TfL’s retrograde ‘School and Young Person Delivery Plan’

I blogged recently (as did several others) about the Mayor of London’s new Vision for Cycling document, which, while short on detail, appears to represent a new approach towards cycling in London; responding to the concerns and needs of the vast majority of Londoners who do not consider riding a bicycle to be an attractive or appealing prospect.

The Vision recognises that cycling in motor traffic is not something that most people want to do, and proposes policies that should make cycling a comfortable and pleasant experience in London – separation from traffic on major routes, and the removal of through traffic on quieter residential streets, to form ‘Quietways’.

One of the groups who stand to benefit most from this new strategy, if successfully implemented, are children and young people; a child on a bicycle is, in my experience, an extraordinarily rare sight in London, certainly away from the pavement. Even in London’s best-performing borough, Hackney, just 3% of children cycle to school, while 33% want to. I expect a similar, if not worse, picture across the rest of London; a massive amount of suppressed demand for cycling amongst the young.

As it happens, at precisely the same time the Mayor’s Vision is being launched, Transport for London are also consulting on a document entitled School and Young Person Delivery Plan: Setting our future direction which has the intention of, amongst other things, ensuring that Transport for London meet the needs of young people.

The foreword acknowledges that

Young people are significant users of the capital’s transport network; whether it is for their journey to school or college, meeting friends or family or going to work…. Using the transport network is incredibly important to young people and to enable them to get the most of London we have an important role to ensure travelling in London is a happy, healthy and safe experience.

This is very important because TfL estimate that there will be over 3 million people aged under 25 in London by the year 2031. TfL aim to promote, in their words, active, safe and responsible travel for these millions of youngsters. Cycling clearly should represent a solution here, given that

TfL faces a number of challenges on the transport network as the population of London grows, impacting on existing levels of congestion and air quality. Coupled with this, obesity levels are rising and so TfL has a role to play in encouraging Londoners to be physically active when travelling around the city…. TfL wants to encourage young people to choose active travel modes, such as walking and cycling, and ensure that they can travel in a safe and responsible way

So how does this consultation document fare on the matter of cycling for young people in London?

There are a variety of sections that tangentially relate to cycling, and unfortunately all are very disappointing. The section on ‘Community and Personal Safety’ is entirely about safety from crime. This is obviously important, but not the only way in which children can be put into danger.

The section on ‘Casualty Reduction’ is even worse. While stating that reducing child casualties are an essential part of TfL’s aim to reduce all casualties by 40% by 2020 (compared to 2005-9 average), and that

TfL wants to ensure that young people travel safely on London’s roads, whether they are young drivers, cyclists, motorcyclists or pedestrians

the strategy aimed at keeping these young pedestrians and cyclists safe seems to revolve entirely around education and training, and has nothing to say about making London’s road environment safer. Here are the ‘Objectives’ –

‘Educate young people’ to behave properly on the roads, give them the ‘life-skills’ to identify hazards, and ‘encourage’ young people to understand the consequences of their actions.

And that’s it. Pretty miserable stuff, not just because of a failure to address creating safer streets, but also because all this ‘education’ and ‘encouragement’ is only directed at children themselves. There is nothing in this strategy that talks about getting drivers to behave better, or ‘educating’ them to drive more carefully around children. Nothing. It’s victim-blaming of the worst kind.

How many of those 1,181 children were completely blameless, or were hit by speeding motorists, or motorists who ‘lost control’? The assumption on the part of TfL seems to be that, because children under 16 form 22% of all pedestrian casualties, this must be due to something that children themselves are doing; the strategy is focused on improving their behaviour, through campaigns like this –

But a disproportionate number of pedestrians will be children in the first place; they can’t drive, so will be walking to school, or walking to catch the bus, unlike adults, many of whom will be driving instead. TfL don’t seem to have taken this into account, and have simply assumed that children forming a high percentage of pedestrian casualties is because they are ‘behaving badly’, rather than because they a relatively large percentage of pedestrians will be children. It’s quite blinkered.

Later in the document, this thinking is again in evidence, in TfL’s ‘engagement’ with young people. Here’s one of the strategies –

The response to some boroughs having high numbers of teenage casualties is to ‘raise awareness of road safety and encourage responsible behaviour’ amongst teenagers in these places – no assessment of how and why these teenagers are being killed, whether driving standards might be lax in these boroughs, whether the streets are dangerous to cross or walk along, or whether there might simply be more teenagers out on the streets here.

TfL might, of course, be doing these things elsewhere, but why is this kind of rational approach completely absent from this document? Why shouldn’t higher driving standards, safer street design, or lower vehicle speeds be put forward as policies to reduce child casualties? Amazingly, it’s not in this strategy document. There is nothing about making junctions safer, or providing safe cycling routes separated from motor traffic. Nothing. Of the ten ‘initiatives’ TfL are proposing to increase child safety, every single one involves training or educating children. There’s no mention of reducing environmental danger.

The same ‘educating’ and ‘training’ strategy is employed by TfL in ‘encouraging’ young people to walk and cycle, in the section of the document specifically on ‘Active and Independent Travel’. There’s a nice picture of some children engaged in cycle sport, strapped onto brakeless track bikes on a velodrome – obviously completely irrelevant for any child attempting to cycle to school or around their neighbourhood, not even useful training.

This is not transport!

The focus of the strategy in this section is almost entirely on ‘workshops’, ‘education’ and ‘training’, and encouraging schools to get more of their pupils to walk and cycle through accreditation schemes. Again, there’s nothing on making the roads and streets themselves attractive or inviting for walking and cycling.

I’m assuming this document was drafted in isolation of the Mayor’s new Vision for Cycling – it certainly reads like it. It might be wise if TfL ditched this consultation and came back with a new one that incorporated the eminently sensible strategy advice outlined in that new document, because it’s simply not up to scratch, certainly as regards cycling. We need safer, more pleasant streets for our children to walk and cycle one, and for a document about encouraging walking and cycling in these age groups to fail to even mention improving the streets themselves is quite scandalous.

The consultation runs until 27th March. Do have your say.

The language has changed – will the strategy match it?

Nearly two years ago I quoted the Mayor of London stating that

In many places, the existing layout of roads and buildings means that there is simply not enough space to provide segregated cycle lanes without adversely impacting other users.

One of my biggest problems with the attitude towards cycling in London is that it is all too frequently seen as something ‘extra’ that has to be accommodated alongside motor traffic and pedestrians; the reference to ‘other users’ in this statement from the Mayor suggested that ‘cyclists’ are another group of road users that have to somehow be fitted in to the existing streetscape.

There did not seem to be the recognition that creating safe, comfortable and direct space for bicycle use was an effective way of reducing the demand on the road network. Make the bicycle a suitable alternative, for all, for those short car trips – to school, to shops or to work – and you massively improve the capacity of London’s roads for all users, as well as making them substantially better places. A car user could become a bicycle user, rather than a bicycle user being fitted in at the margins alongside car users.

It was barely a year ago that Transport for London were suggesting that installing a cycle lane at a location where someone had just died would lead to ‘considerable queues’; the implication being that reallocating road space not just to prioritise cycling but merely to keep cyclists safe from harm was a lower priority than the length of queues of motor vehicles. Around the same time Boris Johnson was also making statements like

It is not possible to put in dedicated cycling infrastructure without disrupting the flow of traffic

and in doing so apparently forgetting that bicycles are a mode of traffic, and one that can improve the flow of traffic for all users.

So, while I think we should wait for more detail about last week’s announcement actually entails before passing serious comment (about which more below), I am very pleased to say that, if the Vision for Cycling in London [pdf] accurately reflects the opinions of the Mayor and those with responsibility at Transport for London, then, if nothing else, the language and the attitude has changed. I have been critical of both Boris Johnson and Transport for London for their failure to come out with the right language and attitude, so it is only fair to acknowledge when they say the right things, even if they haven’t started to deliver yet.

The most exciting thing for me about the Vision document is the recognition that the bicycle is a solution to London’s transport problems; instead of having to ‘accommodate’ cycling on main roads with half measures like blue paint, the Vision recognises that, done properly, with a continental-style approach, cycling infrastructure makes life better for everyone. Instead of claiming that putting in bicycle infrastructure will ‘impede the flow of traffic’, the Mayor and TfL are now suggesting precisely the opposite, that proper bicycle provision will help the flow of traffic.

Even right before last year’s election – in what was fairly universally accepted as a disastrous performance on the subject of cycling – Boris was pitting ‘cyclists’ against ‘motorists’, presenting the former group as slightly weird environmentalists who ‘want to ban cars’, and who think they are ‘morally superior’. All this in front of an audience composed mostly of serious journalists wearing suits, who happen to ride bikes in London. On the basis of that performance and what it implied, I said that Boris would probably be a ‘disaster’ for cycling in London.

Of course, nothing has been delivered yet, but if we consider merely the attitude exhibited in the Mayor’s new Vision document, I have to say that I misjudged Boris. He and his advisors have listened, and responded in a serious manner, and taken on board the criticism.

Naturally, we have heard words before; this, for instance, is from the Mayor’s 2o1o Cycling Revolution document [pdf] –

I’m determined to turn London into a cyclised city – a civilised city where people can ride their bikes safely and easily in a pleasant environment.

But that document was very short on detail of how that ‘pleasant environment’ might be achieved, talking mostly about ‘encouragement’ and getting people to obey the rules of the road.

