign

The money for this project came largely from Sustrans; they put aside £1m they had received from lottery funding. £400,000 came from the local council, and the rest from local fundraising. Sustrans do great work. I cycled from Bath to Bristol last year with the Cycling Embassy on portions of the Two Tunnels route, and on the railway path, a wonderful facility that was full with ordinary people, enjoying the experience of cycling away from motor traffic; there are a huge number of similar routes across the country that almost certainly would not exist if it had not been for the efforts of Sustrans.

But I think it speaks volumes that a charity should be doing this kind of work; we don’t expect roads or railways to be built by charities, so why on earth should essential transport infrastructure for cycling and walking be left to groups like Sustrans? As good as their work is, they have to get a lot done with (relatively) little cash. That’s fine for out of town routes, or routes linking towns and cities, but I think Sustrans run into problems when their routes hit town and city centres.

To be direct and useful, routes in these places require substantial investment, and this is something Sustrans are not able to provide. As a consequence, their routes will inevitably be rather circuitous, because they will have to compromise on their directness to get around obstacles like large junctions where there they don’t have the funding or ability to adapt them.

A good recent example is Sustrans’ Connect London project. This predates the Mayor’s Vision for Cycling, as Sustrans themselves argue –

The Mayor has proposed a ‘Quietways’ network which will deliver direct routes for cyclists on pleasant, low-traffic side streets. Sound familiar? That’s because it is. You heard it here first… Elements of the Mayor’s announcement echo the Connect London plan which aims to see London become home to the world’s biggest cycle network by 2020.

Simple, yes? The Mayor is proposing a ‘Quietways’ Network, and that’s exactly what Sustrans is doing! So the two elements overlap – Sustrans and the Mayor are demanding the same thing.

Well, it’s not quite that simple. The problem is that the Mayor’s Vision is quite explicit, proposing

A cross-London network of high-quality guided Quietways will be created on low-traffic back streets and other routes so different kinds of cyclists can choose the routes which suit them. Unlike the old London Cycle Network, Quietways will be direct.

I’ve put that last sentence in bold, because I think it is very important. The Mayor and TfL have grasped that the old LCN was a failure, because it was hopelessly indirect. As David Arditti has written –

[LCN+] made very little progress, having little political backing, and being mainly on borough roads where the Mayor had no direct control. It embodied a confused strategy, with some of the routes being convoluted, up-and-down backstreet affairs inherited from the original LCN (such as the slalom-like route just east of Finchley Road in Hampstead) that no commuter would use… Since the LCN+ strategy was basically not about segregation, or even road-space reallocation, there was no coherent picture to put to councils, be they pro or anti-cycling, of what was supposed to be put in place on proposed main road routes like LCN+5 on the A5, and in the end it became a strategy just to spend the money somehow.

The ‘Vision’ document is, pleasingly, very clear that this old strategy of putting ‘nervous’ cyclists on wiggling back routes, where you can easily get lost, is out. The Mayor’s Quietways will be direct and straightforward, and, as the document states,

they will not give up at the difficult places… Where directness demands the Quietway briefly join a main road, full segregation and direct crossing points will be provided, wherever possible, on that stretch.

In other words, quality and usefulness are the governing principles, and money will then be spent to ensure that these Quietways match up. Whether this will happen in practice, of course, is another matter; but the document’s strategy is exactly right.

There are plenty of ‘quiet’ routes in Dutch cities and towns, away from the main roads, but importantly they are just as direct as the main roads themselves. They don’t wiggle around major junctions or roads, they go straight across them.

A ‘quiet route’ in Amsterdam – the northern exit of the Vondelpark. Direct, cycle-specific crossing across major road

The southern entrance of the ‘quiet route’ across the park. Same wide, direct crossing

And the ‘quiet route’ continues out into the suburbs. Straight and direct, across cycle-only bridges and along segregated tracks, even here on already quiet streets

This is what the ‘Quietways’ in London should look like; routes that are safe and pleasant to use, but do not lose any of the advantages of directness that you would have cycling on the main roads.

Unfortunately the early signs are that Sustrans’ ‘Connect London’ project will not look like this; they will not have the directness or convenience suggested by the words in the Mayor’s Vision document.

A snapshot of Sustrans proposed ‘Connect London’ network in South London, in green. Note the contrast in directness with Cycle Superhighway 7, in blue.

As Christopher Waller commented on Twitter, the Connect London proposals

look more like a set of postcode boundaries than a network map.

Exactly right. But why does it look like this? At a guess, because usefulness and directness appear to have been sacrificed in order to create, in Sustrans’ words, ‘the world’s biggest cycle network.’

Sustrans want £80 million spent, over the course of 8 years, to construct this network of ‘over 1000 kilometres’. But the amount of money they are asking for to construct this amount of network does not fill me with confidence. Quantity of network is no substitute for quality – 1000 kilometres of meaningless network is 1000 kilometres of meaningless network, regardless of how much of it there is. We already have hundreds of kilometres of ‘quiet network’ in London, which amounts to very little because it is inconvenient, indirect and not very useful to anyone actually wanting to get somewhere. David Arditti again (writing about a ‘Greenway’ scheme in Brent) –

Apart from the fact that it has made practically no progress, in my view, this entire concept is wrong, of attempting to push cyclists onto obscure, un-useful byways. Large-scale popular cycling will only ever be achieved by giving people on bikes direct, convenient, safely segregated routes on main roads, as they have done in the Netherlands, Denmark and Germany.

Now of course we need ‘Quiet Routes’ alongside those safe and pleasant segregated routes on the main roads; Sustrans are quite correct to argue that their project should be seen alongside what might be called ‘Superhighways Plus’, or the new approach to cycling in main roads in London – the segregated tracks which will be appearing on new parts of the Superhighway network from later this year.

But my concern is that Sustrans’ proposals could lead to a worrying watering down of the whole Quietways project, which at least in intent gets things right. I don’t want to see money wasted on fiddly routes that are not useful to anyone. We’ve done that already, and it’s a proven failure. Money needs to be spent doing things properly, or not at all.

We shouldn’t be trying to build “the world’s biggest cycle network” if that network is composed of wiggly circular loops around parks and meandering the long way around junctions. Quietways should not be going down the wrong track.

