Enough is enough

Dave Horton’s excellent Cycling Struggles series continued on Thursday, taking a look at pavement cycling, and how conflict has been created between two user groups that really should co-exist quite harmoniously. I urge you to read it (indeed, read the whole set, if you’ve got time over Christmas), because it is highly pertinent.

The particular passage I’d like to dwell on is this one –

The currently dominant transport order almost enforces styles of cycling which are antithetical to the calm, unhurried orientation towards pedestrians which would in a civilised society be normal. To survive, city cyclists often need to hurry. I doubt I’m alone in sometimes feeling almost primed to fight by my experience of city cycling. A refusal to engage in such ‘fighting’ is of course one of the reasons people take to cycling on pavements; but the fight remains, only the terrain and actors change.

Cycling’s in a fix. Mixing with cars pushes us to ‘hurry up’; mixing with pedestrians compels us to ‘slow down’. There’s work to do here; and in making cities fit for cycling we must also ensure cycling becomes fit for cities.

Our current road layouts and road conditions have created two types of cyclists; the faster, confident cyclist, able (although not always willing) to mix with motor traffic at motor traffic-type speeds. And, by complete contrast, the pavement cyclist; the person who just doesn’t feel like cycling on a certain type of road, and defaults, socially or antisocially, depending on their persuasion, to the pavement.

An awful irony is that both of these types of cyclists are quite unpleasant for pedestrians. Confident cyclists, travelling at car-like speeds, are unnverving, because they are fast and (almost) completely silent. Likewise the pavement cyclist – even the careful and considerate one – can also be unnerving. Dave Horton’s piece is very good at highlighting how the subjective perception of pedestrians – particularly vulnerable ones – is often at odds with how careful some cyclists think they might be.

Neither of these types of behaviour is all that compatible with civilised town and city centres, especially fast cycling. It is undeniable that cycling faster than 20 mph will inevitably become unacceptable on certain types of street. This is not to say that cyclists will no longer be able to make progress on these streets; just that there will have to be a trade-off between rapidity and a calm street environment.

The trouble is that a great proportion of current cyclists, particularly those in London, are precisely those types who cycle at speeds approaching 20 mph, or over, and who engage in long commutes. I don’t blame these cyclists for travelling at these speeds. Indeed, I do so myself when I am in London, or at least try to. You have to try and cycle fast, because it is urged upon you by the road environment. You simply can’t make right turns, or negotiate roundabouts, at lower speeds.

But how compatible is this kind of speed with a civilised London? We can’t simultaneously urge a calming of the street environment, and still expect to cycle just as fast as we like on any street. There will inevitably be places where cycling has to become more social, and more part of the fabric of the street. More like walking, in other words. Not walking speed itself, but a more responsible speed, around pedestrians. This is precisely the point Dave Horton makes –

Challenges lie ahead for people who’ve kept riding through the time of the car. Speaking for myself, I’ve become used to riding fast and assertively, but such riding will become less and less appropriate. I need to broaden my repertoire of styles of riding in the city, learning to enjoy slow and sedate as much as fast and furious!

This brings me to Transport for London’s proposed designs for the bus stops on the extension of Superhighway 2, through Newham.

Courtesy of the Evening Standard

There are a few minor things wrong with this design. The kerbs are too sharp vertically (I am told that the Superhighway planners have not heard of 45° kerbs, which is slightly astonishing), and the corners of the entry to the track are also too sharp. But the principle is exactly right. Instead of placing a bus in a recessed stop, and allowing motor traffic to pass freely, the bus will be held in front of motor traffic, while bicycles can instead pass freely. The track is in the area of the bus stop.

Why this kind of design is so important can be explained quite simply – employing it creates a stretch of road that parents will feel comfortable letting their children cycle on. Few parents would seriously consider letting their children cycle in, around and outside motor traffic on Stratford High Street, negotiating their way into a stream of motor cars to pass stopped buses, however carefully those motor vehicles might be being driven. By contrast, this design creates a high degree of subjective safety, eliminating completely complex interactions with motor traffic.

It is standard practice on the continent to arrange bus stops like this, for the obvious reason that it makes cycling available to all.

Potterstraat, Utrecht. A bus stop is passed in complete comfort.

Pedestrian entry to the bus stop. Negotiated with cyclists.

Amsterdam. Bus stop passed without interaction with buses.

A rural example, just outside Assen.

A busier location, in Groningen

The design solves the problem of constant ‘overlapping’ between buses and cyclists; buses having to overtake cyclists between stops, and the cyclists having to negotiate their way back past the bus every time it stops. It does mean, however, that pedestrians are ‘severed’ (I use the word in inverted commas quite deliberately, because I don’t think they really should be ‘severed’ at all) from the bus stop.

This creates the perception of a problem for two distinct groups. On the on hand, existing ‘fast’ cyclists, who are worried that pedestrians will get in their way, and step without looking into the track. And on the other, more vulnerable pedestrians, who do not want to interact with bicycles, at all.

It should be quite clear that for those ‘fast’ cyclists, their behaviour will have to adapt (I include myself in this group). You will no longer be able to hammer through some parts of London. You will have to be more responsible in certain areas, particularly outside shops and bus stops. You will have to watch out for pedestrians, who will be often be unpredictable. This isn’t just about cycle tracks around bus stops; It’s is a necessary component of creating a more liveable city. We’ve ended up with a cohort of cyclists trying to act like motor vehicles, and as we tame the motor vehicle, so we will have to tame precisely these cyclists.

If Transport for London starts to create cycling infrastructure that makes cycling possible for all, then I think this transition will happen quite organically. Cycling in town and city centres will become dominated, naturally, by those who are not capable of cycling fast, or who have no desire to do so, and this will create a new standard of behaviour. Cycling fast will still be possible, of course –

A roadie in Amsterdam

This gentleman was making very rapid progress out of the city; however, I expect he moderated his speed and behaviour where pedestrians and interactions with them were more likely.

A calmer style of cycling would go some way towards adjusting the perception of cyclists by many pedestrians – particularly disabled groups – as ‘the silent menace’. You only have to look at the mock-up that Transport for London have created of the bus stop to see the difficulty; they have used an image of a fast-looking cyclist, with helmet and hunched over position, onto the cycle track. So I have some sympathy with pedestrians who are concerned; understandably, they are imagining the cyclists who currently use the roads being transplanted directly onto a cycle track, which they have to cross to get to a bus stop.

But it doesn’t need to be like this. Crossing roads and tracks with cyclists – even lots of them – is so much easier when cycling is more civilised, and on more equitable terms with pedestrians.

Enough is enough – we need to break out of the loop we are currently stuck in. Our decades-long attempt to make cycling a form of transport equivalent to the motor vehicle has only succeeded in creating hostility towards cycling from the one group with which we have most in common – the pedestrian. Seen as a fast, lycra-clad menace, or as anti-social pavement invaders (indeed, these two tropes are often blended into one), the act of cycling has unnecessarily been made hostile to walking, through bad design, and bad policy.

The Transport for London plans in Newham are a big step in the right direction; road space is being reclaimed from the motor vehicle, and an environment is being created in  which anyone can cycle in comfort. Bus stops designs like this are a crucial part of that overall vision. Let’s not lose sight of the goal of making cycling a part of the humanising fabric in towns and cities, with its own space where it needs it, and with care and concern for the more vulnerable.

The BBC confuse being healthy with being sporty

I’ve come across an interesting video from the BBC, who have sent a reporter to Sweden to find out answers to the question

Why are Swedish women healthier than the British?