I think it is correct to describe the new Vision document as a ‘step change’ from that approach, because it engages much more seriously with the Dutch and Danish method of catering for cycling, something that London Cycling Campaign have very successfully been demanding, along with the Cycling Embassy of Great Britain, and other campaigners and bloggers.

The focus, throughout the document, is on making cycling a pleasant thing to do; while the Vision is not especially clear about how this might be achieved in practice, the shift in approach, particularly from the initial Superhighways (which were about ‘routefinding’ and making drivers ‘more aware’ that they might encounter cyclists), is remarkable.

As I have already said, the Vision recognises that cycling is a solution to London’s transport problems, not something that needs to be fitted in alongside existing modes. My impression is that TfL have known this themselves for a long time; Peter Hendy writes in his foreword about the pressure of population growth and their inability to build new roads, or to widen existing ones, to deal with that growth. They have reached the limit of accommodating private motor traffic on the existing road network, and something had to change.

What was required was the political impetus to start to tip things in the right direction, and I think the Go Dutch demands supplied that. This is why Isabel Dedring, Ben Plowden and Andrew Gilligan were so seek to praise the people who had been criticising them, often angrily, at the Stakeholder launch of the Vision, because it gave them the political room to adjust TfL’s strategy (Dedring has been saying this for some time). Whether Boris grasped this already while making motor-centric noises before the election, or whether TfL and campaigners have managed to persuade him to see the light, I don’t know, but the message in the Vision is clear – more cycling can help the motorist. According to Boris

at the very heart of this strategy is my belief that helping cycling will not just help cyclists. It will create better places for everyone. It means less traffic, more trees, more places to sit and eat a sandwich. It means new life, new vitality and lower crime on underused streets. It means more seats on the Tube, less competition for a parking place and fewer cars in front of yours at the lights.

Everybody wins.

Just as importantly, the document recognises that this fundamental shift away from motor traffic, necessary to relieve demand on the network and to make life better for all users, will not happen in significant numbers without a change of approach. Namely, the Going Dutch that London Cycling Campaign and others have been demanding, focusing on the needs and requirements of that vast majority of the population who do not feel comfortable cycling with motor traffic.

So it was very pleasing to read, on the very first page of the document, Boris writing

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.

before going on to state

I want [cycling] to be something you feel comfortable doing in your ordinary clothes… I want more of the kind of cyclists you see in Holland, going at a leisurely pace on often clunky steeds.

As many have commented, this is something that could be lifted straight of the Cycling Embassy’s manifesto, or from the London Cycling Campaign’s Go Dutch agenda.

The Vision states that

There will be more Dutch-style, fully-segregated lanes and junctions; more mandatory cycle lanes, semi-segregated from general traffic; and a network of direct back-street Quietways, with segregation and junction improvements over the hard parts.

This is addressing, head on, the central issue that prevents most people from cycling; perception of safety, and fear of motor traffic.

Where there is conflict between modes (which there often isn’t) we will try to make a clear choice, not an unsatisfactory compromise. We will segregate where possible, though elsewhere we will seek other ways to deliver safe and attractive cycle routes. Timid, half-hearted improvements are out – we will do things at least adequately, or not at all.

Separating cyclists from motor traffic is now the stated priority of Transport for London; whether this actually happens or not, the language is remarkable. Even where ‘full’ segregation might not be possible, the Vision suggests ‘semi-segregation’, using mandatory lanes where cyclists are kept separate from traffic by rumble strips or ‘ridges’.

The issue, of course, is whether this will actually happen, and whether the fine words about reclaiming space and not fitting in cycling around the margins will amount to anything once actual conflict for space emerges. I am cynical, but I’m prepared to withhold judgement until these issues actually arise. The scheme to separate cyclists from motor traffic along Stratford High Street is a promising early signal that the willingness is there. So we should wait and see.

My principal concern is actually junctions. The junction review currently being undertaken by TfL is – with the exception of the decision to test something ‘Dutch’ for possible approval at Lambeth Bridge north – very half-hearted and weak. The current TfL strategy of ASLs and ‘early start lights’ (as currently in operation at Bow roundabout), while well-meaning, is not good enough, certainly not as good enough as full separation of modes, and the full removal of turning conflicts. Yet this seems to be the only intervention in their toolbox at present, and there is no detail in the Vision about any other potential designs.

This is something that is going to have to be addressed. The cover of the Vision shows cycle tracks approaching the Houses of Parliament, and Westminster Bridge.

But how are these cyclists going to be steered safely through Parliament Square? I don’t think ‘early start lights’ are going to cut it. We will need routes across big junctions that look like this –

Not timid ASLs that you are not permitted to enter while motor traffic is flowing, and that merely let you depart a few seconds earlier.

So I hope that Transport for London are willing to adapt, and to learn how these Dutch junction designs work. Rather than going to Paris (which with the best will in the world is not brilliant for cycling, and certainly does not cater anywhere near as well for cyclists at junctions as Dutch cities do) why not book a trip to the Netherlands? Take a look around for yourself, and then let David Hembrow fill you in.

The language of the new strategy is very welcome, but the approach has to match it.

Institutional motorism

You are probably aware that the Association of Chief Police Officers have now ‘clarified’ their position on the enforcement of 20 mph limits, following the appearance of the assistant chief constable of West Yorkshire police before the All Party Parliamentary Cycling Group inquiry yesterday.

In many ways the ‘clarification’ is more revealing than the initial statement by the assistant chief constable, Mark Milson, that

We are not enforcing 20mph speed limits at this moment in time

because it demonstrates an institutional attitude to motoring misbehaviour. The ACPO press release states

In most cases, 20 mph limits will follow Department of Transport guidance and include features such as speed bumps or traffic islands designed to slow traffic. ACPO guidelines include thresholds for enforcement across all speed limits to underpin a consistent policing approach. However it is for local police forces to apply a proportionate approach to enforcement of 20mph limits based on risk to individuals, property and the seriousness of any breach. Where drivers are exceeding the speed limit through wilful offending, we would expect that officers will enforce the limit and prosecute offenders.

The first part of this statement is simply wrong. The increasing profusion of blanket 20 mph zones in towns and cities across Britain quite obviously means that it is no longer true that ‘in most cases’ these zones will have design features to slow traffic. These are roads and streets that are physically unaltered; it’s depressing that even in a prepared statement the police can’t get this right.

The final section of the statement is most interesting, principally because of the use of the words ‘proportionate’ and ‘wilful’. The clear impression is that the police think 20 mph limits are unreasonably slow, and it is not ‘proportionate’ to enforce the speed limit universally. Likewise with the reference to ‘wilful offending’. Because a 20 mph limit is not something the police believe motorists can reasonably stick to, it is only those motorists who ‘wilfully’ drive over 20 mph who will be tackled by the police, not those motorists who ‘accidentally’ drive over 20 mph. Quite how the police are supposed to tell these two categories apart is not clarified.

The police attitude that 20 mph zones need design features in order to be self-reinforcing speaks further of this belief that motorists cannot be expected to obey signs; the police think that the only way in which motorists will stay below 20 mph is if they are forced to. Now, obviously, I think a physical environment which makes it largely impossible for motorists to speed is ultimately desirable, but the attitude of the police is worryingly revealing in its tolerance.

It’s not just 20 mph zones where police think motorists are not able to help themselves. I wrote last year about a 40 mph road in Horsham, frequently crossed by children to get to a school on the other side of it, where the police advised against lowering the limit to a mere 30 mph, because motorists couldn’t be expected to stick to this new slightly lower speed due to the ‘design nature’ of the road.

such a change [in speed limit] would fall outside of the speed limit criteria currently adopted by the County Council. The criteria have been developed in association with Sussex Police and takes into account local and national research which shows that drivers generally select their speed from the messages given by the surrounding roadside development and the prevalent traffic conditions.   It is considered that lowering the speed limit alone in this location would have minimal effect on the average speed of traffic. Sussex Police would not support such a lowering of the speed limit here.  

The idea that drivers – instead of just ‘selecting their speed’ from messages given by the surrounding roadside – could actually obey speed limits appears to be completely incomprehensible to the police, as is the notion that motorists breaking these speed limits (speed limits that are apparently ‘unnatural’ to them) should consistently be met with punishment.

Their attitude needs to change, and swiftly.

Some parking issues at Horsham station

There’s a story in this week’s West Sussex County Times regarding the removal of bicycles chained to the railings outside the front of Horsham station. It seems one commuter returned to Horsham to find that his bicycle had been removed and put into storage.

It must be said that Southern trains (and West Sussex County Council) have done a pretty good job at vastly increasing the number of cycle parking spaces at the station; there are now getting on for 150 spaces in total, when just a few years ago there were only about 20 (and none at the rear of the station). I wrote about these improvements a year or so ago.

However, I think there’s a problem with where these parking spots are. There are 112 spots at the rear of the station, which is excellent. Last summer (when people are more likely to commute by bike) they were mostly full.

By contrast, there are just 24 spaces at the front of the station.

Demand for these spots is high, as you can see. Bikes are chained to the frame of the stand, as well as to nearby furniture.  Demand outstripping supply on this side of the station is not surprising, because the station is located pretty much bang in the middle of the town. You would consequently expect just as many people to arrive by bike at this main western entrance as you would on the eastern side, if not more, given that there are shops, cafes and more services in general at the main entrance.

Indeed, the more generous parking at the rear of the station is only about half full, on this cold and damp winter’s day.

Here’s Southern’s response to this situation, as reported in the County Times –

A Southern spokesman said: ‘There is no reason for people to chain their bike to railings at Horsham station. There is ample room for cycles at the rear of the station if the front is full. Access to the rear is by means of the subway and it takes just a couple of minutes to go from the front to the rear.