Exempting cyclists from traffic orders – leadership is needed

Before it was consumed in the ‘bonfire of the quangos’, Cycling England produced some pretty good guidance. One of their design principles was that cyclists should be exempt from Traffic Regulation Orders (or Traffic Management Orders, in London).

Cyclists should be exempt from restrictions within Traffic Regulation Orders (TROs), including banned turns and road closures, unless there are proven safety reasons for not doing so.

There were, and are, sound reasons for this principle. The restrictions imposed by these orders aim at controlling the flow of motor vehicles. There is – for instance – no logical reason why any street should need to be made one-way, save for easing the passage of motor vehicles, or for stopping motor vehicles from using a particular route. Bicycles and people on foot can flow quite happily in both directions on any given street; it was only the advent of mass motoring that gave rise to the restrictions we see on the roads today. Streets with two-way traffic became utterly clogged; others became congested with motor vehicles waiting to make certain turns.

So the bans on particular movements arose out of an attempt to deal with the problems created by excess motor vehicle use. But given that bicycles were never the source of the problem, it seems perverse that they should subject to the same blanket vehicular restrictions that control motor vehicles.

This cyclist will not be able to turn left at the approaching junction

Junction movements have had to be simplified to accommodate vast flows of motor traffic, which cannot interact smoothly in the ways that pedestrians and cyclists can. Cyclists were swept up in these regulations, without apparently even being considered. It is deeply unfair that they have been forced into the same ‘vehicular’ box, penalised for problems they did not create.

Westminster in particular is awash with one-way streets from which cyclists are not exempt; a vast impenetrable maze of restrictions, designed to allow motor vehicles to continue to travel around the borough in tremendous numbers, while at the same time suppressing the use of bicycles.

You can’t cycle down here. Why?

Even new schemes continue to make these same mistakes. If you are travelling along Cromwell Road on a bicycle, you are not allowed to make what should be extraordinarily simple left turns off the road onto Exhibition Road, in either direction.

A cyclist can’t turn left here.

Or here.

There is no good reason for these restrictions. The junctions have been designed to make crossings easier for pedestrians, but in order to maintain ‘traffic’ flow around the network, turning restrictions, without any exemptions, have been put in place.

Indeed, the movement of bicycles doesn’t really seem to have been considered, at all, on Exhibition Road – it’s even illegal to cycle northbound on the southern section.

No cycling this way. Why?

Apparently nobody saw fit to provide an entirely reasonable exemption for cyclists on this street.

We have similar (older) absurdities in Horsham, particularly this street.

It’s part of a one-way system in the town that had the reasonable intention of cutting out through traffic. Very few motor vehicles used this street, because the one-way system was not a useful route to anywhere, except for access.

What is most strange is that it is only this particular stretch that does not have an exemption for cycling; barely 50 yards distant, as it turns to the left where the white frontage stops, this one-way road suddenly becomes two-way for cycling; both before, and after, it was turned into ‘shared space’.

Initially, a contraflow cycle lane on an ordinary ‘road’

Subsequently, by simply banning motor vehicle movements only, in this direction

Making the whole of this area two-way for cycling – while maintaining the one-way restrictions for motor vehicles – is now an absolute no-brainer, because this street is now completely closed to motor vehicles during the day, as I wrote about here. Despite no motor vehicles being on the street at all, cyclists still cannot legally enter it.

All that is really needed in this instance is the simple attachment of an ‘except cycles’ sign below the no-entry signs. A few hundred pounds for the signs, and for the labour.

But things aren’t that simple. Even to attach a simple square sign requires a new Traffic Regulation Order, as I was informed by West Sussex County Council.

….although there have been relaxations in the Traffic Signs Regulations and General Directions to allow such schemes to be more easily signed, a contraflow cycle lane regardless of how it is signed or marked on the ground MUST have a Traffic Regulation Order to support it.  Simply erecting “except for cycles signs” is not enough and without a TRO they would be unlawful, as would cycling the wrong way.

Therefore, in order to progress this request it would be necessary to make a new Traffic Regulation Order which will have to be considered as part of the North Horsham CLC’s “top 3” at next year’s assessment.  Should you wish to pursue this it will require the usual documents to be prepared including the Local Member’s written approval that they would support such a TRO being put on the list.

All very clear, and correct. The use of “Top 3” here refers to the fact that ‘North Horsham’ county local committee (CLC) – which actually covers a population of around 50,000 people – can only put forward THREE Traffic Regulation Orders per year. Just three.

Given the extraordinary amount of work that needs to be done across Sussex to make it more cycling-friendly, this represents a glacial rate of progress, even if we ignore the fact the Traffic Regulation Orders are frequently used for other purposes, particularly the addition or amendment of double yellow lines, and new speed limits. A quick glance at the North Horsham TRO priority list shows the pressure that exists just to get on this shortlist of three; in particular, there are plenty of rural roads in the district with 60 mph limits that plainly need to be lowered, as well as countless excessively high limits that residents want lowered.

To be fair to West Sussex County Council, they are fully aware that ‘TRO backlog’ is a significant problem, and are looking at ways to speed up the process – in particular, they are ‘considering’ raising the number of TROs each CLC can submit each year from three to five. Even if this does happen, however, it is still nowhere near good enough.

Cycling exemptions to one-way restrictions on multiple streets can be bundled up into just one TRO – this happened recently in the North Laine area of Brighton. Indeed, the process of ‘bundling’ (and indeed the entire TRO process) was described very well in a recent Cycling Embassy blog post. But the bigger the area covered, the greater the likelihood objections.

Beyond that, I simply don’t think it should be this difficult to make easy and coherent changes to our streets, to improve them for cycling. Even if – by some miracle – every CLC in West Sussex decided to bundle up a coherent set of exemptions and improvements for cycling in their area (a big ‘if’), it would still take a decade to get anywhere, at the very best.

Central government is happy to pass the buck down to local and county councils, and to point out that it is ‘up to them’ to implement these exemptions to TROs. But I don’t think that’s entirely fair on councils, who have a vast amount to do, in particular controlling parking, and responding to concerns about speed limits. Cycling is very often not on the radar at all, with more pressing problems of congestion and speed control.

If central government is serious about promoting cycling, we need new legislation that makes these kinds of changes much simpler; perhaps even that exemptions on one-way streets should be the default situation, and that they can be signed as such, unless there are serious grounds for objection. That would speed up the process considerably.