It’s interesting principally for the bizarre way the report focuses completely on sporting activity, as if that is the only way Swedish women can possibly be healthier.

This country bucks the European trend. They’re sportier. They’re fitter. And as a result, on the whole, healthier than most.

Despite being darker and colder,

[Swedish] girls are much more likely to take part in school sports, and then make it a part of their lives as they grow up.

Indeed, we are told that

On average, a Swedish woman is four times more likely than her British counterpart to be active.

Helpfully the report shows us footage of a female jogger exerting herself, as if we didn’t know what being ‘active’ means.

The rest of the short report is then devoted to a young girls’ football training session –

And an interview with the European 400m champion –

The clear impression created is that Swedish women are healthier because they are sportier, and indeed that ‘being active’ is the same as ‘being sporty’.

This is slightly confused. There may be a connection between the amount of sporting activity in one country and its relative degree of overall health, but it is entirely possible to be healthy without engaging in sport.

Someone at the BBC has presumably heard that Swedish women are much more likely to be active, and decided to create a report on that basis. But somewhere along the line they’ve forgotten that you can be active without engaging in football, or sprinting, or jogging. This is how they’ve ended up with a report filled with women doing sport, rather than just being active, which is rather more mundane. Being active can just involve walking to the shops every day, instead of driving, or cycling to school with your children.

Hilariously, there is actually an example of a woman being active in this rather ordinary way, which appears inadvertently in the programme.

While the camera follows the woman jogging along the pavement, a lady cycles past, in ordinary clothing, on a bicycle on the cycle track beside her. She is, however, completely ignored, presumably because she is not being ‘active’ in the way the BBC have assumed being ‘active’ to mean; that is, dressing up in sporting clobber and getting sweaty.

This is a grotesque oversight, because being active in ordinary ways is an extraordinarily simple way of achieving better public health. It’s a message rammed home by recently published National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence guidance, for instance.

Not everyone likes sport, or wants to exert themselves. However, it’s very simple to get people healthier if they don’t even realise that they’re being active. A bit like school work; it only becomes arduous if you realise that it’s actually work. Instead of exercise being a chore, or something that you have to do, exercise can be built, surreptitiously, into daily life, by designing environments that reward more active modes of transport.

Dutch schoolchildren being active without realising it. Not sport.

Retired Dutch ladies being active without realising it. Not sport.

Dutch teenagers being active without realising it. Not sport.

If we really care about public heath, this is the kind of activity we should be trying to foster. Not trying to persuade everyone to go jogging.

That ‘war’ on Britain’s roads – the statistics

For me, the most troubling aspect of the BBC’s much-discussed programme last week was its attempt to portray cyclists and drivers as two seemingly equal parties, ‘battling’ for supremacy on the roads. The voiceover intoned, right at the start – above aggressive music and swearing – that

The battle between two wheels and four has never been so intense.

Footage of outright dangerous driving (one clip shows a van with trailer passing within inches of a cyclist, at speed) was accompanied by the narrator informing us that

with the arrival of the helmet cam, cyclists have found a way of highlighting what they see as the bad behaviour of motorists. [my emphasis]

As if this was merely a problem of perception; cyclists only interpret motorists as dangerous. The ‘battle’, in other words, due mostly to lack of compromise, and misunderstanding.

This failure to take the perspective of people on bicycles seriously was exhibited later in the programme, when, as footage of trucks and buses passing within inches of cyclists in cycle lanes appears on the screen, we are told that ‘cyclists feel under threat, even when in the cycle lane’ – and that they were consequently ‘taking control of the road, even if it means annoying other roads users’. This is hardly the most helpful way to frame the issue, to put it mildly.

Worse than this, the programme went out of its way to present both parties as equally responsible and culpable for the hostility, injuries and deaths that occur. The programme makers evidently searched desperately for a balance that doesn’t exist in reality. While there was plenty of footage of bad driving, they evidently had to scrape the bottom of the barrel to find examples of equivalent behaviour from cyclists.

Principally, of course, this involved the well-documented abuse of alley cat footage, and its presentation as something cyclists get up to regularly, rather than a handful of messengers having been egged on by an American offering them the incentive of a cash prize. The only possible motive for the inclusion of this footage – alongside the absence of footage of people behind the wheels of motor cars acting far more dangerously, of which there is plenty out there on the internet – can only possibly have been to ‘even up’ the culpability of cyclists and drivers.

The other attempts to even up the tally were quite laughable. A taxi driver unburdened a series of anecdotes, telling us that ‘many cyclists take diabolical liberties’, before inviting us to ‘look at this wally’ – a wally unfortunately  cycling quite legally on a marked shared use pavement.

Look at this maniac.

Not content with this, the taxi driver is then shown pointing out a cyclist going down a street where, he alleges, cyclists aren’t allowed to cycle.

The angry pointing finger of a taxi driver spotting cyclist wrongdoing

The only trouble is… this isn’t true at all.

The distinctive Smith & Sons umbrella shop at the corner of New Oxford Street and Shaftesbury Avenue in Bloomsbury, visible behind the taxi driver’s wagging finger. It’s perfectly legal to cycle south onto Shaftesbury Avenue. The taxi driver is talking out his arse.

I would say that it is extraordinary that this guff made it into the finished programme, but the makers were plainly on the hunt for material that would ‘prove’ that cyclists are just as bad as drivers, and any old tat – even rubbish from taxi drivers – would do. Was the taxi driver encouraged just to point at people on bikes and say they were doing something wrong? It seems so. Lazy, contrived, and irresponsible.

We then have the driver of a cement truck, travelling into Parliament Square, identifying that a cyclist ahead of him is listening to music, stating that the attitude of the cyclist must be

‘I’m riding my bike, and everyone else better beware’

Well, yes! As the driver of a cement truck in central London, an area full of tourists, other pedestrians, and cyclists, you certainly should be aware of cyclists. It might make your job more difficult, but you are the one posing the danger. Cycling with headphones might be unwise, but it is not illegal, and the responsibility must lie with the truck driver to exercise caution. Yet the way the footage was presented, the cyclist was framed as being unconscionably reckless.

This segued into a series of clips of cyclists jumping red lights; a practise which is, of course, illegal, and which can be dangerous. However, I didn’t see any particular danger being posed to anyone in this sequence. It’s selfish, dangerous and rude to cut close to pedestrians when they are crossing, but in these clips the people on bikes were trundling. The reaction to their behaviour struck me as slightly hysterical. (Interestingly, one of the red light jumpers was a young man attempting to escape from a lunatic taxi driver, who was subsequently let on his way without admonishment by the police officer, while the cyclist was advised to use… a whistle).

No sooner had this sequence finished than we were given one of the few statistics in the programme; the number of cyclists’ deaths this year. This was uncomfortable timing, because it created the clear impression that cyclists’ own law-breaking and irresponsibility was a prime factor in that tally, when – in reality – quite the opposite is true.

Indeed, the near-total absence of facts or statistics in the programme underlined all the other serious failings of editorial balance. What happens when a motor vehicle and a bicycle are involved in a collision, for instance?

2664 cyclists were killed or seriously injured in these kinds of collisions last year; just 32 vehicle occupants were killed or seriously injured. (For clarity, no vehicle occupants were killed. All those 32 were serious injuries.) I doubt these injuries suffered by vehicle occupants were as a direct result of being hit by a bicycle; most likely they have were suffered as a result of colliding with street furniture, or other vehicles, during or after the collision.