“We give plenty of warning to cyclists by means of posters and signage that cycles chained to the railings will be removed.

There is nowhere at the front of the station for additional cycle racks for safety reasons as this would compromise the station evacuation point.”

That’s not particularly helpful, I’m afraid.

As it happens, it’s more convenient for me to use the rear of the station, but if I did arrive at the front, it would be slightly annoying to have to budget at least five minutes more time in the expectation that I might not find a space, and have to make my way to the rear of the station. It’s not just a ‘couple of minutes’. You have to make your way to a subway some 100 metres down the road, then walk through it (because cycling isn’t allowed).

Then across the large car park.
Up another road.

Before finally arriving at the rear of the station.

Not the biggest problem in the world, certainly, but inconvenient to have to make this extra journey every day simply because the balance of parking at the station is wrong; it should be more evenly distributed between the front and the rear.

Southern are arguing that they simply can’t even up the distribution, because – as their spokesman has said –

there is nowhere at the front of the station for additional cycle racks.

No location that would not compromise the station evacuation point.

I quizzed Southern on Twitter about where this evacuation point is, and it turns out, according to Southern, that it is in this railway staff car park, to the north of the main entrance.

The existing racks (the ones in short supply) are on the other side of this main entrance.

So, given that the assembly point is nowhere near these racks, I don’t think it’s coherent to argue that putting more racks here would ‘compromise’ that evacuation point. Southern just need to put more racks here. It’s as simple as that. There is ample space; they can do it.

There’s even space for a parking bay on the newly-created plaza in front of the station; it could take the place of the large sign telling you not to park your bike here.

This issue isn’t going to go away, because come the summer the rear parking bays will be full, and people arriving at the front to find the racks full will go to the rear only to find those racks full too.

As Mark Strong points out, Southern have recently received funding from government for 200 spaces at Horsham. Perhaps they could use it to put cycle parking spaces where they’re actually wanted?

Britain’s exclusionary roads and streets

A recent news item from Epping should come as no surprise to anyone who understands the reasons why people don’t cycle in Britain.

A head teacher has moved to explain changes to plans for the first new school the district has seen built in years.

Parking provision for teachers at the £18 million St John’s School in Tower Road, Epping is expected to be increased from 44 to 76, while bike spaces for pupils are set to be quartered, falling from 322 to at least 80.

George Yerosimou, the school’s head teacher, said: “The plans were drawn up some years ago. What we’ve been looking at now is basically how many spaces are being used now by staff. The original number put in was not realistic. We have been promoting car sharing, but we’re a rural school and a lot of them live far away.

“On Bury Lane, where the new entrance to the school will be, there is no parking or pavements. We don’t want to upset the local residents by having too many cars outside. He added that the number of bike spaces planned far outstripped the number of pupils who currently cycled in.

He added: “The local area isn’t really conducive to children cycling – there are no cycle paths. Maybe it’s something the town and district councils can be looking at.”

The school is not to blame here. There is no point putting in 300 cycle parking spaces for pupils if only a tiny fraction of that number is actually prepared to cycle to school. It would be a waste of money. Simply putting in lots of cycle parking, and keeping car parking spaces to a minimum, will change nothing if the streets and roads surrounding the school are hostile and unpleasant to cycle on.

It is those roads and streets that are to blame for this situation, not the allocation of parking at the school itself. Access to the new school appears to be from twisty, narrow country lanes with a 40 mph speed limit; it is not surprising that local children and their parents are voting for the car as a way to get to this school. Putting in 300 cycle spaces will not address this basic problem.

Lower Bury Lane, the road to the new school in Epping

This situation is just symptomatic of a broader scandal; namely, that Britain’s roads and streets are designed in a way that denies children their independence, and forces car dependency upon them.

We should remember that in a country a few hundred miles away across the North Sea, 40% of all trips made by children under the age of 17 are made by bicycle.

From Pucher & Buhler (eds.) City Cycling

Dutch children have independence. They can cycle to school by themselves; they can visit friends by themselves; they can go shopping by themselves.

At a similar secondary school to the one in Epping – also recently built – Dutch teenagers arrive and leave by bike.

It should be obvious from the video why these teenagers in Groningen are cycling home from school. It’s not because of ‘culture’, or because it’s flat, or because they’ve received training, or any other spurious reason.

The environment is designed to facilitate cycling; to make it an easy, safe and obvious thing to do. Cycle tracks and paths connect the school to their homes directly, without interaction with motor traffic. Likewise there’s a huge amount of cycle parking, in use, at this secondary school in Assen –

because children can cycle to the school in safety and comfort.

The same is true for primary schools, like these ones in Assen.

Tiny children, as young as four or five, cycling completely independently.

And Dutch children don’t just cycle to school; they go on shopping trips in cities, by themselves.

They can do all these things because the environment has been made safe, both objectively and subjectively.

By contrast in Britain – where schools quite rightly don’t bother to build cycle parking on the sound assumption that very few children are even going to attempt to cycle to them – children are dependent on their parents to a staggering degree for their mobility needs. I wrote over a year ago about how this is not just deeply unfair on children, but also on their parents, who have to spend a considerable amount of their time chauffering their children. The average British father spends well over two hours a week on ferrying his offspring around.

Multiply the situation at this school in Epping across the entire country – add up all the unnecessary car trips that are being made to transport children which, if we had a sane transport policy, would be made by the children themselves on bicycles – and we have what amounts to a national scandal. Wasted time; extra wear and tear on our roads; less safety; worse public health; more congestion; blight; visual, aural and atmospheric pollution. It’s desperate.

And this is without even considering all the other groups who have been shunted off our streets by our iniquitous transport policies; people trapped in their homes, or forced into the use of motor vehicles. This includes my grandmother, who never passed a driving test, and continued to cycle – against all the odds – the half mile to her local shops well into her 80s, but has now been forced to abandon her independence because she cannot dismount from her bike quickly enough. She is now reliant on her friends and neighbours to bring her supplies and to ferry her around, because the road in her village is simply unsafe to cycle on, and doesn’t even have a pavement.

This is why many elderly people continue to drive, even when they themselves know they are not fit to do so, and probably don’t even enjoy the experience – because they have no alternative. Drive, or stay at home. Similarly disabled people, or those with poor mobility, are forced into car use simply because our street environment is poorly designed for their needs.

It doesn’t have to be this way; it is possible to design streets and transport networks that are inclusive and accessible to all.

What all this amounts to is that in Britain the needs of the most vulnerable – children, the infirm and the elderly – are ignored, or considered far below the needs of facilitating the flow of motor vehicles through our streets.

This could be anywhere in Britain. An awful street environment for anyone not in a car, or not prepared to cycle with heavy motor traffic

South London again. Who is this road for? How has the space been allocated?

Central London. Who is important here? What message does this street arrangement send out?

Walk, cycle or drive? What is this street telling you to do?

Only young men can cross the road here

Our walking environment has been arranged around the prime objective of the flow of motor vehicles, while cycling has effectively been removed as a choice for the vast majority of the population. These policies are iniquitous, because they have disproportionately affected certain groups. Children have little or no independence; other groups are forced into car use, or are left to rely on others.

Sadly the impression I am getting from government is that nothing is going to change any time soon, especially with relation to cycling. Norman Baker, the minister with responsibility, recently presented this uplifting message –

If we reached Dutch levels I’d be ecstatic, but I can’t see us getting there. I went to to Leiden railway station and there were, I think, 13,000 bikes there that morning, which is just a different world from all other European countries. The Dutch have been fantastically successful. It is by and large flatter in Holland than it is in the UK, which is certainly an advantage, and it’s more compact, so there are differences.

What I can see is individual places in the country taking up cycling. I can see that now, with places like Cambridge. I think the message is getting out. The clear message we’re getting from the government, the enthusiasm local councils are displaying, means the renaissance of cycling, which was in decline for many years, is underway. A corner has been turned. We’re on the way back …

In other words, It would be great if we had the amount of cycling there is in the Netherlands, but we’re not going to get there. Maybe the ‘message will get out’, maybe it won’t.

Baker’s response is symptomatic of an astonishing ambivalence about cycling at the highest levels of government; an attitude that mass cycling will have to happen all by itself, and that when (if) it does happen, that’s the time the government might start to consider supporting and enabling it. There’s no vision.

The same wooly mindedness was apparent in the evidence given by health minister Anna Soubry to the Get Britain Cycling Inquiry this week. Once again, we had pleasant-sounding noises about how great cycling is, but an underlying message that cycling isn’t for everyone.

[Cycling] is just, often, a great way to travel. But I think we just have to accept the limitations of it. And I’ll just say that I never ever even considered taking one of my children on a bike. I lived in Nottingham for the vast majority of my life. Even though we have cycle lanes, you must be joking. I would not put a child on a bicycle in the city of Nottingham. I just don’t think I could have been that brave, or courageous. And the lanes weren’t extensive enough.

This message was repeated by Soubry later in her evidence –

I think that whenever we talk about cycling, we have to realise and appreciate the many concerns that people have about how safe you would be, and your children would be, on bicycles.

And I’m just thinking that, in a way… I used to make my daughters walk to school. It was very simple, I just refused to drive them there. And this is in the city of Nottingham. And in many ways I think I would have been more concerned about their safety if they had cycled to school, than walking to school. I’m not saying I’m right to feel that, but as a mum looking back, I think that would be right.