David Arditti has written recently about precisely this same problem – his piece is worth reading, as always

 

Self-driving cars and simple errors

Some recent news stories –

A man is seriously ill in hospital after a car crashed and ended up embedded in a house in Suffolk. The red Audi TT left the road and crashed into the home in Long Meadow Walk, Lowestoft, at about 01:45 GMT.

Note that in this case it was ‘the car’ that crashed, ‘leaving the road’ all by itself. The driver was a mere passenger.

Sgt Bob Patterson, of Suffolk Police, said investigators had been at the scene to assess how the accident happened. “At this early stage we could not speculate as to what has caused the crash,” he said. A police spokesman said it was “far too early to say if the crash is weather related or not. This will all make up part of the investigation.”

‘Weather related’.

Audis seem to make a habit of driving themselves; in another recent case, an Audi chose to drive through a red light, killing two passengers (but not the driver, who, curiously, was already disqualified from driving).

Two men have died following a police chase in north London.

The pair were killed when their Audi jumped a red light, clipped a van and hit a bridge in South Tottenham in the early hours of Friday, police said.

To be fair, sometimes it isn’t the car that’s responsible. Sometimes, like in this case from Ireland, the driver makes ‘a simple error’.

A BEAUTY therapist who “catapulted” a cyclist into the air leaving him with catastrophic injuries has avoided a jail sentence. Sinead King (29), a mother of two, pleaded guilty to dangerous driving causing serious harm on Monastery Road, Clondalkin, Dublin, on October 16, 2010.

She was given a 12-month suspended sentence at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court.

King (29), of Riverside, Clondalkin, didn’t de-mist her car windows that morning before setting out on her drive to work. She accepted she couldn’t see out properly and later told gardai she had no idea she had knocked someone over.

She said she noticed four children playing on one side of the road and then heard a loud bang. She noticed her windscreen was broken and assumed her former partner, who she had difficulties with in the past, had attacked her car.

So she saw some children playing, heard a loud bang as she crashed into something, and just assumed it was her partner attacking the car, rather than her driving over a human being. Fair enough.

King drove on, leaving Peter Vaughan, a retired English man visiting his son in Clondalkin, on the side of the road with his leg broken in three places, a broken eye socket and mild brain damage.

Mr Vaughan told gardai he had taken his son’s bicycle to the local shops and “was catapulted” into the air. He had seen no cars around and thought at first it was a gas explosion.

King had one previous conviction for failing to give a breath sample and was banned from driving for four years in December 2010.

Paul Comiskey O’Keefe, defending, said his client had “made a simple error” but one with serious consequences.

Judge Patrick McCartan told King she had made a dreadful mistake because she didn’t have the patience to properly defog her car windows.

“She did a very foolish thing to get up and drive to work in an urban area when she could not see out,” before he added that she compounded her wrongdoing by driving away.

He accepted her remorse was genuine and said he didn’t believe anything would be achieved by sending her to prison. The judge then handed down an 12-month suspended sentence and banned King from driving for 10 years.

Even when you don’t de-mist your windows, people on bicycles can be awfully hard to see, especially if they have the temerity to wear dark clothing in the middle of the day. It can take as much as 30 seconds to spot them, and even then that’s not enough. Apparently.

A WOMAN accused of causing death by dangerous driving after killing a cyclist will stand trial on July 22. 

Victoria McClure, 37, of Chiltern Drive, Charvil, pleaded guilty to killing Anthony Hilson on the A4 near Twyford on September 16 when she appeared at Reading Crown Court on Wednesday.

She claims Mr Hilson’s death was caused by careless rather than dangerous driving as she was not distracted at the wheel. Richard Clews, defending, told the court the cyclist may have been stationary at the time of the collision and that he was wearing dark clothing, making him less visible. 

He said: “The evidence has to meet the high threshold for the dangerous driving conviction. I suggest that the evidence is not sufficient under the circumstances.”

Thankfully Mr Clews’ absurd notion of where the threshold for ‘dangerous’ should lie was not accepted by the Judge.

Charles Ward-Jackson, prosecuting, called on evidence from an expert who estimated that when driving at 40mph to 50mph, which is what McClure claims she was doing, it would take 22 to 27 seconds to travel 500m. He said: “In this case we have an empty, open road with exceptional visibility where you can see 500m, which is about as far as you can possibly see on an open road.

“A jury is entitled to ask themselves what on earth caused this defendant to collide with the bike?”

Judge Zoe Smith said: “Although the defendant has accepted her driving falls below the test for a competent and careful driver, the facts are that at around 10.40am on a Sunday morning a collision occurred on the A4.

“Mr Hilson was on a bike and, even accepting that he was stationary on his bike, it would appear that there should have been some 500m in which the defendant would have been able to see him.

“It is said that he was wearing dark cloth but the fact is that the defendant did not see the cyclist until the point of collision itself. She was unable to take any diverting action.

“You could consider that she was driving along that stretch far below the standard of a competent and careful driver. I conclude that a jury could convict for dangerous driving on the facts of this case.”

Finally, it seems that even Health and Safety consultants with exemplary driving records find it hard to avoid crashing.

HEALTH and safety consultant Brian Hampton has formally denied causing Jade Clark’s death on the A31.

At his second appearance at Bournemouth magistrates court, the 58-year-old entered a not guilty plea to causing the 16-year-old’s death by careless driving.

He did not enter a plea to the other eight charges – three charges of driving while disqualified, three charges of driving without insurance, one of failing to stop at an accident and one of failing to report an accident. 

A Daily Mail article composed entirely of nonsense

I realise this is probably as easy as shooting fish in a barrel, but the recent Daily Mail article about furious lawbreakers furious that they had been caught breaking the law (Mail translation – hard-working families hit by evil stealth tax) was too impossible to resist.

Yes, it’s the Daily Mail article about a bus gate that’s actually a ‘money making scam’, or some such.

The article is headlined

Furious drivers face two mile round trip to get home after council marks up 10 metre bus lane outside entrance to housing estate

Helpfully, the Mail themselves provide a diagram of the situation in the article, which shows that drivers will only face a ‘two mile round trip’ if they actually drive all the way up to the bus gate, realise they can’t progress through, and then have to drive all the way back the way they came. The bus gate is at the approximate location of the left arrow.