The relative degree of risk in these collisions is also worth illustrating.

At the right hand side, we can see that a staggering 32.3% of cyclist/HGV collisions result in death or serious injury for cyclists, and that 0% of these collisions result in death or serious injury for the HGV occupant. The picture is scarcely better for collisions with vans. 17.4% of these collisions involve death or serious injury for the cyclist; just 0.08% involve death or serious injury for the van occupant. The only slightly anomalous statistic here is the one for bus/coach-cyclist collisions. Four bus or coach occupants were seriously injured last year in collisions with a bicycle. Quite how this occurred, I don’t know; I suspect, again, one incident in which a bus or coach subsequently collided with something else.

What contributed to these collisions?

A slight ‘health warning’ should be attached to these statistics, because they are based on the interpretation of the attending police officer. There may also be other ‘contributing factors’ involved in these collisions; failing to look may or may not have been the prime or sole cause. Nevertheless we can see that a significant factor in collisions between motor vehicles and bicycles is a failure of observation on the part of the driver, particularly for vans and cars – in nearly half of all collisions between these vehicles and bicycles, the driver had failed to look properly. Of course, we can see that cyclists are also (to a lesser extent) failing to look properly. But I would argue that, given the much greater risk posed by motor vehicles (as shown in the graph just above), it is surely deeply worrying that the parties posing the greater risk are less observant.

Why was it not revealed in the BBC’s programme that in fatal collisions between bicycles and HGVs, the driver of the HGV is nearly twice as likely to have failed to have made proper observation? The clip itself, already mentioned, showed a virtuous HGV driver (of which I am sure there are many, of course) pontificating about the faults of cyclists, and a ‘reckless’ cyclist wearing headphones and not observing properly. While the death of Cynthia Barlow’s daughter at the hands of a left-turning HGV featured prominently, there was a complete absence of facts about causality in these kinds of collisions, which account for so many cycling deaths. Real balance doesn’t mean showing one side of a story and then another, or giving a ‘range of opinions’ – it means presenting a story fairly and objectively. The programme singularly failed to do this.

If there really is a ‘war’ on the roads, then only one side can be said to be winning. Indeed,  it might just be one of the most one-sided war in history, with one particular set of victims – people not in motor vehicles.

Children are also casualties of this ‘war’.

Particularly children trying to get to and from school.

With all the rhetoric about cyclists increasingly entering into ‘battle’ with motorists, you’d expect the statistics of this war to be turning in their favour. Wrong.

Being in a car in this ‘war’ is getting safer and safer; quite the opposite for being on a bicycle.

Adjusted for distance travelled –

Perhaps a better comparison would be KSIs per unit of time spent travelling, rather than distance, as motor vehicles cover significantly more distance per unit time. Nevertheless this is a useful indicator both of the relative degree of risk for these two modes of transport, and (again) of trends over time.

Interestingly, the mere act of riding a bike appears to be getting safer. The number of single person incidents (with no other vehicle involved) which result in serious injury or death has steadily declined. The same is not true, however, for collisions with motor vehicles, which have been getting more numerous and/or lethal recently (that blue line has continued rising to the 3200 mark in 2011, as you can see in one of the earlier graphs).

Graph from TRL’s PPR445 report

And who is responsible? Well, in London at least, where a great proportion of the footage included in the War on Britain’s Roads was filmed, the picture is reasonably clear (although you may have to click to enlarge) –

From TfL’s Pedal cyclist collisions and casualties in Greater London, 2011

Over to the left, we see that the primary causes of serious injuries to cyclists are motor vehicles turning right across the path of cyclists; cyclists being hit by vehicles passing too close; and the infamous ‘dooring’ – each accounting for 11% of cyclists’ serious injuries.

Next we have the ‘left hook’, accounting for 10% of cyclists’ serious injuries. Then ‘failure to give way at a junction, or to obey traffic signals’, on the part of motorists, which accounts for, in total, 11% of all cyclists’ serious injuries (6% in direct collisions, 5% from turning into path of cyclists). Drivers crashing into the back of cyclists – that’s 5% of all cyclists’ serious injuries.

We then come to the first examples of cyclists being responsible – single-person accidents (5%) and riding off the pavement into the path of a vehicle (4%). Note, finally, that cyclists failing to give way, or ‘obey junction controls’ (jumping red lights!) accounts for only 3% of cyclists’ serious injuries in Greater London. Three times more cyclists in Greater London, therefore, are injured by motor vehicles jumping lights or failing to give way.

Statistics like this did not make into the BBC’s programme, while comments from the narrator, like this –

Not all cyclists jump red lights. But for some it’s a way of life.

did.

Perhaps the BBC should consider making another documentary. With some facts included next time.

Some misconceptions

Much as I am loath to take issue with Martin Porter – his blog is ever-excellent on the matter of the seriousness with which road crime is treated (see especially his recent post on the inadequacy of the police attitude exhibited in the BBC’s War on Britain’s Roads programme) – I feel that some aspects of his response to the All Party Parliamentary Cycling Group’s Inquiry, ‘Get Britain Cycling’, merit a response.

Martin writes that

Segregation has a place (particularly on routes to schools) to encourage the large number of potential cyclists fearful of cycling on the roads.

I’m not sure the Dutch would recognise this description of ‘segregation’. A policy of constructing cycle tracks and paths, and minimising interactions with motor vehicles in general, is not about ‘encouraging’ the more nervous, and those who are reluctant to cycle on the roads. Dutch policy is specifically about making the cycling experience of everyone – children getting onto a bike for the first time, as well as ‘hardened’ cyclists like David Hembrow – more pleasant. In that context, cycle paths are not some kind of stop-gap compromise measure to get people onto bikes, but part of a holistic approach to prioritising cycling. It is more enjoyable and relaxing to cycle on a path away from lorries, buses and vans. This is why the Dutch build them.

Martin then argues

However segregation is no panacea and it certainly is no quick fix solution. It is often overlooked that even the Dutch do not just do segregation and that they do integration better we do.

Regarding the first two points, I don’t know of anyone who has suggested that segregation is a ‘panacea’, or indeed that is a ‘quick fix’ solution. The point about segregation, rather, is that it is specifically a necessary treatment on certain categories of roads. Currently, we have a serious problem, in that we do not segregate on roads and junctions that carry high volumes of motor traffic, or motor traffic travelling at speed (or at least, we don’t do so competently). And it is these roads and junctions that are the most significant barrier to cycling.

This is what I and many other campaigners and bloggers are so exercised about. We are not calling for cycle paths everywhere; we want them as a solution to a specific problem. Nor are we suggesting that this would be a ‘quick fix’. It is our contention that you simply cannot solve the problem of decades of stagnation in cycling levels without high-quality infrastructure that creates a high level of subjective safety; the fact that this won’t happen immediately (and why would it?) is somewhat immaterial.

When it comes to the claim the Dutch do ‘integration’ better than us, well this is certainly true too, but only because the Dutch are very careful to minimise interactions between motor vehicles and bicycles in the locations where they do indeed ‘integrate’. This is, as David Hembrow has argued, the result of a policy that aims at 100% separation. It is pleasant to cycle on roads and streets in the Netherlands where you are not physically segregated specifically because the Dutch have carefully made sure that only a small number of vehicles will ever be sharing that space with you. To repeat a point from earlier, this is about making the cycling experience of everyone more pleasant.

