Swimming with sharks – the truth about Safety In Numbers

You knew it was dangerous. But you let people go swimming anyway.

Let us imagine a situation on a holiday resort island – call it ‘Amity Island’ – which is subject to increasing numbers of shark attacks on its numerous beaches. The authorities are rightly concerned, and commission a study, which discovers a correlation between the numbers of people swimming at different beaches, and the number of shark attacks.

Namely – it is found that there are more shark attacks, per person swimming in the sea, at those beaches were there are fewer people swimming. And, conversely, it is (relatively) safer to swim at beaches where there are plenty of people swimming. On these beaches the rate of shark attacks, per person swimming, is lower.

It is then hypothesised that perhaps it is actually the numbers of people swimming at these more populated beaches that is somehow responsible for the lower rate of shark attacks. Perhaps it is something connected to the numbers of people in the water that discourages the sharks from attacking? In other words, the reason might be that the sharks’ behaviour is modified by the number of people in the water – lots of people mean they are less likely to attack.

No hard and fast evidence for this change in the sharks’ behaviour is discovered, but nevertheless a plan is put forward to encourage more people to swim in the water on those beaches where people are more likely to suffer a shark attack. After all, there is a proven link between the risk of shark attack, and the numbers of people swimming. Thus, if you can simply get more people swimming on the more dangerous beaches, then swimming becomes (relatively) safer for all. The more people that swim, shark attacks become less likely (for each person swimming).

Foolproof.

Except, of course, it isn’t. This isn’t a very sensible way of dealing with the problem of shark attacks, for one particular reason. There might be confounding variables, which make the best beaches for swimming – hence the most popular – simultaneously the least likely to suffer shark attacks (per person swimming).

Another problem is that local knowledge of the beaches, and where sharks are likely to attack, might explain why fewer people are found swimming at the more dangerous beaches. In other words, sharks are keeping people away from certain beaches, rather than people keeping sharks away from others. Put simply, the correlation could run in the other direction.

If either of these explanations are true – and they could well be – then simply encouraging more people to swim on the most dangerous beaches is hopelessly misguided, perhaps even immoral.

It’s immoral in the further sense that it doesn’t actually reduce the absolute risk of shark attacks – which could be achieved by, for instance, erecting barriers to keep sharks away from the beaches completely, or similar measures. The ‘Safety in Numbers’ policy only aims to reduce the relative risk of people swimming. Even if it works, more people could actually die on beaches as a result, although each person swimming would be relatively safer.

Yet this kind of approach to the safety of cyclists and pedestrians has gained a worrying degree of traction over the last decade, despite a similar lack of evidence behind the theory. One of its exponents has been the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, who by coincidence or otherwise has written

My hero is the mayor in Jaws. He’s a fantastic guy, and he keeps the beaches open, if you remember, even after it’s demonstrated that his constituents have been eaten by this killer fish. Of course he was proved catastrophically wrong in his judgment, but his instincts were right.

‘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).

The modern history of this idea can be traced back to a paper by P L Jacobsen, published in 2003 in the journal Injury Prevention. Looking at various data sets at a variety of scales (the amount of walking and cycling in 68 different Californian cities, the distance walked and cycled in Danish towns, walking and cycling rates in a number of European countries, and the total amount of annual cycling in the UK and the Netherlands) and comparing them with fatality/injury rates, Jacobsen argued

A motorist is less likely to collide with a person walking and bicycling if more people walk or bicycle. Policies that increase the numbers of people walking and bicycling appear to be an effective route to improving the safety of people walking and bicycling.

The one graph in Jacobsen’s paper that might be of particular interest to UK cycling campaigners – who are often deeply attached to the Safety in Numbers concept– is this one –

Does “increasing the numbers of people walking and cycling” mean that fatalities are less likely, on the evidence of this graph? Well, not really. The fatality rate in 1950 is virtually identical to that in 1999, despite a vastly greater amount of cycling in 1950. Likewise cycling was much safer, relatively, in 1999 than it was in 1972, despite a virtually identical amount of cycling being carried out in the UK. And perhaps most damningly of all, from 1983 to 1999, people cycled less, and yet it became safer to do so (the graph runs down towards the origin).