As is immediately clear, using the ‘proper route’ – as the Mail itself describes it – involves little extra distance, and is almost certainly quicker than the ‘shortcut’, given that it is a national speed limit dual carriageway, rather than a single carriageway country lane with a 40 mph limit.

Equally, given that the entire length of the blue ‘shortcut’ is just half a mile –

the only possible way drivers could end up taking a ‘2 mile round trip’ is if they drove around one of the roundabouts thirty times, and then got lost. Gibberish.

We haven’t even got into the article yet, and there’s more nonsense. The bus lane has not just been ‘marked up’ by the council; it’s been there since (at least) 2009, according to Streetview.

In other words, the bus gate predates the estate.

The signs are quite clear to understand for anyone who’s recently sat their theory test, or who actually bothers to remember the rules. ‘No motor vehicles’.

Under the headline, we then have some helpful bullet points –

• Bus lane created on access road to housing estate in Bedford
• Residents at Wixams estate forced to make two-mile detour to go shopping
• Nearly 300 people have been fined in two weeks since lane was narrowed

Sweet Jesus. The bus lane hasn’t been ‘created’ or ‘narrowed’, it’s always been there, and it’s always been illegal to drive through it. Nobody is ‘forced’ to make a detour, let alone a bogus ‘2 mile’ one; they just need to drive on the dual carriageway, which will be a faster route to their destination in any case.

All that has changed is that the council are now fining people for doing something illegal.

The article starts with a repetition of the same nonsense.

Residents on a housing estate have been left facing a two-mile detour to get home after a council installed a 10-metre bus lane next to a junction. People living on Wixams estate, outside Bedford, now have to drive along the busy A6 to avoid the 32ft lane that is used by just two buses an hour at peak time.

No, no, no and no. NO!

Nearly 300 drivers been fined since the road was fitted with cameras and marked ‘Bus Only’ two weeks ago.

As you can see from the 2009 Streetview image, this bus gate has always been marked as ‘no motor vehicles’. People have been breaking the law with impunity; all that has changed is that they are now being caught.

The lane has been created in the middle of Kingsway road cutting off the access to the estate.

Not ‘created’, not ‘cutting off access’. There’s a big dual carriageway right next to it, that is faster!

People living nearby say the lane is nothing more than a money-making scam by Bedford Borough Council which has fined 284 drivers in the past two weeks.

It’s only a ‘money-making scam’ if you fail to obey signs, of which there are MANY.

That’s BUS ONLY painted on the road, in both directions, BUS AND CYCLE ONLY signs on both sides of the gate, AND a warning that cameras are operating.

Anyone who drives through this arrangement, and then has temerity to complain that they got fined, really shouldn’t be driving, it’s as simple as that. They are effectively admitting they are driving without due care and attention.

Katie Baughan, 32, was hit with a £50 fine for driving through the bus lane last week. She said: ‘It’s nonsense and completely pointless, you can drive either side of this red strip but not through it without getting a ticket.’

Katie, you are an idiot.

Ms Baughan added: ‘There are signs saying ‘bus only’ directly as you come up to it but not as you are coming off the A6 roundabout. It is completely ridiculous to have such a short bus lane.’

There are signs saying ‘bus only’, yet you still drove through, and are now complaining about it? Amazing!

Marie Jepps, 68, whose husband David was fined, said: ‘It is ludicrous. I think it is just another way to get money out of people. We always go that way to go to the shop or garden centre because it makes sense.’

If you don’t want the council to take your money, don’t drive through it! What is so hard to understand here? Mrs Jepps also seems happy to state in a national newspaper that ‘it makes sense’ to drive half a mile on a 40 mph road, instead of driving a fraction further on a 70 mph dual carriageway.

A note of something approaching sanity is then introduced into the article by another resident –

Mark O’Leary, 26, has been a resident on Wixams estate for 2.5 years and says that although the lane has been narrow for the duration of his residency, the cameras have shortened fuses in the area.

‘It has always been a bus lane, the only new addition is the actual camera which has gone up in the past few months and the camera sign which has been there for a couple of days.

‘I do agree that there are no signs either end of the “shortcut” road highlighting there is no access for vehicles other than buses.’

From this we can gather it’s not the bus gate that’s the problem – which Mr O’Leary confirms has existed since he has lived on the estate – it’s the fact people are now being caught using it. The only remaining issue is the apparent lack of signs warning people.

Well, no. On every single approach the signs mark quite clearly that the road is for buses and cycles only. Heading south on the A6 –

On the A6 heading north –

And heading west, into the estate –

And heading north from the estate.

Maybe people don’t understand what these signs mean, but frankly that is their problem. They should know. And there is certainly no excuse for driving through the bus gate, if you did mistakenly end up driving down the lane.

Should we be surprised that the Mail is on the side of these chumps? The top-rated comment on the article gives us a clue –

Ah yes.

 

Would you walk here?

The recent discussion on the ibikelondon and City Cyclists blogs about carriageway narrowing, and how it can be dreadfully unpleasant for cycling, started me thinking about precisely why these new arrangements are so awful.

Beyond the fact that it makes it difficult or dangerous to filter through stationary motor traffic, it requires cycling bang in front of those motor vehicles to prevent dangerous overtaking. For people who are fast and confident on a bike, this isn’t necessarily too much of a problem. But I think it’s a big problem for people who don’t want to cycle fast, or aren’t confident, and don’t really fancy the idea of cycling slowly in front of buses, lorries or vans. These people will cycle next to the kerb, where some of these vehicles will inevitably squeeze past them, with little room to spare – just as intimidating and scary as cycling in front of them.

A useful way of considering the issue is to ask whether a person would be comfortable walking in the space they are being forced to cycle in. I think this is a very reasonable comparison, not just because many people are in practice not capable of cycling at much more than walking speed, but also because the ability to choose to cycle slowly is an important indicator of the comfort of the cycling experience. A commenter on Danny’s blog hits the nail on the head (while discussing the City of London’s bizarre opinion that segregated tracks would lead to an increase in cycling speeds) –

If I’m cycling with traffic I speed to keep up with it for my own safety and to meet the expectations of motor traffic around me. With physical segregation I am no longer trying to get ahead of traffic for my own safety at junctions.

If the City of London creates proper physically segregated tracks I automatically will cycle in a more relaxed way and at slower speeds as I no longer need to keep up with traffic. I feel less stressed which will affect the speed at which I cycle. It really is that simple.