Next Martin writes

Potential cyclists are not fearful of the roads per se but of the badly driven motor vehicles on the roads.

I’m afraid that here Martin is confusing his own, personal experience – what makes him fearful to cycle on the roads – with the attitudes of ‘potential cyclists’. Potential cyclists do not want to cycle amongst lorries and buses, however well driven they may be. That is what they say, in survey after survey, and report after report. It is an unpleasant and intimidating experience. Indeed, this is precisely why they remain ‘potential cyclists’. Quite obviously, they have not had experience of badly driven motor vehicles while cycling, because… they are not cycling. The issue is motor traffic in general, not badly driven motor traffic.

Finally – and this is perhaps the claim I take most issue with – Martin says

Unfortunately some cycling advocates regard the calling for improved conditions for cycling on roads as heretical since it is seen to detract from their goal of segregation. [my emphasis]

Who are these people? Where are they saying this? Answers welcome.

The significance of the TfL cycling funding

The big headline for cycling at the end of last week was the £1 billion worth of funding announced by Boris Johnson for cycling improvements in London, spent over the next ten years, which made the front page of the Times.

The figure isn’t £1 billion, of course – to be precise, it’s £913 million. This number is made up of £640 million ‘extra’ funding, on top of the £273 million already set out in Transport for London’s ten year plan. So Boris is indeed planning to treble spending on cycling over the next decade, at least compared to the original baseline funding. We can see how significant this is by looking at TfL’s funding for cycling over the last decade –

From the London Assembly’s Gearing Up report

A figure of £273 million over ten years would have meant cycling funding trundling along at about the level of those red bars. £913 million – £91.3 million a year – means that cycling will be funded at about the level it has been for the last three years.

There was some carping over the weekend – from myself included – about the significance of the announcement, particularly about the presentation of the ‘£1 billion’ figure, in the light of the small increase in funding it actually represents, compared to the last three years. But make no mistake, this is a large sum of money. It amounts to over £10 a head for the London population, per capita. This is not Dutch (or Danish) funding commitment, but it should be enough to start getting things done properly – about which more in a moment.

This announcement of funding for London does do one important thing in particular – it demonstrates quite clearly the pitiful size of the ‘extra’ £20 million announced by Norman Baker for cycling improvements across England only a few days earlier. Unlike the TfL funding commitment, this appears to be just a one-off payment, presented at the Active Travel conference, no doubt as a feel-good announcement. But it’s barely a fifth of what Transport for London will be spending on cycling, in London alone, every year for the next ten years. By contrast, this £20 million will be spent across the entire country, and there’s no commitment to any future funding. While cycling groups, including the Cycling Embassy, welcomed the cash – it’s very hard not be grateful for funding, however small – it pales into complete insignificance in the light of the Transport for London announcement. It’s meaningless.

What’s needed is a firm commitment for a serious proportion of the Department for Transport’s budget to be put aside for cycling, each year, and every year. Enough of these scraps appearing intermittently every six months. If cycling is as brilliant as all the Ministers keep saying it is, they need to back up words with action. Boris Johnson, despite my reservations about his commitment, is at least starting to do that, and the government should follow his lead.

But of course the cash needs to spent in the right way. It’s all very well committing to £90 million a year for spending in London, but if TfL do things badly, they’re effectively wasting it, because at some point in the future the work is going to have to be undone, and redone properly. The consultation for Superhighway Five – from Victoria to New Cross – opened yesterday, and while there are some good things in the proposals, there are some aspects of it that are still awful, and nowhere near the standards of Go Dutch that the Mayor has pledged to implement all future Superhighway developments to.

One really standout example is at the Vauxhall Cross gyratory (doubtless there are more examples along the length of the route which can be picked out). The better of the two Options proposed taking away a traffic lane on the (one way) Harleyford Road, and replaces it with a two-way cycle track, the intention being to allow cyclists to progress more or less directly across the gyratory, without having to make complex movements across three or four lanes.

The lane on the left, shown in the picture below, will be replaced with a track. If done properly, it should be plenty wide enough for two-way cycle traffic. This is good.

However, as is often the case, however, the problems come at junctions, and the entry to the track heading west is deeply problematic.

There’s an ASL, which means cyclists can position themselves on the right for entry into the track when the lights change. But what about when the lights are green? You need to get across two lanes of traffic to move into the track. I can’t see this kind of manoeuvre being at all attractive to the people who would like to cycle across this gyratory in comfort, and it rather defeats the point of protective measures elsewhere. Just as a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, so a cycle route can be rendered pointless if there are difficult gaps in it.

Money – some of that £913 million – will be spent implementing this design at this point. I think that would be a complete waste. Money needs to spent properly, on good designs, that won’t need to be tinkered with in years to come, and that are suitable for cyclists of all abilities.

In a similar vein, Transport for London also need to have a good look at their ‘early start’ traffic light design, which is now increasingly prominent in their designs, appearing several times on this Superhighway route. While the principle of separating movements is sound, in reality, as Paul James shows, this is an ‘always stop’ design for cyclists; arriving at these junctions on two wheels, and you will always hit at least one red light. Again, that’s not good enough. You can’t spend serious money on junction designs that needlessly impede cyclists, and tempt them to jump lights in a way that defeats the purpose of the design.

Money is starting to appear; while that’s excellent, and shows up how the desperate paucity of central government’s commitment, it’s really important it doesn’t get thrown away.

A half-hearted junction review from Transport for London

As you know, Transport for London are consulting on improvements for cycling to a series of junctions in London, that are the most dangerous (I’ve written about two before). A consultation closes tomorrow, Friday, for the four-way junction of Battersea Park Road/Havelock Terrace/Prince of Wales Drive, so I thought I’d share my thoughts on this junction, and what TfL are proposing.

It’s really quite a horrible spot, with plenty of lorries thundering through, amongst plenty of other motor traffic, often at speed – principally up and down Battersea Park Road.

My immediate first impression was  that this quite a hazardous and intimidating place for riding a bike, particularly when attempting to make turns. Casualties must have occurred here for this junction to feature in the review, and it’s not hard to see why.

I’ll start with the slightly good things that TfL are proposing. Currently, the Prince of Wales Drive entry to the junction looks like this –

Two lanes for motor vehicles, and no cycle lane. However, the new arrangement will take one of these vehicle lanes away, and replace it with a 2m wide cycle lane.

This is good, but there are two slightly odd things here – the cycle lane could surely be wider than 2m, given it is replacing an entire vehicle lane. The ASL also seems to be a bit pointless, given that everyone emerging from this junction – bicycles and vehicles – can still only turn left. There’s no point placing bikes back in front of motor vehicles if they’re all progressing in the same direction. It would be better just to have a cycle lane ending some distance in advance of a stop line for vehicles.

Other improvements. There is currently an appallingly narrow mandatory cycle lane, heading north on Battersea Park Road.

This will be replaced with a wider, 1.5m mandatory cycle lane.

Again, an improvement, of sorts, but when you look at this stretch of road, a 1.5m wide cycle lane is actually a bit of an insult.

This is an enormously wide bit of road. I can’t understand why the cycle lane should only be 1.5m wide, when there is ample scope for making it much, much wider, or indeed for protecting it with kerbing, or some kind of ‘soft’ measure.

Further, the cycle lane only appears after the junction.

There is no protection at the apex of the left-hand bend, just where it is needed; see, for instance, the line this van is taking.

This would be an ideal spot for some kerbing to keep cyclists and vehicles apart. But it is absent from the proposals.