The message from Soubry here is that we should be realistic and appreciate that we won’t be able to persuade many people to cycle. Mums aren’t going to let their children cycle, and we should accept that. Mums aren’t going to be able to do their shopping by bike, and we should accept that as well.

This is the thrust of her ‘limitations’ argument; that the bicycle is a limited way of getting about, because it is no replacement for the safety, security and convenience of the car.

I think that if you want to lead the sort of lives that most people do, which is when you have to go and do supermarket runs, I’ve never understood how you’re going to do all that [by bike]… So I think you’ve got to look at its limitations as an alternative to public transport, or cars, and so on. So it has its limitations. But hey, what’s not to like.

The message that this should change – that we should make cycling just as safe and convenient as driving, if not more so – was completely absent.

Soubry also stated that ‘we’ve all got to make sure we do a lot more cycling’; a fairly meaningless platitude that presents cycling as something wholesome and good but doesn’t address the underlying reasons why the vast majority of the population won’t even bother.

The chair, Julian Huppert, thanked Soubry for her response, and then invited her onto the next Parliamentary Bike Ride. Soubry responded

No, I’d be very happy to, but I’m not going to. I’m just not going to do stunts.

She doesn’t mean ‘stunts’ in the acrobatic sense – she means a publicity stunt; the act of riding a bike with other parliamentarians is evidently seen by her as a gimmick. This much is clear from her response a moment later, when she described going to Leicester with Norman Baker on some official bicycle-promoting business (presumably this event)-

Norman did get on a bike. I refused to. I just have memories of a certain other public health minister – and you’re old enough to remember to whom I refer – doing too many stunts. I just think it can sometimes backfire.

David Arditti wrote after Soubry gave her evidence that

One gets the feeling Anna Soubry thinks cycling is about being sporty and healthy, not about convenience, inclusiveness & economic benefit

That’s exactly right; it would explain why Soubry thinks riding a bike is a gimmicky ‘stunt’, and why she was so enthusiastic about children doing cycling for sport at school, but so unenthusiastic about enabling children to cycle to school by themselves.

From her evidence, it is apparent that Soubry doesn’t have any understanding that cycling could ever be a mainstream mode of transport for the entire population. She doesn’t think it’s practical to use a bicycle for shopping; she doesn’t think children would be allowed to cycle by themselves by their parents; she didn’t have anything to say about the elderly cycling. She appears constrained by a fixed impression of what cycling is like in Britain now, and the kinds of people currently prepared to cycle; she had little or no awareness of the policies and planning decisions required to make cycling a possibility for all kinds of trips, and for those who don’t cycle.

I think that’s tremendously sad. We’re stuck in a hole, and this government doesn’t appear to have the vision or the willingness to dig us out of it. There will be plenty more schools installing more car parking spaces than bicycle parking spaces for the foreseeable future. Get used to it.

No, you are not ‘held up’ on Dutch cycle paths

I noticed this gem over the weekend on Twitter (thanks to Kats Dekker). It’s a quote from the forefather of Vehicular Cycling, John Forester.

The bikeway advocates are so imbued with the imagined virtues of the Dutch bikeway system, that it makes cycling safe for the incompetent and creates many cyclists where there were few before, that they have transformed, in their own minds, the defects of the Dutch system, its slow speed and long delays, into virtues.

I think it is now common knowledge that Forester – despite being so absurdly influential in cycling policy for a considerable period of time – is completely clueless about Dutch practice. This cluelessness is partly due to blatant prejudice, but also because he’s never even taken a look for himself.

Forester said that, besides a childhood train journey through Holland before World War II, he has never been in the country. “However,” he told me in an e-mail, “I have several cycling associates who have cycled there, and they inform me that they didn’t like cycling there for reasons which I see as eminently reasonable and conforming to my feelings about the few imitations implemented here.” [Quote from Pedaling Revolution, by Jeff Mapes]

Anyone who has visited the Netherlands would know that you are never suffer ‘delays’ while cycling, let alone ‘long delays’; nor is ‘slow speed’ an intrinsic quality of the Dutch system. Forester has just assumed that to be the case, without any evidence.

Nevertheless the idea that Dutch tracks are for ‘pootling’, or for ‘slow cyclists’, is remarkably persistent among a good number of prominent UK cycling advocates, particularly many who should know better. In the Netherlands, according to these individuals, you apparently have to cycle slowly everywhere; if you’re a ‘fast’ cyclist, woe betide you if you get stuck behind a granny, or some schoolchildren. You’ll be stuck! Richard Lewis of the London Cycling Campaign is just one person who seems to think this, although there are many others like him.

You are a lot more like a vehicular cyclist in Denmark than you are in the Netherlands, where you are much more of a pootling cyclist. The Dutch stuff encourages slower cycling – which some people say is more civilised, and perhaps under certain circumstances it is.

Well, without wishing to be rude, I have to say this is nonsense; as wrong as Forester’s silly notions about Dutch infrastructure.

One of the most obvious reasons why it is nonsense is that the use (both legal and illegal) of Dutch cycle tracks and paths by scooters is rapidly becoming a serious problem, as Mark Wagenbuur has recently detailed. Why would scooter users – particularly those whose scooter is legal only on the roads – choose to divert onto cycle paths if they are ‘slow’? As Koen writes in the comments below Mark’s piece

Ironically, the very fact that fast moped riders sometimes illegally use the bicycle path, because they prefer it over the main road, even though they should be riding on the carriageway, is in itself an indication of the quality of this separated bicycle infrastructure.

If you are still sceptical, I’ve compiled a collection of videos taken on cycle paths and tracks in a variety of Dutch urban locations. I should stress that this is not a complete picture of the Dutch cycling experience – cycle tracks form only a part of typical cycling journeys. However I have focused on tracks and paths because that is where it appears to be assumed one will be ‘held up.’

Starting with city centres, here are videos of tracks in the centre of Rotterdam, Amsterdam and Utrecht. (For reference – given that this is now a hot topic in London – note that the Utrecht track passes behind a bus stop).

These are busy locations, but it’s not really valid to claim that you are ‘impeded’ cycling here. It’s perfectly possible to pass other cyclists using the full width of the track. Even if you are delayed, it would be only momentary; it bears no comparison with the typical delays you will encounter cycling amongst heavy motor traffic.

Another city centre location, this time a track in Groningen –

Cycled twice –

Note that this cycle track serves as a service road for vehicles accessing side streets, and parking bays. It’s wide and smooth enough for that purpose. Note also that, just as in the Utrecht example, it passes behind bus stops, meaning that you can cycle free from the stress of having to overtake – and be overtaken by – buses. It’s very civilised, and pedestrians and cyclists interact calmly. The system works beautifully.

Two-way cycle tracks are common in many locations in the Netherlands. Typically they will be found alongside larger roads, and with restricted access to and from side roads, to minimise conflict. This one is in the centre of Assen.

Very easy to cycle fast on this track, and to pass people who might be cycling slower than you. The same is true of two-way tracks in the suburbs of Assen – this one connects the new, large development at Klosterveen with the city itself.

And another two-way track in Assen. No hold ups. (The video also shows how motor traffic is held while cyclists have their own green signal on the junction, something I touched upon in this earlier post).

On a one-way track nearby, I find myself cycling behind a mother and her daughter, cycling side by side; perhaps the greatest fear of those who wish to cycle fast.

As the video explains, it is actually very simple to pass people cycling side by side like this in the Netherlands. A simple ring of the bell, and those ahead of you will move over to allow you to pass. I choose not to do so in this case as there’s no need; we’re making good progress, and I am part of a group.

Here’s a video of a similar track in Groningen, albeit without car parking. Very easy to cycle fast, and to overtake others, as the scooter riders demonstrate.

Suburban tracks in the Netherlands typically look like small roads. They are as wide as, if not wider than, a conventional UK country lane, but for the exclusive use of cyclists and pedestrians. Here are some examples.

There is no way on earth you would ever be ‘held up’ on a cycle track this wide.

Finally, while I have been describing the process of cycling on Dutch tracks and paths themselves, it is very important to stress that you aren’t ‘held up’ at junctions either. While making left turns (the equivalent of a right turn in the UK) will often have to be made in two stages, the light sequence will usually be designed in your favour, so that second leg comes quickly. Conversely, right turns – the equivalent of a left turn in this country – are always possible, no matter what is happening on the junction itself. That is because cycle tracks typically bypass signal controls when it is not necessary to stop bicycles. Mark Wagenbuur has an excellent post detailing these designs; here’s just one small example from Amsterdam.

I suspect the reason why the assumption that Dutch cycle tracks are for ‘slow’ cycling is so persistent is because of a category mistake. ‘Fast’ UK cyclists look at the Dutch experience and see plenty of people cycling slowly, in the way they want to – the type of people who are very rarely seen cycling on Britain’s roads. They then assume that Dutch paths are ‘for’ this type of slow cycling. Forester makes a version of this mistake; that because Dutch cycle paths allow for ‘incompetent’ cycling, so this must be the only kind cycling possible on them.

But this isn’t true at all. Dutch cycle tracks are for everyone; the mere fact that they attract plenty of ordinary people is a virtue of their inclusiveness, not a fault of their design. They are safe and attractive, and fast and direct. This is a message that David Hembrow has been communicating – or attempting to communicate – for years. I wish it would start to sink in.

Do the Dutch create ‘shared use’ pavements like us?