So – if walking in the street would fill you with dread, or unnerve you, then it’s not an appropriate place to cycle. Cycling will not have mass appeal, and will be limited in its attractiveness to those who are capable of ‘meeting the expectations of motor traffic’.

To take just one example of the recent fad for carriageway narrowing – Pall Mall – I wouldn’t want to walk in front of vehicles here.

So it is highly unlikely anyone who cycles at or around these speeds would want to cycle here. It’s not relaxing cycling on this street even for me, a confident and experienced cyclist capable of cycling at more ‘appropriate’ speeds, because I am constantly aware, like Danny’s commenter, that I have to ‘keep up’, and position myself correctly.

And there are more extreme examples. I wouldn’t walk in the road here.

I won’t walk, and a huge swathe of the population won’t cycle, in this road. If it’s not fit for an adult male to walk in, it’s not fit for children to cycle in, or the elderly, or anyone who just wants to cycle slowly.

I wouldn’t walk in the road here, either.

Or here,

or here.Walking in the road in these places would be scary and intimidating.

Exactly how it would feel for most people if they happened to be forced to use these roads on bicycles.

So the net effect is that cycling on these roads has, for all practical purposes, been designed out of existence – it only appeals to the small minority who are willing or able to cycle on the terms of motor vehicles.

There are, of course, streets in Britain where people feel reasonably comfortable walking in the road.

Using the same ‘would you walk here?’ rule of thumb, it’s fairly safe to say that these are streets where cycling would have universal appeal. Where anyone could ride a bike.

This same approach gives us clues as to why bus lanes are not appropriate cycling environments, and why cycling is more likely in some shared space environments than in others. Bus lanes are not for walking in, and nor are some shared space environments (for instance, the busiest section of Exhibition Road), unless you are especially bold.

By contrast, the reason why cycling in the Netherlands is so wonderful is that the cycling environment there is universally one where you can comfortably walk, if you wanted to.

Walking in the road here – mixing with that lorry – would not be pleasant, and once we have established that, we already know that cycling on that road has minimal appeal in the general population. By contrast the cycling environment would be a pleasant place to walk, and consequently has appeal for anyone choosing to ride a bike.

The Dutch cycling network is configured to these standards. Wherever you go by bike, you could quite easily stop and walk in precisely the same place, without difficulty, whether that street or road has cycle tracks, cycle lanes, or nothing at all.

You can walk comfortably where you have to cycle – and that explains, very simply, why cycling in the Netherlands is available to all.

Note that I am not suggesting that cycling infrastructure should be designed for walking, or for cycling at walking speeds. It should be able to accommodate all users, travelling at whatever speed they wish (within reason!), just as Dutch infrastructure does currently. Instead I am merely arguing that a very useful test of whether you are creating an inclusive environment for cycling is to consider how appropriate that cycling environment would be – hypothetically – for walking.

Would you walk there?

Shared space and driver behaviour

One of the more interesting claims made for ‘shared space’ road designs is that they will serve to improve driver behaviour, by making those sitting behind the wheels of motor cars think for themselves, and to respond to stimuli, rather than driving on autopilot. In the absence of clear rules about how they should drive – give way lines, traffic lights, and so on – motorists will be forced to think carefully about how they should be driving.

Back in 2005, Ben Hamilton-Baillie, one of the foremost proponents of ‘shared space’, argued in the Times (£) that, on Exhibition Road,

motorists would still have full access to the road, but it would be like driving through a campsite. “You don’t need signs everywhere on a campsite telling you to give way or stop or slow down, because its blindingly obvious what you need to do,” he said.

Similarly, he argued more recently, in an item aired on Radio 4 last year about Exhibition Road and other ‘shared spaces’, that on these streets

there is a degree of uncertainty, intrigue, and as soon as the driver’s brain is engaged, the speeds drop, and the responses to the unusual, the unexpected, the individual, become immediate and responsive, rather than assumed.

Daniel Moylan, formerly both the Deputy Chair of Transport for London and the Deputy Leader of the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea Council, and instrumental in the implementation of Exhibition Road, voices similar opinions about the necessity of treating motorists as adults who we should trust to make their own decisions. For instance, in this video, he argues that

The first [principle of shared space] is to do with respect for other people, and acknowledging their rights and their autonomy, their responsibility to make sensible decisions for themselves and in relation to others.

And likewise

in urban environments, and even in suburban environments, the principle idea – the idea that negotiation with other road users is a safe and responsible and adult way forward, it seems to be of pretty universal application.

As I have said before, the implication of comments like these is that it is the rules themselves that generate bad behaviour. Strip them away, give people the responsibility to behave like mature adults – and they will behave like them. Conversely, so the argument goes, if we use ‘nanny state’ principles, and treat people like idiots with signs about how they should drive, and where they should park, and they will behave like idiots.

Unfortunately, I can’t see any reason why the minority of drivers who behave like idiots on ‘conventional’ roads will cease to do so when they drive through schemes with an absence of rules. They will continue to behave like idiots.

In the above video, by cycleoptic, the driver of the Mini enters and exits the ’roundabout’ on Exhibition Road on the wrong side of the road. The lack of clarity in the design has plainly not stopped his or her stupidity – indeed, it may even have given licence to driving in this manner. Without rules governing how drivers should behave, what’s to stop them doing things like this? Rather than ‘uncertainly’ and ‘intrigue’ about the right way to behave generating better behaviour, it may be the case that that the very same uncertainty can be exploited by those in a hurry. If it’s not particularly clear that the circle in the road is a roundabout, why not just drive around it the wrong way, cutting across the ‘pavement’ as you do so?

Similarly this Mercedes driver, frustrated with a long queue on Exhibition Road, is driving down the ‘wrong’ side of the road.

Not pleasant for anyone who might happen to be cycling in the opposite direction. But with an absence of rules, it becomes harder to claim that this driver is doing anything wrong. On a flat, uniform surface, without markings, what’s to stop you just driving past stationary traffic, beyond simple common courtesy?

Granted, it may only be a minority of drivers who behave in this way, but given that shared space is reliant for its success on vulnerable users being willing to mix and interact with motor traffic, and not to just meekly stay out of the way, the implications of bad behaviour are quite serious. It only needs one in a hundred – or one in a thousand – drivers to act aggressively, or to take shortcuts, for people to become reluctant to share space with the other 99, or the other 999. In a society that is still heavily motor-dominated, we should acknowledge that the libertarianism and personal responsibility offered by shared space may not be quite as uniformly positive as it might first appear.