Curiously, however, there is a proposal for a kerb on entry into Prince of Wales Drive.

This kerb doesn’t seem particularly important to me, given that the proposed design expects cyclists to cycle – much more hazardously – along the outside of vans and lorries as they turn right simultaneously into Prince of Wales Drive, on a green stripe.

A lorry turning right into Prince of Wales Drive. The design suggests cyclists will cycle on the outside of this truck as it turns right

This is the design change. I have a horrible feeling about that sharp corner on the island in the middle of Prince of Wales Drive, to the left, and what it might mean for vehicle movements when a cyclist is alongside.

You can see that one of the three southbound queuing lanes has been replaced with a cycle feed-in lane, for an ASL, and for making right turns – it’s nice to see that, as with the Prince of Wales Drive entrance, a motor vehicle lane has been taken away, and replaced with space for bikes. However, this is still a problematic design, for several reasons. As I have already described, it expects cyclists to move through a turning on the outside of a lorry, on a green stripe.

Another problem is that for cyclists going straight on through the junction, the feed-in lane to the ASL has great potential to leave cyclists stranded on the outside of vehicles progressing straight on in lane 1, which would not be a pleasant experience.

The final problem is that, while cyclists wishing to turn right no longer have to get in to lane 3 to make a right turn, they still have to negotiate across one lane, and hold position between vehicles passing on both sides of them. The cycle lane will be between these two lorries.

So, it’s an improvement, of sorts, but hardly ‘Going Dutch’.

The only other change I can see is a widening of the pedestrian island in the middle of the southern side of the junction.

In other words, the deliberate creation of a pinch point, forcing lorries and cyclists into the same space. Why? Why would you do this on what is a very, very wide road, with ample space to keep the two modes apart?

Looking south from the existing, unwidened, pedestrian island

There is enormous potential for making this wide, busy road into a pleasant place to cycle, through the construction of infrastructure that separates cyclists from the movements of large vehicles. This consultation, however, is just tinkering around the edges. It’s still going to be a horrible junction. You will still only be able to cycle in certain directions from certain arms of the junction (you won’t be able to turn left into Prince of Wales Drive, for instance, and you will still be forced to turn left out of it).

The motor vehicle will still be king, in other words. Pedestrians will continue to have to cross in two stages on each arm of the junction. Indeed, if you wish to cross to Battersea Dogs Home on the north side of the junction, you will have to take six separate crossings around the entire junction, which is a complete joke.

No pedestrian crossing here. Take six crossings instead, all the way around the junction

Direct crossings would not only be better for pedestrians, they would also obviate the need for the islands which form the pinch points, and consequently free up more space for cycling. But ‘smoothing traffic flow’ doubtless prohibits such a move.

I’d really like to see Transport for London trialling proper, continental-style solutions as part of their junction review process. Just one junction like this one, to see how it works. The Mayor pledged to support London Cycling Campaign’s Go Dutch agenda, which, as I’m getting tired of reminding you, demands that TfL

Make sure all planned developments on the main roads that they controls are complete to Go Dutch standards, especially junctions.

And this demand has been repeated by the London Assembly’s recent Gearing Up report.

When will we start seeing infrastructure like this in London?

There are some promising signs of change in TfL’s recently-announced proposals for Bow westbound, particularly in the arrangement of a bus stop which cyclists can bypass by a pavement-side track.

A cycle track behind a bus stop, created by moving the bus stop out into the traffic flow

But this junction in Battersea would have been an ideal place to try something much bolder than what is contained in this review. I have to say that what TfL are proposing will make only a negligible difference, at best.

And as Danny at Cyclists in the City notes (and Cycalogical), these junction reviews don’t address the rest of the network, which may be just as intimidating, if not as statistically dangerous. The roads to and from this junction will remain hostile and unpleasant.

The LTN 2/08 solution – rubbish pavement conversions. A waste of space on Battersea Park Road, northbound

Not good enough. And not addressed by this juntion review process.

You can add your comments on the consultation here.

Helmets – Expectation and Inconsistency

One of the most baffling aspects of the fixation on bicycle helmets as a way of attempting to protect cyclists from harm is the extraordinary inconsistency with which helmets are advocated. Setting aside the vexed issue of how effective helmets actually are in preventing the injuries cyclists most commonly suffer in collisions with motor vehicles, it is deeply odd how the logic used to urge helmets onto cyclists is never applied to other road users, particularly pedestrians and car drivers.

Perhaps the greatest absurdity is that a compulsory helmet law would force those of us cycling to the shops at less than 15 mph to wear a polystyrene hat, while people in convertible sports cars remain free to drive at over 70 mph with absolutely no protection to their bodies whatsoever should their cars roll over in a collision, beyond a seat belt which may or may not hold them in the car. Yet as far as I am aware, Headway, BHIT and other bodies which advocate a compulsory bicycle helmet law have absolutely nothing to say about crash helmets for the users of convertible cars.

Shockingly dangerous behaviour.

Of course, the ‘fragile skulls’ of people in cars (for this is the phrase of choice for groups like Headway and BHIT) are not just at risk in convertibles. It is commonly established that head injuries are the most common type of severe or fatal injury sustained by car occupants in crashes. Of vehicle occupants taken to hospital in Australia, the head was usually the most severely injured body region. [pdf]

This same paper notes that, for car occupants,

a bicycle style soft shell helmet could provide a large degree of protection for the head very cheaply. A simpler form of headwear, in the form of a headband covering mainly the forehead, where most impacts to the heads of car occupants occur, could offer almost as much benefit without as much bulk and even less weight. Protective headwear also has the very considerable advantage that it could be available within a matter of months for use by those who wish to reduce their risk of sustaining brain damage if involved in a road crash.

However, the logic that polystyrene helmets could offer protection to car occupants in precisely the same fashion that they could to bicycle users is routinely discarded. A search for ‘helmets’ on the Headway site only produces 68 results almost entirely related to bicycle helmets – nothing about the potential benefits of protecting the ‘fragile skulls’ of car occupants.

Drivers, we are told, have seatbelts, and a protective shell around them, and there is no need for them to protect their ‘fragile skulls’ in the same way that a bicycle user might with a polystyrene shell. This despite the evidence that the most common severe or fatal injury to car occupants is to the head.

Counts, and proportions, of serious injuries to body regions, Australia 2003-4. From this paper [pdf]

Similarly, a UK study of data from 33 hospitals between 1996 and 2003 found that around 25% of car occupants who had suffered a head injury did not survive [pdf].

Plainly the heads of car occupants are susceptible to serious damage. Yet lobbying for car occupants to wear helmets is non-existent, even if, to use the emotive language of bicycle helmet advocacy, ‘they might just save one life’. Or that ‘wearing a helmet is surely better than not wearing one’.

I wrote earlier this year about a tragic local case in which a young car driver, Toby Woolford, died from his head injuries after he crashed into a lorry on the A27 near Arundel.

Although Toby died of severe head injuries – thankfully very quickly – the inquest did not discuss how Toby’s life might have been saved by something he could have been wearing, but was not, at the time of the collision. This is quite proper, of course; it would be unseemly to suggest or imply that Toby was somehow responsible for his own death by failing to use protective equipment while inside his car – a crash helmet, for instance. Such a helmet, similar to those worn by motorcyclists or racing drivers, could possibly have saved Toby’s life. On the other hand, it might not have. We simply don’t know. And it would be wrong to speculate about it. Especially because no driver, or any occupant of a car, would ever see fit to wear crash helmets while using their car for ordinary, day to day activities. It would be quite improper to talk about how Toby wasn’t wearing a crash helmet, even if there was a remote possibility it could have saved his life, because drivers are not expected to wear them.