There was a small bit of back-and-forth in the comments under my piece about attitudes to ‘surrendering’ the roads in UK cycling campaigning, principally about the usefulness of the Hierarchy of Provision, and its advice (albeit listed last) to

Convert pedestrian routes to shared use

I think that advice is deeply unhelpful, no matter where it is listed in the Hierarchy, because it gives councils and authorities licence to put cyclists on pavements that were designed, first and foremost, for pedestrian use, without considering how that might affect the safety and convenience of both pedestrians and cyclists (this is just one of several serious problems with the Hierarchy). You end up, at best, with this sort of thing-

Taken from LTN 2/08 – ‘Cycle Infrastructure Design’

A pavement with ambiguous priority, ambiguous legality of two-way cycling, and ambiguity over where pedestrians and cyclists should be.

Carlton Reid disagreed slightly with the position that I and several others were taking on the Hierarchy of Provision, arguing that

If an item is at the bottom of a list I think that signals that it’s not to be considered until, you know, last.

If a crappy cycle lane is one that’s just striped with paint, which pedestrians can access, UK isn’t alone at having these. Striping with paint is normal in the Netherlands, as your link [this link] shows. I’ve also cycled in the Netherlands, on family cycle tours and on cycle infra tours, and have ridden on plenty of NL cycle paths that are just paint. [my emphasis]

The argument being both that the Hierarchy isn’t at fault, and also that the Dutch do precisely the same thing that we do; simply striping out cycle lanes with paint alongside ‘provision’ for pedestrians.

I pointed out that the photographs of Dutch infrastructure included in that link (by Pedestrianise London) don’t actually show the separation of pedestrians and cyclists with just paint, as Carlton seemed to be arguing, to which he responded

I wasn’t referring *only* to those pix. It was a wider point referring to the fact that the Netherlands sometimes uses paint for cycle infrastructure, of which there are many examples that aren’t too dissimilar to the sort of infra that gets (rightly) disparaged in the UK because it’s not part of a grander whole. Clearly, much infra in the Netherlands is wonderful – separated, kerbed etc etc – but there’s a lot that just works cos it’s systemically understood that the white lines should be considered as brick walls. [my emphasis again]

Again, the implication is that the Dutch sometimes employ ‘Hierarchy-like’ solutions, and do things, effectively, just as badly as we do, with a stripe of paint separating pedestrians from cyclists, just like in the picture above. Apparently the reason this works well in the Netherlands, and not over here, is because of cultural understanding.

I’m not so sure any of this is true.

The Dutch are meticulous about clarity and separation. Even where cycle tracks are built sympathetically with the surrounding environment, it is quite clear what is a cycle track, and what is pavement.

In urban areas, pavements are almost always included alongside cycle tracks, even in places where there isn’t a road for motor vehicles. The separation is clear.

And the usual arrangement of a cycle track beside a pavement is, of course, again scrupulously clear, with different materials, different colouring, and different levels. It could not be more obvious.

The reason for this clarity is, I would have thought, blindingly obvious.

The Dutch do not build shared use routes.

They build cycle tracks, and provide pavements alongside those cycle tracks. They treat bicycle users and walkers separately, and don’t try to shoehorn them both into the same design solution. The Dutch do not stripe pavements and expect pedestrians to keep on one side of the line, and cyclists on the other. They design properly.

There are, of course, areas where pedestrian demand is very low indeed in the Netherlands. These are rural areas, or areas right on the outskirts of town and cities, where people will either drive to the nearest town, or cycle. It makes no sense to walk distances of half a mile or more when the cycling infrastructure is so good and can accommodate all types of cycling. In these areas – and only in these areas – will you find this kind of arrangement –

This is two-way cycle track alongside a road through a village just outside the city of Assen. As you can see, there is no pavement for pedestrians here, but this is not an oversight; there aren’t enough pedestrians to justify providing a pavement. The cycle track – with suitably low bicycle traffic – is perfectly adequate to walk on for short trips within the village. If demand were higher, or there were more cyclists using this path, then a pavement – with the clear separation seen in the earlier photographs – would be provided.

Because this is a cycle track, and not a pavement, it is designed like a cycle track across side roads, and at junctions.

Another example of a two-way cycle track, without a pavement – Very few people will be walking to an industrial park some 3 to 4 miles outside the city, and with low demand on the cycle track itself, it is perfectly adequate for walking. If there were plenty of people walking on this route, then a separate pavement would be provided.

These are routes that are ‘shared’, but not in the way we understand ‘shared use’ in the UK. They are effectively roads for bicycles which are perfectly adequate for walking on (and indeed are probably better for walking on than typical UK pavements, given that they are direct, smooth and level, particularly at junctions).

Even in cities, of course, you will find people occasionally walking in cycle tracks. These aren’t just confused tourists; they will be people trying to get past a temporary obstruction on the pavement (a crowd of people, for instance). The cycle track is not sacrosanct. But occasional incursions into cycle tracks do not matter, because of the width and quality of the tracks themselves.

The Dutch create separate space for people to walk and cycle in, respectively, and clearly demarcate it – not just with white paint, but with kerbing, level differences, different colours and different materials. They do not use crappy UK-style solutions which somehow work in their country because of a different cultural understanding of white lines.

Uses for bicycle facilities

I’m currently reading (probably about two years after everyone else has) Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Too Big to Fail, about the collapse of Lehman Brothers and attempts to stop a financial meltdown on Wall Street.

The book contains this brief but intriguing passage describing how John Mack, CEO of Morgan Stanley, rushed to a meeting in downtown Manhattan on the evening of Friday 12th September 2008. The meeting had been arranged by Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Tim Geithner, head of the New York Federal Exchange, and was intended to get the CEOs of the major Wall Street firms to arrange some form of private sector bailout of Lehman Brothers.

John Mack and Colm Kelleher, Morgan Stanley’s chief financial officer, were sitting in the backseat of Mack’s Audi, having hurried to the car just ten minutes earlier after Mack’s secretary had instructed them to get down to the Fed as soon as possible. “This must be Lehman,” Kelleher had said as they rushed out.

Not only was the rain pelting the roof furiously, but they were sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the West Side Highway, still miles away from their destination.

“We’re not fucking moving,” said Mack, repeatedly checking his watch.

“We’re never going to get there,” Kelleher agreed.

Mack’s driver, John, a former police officer, noticed the bicycle lane running alongside the highway — a project of the Bloomberg administration to encourage walking and cycling.

“Boss, that bike lane on the right, where does it go?” John asked, craning his neck back at them.

Mack’s face lit up. “It goes all the way down to the Battery.”

“Fuck it!” the driver said, as he found a break in the street divider and inched the car onto the bike lane, speeding down it.

Much of the book is relayed in this narrative style, with conversational detail that the author admits may or may not be strictly accurate. So I sought out some corroboration that this might actually have happened, and found this video of Mack himself actually describing the incident. Here’s what he says –

So we get a call from Tim Geithner, head of the New York Fed, Friday afternoon, sometime around five o’clock, four-thirty, and he says ‘John, can you come down the Fed, we’re going to have a meeting.’

So we get the call, ‘come downtown’. We’re at midtown, 48th Street. We get in the car with my CFO [Chief Financial Officer], we start down the drive, we get to about 40th Street, the traffic’s not moving, it’s raining in New York. There’s no way we’re going to make it downtown to get to the Federal Reserve.

My driver, who is an ex-policeman, says to me, ‘Hey boss, you see that bike lane over there? Does that go all the way down to the Battery?’

I said ‘Yeah Joe, it does.’

Next thing I know we’re in the bike lane, going all the way down. We actually got there in five minutes. It’s amazing. Now a couple of bikers actually threw things at us. But we made the meeting and got there on time.

A slight difference over the name of Mack’s driver, but the story sounds the same, related here with the additional detail that ‘bikers’ threw things at Mack’s Audi. So this really did happen, unless Mack is presenting a James Martin-style tall tale for dramatic effect (nobody likes people on bikes, so if you were to invent a story, they make an ideal choice to be driven at by your limo driver; suggesting you drove downtown on the pavement, for instance, would be far less helpful as a snappy anecdote).

There wasn’t even any need for such extraordinary haste or risk taking, because as it turns out, Paulson didn’t even turn up until a quarter to seven, some two hours after Mack says he arrived at the Fed – Paulson himself was flying in from New Jersey. Indeed, proper negotiations to save Lehman Brothers didn’t even start until the next morning, Saturday; this was just a preliminary get together.

I did a quick Google Maps search for the route from Morgan Stanley’s headquarters to the Federal Reserve that Mack and his colleagues must have taken. About 6 miles, although most directly – on foot or by bike – it is 4 miles.

And a probable point of ingress onto the protected cycle lane on the right, heading south on the Lincoln Highway –

Perhaps Mack and his colleagues could have used the bicycle lane in the way it was intended – for people on bikes. They could probably have cycled down to the Federal Reserve in about the same amount of time it would have taken them to drive down there  on the cycle lanes. They might even arrived in a better frame of mind; a titbit from the book is that Paulson himself cycled around Washington DC’s parks and cycle tracks on his bicycle to relieve stress and to give himself thinking time.

On this particular day, of course, it was raining heavily, so we can perhaps cut Mack some slack for not using a bicycle to get to the Federal Exchange, although it should be pointed out that the New York subway – with stations just a few minutes walk from both Morgan Stanley’s offices and the Fed – would have got him there in about twenty minutes, with no need for charging down a bike lane in a large Audi.

Mack’s behaviour reminded me of a scene near the start of the latest Bond film, Skyfall, in which ‘M’ is being driven from the Cabinet Office back to the Special Intelligence Service (the monstrous building in Vauxhall). Informed by her assistant of a developing situation, she demands her driver ‘Get us back to base as quickly as possible!’