Why the Hierarchy of Provision is doomed

The street pictured above is Blackfriars Road in London, looking north towards Southwark tube station. The illuminated tall building on the right is Transport for London’s headquarters, Palestra House.

As you can see, the road is rather wide. At a rough guess, each carriageway could accommodate three cars, side by side, if not more. At least six vehicles wide.

How would we make cycling a more comfortable and pleasant experience on this road? The obvious answer would be to reallocate some of that space, and to create wide cycle tracks, protected from motor traffic, on either side. There’s plenty of room for the cycle tracks to pass behind new bus stop islands too, freeing buses and bicycles from interaction with each other. A narrower carriageway, in and of itself, would also lead to a reduction in vehicle speeds.

Indeed, this is what the Mayor of London’s new Vision for Cycling suggests should happen on Blackfriars Road; it states that TfL

will segregate where possible, though elsewhere we will seek other ways to deliver safe and attractive cycle routes.

and

With the proviso that nothing must reduce cyclists’ right to use any road, we favour segregation

and

We will install Dutch-style full segregation on several streets without bus routes, such as the Victoria Embankment. We will install it on several streets which are wide enough to put bus stops on ‘islands’ in the carriageway

Blackfriars Road meets all these criteria. ‘Dutch-style full segregation’ is eminently possible here, despite the presence of buses and bus stops, because tracks can easily run behind those bus stops, and not interfere with the functioning of the bus route.

The problem, however, is that current guidance would not suggest the installation of tracks.

The hierarchy of solutions suggested in the Department of Transport’s Cycle Infrastructure Design (above) gets things back to front, in that it suggests last what should actually be implemented first on this kind of road. There is no need for traffic volume reduction, or speed reduction, on Blackfriars Road. The cycle tracks can and should be installed on the road, as it currently stands.

Of course, a lower speed limit of 20 mph, as compared to the current 30 mph limit, is desirable. But it is not necessary, and nor should it be considered as a priority for improving cycling conditions ahead of safe, comfortable and well-designed cycle tracks. Nor indeed do we need to ‘reduce traffic’ to make cycling a more attractive option on Blackfriars Road. (Indeed, we shouldn’t really be concerned with ‘reducing traffic’ at all, but rather with changing the mode of transport that ‘traffic’ uses).

The problem is that so much current cycling guidance is fixated on attempting to ‘reduce traffic’, when it should instead be focusing more clearly on creating good conditions for cycling. Obviously, these two aims will often overlap quite neatly, but they are not one and the same thing. I think this explains why the CTC are in a bit of a policy muddle; they have confused two different policy aims. Creating good conditions for cycling is not the same as reducing (motor) traffic, even if the latter is an outcome of the former.

Maybe this confusion on the part of the CTC stems from the legacy of the ‘no surrender’ attitude amongst their more prominent campaigners in the earlier part of the 20th century; the struggle to retain and control roads on which motor vehicles were seen as intruders still informs current attitudes. This necessarily waters down the commitment to proper Dutch-style provision for cycling, because it would require a ‘surrender’ of certain categories of road. The result is a compromise, apparent in this description of the Hierarchy of Provision provided by the CTC themselves –

Many people who don’t cycle say they’re held back by their fear of traffic, and reckon they’d cycle if there were more cycle paths away from the roads.  Local demands for ‘traffic-free’ routes can be quite persuasive for councils, but when they install segregated tracks they often meet with opposition from cyclists who would prefer to cycle on the road… The dilemma over how to decide on the best option for a given location led to the development of the ‘Hierarchy of Provision’, a concept that was officially endorsed by the Department for Transport (DfT) in 1996. In theory, therefore, the Hierarchy has been embedded in the Government’s cycling policies for years.

Well, there really shouldn’t be a ‘dilemma’; the best solution for cycling on a given category of road should be quite obvious. In fact, there is only a ‘dilemma’ because the CTC are in the unfortunate position of having to accommodate the demands of the ‘no surrender’ group alongside the demands of those who might want to cycle in comfort with their children.

I also think it would be fair to say that in attempting to resolve this dilemma, the Hierarchy of Provision doesn’t really solve anything. As Freewheeler of Crap Waltham Forest put it –

The problem with the CTC’s Hierarchy of Provision is that instead of demanding concrete infrastructure which would make cycling safe, fast and convenient it dissolves into windy platitudes.

And that is exactly what we would get on Blackfriars Road; instead of clear demands for that ‘concrete infrastructure’ – cycle tracks which would make cycling a comfortable and pleasant experience for all – the Hierarchy instead provides a vague demand to ‘consider’ reductions in traffic volume and speed.

It’s nowhere near good enough, and thankfully, it seems to be on the way out, principally because it is fundamentally incompatible with the policy that Transport for London, housed in that building on this road, will be coming up with in response to the Mayor’s Vision. Transport for London will be segregating cyclists on the network, quite often in places where there is no reduction in traffic volume or speed, and they will be doing so as a first priority.

National policy needs to start catching up.

Pickles and Portas aren’t listening

I’ll start with a confession. Eric Pickles is the reason I started writing this blog.

Back in the winter of 2011, he attended a conference organised by The Economist, on Urban Planning and Liveable Cities. After he had spoken, Mark Ames posed the following question –

As Secretary of State for Communities, and given the known effects that over-use of private cars has on local communities in terms of urban blight, noise pollution, obesity etc, how do you reconcile and balance these issues with your declaring the end to the so-called war on the motorist?

Pickles’ response was breathtakingly bone-headed –

Don’t be such a puritan. Not all of us can pedal up and down in rubber knickers you know; we need to find balance. Of course, let’s encourage cycling and walking, and we need to make cycling safer, but let us not treat people in cars like the enemy!

It’s hard to imagine a clearer illustration of this government’s total failure to engage with the bicycle as a serious mode of transport – one that can solve all the problems Mark alluded to – than this comment. Cycling is for those people, Pickles is saying, as he presents those who ride bikes as a weird, freakish minority. Yes, we can’t seriously expect everyone to wear rubber knickers! Of course, while we should ensure that the tiny minority of people who want to pedal up and down in their strange outfits aren’t seriously injured – or at least killed – we have to focus on the balance. And by balance we mean keeping things exactly the same as they were before; not imposing any restrictions on driving, and not doing anything to make riding a bike or walking an attractive prospect by comparison. Because that would be puritanical.