This, I think, is the essence of the matter – the expectation that bicycle users should wear helmets, and that car drivers shouldn’t have to. Because bicycle helmets are now increasingly seen as a ‘normal’ piece of equipment, it becomes ‘irresponsible’ not to wear one. Conversely, because nobody drives a car with polystyrene strapped to their head, you might look like a bit of a lunatic if you chose to do so – even though, by doing so, you might actually be acting just as ‘responsibly’ as a cyclist wearing the same item. Attitudes to bicycle helmets, in other words, seem increasingly to be framed by custom, and expected behaviour, than about actually preventing harm.

Just like car occupants, pedestrians aren’t expected to wear helmets. That is why, in the case of this unfortunate man airlifted to hospital with life-threatening head injuries after being struck by a car in Brighton just a few days ago, there is no mention of the man’s lack of helmet. Nor should there be; he was walking along, and he was struck by a car. We don’t expect people walking about to be wearing helmets, and so we don’t mention the absence of one when they are struck by motor vehicles.

The glaring inconsistency of this attitude leapt out at me from a report into the recent inquest of the death of a teenager, Joshua Dale, in Nottingham in January this year. He was using a pedestrian crossing when he was struck by a car; traffic was stationary in the right-hand filter lane, held at a red light. However, traffic progressing straight on still had a green light, and Joshua was hit by a car he had failed to anticipate coming (the driver might also have been expected to anticipate people attempting to cross). The Coroner had this to say –

Recording a verdict of accidental death, Notts Coroner Mairin Casey said: “It’s imperative if we are to learn anything that children must be educated further and become more aware of the safety aspects of wearing helmets.”

This is utterly bizarre, because Joshua was using the crossing in precisely the same way as a pedestrian might have been, and he was struck by a car in precisely the same way he would have been if he had been walking across. No mention of a helmet would have been made if he had been hit while using the crossing on foot. But because he was on a bike, the absence of a helmet suddenly becomes relevant, despite making no tangible difference to the outcome. Again, it is the expectation that people using bicycles should wear helmets that is colouring attitudes, even when those bicycles are being used to convey people in a manner very similar way to walking.

The final recent example of expectation producing absurd statements about helmets comes from Tamworth, where a man on a bicycle was struck by an HGV coming off a sliproad from the M42 motorway. He suffered serious leg injuries. A spokesman for West Midlands Ambulance Service said

Fortunately the cyclist was wearing a helmet which undoubtedly helped to minimise his injuries.

I doubt this ambulance service spokesman would, on reflection, genuinely believe that a polystyrene hat ‘undoubtedly’ minimised the injuries of a man plainly run over by an HGV. This statement is not really a rational assessment of the abilities of bicycle helmets to protect their users. It’s a product of the belief that people on bicycles should wear helmets, regardless of the actual extent of protection a helmet would offer in the particular circumstances. A belief that disregards the fact that bicycle helmets could be equally ‘useful’ to people on foot when they might be hit by a car or a lorry, or to the occupants of motor vehicles.

What’s in action here is the subtle reinforcement of expectation.

‘Safety in Numbers’ dismissed as a strategy by London Assembly report

I’ve written extensively about the ‘Safety in Numbers’ effect before, particularly about the folly of employing it as a safety strategy, so I won’t spend too much time going over old ground.

One of my main concerns about the ‘Safety in Numbers’ effect is that it can be stripped away from its original context – an observation of a correlation between safety and numbers, without any established mechanism for that correlation – and directly employed as a safety strategy, even as a substitute for hard action to make cycling safer. Instead of changing the physical environment of our streets, to minimise the number of interactions between motor vehicles and bicycles, and to lower the speeds when those interactions do take place, you might see politicians arguing that all we need to do is increase the numbers of people cycling. As I wrote back in October

‘Safety in numbers’ is attractive as a theory because it requires very little financial or intellectual investment in trying to improve conditions for the most vulnerable users. All that needs to be done is to ‘encourage’ more walking and cycling, without the hard effort required of improving the environment itself (which, incidentally, does have a proven record of making walking and cycling safer).

It’s also a useful way of dismissing or silencing the concerns of those who argue that cycling is too dangerous, or feels too dangerous. By talking about the hazards of cycling, and how unpleasant cycling feels, so the argument runs, we are discouraging potential cyclists, and so reducing the ‘safety in numbers’ effect, and making cycling less safe. This is something Andrew Gilligan has argued, in response to the Times’ Cities Fit for Cycling Campaign –

It’s still not clear whether The Times’ coverage will bring about many, if any, of the improvements it seeks. What it certainly will do, however, is make several hundred thousand Times readers think twice before they get on a bicycle. And if fewer people cycle, or take up cycling, the casualty rates will suffer.

That is, cycling safety is dependent on the numbers of people cycling – so stop talking about how dangerous it is.

Boris Johnson and Transport for London have placed a good deal of emphasis on ‘Safety in Numbers’ as a safety strategy. A TfL document [pdf] claims that the Boris Bike scheme will, in and of itself,

 Improve safety by increasing the number of cyclists on London’s roads

Likewise Transport for London’s 2010 Cycle Safety Action Plan [pdf] argues that

One of the most effective strategies to increase the safety of cycling may be to encourage more cycling and more cyclists.

At few years before this was written, there may have been good grounds for believing this. The rate of cycling casualties on London’s roads had generally fallen since 2000-1, over a period in which cycling increased substantially (albeit from a very low base). Yet a graph contained in the London Assembly’s newly-published report, Gearing up – An investigation into safer cycling in London [pdf] throws this relationship into serious doubt.

The casualty rate in London has risen quite consistently since 2007, despite a continuing increase in the amount of cycling over this period. Here are the figures for the average number of trips since 2000, from TfL’s Travel in London report –

And in graph form –

So the increase in cycling has been fairly continuous over the last decade, and yet since 2007 there has been a reversal in the casualty rate. More people cycling is not leading to an increase in relative safety; quite the reverse. Cycling in London is getting less safe, despite the increasing numbers.

The London Assembly report is quite right, therefore, to note that

The Mayor believes the ‘safety in numbers’ effect will improve cycling safety in London but this is not currently evident… Our analysis shows that the safety in numbers effect has not prevented an increase in the cycling casualty rate between 2007 and 2010. Therefore, there remains an imperative for the Mayor and TfL to make improving the safety of cyclists on the roads the top priority in all their cycling programmes.

Danny over at Cyclists in the City has provided an excellent summary of the main findings of the whole report, although I’d recommending reading it in full if you have the time. It’s a rallying call for action, particularly for greater financial investment in physical infrastructure for bicycles, and for the Mayor to fully commit to following London Cycling’s Go Dutch demands. The overwhelming impression it gives is that we simply cannot go on as we are, with our roads and streets so poorly designed for bicycles, and so far behind our European neighbours and other major world cities. There can be no more complacency.

Adapting to the environment, or changing it

For good or ill, the injuries suffered last week by our first ever Tour de France winner and his coach, in separate incidents on consecutive days, have put the issue of cycling, and cycling safety, in the media spotlight.

I’ve been quite fascinated by the response, because it has often been deeply revealing about the in-built assumptions many of our journalists have about cycling, and, more broadly, about what our towns, cities and villages should look like.