The quickest way, of course – just as Mack discovered – is to drive in a bike lane.

Judi Dench’s Jaguar charges down one what is (albeit currently) on of the best sections of Superhighway in London, CS8 on Millbank. Nice and wide for speeding past traffic when you’ve got important business.

The filmmakers evidently weren’t content with just using the Superhighway for emergencies. They also have a taxi rolling along in it, besides the government Jaguar, earlier in the scene.

No ‘national emergency’ excuse for taxi V529 DGY!

Either the Skyfall production team are going for ‘authentic London detail’, or they need a primer in the meaning of ‘mandatory cycle lanes’, as there’s another vehicle (a silver car) driving in it seconds later, before ‘M’ gets swerved into it. (Quibble – how she’s going to use the cycle lane to undertake motor traffic when there’s already so much motor traffic using it?)

So it seems that in both the world of reality and fiction, cycle facilities are a handy way of allowing really important people to get to really important destinations in their limos in a way that’s really really fast. 

Incidentally, it’s only one and a half miles from the Cabinet Office to the Secret Intelligence Service building, and while I could see Judi Dench on a nice Pashley with a wicker basket (with machine guns in it, naturally), I can’t really see her tackling Vauxhall Bridge or the roundabouts at either end of Lambeth Bridge.

So she’s just about forgiven.

‘No surrender’ – the damaging, enduring legacy of the 1930s in British cycle campaigning

The notion of providing a separate, dedicated space for people on bikes, away from motor vehicles, continues to be met with opposition of a particular form.

I am not talking here about pragmatic opposition; the kind of opposition which tends to form itself around the idea that cycle tracks in this country will inevitably be substandard, or slower than the road, or blocked by too many bike users. This was, in fact, my position several years ago; I was opposed to off-carriageway provision essentially because I had no idea that it could privilege me while cycling, providing a more direct and comfortable experience than cycling on the road itself. My only experience tended to be pavement conversions, or narrow painted stripes at the side of the road. I had no real understanding of what cycle tracks would look if they were done properly, like they are in the Netherlands. It was only when I became aware of David Hembrow’s site, in around 2008-9, that my opinions began to change. (A similar conversion was undergone by a notorious east London blogger).

Instead, the opposition I am talking about takes an ideological rather than pragmatic form. It suggests that almost any kind of dedicated provision for cycling, separate from roads for motor vehicles, represents a form of surrender, and an abandonment of roads in general to motor vehicles. That Jeremy Clarkson and ‘petrolheads’ will have won, and have got all those pesky cyclists out of their way.

Subsidiarily, it suggests that the drivers of motor vehicles will then behave with greater abandon, and a greater sense of entitlement, now that the roads are ‘theirs’. It argues that when drivers meet cyclists on roads without cycle tracks – as they will inevitably do, as cycle tracks can’t be built everywhere – then they will think that cyclists are on ‘their’ roads, and will act possessively. Or – alternatively – that drivers will not be used to driving around cyclists, and may drive badly around them when they do encounter them.

These are not positions greatly supported by evidence. A minority, significant or otherwise, of British drivers already act with a sense of entitlement that the roads are ‘theirs’, despite cyclists almost entirely cycling on them, and not on separate cycle tracks and paths. The situation could hardly be made any worse. Nor is the position supported by a near total absence of hostility from Dutch motorists towards Dutch people riding bikes on Dutch roads that do not have cycle tracks. And nor would Dutch people who happen to be riding bikes (remember – 80-90% of the Dutch population rides a bike once a week) believe that they have ‘surrendered’ some nebulous right to the road, probably because most of them drive cars too, and also because the system of separate provision they have is as good as, and very often far better, than the conventional road network itself.

Nevertheless, opposition to cycle tracks in the UK, of this ideological form, persists. This opposition is not new; it has a long history, dating right back to the 1930s, a time when cycle tracks were, intermittently, being proposed alongside some arterial roads in Britain. Most strikingly, the arguments advanced at the time have hardly changed in the intervening eighty years.

Picture via Carlton Reid

The Cyclists’ Touring Club position during the 1930s is set out well in this letter to the Times written by the Club’s Secretary, G. H. Stancer, published on the 4th April 1934 –

The demand for separate tracks for cyclists is part of the campaign of motorists to appropriate public highways for their exclusive use. Have we yet got to accept a condition of affairs when cyclists have to renounce their use of the roads to escape annihiliation? If motorists do not wish to conform to a standard of conduct on public highways compatible with the safety of all other users, then it is they and not cyclists who should abandon the use of the highway, the main cost of which is borne by ratepayers. There is nothing to prevent motorists from building at their own expense private roads where they can indulge their craze for speed without let or hindrance.

Here we see the opinion expressed that cycle tracks – while being presented as necessary for safety by the authorities – are in reality part of a plot by motorists to ‘appropriate’ highways for their ‘exclusive use’; that motorists want cycle tracks because they are unable or unwilling to conform to a safe standard of conduct. In a letter published just a month later Stancer wrote of ‘hostile interests’ seeking to ‘confine [cyclists] to special paths’.

The Times also reported, around the same time, on an international conference about road safety, at which

The Cyclists’ Touring Club stated that the provision of cycle paths at the side of any of the main roads would not be with the object of giving cyclists a good path on which to ride, but to remove them from the road in the interests of motorists. The cost of providing such paths would be enormous.

These are familiar themes, still rehearsed today. 

Maybe less familiar is the attitude that motorists should build their own roads for their use. Indeed, the Cyclists’ Touring Club was strongly in favour of motorway building; they sent a member on a delegation to Hitler’s Germany to look at autobahns. If these roads were not to be built, said the Club, then the existing roads would have to have severe speed restrictions.

Their support for motorways was, perversely, a form of segregation; a separation of motor traffic from cycle traffic, with motor traffic being allocated new roads on which cycles would be prohibited. Indeed, this is how the Club framed the issue, as in this extract from William Oakley’s Winged Wheel, a history of the CTC.

the idea of segregating various forms of road traffic occurred as a way of getting [cyclists] off the public highways onto separate paths: ‘for their own good’, of course! But the idea could also be applied to high-speed motorists by segregating them on special motor roads.

So ‘high-speed motorists’ would be presumed to disappear, almost entirely, from the existing roads, leaving them ‘free’ for cycling; a solution, of sorts, to the emerging problem on the roads that wouldn’t involve cyclists being ‘pushed away’ onto cycle tracks. A semantic difference, but an important one nonetheless, and one which characterised the attitude towards ‘surrendering’ of existing roads.

It is also worth noting that throughout this period, the focus of the Cyclists’ Touring Club was on getting motorists to behave better, and to drive more slowly (see the emphasis on ‘high speed motorists’), rather than on eliminating attitudinal conflict between modes entirely in a way cycle tracks would have achieved. The Times reports a meeting of the Cyclists’ Touring Club in early 1935 thusly –

Objections to special tracks for cyclists were made at a largely-attended meeting of the Cyclists’ Touring Club, held in the hall of the Royal Society of Arts, John Street, Adelphi, last evening, when the following resolution was carried unamimously :-

That this general meeting of the Cyclists’ Touring Club deprecates the view of the Minister of Transport, as indicated by his approval of cycle paths, that the segregation of cyclists is a just method of minimizing the number of road casualties, and strongly urges upon the Minister its opinion that the problem can be more satisfactorily dealt with by the rigid enforcement of the existing laws, which were instituted with the object of enabling all sections of responsible road users to enjoy the full exercise of their rights in safety. Mr. W. M. Robinson (Birmingham), member of the council, who moved the resolution, said that the effect of cycle paths would be that motorists would drive faster. Cyclists were not going to allow themselves to be pushed off the roads and segregated onto a track on the side. The only way to end the shambles of the roads, which had become a national disgrace and crime, was to lay the culprits by the heels and put them in gaol.

The ‘no surrender’ attitude in action, coupled with the belief that motorists would behave worse. The roads must be kept as they are, but with higher standards enforced on the (ever-increasing) numbers of drivers of motor vehicles using them.

At the same meeting, council member William (Bill) Oakley (later a president of the Club, and the aforementioned author) argued that ‘cycle tracks were a tacit admission of failure’ – an apparent inability to get all users to, in an uncanny echo of language still used today, ‘share the highways’, as Stancer put it in another letter to the Times in 1935.

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. 

There are further echos of today in the Cyclists’ Touring Club attitude to the safety of child cyclists –

Whatever the circumstances in which child cyclists met their deaths, the only just and reasonable way to remedy them was through the training of children in the principles of a wise use of the roads and by the taking of most stringent measures against vehicle drivers who endangered the lives of other people. The proper solution of the road problem should be sought, not in depriving the vast majority of vehicular users of the roads of their right to use them, but of restraining, and if necessary eliminating, the small minority who were responsible for the present evil.

The Club’s preferred solution to the emerging ‘problem’ of the roads was to train drivers and cyclists to behave better, rather than attempting to keep these users apart. Indeed, the opinions of those who voiced a preference for cycling on tracks away from roads, as a more pleasurable experience, were dismissed. This letter appeared in the Times on the 17th April, 1935 –

In view of the meeting of protest against the proposed cycling tracks reported in The Times of April 9, you may care to publish the views of a regular user of the tracks on Western Avenue. These tracks have converted what was previously a nerve-racking ride into a care-free glide, except for occasional indiscreet pedestrians. I have no objection whatever to being “segregated”, and shall use tracks wherever I happen to travel, if they are kept up to the Western Avenue standard. U suggest this is the view of most sober-minded cyclists travelling to and from work. MR MAURICE G EVANS, Tarrystone, Philip Road, High Wycombe

Stancer was quick to put Mr Evans to rights, writing in response

Mr. Maurice Evans’s letter in your issue of April 17 ignores the undeniable fact that “what was previously a nerve-racking ride” (as he describes cycling on the Western Avenue prior to the introduction of the cyclists’ tracks) was only made so by the reckless behaviour of the inconsiderate section of the motoring community.