The logic is circular; because riding a bicycle is an unpleasant, stressful and inconvenient mode of transport for most people in Britain, it remains the preserve of a minority. And because only a minority are willing to ride bikes, so we must continue to accommodate the needs of mass motoring within our towns and cities, with deleterious effects for all, including those who drive.

The government are either unwilling to break out of this vicious cycle, or lack the awareness or understanding to contemplate how things could be very different – even with an example parked right on our doorstep. This is in marked contrast to Boris Johnson, who now seems to grasp the basic economic logic of designing for greater bicycle use, rather than waiting for more cyclists to appear and then accommodating their needs. Major engineering firms are also now stating, loudly and clearly, that our cities have to focus on the bicycle as a mode of transport.

For central government, however, nothing is changing, and indeed we even seem to be going into reverse, if Pickles’ announcement at the Conservative Party Conference of yet more policies designed to make urban motoring easier (although whether they would have that effect is very uncertain) is taken seriously.

This is the idea that motorists should be entitled to park for free while ‘popping into shops’, coupled with calls for more off-street parking. In an echo of his earlier remark about ‘puritanism’, Pickles spoke of

a rigid state orthodoxy of persecuting motorists out of their cars, with no concern about its effect in killing off small shops… I believe we need to give people the good grace to pop into a local corner shop for 10 minutes, to buy a newspaper or a loaf of bread without risking a £70 fine.

Naturally, the absurdity of people driving to their local corner shop is not even considered.

The whole policy is predicated on a fallacy; namely, that to reverse the decline of the high street, we must make it as easy and cheap to drive to as it is to drive to an out of town shopping centre.

This is not possible. There is not the space in our towns and cities to accommodate unlimited motor traffic (something that has been appreciated for half a century). Motor traffic restraint is necessary not for ‘puritanical’ reasons, but for self-preservation. Free parking everywhere would create chaos, not just for people on foot and cycling, but for other motorists, and for the shops trying to receive deliveries. It is fundamentally impossible to level the playing field between towns and shopping centres built miles away on cheap land, and we should stop trying.

Making it cheap to park on streets degrades the quality of the urban environment, and so destroys the reason why people might choose to shop there, instead of driving past and heading off to an out of town centre. Once you are in your car, the hassle and stress of finding a parking space close by, in town, will obviously be trumped by the lure of unlimited and pain-free parking a little distance further away. As a blogger astutely observed yesterday, with respect to a street in a northern suburb of Bristol –

why is this high street so mediocre? Because its so painfully car centric that it only welcomes people in a car – and once you get in one, you may as well drive all the way on to the ring road instead of shopping in such a run down street. Encouraging people to park simply discourages people from walking to the shops – and once in a car, they can shop where they want.

Another blogger voiced similar thoughts –

Often I have to ‘fire up the Quattro’ just to nip to the shops.

When I get there it’s a flipping pain in the arse. Finding somewhere to park, often having to get change for the parking. And the Quattro is ruddy enormous, I often drive round and round trying to find a big enough space.

To be honest, once I am in the car, I may as well go somewhere that is free to park and has a big multi-storey carpark.

Does this sound like somewhere familiar? You see, the moment I utter the words ‘FIRE UP THE QUATTRO!’ you have lost me.

The money it will cost me in petrol, insurance, parking, etc etc I may as well go a bit further afield and get a few more things. Shopping that I know will probably go off and be thrown away before I eat it, but hey, I was there, it was on special offer……..

But I don’t want to do that.

I want to go to my local Butcher and buy tonight’s tea. Not £150 of over manufactured crap. I want a steak, or some sausages. I want to go to a proper Greengrocer for the veg. I would like to go on my bike, not have to worry about parking or change. I just want a nice trip to the local shops.

If you insist on making your high street attractive only to those who arrive by car, well, you’re going to kill it; car drivers will opt for the easier place to get to, the shopping centre that is actually designed for the motor vehicle, not the high street, which is fundamentally incompatible with mass motoring.

Across the country we now have countless examples of thriving streets, with higher footfalls and longer ‘dwell’ times, all places where the motor vehicle has recently been excluded or restricted.

These are street environments that would be fundamentally ruined as destinations – as places people might want to go to – if all motorists were at liberty to park for free on them. Their attractiveness would be lost.

Most worryingly of all, this lesson does not seem to have been learnt by retail expert Mary Portas, who was charged by the government with carrying out a review into the future of our high streets. She tweeted yesterday

Councils with any sense and commitment to their local shops should listen to Eric Pickles 10 minute parking idea

This is fatuous, and wrong. Councils with any sense should concentrate instead on making their high streets attractive places, and give up on futile attempts to compete with out of town shopping centres on the latter’s terms. Several people pointed this out to Mary Portas on Twitter – that unrestricted motoring in towns and cities would ruin them.  Unfortunately her response was even more troubling –

Anything that allows shoppers to stop has to be a good thing.

I couldn’t disagree more. If all those shoppers are arriving directly on the high street by car, that is not ‘a good thing’, not for me, not for anyone, not for the high street itself. But unfortunately Portas, like Pickles, is fixated on the motor vehicle as a mode of urban transport. The Portas Review does not mention walking or cycling even once, yet mentions cars, and car parking, dozens of times. This is despite a mountain of evidence that those arriving on foot, or by bike, actually spend more over the long term, and invest more in their local neighbourhood – you know, the High Street – than those arriving by car, who are more likely to be passing through on their way to somewhere else.

If anything is killing the High Street, it’s the car. Stop pandering to it.

In praise of gyratories (and one-way systems) – why more of them could be the answer

If you say the word ‘gyratory’ to anyone who cycles regularly around cities or large towns in Britain, they’ll probably shiver involuntarily and start to sweat a little. In their mind, they will almost certainly be picturing  scenes like this –

Wide, fast, sweeping roads, with nerves of steel required to move across lanes to make turns; unpleasant places to ride a bicycle.