One of the most damaging assumptions, widespread amongst both journalists and the general public, seems to be that our roads and streets are somehow intrinsically dangerous, and that people who venture out onto them on two wheels should therefore take measures to protect themselves against the hazards that they will meet. A common form of this refrain is, alongside exhorting drivers to ‘look out’, a plea (even a demand) for cyclists to clad themselves in high-visibility clothing to aid drives in their ‘looking out’, and to wear protective items of equipment to protect themselves should drivers fail to ‘look out’ properly.

The astonishingly bad ‘Ride Smart’ campaign that appeared (and then swiftly disappeared) yesterday didn’t even the merit of presenting these kinds of arguments in the context of asking drivers to ‘look out’; it came straight out and blamed cyclists for their own injuries and deaths, while saying nothing about the the behaviour of those drivers who run over those cyclists who have the temerity to be listening to music.

Of course, slightly less offensively, these arguments exhorting cyclists to take ‘extra’ measures to ensure their own safety are usually presented as a form of ‘mutual respect’; that in expecting drivers to ‘look out’ for them, cyclists should do things that the law does not even demand of them. That to be a ‘proper cyclist’, one must be wearing a helmet, one can’t ever be using headphones, and one shouldn’t wear dark clothes.

It’s perfectly legal to cycle without a helmet, or in dark clothes, or while using headphones, but woe betide any cyclist who chooses to head out onto the streets like this, for you are being ‘irresponsible’, and therefore not due the mutual respect of being ‘looked out for’. A typical example is this piece from the Metro Newspaper, entitled Cyclists and drivers need to be mutually respectful to ensure road safety. What is it that cyclists have to do to ‘earn’ mutual respect? Wear helmets and ‘bright clothing’.

Similarly, Barrow Police chose to tweet the following last Friday –

Hoping @bradwiggins is back on his bike soon. A wake up call to all cyclists #BESEENBESAFE #WEARAHELMET & enjoy safer cycling

It’s worth remembering that Bradley Wiggins was wearing a helmet, and should have been seen by any driver who was actually paying attention; and further, that his injuries were caused by the driver of a motor vehicle acting irresponsibly. (Reading this tweet in isolation of news events,  you might think that Bradley Wiggins was himself responsible for his own injuries.) Yet at the time this tweet was published, Barrow Police had had nothing to say about driver behaviour, following both the Bradley Wiggins and Shane Sutton incidents. It was only after I and several others had responded to this tweet that they urged drivers to ‘take a second look’. It is telling that their first reaction was to ask cyclists to make themselves more visible, and to don protective equipment.

This disappointing attitude was also exhibited by two BBC journalists on the same day, Rachel Burden and Jacqui Oatley. In what can only be described as a surreal debate on BBC Radio 5 Live on Friday morning, the former decided to ‘challenge’ Chris Boardman on his entirely reasonable position that bicycle helmets should be a matter of choice. You can listen to the discussion here.

Rachel Burden starts by saying that most cyclists near where she lives  are ‘responsible’, and ‘wear helmets’; and that ‘it would seem to be a sensible precaution’ to wear one.

I don’t quite get why cyclists generally don’t uniformly say “yeah, do you know what, as a matter of course, of course everyone should wear hi-viz garments, and of course everyone should wear a helmet, and then let’s focus on how we can make the roads better.”

Boardman responds quite sensibly that this should be up to the individuals concerned, and that the danger in pushing this line is that we end up focused on symptoms, rather than causes. Our first response to people being shot at on the street shouldn’t be to clad them with bullet proof vests; it should be to investigate how and why people are being shot, and to stop it.

The host Nicky Campbell then interjects with a point about cyclists listening to music (a particular concern of his, I’ve noticed) – Boardman responds that we don’t ask drivers to keep their radios off,  and their windows open, so they can hear what’s going on around them. Why should cyclists be any different? There’s not really a sensible response to this point, and Burden demonstrates it by pretending that in her car she can hear what’s going on around her while music is playing, while listening to music on a bike is ‘very different’ (hint – no it isn’t).

Running through this entire discussion is the assumption that it is the most vulnerable parties who should have to take extra measures to ‘be sensible’ (this isn’t just limited to cyclists; Burden says that pedestrians ‘should not be on smartphones’), while those who pose the risk are free to continue listening to music, or to drive dark cars that are hard to see. The motoring environment is, for the foreseeable future, immutable, and pedestrians and cyclists should have to conform to its logic.

The other BBC  journalist, Jacqui Oatley, verged on the offensive. She engaged with Burden on Twitter, professing astonishment with people who ride bikes who are ‘not fussed about helmets’ and who ‘wear black’. She then stated that people who cycle without helmets ‘have a death wish’ and ‘totally agreed’ with the sentiment that ‘anyone who cycles without a helmet is simply mad!’

Here is a picture of me cycling along Lancing seafront. (by @steinsky)

My choice to wear a straw hat instead of a bicycle helmet does not make me ‘mad’, or suggest that I have a ‘death wish’. (We can even set aside the likelihood that a straw hat on my head will do me just about as much good as a polystyrene one in the event that I am hit by a car).

My bike is heavy. It is not inherently dangerous to ride it at the slow speeds I generally progress at while I am on it. Danger is presented to me by motor vehicles, and the suggestion that I am being ‘irresponsible’ by not protecting myself against that danger by donning various items of clothing is almost as offensive as suggesting to the innocent victim of a shooting that they were ‘irresponsible’ because they hadn’t worn a bullet proof vest. I say ‘almost’, because shootings are rare, while cyclists being being killed or seriously injured by motor vehicles is unfortunately very common; it might be possible to argue that you can ‘expect’ to be injured while cycling, but you shouldn’t ‘expect’ to be shot (but this in turn says something about how uninterested we are about road deaths and injuries).

Of course one could respond that cycling along in normal clothes, and without protective equipment, is perfectly fine in areas where motor vehicles are not present, like Lancing seafront, but that cycling on busy roads in towns and cities is a very different matter; that where motor vehicles are present, we should take ‘precautions’.

To an extent, I conform to this logic. I often listen to music while cycling along quieter roads around where I live, but I haven’t ever done so in central London, where I quite reasonably need to ‘keep my wits about me’. I don’t, however, cycle in London wearing hi-viz; I believe my lights and the reflectors on my bike are (or should be) sufficient to make me visible. I am similarly dubious about the ‘extra’ safety a helmet might offer me in the event of being struck by a vehicle.

But in making this kind of argument, we are inevitably conceding that riding a bike is not inherently dangerous (an argument that I have heard the wonderful Chris Boardman making several times over the last few days). If cycling is safe in the absence of motor traffic, but not while motor traffic is present, then it is quite obvious that it is not ‘cycling’ that is unsafe, but ‘cycling in motor traffic’. This makes the focus on ‘safety equipment’, and on cyclists’ behaviour, all the more absurd, because it completely ignores the root cause of the danger.

This brings me, circuitously, to the central point of this post; that now is the time to focus, more than ever, on changing the environment for cycling, and to push back even harder against a ‘safety’ agenda that seeks to adapt the act of riding a bike to the logic of motoring.