In other words, the difficulties and problems those people cycling on the roads in the 1930s were increasingly facing were due solely to the bad behaviour of motorists; the road could be as pleasant as cycle tracks if only we could just get motorists to behave. The fact that cycling in motor traffic could be fundamentally unpleasant was not recognised by Stancer and the Club. They were demanding, as reported in 1936,

a better spirit among road-users, a higher degree of skill and courtesy, and that quality which might be summed up on the word “roadmanship”.

The ‘can’t we all just get along’ mentality that still persists today.

Stancer in action

Stancer was most definitely a hardened cyclist. In 1910 he had cycled from London to Brighton and back in under 6 hours, a feat that would be remarkable even on today’s modern roads, and with modern bicycles. He had little interest in touring, his focus being time trialling and setting cycling records. He consistently won prizes in racing events. Even at the age of 78, he was still completing century events, and arriving first.

He was therefore hardly a person best-qualified to understand the motivations and feelings of those people who might not wish to cycle confidently in ever-increasing volumes of motor traffic, yet as secretary of the Club from 1920-45 he was a most influential figure during a critical period in cycling history in Britain. He wrote a column in the Club’s Gazette under the pen name ‘Robin Hood’, the focus of which, according to Oakley’s Winged Wheel, was usually

a vigorous defence of cyclists against repeated attempts by motoring interests to encroach on their freedom and welfare.

At the time, the Cyclists’ Touring Club claimed to speak for around 7 million users of bicycles in Great Britain. Indeed, in 1933, cycle users were in a position of relative power – at least compared to today. Bicycles still outnumbered motor cars on the road. It wasn’t even until the 1950s that total mileage travelled by motorcar in Britain outstripped miles travelled by bicycle. So the voice of bicycle users could, potentially, have been very powerful. But the interests of the Club and those millions who at the time were merely riding bicycles for transport, rather than touring, were not well-aligned.

The membership of the Club had collapsed between 1899 and 1918 as their traditional members – the upper and middle classes – increasingly abandoned bicycles for motor vehicles as a mode of ‘touring’. This was, paradoxically, at a time when bicycle use was sharply increasing in the general population, but these people who were using bicycles as a mode of transport – the lower classes in particular – saw no need to join a touring club, as Oakley writes in Winged Wheel –

The urge to travel over the hills and far away, day after day, had not yet come to them; even if it had, they could not have responded to it.

There was, therefore, no real representation of those people who rode bikes for transport. The only alternative to the Cyclists’ Touring Club was the National Cyclists’ Union, which was a sporting organisation.

By 1934, the Club was, as we have seen, strongly agitating against the cycle paths that were starting to be proposed; it was preparing pamphlets

warning against the threats of cycle-paths, proficiency certificates, exclusion from certain roads, and other steps intended to restrict and discourage the use of bicycles.

Cycle paths ‘discouraging the use of bicycles’; written, apparently without irony, in the year 1977 by Oakley.

One of these pamphlets was entitled ‘Making the Roads Safe’, a response by the Cyclists’ Touring Club to the opening of cycle tracks alongside roads in west London. This also contained the assertion that cycle tracks were ‘a serious threat to cycling’, and its title is clearly suggestive of keeping cyclists on current roads, and moderating driver behaviour. The agitation against cycle tracks continued after the war, with Stancer writing an article in 1946 entitled The Fallacy of Cycle Paths. Oakley writes that

Inter alia, it recorded what had happened on the Continent when cyclists had lost the right of choosing to ride on the carriageway or the cycle path.

‘What happened’, of course, was that cycling didn’t collapse in countries where that ‘right’ was forfeited, like the Netherlands; it collapsed, by contrast, in Britain, where we still have the right to cycle on roads that nobody wants to cycle on. We have the benefit of hindsight, but Stancer quite obviously got this completely wrong. He allowed his ideological attachment to ‘retaining’ the roads to blind him to the potential consequences of increased motor traffic. In 1947, at the Club’s AGM,

Stancer moved a motion expressing determined opposition to cycle-paths alongside public roads, protesting against the threatened exclusion of cyclists from the carriageways and calling for the restoration to the Highway Code of the precept that ‘all persons have a right to use the road for the purpose of passage’.

There was a keen debate. One member suggested the Club was ‘flogging a dead horse’ and that it should press for wider paths. Another said motorists were seeking to monopolise the highways and their should be no surrender of the rights so ardently fought for in the past.

As you can see from the emboldened text, even at this relatively early stage some Club members had started to recognise that the game was up; that there was no point continuing to insist on a right to use the road that was becoming increasingly hollow, and that the focus instead should be on improving the standard of off-carriageway provision.

But these voices were lost, and the following year, 1948, cyclists started being banned from some roads completely, at Southend-on-Sea, and Rowley Regis in Staffordshire, in the apparent interests of safety. Over the next decade the Club also fought vainly to retain the legal right to cycle through the Mersey Tunnel at all times, a battle that was destined to be lost (you can now only cycle through it at night, if you so wish).

By 1955 the Club’s position was stated thusly –

‘The Cyclists’ Touring Club approves the construction of special roads for cyclists and the taking over of existing roads for the exclusive use of cyclists, while at the same time maintaining its opposition to the segregation of cyclists on separate tracks alongside the public highway.’

So, new roads could be built for the exclusive use of cars; new roads could also be built for the exclusive use of cyclists; and some existing roads could be completely given over to the exclusive use of cyclists. But the partitioning of existing roads into areas in which bicycles and motor cars would travel separately was completely opposed.

The only way in which it is possible to make any sense of this position is through an understanding of the ideology of ‘no surrender’ of those existing roads; the construction of cycle tracks on them would represent an ‘abandonment’ of them to the motor car, and a ‘defeat’ for cycling. The Club viewed the claims for the safety of cycle tracks as, in reality, merely a way of getting potential victims off the road, and continued to maintain that the proper way to achieve safety was through training, education and enforcement, and ‘sharing’ of the existing roads.

This was a period in which, with a rapid rise in motor car use, road casualties were sharply increasing, while cycle use was sharply declining. But the CTC stuck to its guns about ‘raising the standard of conduct among motorists and cyclists’, apparently blind to how bicycle users were already abandoning the roads in droves, plumping instead for the comfort, safety and convenience of the motor car.

Graph by Jack Thurston

In a telling passage from Winged Wheel describing mid-1950s staffing problems, Oakley notes that

For many years it had been possible to recruit [Cyclists’ Touring Club] employees from among members of the Club who, almost without exception, cycled regularly to work. But it now became difficult to maintain adequate staff by accepting only those who were first and foremost active cyclists, and even some of the most enthusiastic riders on the staff ultimately ceased to cycle to and form work because of the growth in the volume of traffic.

So even the more hardened riders in the Club were no longer choosing to cycle to work, put off by increasing motor traffic. During precisely the same period, however, the CTC were apparently

continuing to play a significant role in educating child cyclists and winning for them a respected place in the scheme of road-users.

No apparent reflection on how many of those children would wish to take their ‘place in the scheme of road-users’ at a time when the Club’s most enthusiastic members were themselves abandoning the road due to the volume of motor traffic.

Of course, as I have already said, we have the advantage of hindsight, and can see how misguided the Club’s position was throughout this period. I don’t think it would be fair to blame them for getting things wrong. The roads had been theirs, and motor cars were quite easily and reasonably seen as ‘interlopers’, vehicles that should quite properly be restrained, or given their own space. Why on earth should cyclists have ‘surrendered’ the roads – their roads – to this impudent newcomer? By the time it was fully apparent that motor vehicles were going to take over, and that cyclists would quite literally be driven from the road, it was probably too late.

What is less understandable is that the attitude exhibited by the Cyclists’ Touring Club in the 1930s persists today, despite having seen how history has turned out. That attitude continues to manifest itself in an ideological opposition to the separation of motor vehicles and bicycles on the existing road network.

We don’t have to look very hard to find the legacy of this ‘no surrender’ philosophy in action. Perhaps the best-known piece of current UK cycling guidance is the Hierarchy of Provision; every improvement for cycling is filtered (or an attempt is made to filter it) through this table of measures by prominent UK cycling campaigners.

But in the context of the history of cycling in Britain, the Hierarchy is best understood as an embodiment of the 1930s attitude; it first asks for motor vehicles to be removed from the roads, and then asks for any motor vehicles remaining on those roads to be tamed. Then, and only then – once the roads have been sufficiently ‘reclaimed’ from motor traffic – might we even consider putting in measures that ‘separate’ cyclists from motor vehicles.

Sounds familiar?

The CTC’s position on the proposed redesign of the roundabout at the northern end of Lambeth Bridge is a perfect illustration of the persistence of the 1930s attitude, as applied in the formal language of the Hierarchy of Provision. While most respondents to the consultation, and cycle campaigning groups such as the London Cycling Campaign and the Cycling Embassy, called explicitly for a continental-style track around the perimeter of a (narrowed) roundabout – wide provision for cycling, alongside reduced roadspace for motor vehicles – the CTC called for something else entirely. A narrowed roundabout, without any tracks at all.