Gyratory removal is unsurprisingly very popular with cyclists, and is starting to happen across London. The one-way system around Piccadilly was restored to two-way working recently (with, in my opinion, mixed results for cycling), and there are plans afoot to remove the Aldgate gyratory [pdf], among others.

The Mayor’s promising new Vision for Cycling also talks of

making bike journeys easier and more direct by removing one-way streets, gyratories and complicated crossings of big roads.

and argues that

Removing one-way streets and gyratories will cut the incidence of cyclists travelling the ‘wrong’ way or on pavements

Well, I’m not quite so sure gryatories and one-way systems are such a bad thing (bear with me). I think that in many places we actually need them, and that they can be highly beneficial for cycling, and for public transport.

The reason why is hinted at in this sentence from the same Vision document –

We will put Dutch-style segregated lanes on several one-way streets where the bus stops are only on one side of the road, such as part of Harleyford Road in Vauxhall.

The broader point, hinted at here, is that segregrated tracks, running in both directions, are more possible on one-way roads.  Keeping roads one-way for motor vehicles only allows space to be allocated specifically for cycling. By contrast, restoring current one-way systems and gyratories to two-way movement for motor vehicles would clearly impinge on the amount of space that can be given over to bus lanes and cycle tracks.

So – if we are serious about prioritising bicycle use in London and other cities across Britain, I think gyratories and one-way systems (of a particular form) should be here to stay, and indeed should actually be introduced in some places where they don’t currently exist. According to the Vision for Cycling document, Transport for London are sacrificing their commitment to a comfortable cycling experience where bus lanes currently exist. There is not the space between buildings for cycle tracks, and for keeping bus lanes, and for keeping two-way motor vehicle flow.

The answer in some places would be to create one-way systems, for motor vehicles only; to reallocate the space used for two-way running to bicycle tracks, while keeping bus lanes. I’ll come to some Dutch examples of this kind of design in a moment, but first we can take a look at Piccadilly, which is an interesting example of how this might have worked. Here’s the old arrangement, looking west from close to the Royal Academy.

A bus lane in each direction, with three motor vehicle lanes heading east. If you were driving on this street, and you wanted to get to Hyde Park Corner, you would actually be substantially disadvantaged, having to progress all the way around a giant rectangle formed by Haymarket and Pall Mall.

And now the current arrangement at the same spot, courtesy of Streetview –

Now you can drive west (heading away from us). The bus lane going west has disappeared, as have a good number of the eastbound vehicle lanes, to make way for a westbound carriageway. Instead of three lanes heading east, we now have one or two in each direction. Eastbound capacity for private motor vehicles has been sacrificed.

My point is that, ideally, this eastbound capacity reduction should have occurred without the introduction of a westbound carriageway; that space instead could have been allocated to cycle tracks running in both directions. In so doing you would have made driving in central London as difficult as it was before (and not slightly easier), and you would also have made cycling along this road a more comfortable and pleasant experience (instead of having to fight your way through motor traffic, particularly heading east).

In short, the one-way system for motor vehicles should have been kept, and the space used to create two-way motor vehicle movements should instead have been allocated to cycling. Precisely the same is true at other horrible gyratories across London. I don’t want to see two-way roads for motor vehicles all around King’s Cross, because that would use up valuable space, and valuable signal time, that could be allocated instead to cycling and public transport. Keep the gyratory for motor vehicles; make them continue to go around the houses, so that their journeys are inconvenient. This can be achieved while making bicycle journeys comfortable, direct and straightforward (indeed, keeping one-way running for cars makes this even easier).

One-way systems are a significant feature of Dutch towns and cities, and they go a long way towards explaining why they are so pleasant to cycle around. They make driving inconvenient by comparison with cycling, and they also allow space between buildings to be used for public transport, walking and cycling instead, in ways that would not be possible with two-way flow for motor vehicles.

A simple example to start with. This street is part of a complex one-way system in a residential area just to the north-east of Utrecht city centre.

One-way for cars (towards us) but, as you can see, two-way for bicycles. This street would be substantially worse for cycling if it was two-way for motor vehicles. The one-way system has the additional advantage of discouraging driving through this area, and you can see that it works. Not much driving. It even seems to have made the Google Streetview drivers quit in disgust, as this area is barely mapped at all.

Elsewhere in Utrecht, there exist ‘virtual’ one-way systems, that only exist for motor vehicles, but not for bicycles or public transport. Try driving into the centre from the east – you will be forced to take an extensive detour.

 This is because a section of this route, Nobelstraat, is part of a ‘gyratory’; a one-way road for cars, but in the opposite direction.

Looking west. A two-way bus lane in the middle, and a cycle track on the right. No way through for motor vehicles; only a one-way road towards us on the left.

This is what big one-way streets in London could begin to look like if we decided not to dismantle them entirely, but to keep one-way running for motor vehicles, and use the space we might have allocated to two-way flow specifically for public transport, walking and cycling. Conversely, it’s often very hard to allocate space in this way if you are intent on unwinding a gyratory for all modes.

Believe it or not, this is another extensive one-way system, in the centre of Amsterdam – but one for motor vehicles only.

Motor vehicles can only travel away from us (indicated by the small blue arrow towards the right of the photograph). The rest of the space is for pedestrians, a two-way tram route, and two-way cycling. Would you want to dismantle this and install two-way running for motor vehicles? I hope not.

A similar example, further out into the suburbs of Amsterdam.

The van is driving around a one-way system, while bicycles can travel in both directions, on cycle tracks. The grassy area is a two-way tram route. Again, this allocation of space would not be possible with two-way flow for motor vehicles.

Finally, here’s a video of a one-way street in Groningen.

The cars are flowing on a one-way system all of their own, while bicycles can travel in all directions. These are private gyratories for motor vehicles, created to allow safe, comfortable bicycle travel in all directions. You would not be able to allocate this amount of space to cycling (and walking) if this road had two-way running for motor vehicles.

So, before we start dismantling our own gyratories and one-way systems, and restoring them to two-way running, perhaps we should think more creatively about how we can use the space that they occupy.

Why would you restore a road like this in Kings Cross to two-way running for motor vehicles, when you could use the space far more effectively for two-way public transport and cycling?

The emerging competition for space between bus lanes and cycle tracks in London can be greatly reduced if we keep one-way running for motor vehicles, and indeed if we introduce gyratories and one-way systems of this particular form in other places across the city.

Let’s not consign them to the dustbin just yet.