To its credit, the Times’ Cities Fit for Cycling Campaign has evolved in the right direction over the course of this year. I had some concerns, when the campaign was launched, about an excessive focus on keeping cyclists safe, rather than thinking about how to make roads and streets pleasant for cycling, and to improve the environment of our towns and cities for all. But its (serendipitous) relaunch last week shows that the campaign is heading in the right direction; the editorial in the paper called for ‘structural and geographical change’, and asserted that

the stated aim of this campaign has never been to change drivers or cyclists. Rather, it has been to change the cities in which they cycle and drive.

This is exactly right. We should be making our towns and cities look like this.

These cities in the Netherlands have made the environment safe. The danger presented to cyclists by motor vehicles has been removed, either by segregation, or by the removal of through traffic, and careful design to keep vehicle speeds and traffic volume low. These are busy places, but you don’t need to wear helmets, or special clothes, or keep your wits about you. It’s completely unnecessary.

In cities in the UK like London, however, the environment is not safe; it is unyielding, and errors on your part, or on the part of a driver around you, may result in serious injury or death.

A sensible long-term safety strategy should not involve cladding the cyclists in these pictures in more day-glo material, or better helmets, or asking that they and the drivers around them continue to ‘look out’. The focus should be on ameliorating the public realm, to remove the danger posed by motor vehicles to both cyclists and pedestrians. Creating safe space to walk and cycle in, and to prioritise walking and cycling as modes of urban transport. Making better cities, in other words.

This is going to be an uphill struggle. I’m sad to say that, at the risk of generalising, most people don’t even comprehend that our streets could be better places. That there is a better way of organising them so that they are not completely oriented around the flow of motor traffic, and that restricting that flow, even marginally, gives us an opportunity to provide people with pleasant alternatives. A case in point was the presenter on BBC Breakfast who interviewed Chris Boardman and the admirable Phil Jones on Friday. The presenter argued that ‘we don’t have a system that, if you like, lends itself to having separate space’; that there ‘isn’t enough width’, and ‘there’s a problem with the logistics of the space available’. This while the following footage was appearing on screen.

Quite obviously, we do have space on these kinds of streets, and plenty of it; it’s just that it is allocated entirely to motor traffic. That the BBC presenter could not even see what was right before his eyes is unfortunately quite common; we are in a situation where four-lane gyratories and junctions are seen as ‘natural’, and that provision for walking and cycling must therefore be fitted in around the margins. Likewise, on narrow streets (those genuinely narrow streets) we can make cycling and walking pleasant, by reducing speeds, and by restricting or even removing motor traffic.

This really isn’t rocket science; as both Phil and Chris pointed out, it has been done in countries only a few hundreds of miles away, and in the last few decades. We should be ‘hoping’, not ‘coping’, as Mark Ames memorably described the aims and intentions of London Cycling’s Love London, Go Dutch campaign in the latest Street Talk. I can’t put it much better than that.

Should we employ children as transport planners?

In Mikael Colville-Andersen‘s talk at the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea’s Bikeminded event last month, he described how he had asked the children at the school his son attends to redesign a roundabout near the school. The results were very different from how the roundabout might have been designed by adults; the design was quite obviously informed by how the children themselves would want to negotiate the roundabout, when not in cars.

I was reminded of this anecdote about how useful it can be to seek out the opinions of children by a CBeebies programme that was recently mentioned on Twitter. Part of the series My Story, in which children find out what their grandparents did, this particular episode focused on young Leo and his grandfather Joe, who was a civil engineer in Glasgow.

We meet them addressing a traffic jam, blocking up Leo’s wooden toy road set.

Papa Jim: Uh oh, there’s a traffic jam up ahead. You’re going to have to stop. And look, this traffic jam goes all the way along here, and up over this bridge. How are we going to fix it?

Leo ponders this question, and then comes up with an obvious answer that I suspect not many adults would give.

Leo: We could take some cars off.

Take some cars off! The simple, direct approach.

Papa Jim: We could. Would you like to try and take some cars off over there? Is that where you would take them off?

Leo: Yes.

Papa Jim: Okay. You take the cars off then.

And the cars are removed. Leo has intuitively grasped that one of the simplest ways to address a traffic jam is to to get rid of the thing causing the blockage – too many cars.

But adults know better, of course, as our narrator quickly tells us.

NARRATOR: But that won’t work in real roads! So – what can be done?

Getting rid of some of the cars won’t work, apparently. So what can be done? With a sprinkling of magic dust, the answer is revealed to us.

Really wide roads!

A really, really big road, that won’t ever have a traffic jam on it. Except that this one does. Better make it wider!

NARRATOR: There are millions of cars on the roads. So how can we stop traffic jams? Look at all those cars stuck in traffic! They’re going to be late!

Footage of another really wide road, no doubt built to get rid of traffic jams, that has… a traffic jam on it.

NARRATOR: [Ignoring the implications of the footage appearing on the screen] Ah! So making more lanes would allow for more cars to travel more smoothly, and help stop traffic jams!

We are shown more really wide roads. Note that the bridge – despite having three lanes – is blocked by a traffic jam. As this is a children’s programme, I don’t think this footage is being used ironically.

PAPA JIM: I think that’s what I would have done in the first place. It’s make a big wide road, so that you can get lots of cars on it.

Papa Jim, just like the narrator, rejects Leo’s solution, plumping instead for making the roads even wider, to accommodate ‘lots of cars’; ‘lots of cars’ that will most likely create traffic jams just as dense as on the unwidened roads.

Here Leo is thinking – ‘Wouldn’t it just be better to get rid of some of the cars?’

The road that Leo’s grandfather built to ‘get rid of traffic jams’ was the M8 orbital motorway in the centre of Glasgow, an inner ring road that was abandoned, before completion, in 1980, as a result of growing public anger about the scarring of the urban landscape it necessitated. Wikipedia isn’t necessarily a reliable source, but it tells me that the M8 is

consistently jammed at rush hour

And when Leo and his grandfather take a trip to visit this ‘special road’, built to ‘get rid of traffic jams’, it looks like this –

Certainly the ‘old roads’ of Glasgow couldn’t take all these vehicles. But instead of getting rid of some of these cars, as Leo suggested, large swathes of the city were flattened to accommodate them. And more of them.

The Dutch made similar mistakes. Until the 1970s, the Catharijnesingel in Utrecht was a wide canal, with narrow roads on either side of it. Then the canal was filled in to construct a similar road to the M8 in Glasgow; a large urban motorway, right through the heart of the city.

Catharijnesingel in 2009 – courtesy of Google

But when I visited Utrecht last year, this urban motorway had gone, and the canal was in the process of being restored.

Catharijnesingel, 2011. You can see the same buildings on the right.

By 2018, the Catharijnesingel will look something like this –

Picture from Mark Wagenbuur

The motorway is completely gone, and the bridges across the canal are for buses only, along with bicycles and pedestrians. The location of this mock-up is approximately where I was standing to take the photograph of the building works (and the corresponding Google Streetview image). Turning to the right –

Courtesy of Google. The building at upper right corresponds to that seen on the left in the mock-up.

You can read more about the transformation of this area in this informative post from Mark Wagenbuur.

The Dutch have arrived, eventually, at a ‘Leo’ solution to an inner-city transport problem, having first tried out the ‘Papa Joe’ solution. Having built the big wide road to accommodate cars, vans and trucks, Utrecht has decided to remove capacity for these vehicles from its inner city, and to encourage many of those journeys to be made, instead, by public transport, bicycle, or on foot. The problem of congestion has been solved by getting rid of some of the cars – and the city has been made more pleasant as a result.

Perhaps we should start paying more attention to what children suggest.

CBeebies item via Matthew Hankins on Twitter