Our preferred option in this situation would be to redesign the layout of the roundabout along ‘continental’ lines – that is, with a single lane roundabout and small curve radii single exits and entry lanes.

That is, a design that would slow and calm motor traffic, but would leave cyclists in the road, mixing it with motor vehicles – their road, from which motor vehicles are expected to disappear.

There is, I think, no other way of explaining why the CTC would choose a design that would make the cycling experience more uncomfortable than a Dutch-style design than through the persistence, diluted or otherwise, of 1930s cycle campaigning logic; that the roads cannot be abandoned to cars.

The CTC’s pet theory of ‘Safety in Numbers’ also makes sense when viewed as a direct continuation of 1930s thinking. What better way to ‘reclaim’ the streets from motor traffic than by filling up those streets with cyclists once again; and how wonderful it is that we can present that as improving the safety of those cyclists at the same time. No need for any of that pesky ‘segregation’, pushing cyclists off the roads – just convince everyone to switch from cars to bikes and the roads will be made safe again, and belong to cyclists once more.

‘Shared space’ is similarly attractive to campaigners of a 1930s bent; attractive, for instance, to this cycle trainer and advocate, who gave evidence to the Get Britain Cycling Inquiry in January.

the emphasis on segregation by LCC and others is a backward step IMO. Extending and improving shared space is better

He even seems keen to apply ‘shared space’ to Stratford High Street, instead of the proposed cycle tracks to be built this summer.

perversely while some people in london are trying to make us go dutch some people in Denmark are looking a some of the shared space ideas we’ve developed in London.

Quite how a six lane road is turned into an amenable environment for cycling by making it ‘shared’ is not clear. (We should remind ourselves that shared space is simultaneously popular with many motoring enthusiasts, who want to see the removal of restrictions and controls on the use of their motor cars, as well as amongst those cycling advocates who want to use it as a way of encouraging more ‘sharing’, and indeed ‘taming’ of the motor car). Once again, the only credible motivation here must be an underlying refusal to ‘surrender’ the road to motor vehicles.

Both Safety In Numbers and ‘shared space’ are often allied to what might be described as the rallying cry of ‘assertiveness’; that if you are cycling on the road you should take your place in traffic, and show the drivers of motor vehicles who is boss; to ‘own the road’. If you hold this view, it is probably quite natural for you to think that all any other person might need to cycle like you do is training, experience, and confidence. You might also think that those who don’t wish to be ‘assertive’ in this fashion have issues, or are weak-willed. Consequently cycle tracks away from motor traffic would, hypothetically,

offer respite from any status problems people on bikes might feel about taking space on the carriageway

A simple Google search for ‘we have cycle lanes; they’re called roads’, or similar expressions of the same sentiment, will quickly find you plenty of modern devotees of the 1930s attitude that the roads are ours, and need to be reclaimed by assertiveness, pushing cars away. To take just one example, (the first I clicked on – there are many others), we find in this thread a comment about the London Cycling Campaign –

“Go Dutch” is disgustingly defeatist, in my view.  We’ve got superbly wide and smooth paths to cycle on already.  They’re called roads.

‘No surrender.’

The same author writes that less confident cyclists

should be ENCOURAGED to use the primary position (at danger spots).  Cyclists can increase in confidence through training and riding sometimes with a more confident cyclist.  My 75-year-old mother is a case in point.  But also I accept that part of this encouragement needs to come from a drop in the speed and numbers of motor vehicles, and better behaviour from motorists.  This requires some changes in law and policing.

Just as G.H. Stancer was maintaining eighty years ago, the author thinks roads are unpleasant to cycle on solely because of the bad behaviour and speed of motorists. If only we could address that, then people would cycle on them.

Unfortunately – just like Stancer did – the author has ignored, or overlooked, the central message that the vast majority of ordinary people prefer to cycle away from motor traffic, and have no interest in trying to tame it by cycling in it, or by fanciful ‘traffic reduction’ schemes that will apparently get rid of cars by making them hard to use, but without offering people a meaningful or attractive alternative.

We can even see what our roads would look like if we did manage to turn the clock back and reduce the speed and volume of motor traffic; we have videos of London in the early 1930s.

What percentage of people would actually prefer to cycle in that kind of environment, as opposed to their own space, free from interactions with motor vehicles? Surely only a tiny one.

This is no way to reclaim the streets from cars; it didn’t work in the 1930s, and its certainly not going to work now, when car use is even more deeply embedded, and when the voice of cycle advocacy is weak, weaker even than it was in the 1930s. We need desperately to move on from this tired, eighty-year-old fixation with opposing the creation of dedicated space for motoring alongside dedicated space for cycling. If we continue to remain stuck in the past, we will not succeed in our ultimate goal of creating civilised urban areas.

Dutch towns and cities are calm and pleasant places precisely because they have separated cars away from bicycles and pedestrians. Yes, they may have ‘surrendered’ the ultimate right to cycle in the middle of some categories of roads, but this was a right that very few people wished to exert; and nor would they wish to do so, when you can cycle on these roads in far more comfort, and with much greater speed, in your own dedicated space.

This lady in Amsterdam has ‘surrendered’ the right to cycle with trams, taxis and buses in the middle of this road

And the bigger gain from this Dutch system has been the creation of town and city centres almost completely devoid of motor traffic, achievable because they have given people an alternative way of arriving in those areas to the motor car. Safe, comfortable and direct routes by bicycle, free from interactions with motor traffic.

No ‘segregation’ needed here in the centre of Utrecht, because motor vehicles have been removed almost entirely from these streets

The Dutch are still reclaiming space from the car in each and every one of their towns cities; they are able to keep making these gains because they have enabled the bicycle as an alternative mode of transport for the vast majority of the population.

We should embrace these lessons, instead of repeating the same talking points over and over again; talking points that are getting on for being a century old. The record is stuck. It needs to change.

Thanks to Carlton Reid, whose excellent historical piece provoked me into digging out some of the ideological positions taken towards cycle tracks, and David Arditti for his typically thorough and detailed analysis of the legacy of this period

Pedestrianisation and the decline of the high street

A very silly article has appeared on the BBC news website this morning, the thrust of which is that the decline of the high street – in particular, one high street in north Wales – is apparently due to pedestrianisation.

Welsh councils are being asked to look again at pedestrian zones amid concern they are deterring shoppers. The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) says towns need to find new ways to attract people. They should make them easier to get to and easier for car drivers to navigate around, it says.

RICS members are meeting this week to discuss what should be done to make town centres more accessible and get more people spending there. One town the group says could benefit from a review of pedestrianisation is Colwyn Bay.

The BBC have spoken to a greengrocer on Station Road in Colywn Bay, one of the main shopping streets, who is attributing the reason for shutting down to… pedestrianisation.

“Pedestrianisation has been a big nail in the coffin,” he explained. “Fruit and veg is heavy. People don’t want to be carrying bags of veg to the nearest car park. When cars could come down the street, people just used to pop in. We’ve really campaigned against pedestrianisation the whole time. But now it’s too late. It’s terribly sad. I’ve been here all my life, and my father, grandfather and great grandfather before me.”

I don’t suppose you can really blame this grocer for failing to discern the real reasons why he is going out of business. Pedestrianisation of the street seems to have coincided with a decline in footfall, and he has formed causation out of the  correlation, without really thinking about why footfall on streets in Colwyn Bay might have been declining – most likely a rise in out of town retail, the convenience offered by supermarkets, and online shopping.

What’s extraordinary is that Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors – who really should know better – are peddling exactly the same nonsense.

Richard Baddeley, a surveyor in Conwy county and a member of RICS in north Wales, said towns like Colwyn Bay, Holyhead, Rhyl and Holywell have all had pedestrianised areas for some time, but now need to think of new ways to get people spending.

“Shopping has changed. High streets have changed. There are now out-of-town shopping centres – they’re a draw for people,” he said. “One out-of-town shopping centre near north Wales – Cheshire Oaks in Ellesmere Port – has increased its turnover by 22% this year. The key issue is accessibility. Small and medium-sized towns need to think about how they attract cars in the future with improved parking and making the shops more accessible. It will not put the clock back, but improved accessibility may attract new independent retailers.”

But Station Road in Colwyn Bay is accessible by car. The large pale stripe on the map below (Station Road) is clearly very close to two car parks, to the east and north. Consequently it’s bizarre to argue that a lack of car access to the street itself is to blame here, when you can get a car to within such a short distance.

Courtesy of Google

Richard Baddeley references the Cheshire Oaks out of town centre, about forty miles away, as a place where turnover has increased 22% in the last year alone. But this is, of course, a pedestrianised environment.

Picture courtesy of Trip Advisor

There is, naturally, plentiful parking here, and you can park close to your desired shop.

Courtesy of Google

But unless you are incredibly lazy, and go back to your car and drive it close to another shop you want to visit, you will have to walk around in a pedestrianised environment once you have arrived.

Therefore it simply cannot be the case that ‘pedestrianisation’ is a deterrent to shopping, because shopping centres like this one offer large pedestrianised areas, which are pleasant places to shop in. That is why they get implemented. Out of town retail does not allow you to park directly outside every single shop; for one thing, it would be absolute chaos, and for another, it’s not what people want, or what the managers of these centres want. They’re not stupid.

There is no connection between pedestrianisation and a drop in footfall in shops; quite the opposite. There are many substantive reasons why the high street is declining, but the Royal College of Chartered Surveyors seem to have ignored all of them, and focused on a bogus one. They should be ashamed of themselves.