Those who think that the best way to create safer cycling is just to get more people cycling should take a long hard look at this graph, because frankly it’s a complete mess, that shows no clear relationship at all between the amount of cycling, and relative safety.

However, Jacobsen himself is undaunted, stating that the relationship is ‘complex’, and ties himself in knots coming up with intervening variables that account for the way the graph shoots all over the place (intervening variables like, for instance, the amount of driving, or even seatbelts, which are not accounted for by the ‘Safety in Numbers’ hypothesis).

No such problems with another graph Jacobsen includes, comparing cycling rates with safety, but this time in the Netherlands, from 1980-98 –

By comparison, this relationship is more straightforward. More cycling, from 1980 onwards, corresponds more or less directly with greater relative safety.

While Jacobsen concedes (somewhat vaguely) that, over this period,

the Netherlands has implemented a range of policies to encourage people to walk and bicycle and make them safer. These efforts have succeeded in increasing bicycle use and decreasing risk.

He then goes on to state that

it is improbable that the roadway design, traffic laws, or social mores, all of which change relatively slowly, could explain the relationship between exposure and injury rates. The more plausible explanation involves changes in behavior associated with changes in the amount of walking and bicycling.

In other words, the reason cycling has become safer is not because of changes to the physical environment; rather, the “more plausible explanation” is that drivers are behaving differently now that they are surrounded by more cyclists.

I’ll leave you to judge whether that is indeed more plausible; what is interesting is that this explanation of improved driver behaviour as a consequence of being surrounded by more walkers and cyclists is only a hypothesis. It is not substantiated by Jacobsen. He cites research showing that motorists drive slower when surrounded by more pedestrians (not, in itself, an indicator of better or safer driving), and also speculates that

motorists in communities or time periods with greater walking and bicycling are themselves more likely to occasionally walk or bicycle and hence may give greater consideration to people walking and bicycling.

The operative word here being ‘may’. There isn’t any research cited; this is pure speculation.

the most plausible explanation for the improving safety of people walking and bicycling as their numbers increase is behavior modification by motorists when they expect or experience people walking and bicycling.

And that’s it. It’s very thin stuff indeed for what has proved to be the foundation of nearly a decade of ‘safety’ promotion amongst transportation engineers, urban planners and walking and cycling advocates. Just last month I read Rob Penn arguing, in the Observer, that

Right now… we need to keep transmitting a positive message, a message that extols the utilitarian, democratic virtues of the bicycle, a message that encourages people to wheel their steeds out of the garage and into the sunshine. Which brings me back to my first point: if you increase the number of cyclists, it becomes safer to cycle. [my emphasis]

This argument has been repeated so often it is perhaps a little unfair to single one person out for parroting it – this is just the most recent example – but the causal relationship posited in bold simply isn’t substantiated. Jacobsen only identified a correlation (and a deeply shaky one at that, if we re-examine the graph of cycling and risk in the United Kingdom). He did not establish a causal relationship – only assumed one! – and on top of that only speculated about a possible cause that might explain that relationship, namely improved driver behaviour.

That cause has not been established. In a critical appraisal of the ‘Safety in Numbers’ concept by Rajiv Bhatia and Megan Wier, published last year in the journal Accident Analysis and Prevention, the authors write

A popular explanation of [the non-linear relationship between numbers of walkers and cyclists and the rate of injury or death] is that an increasing numbers of walkers or cyclists directly influences hazardous behaviors of motor vehicle drivers; hence, the term “Safety in Numbers” (Jacobsen, 2003). However, this causal inference has not been subject to a thorough critical examination in the peer-reviewed literature.

In other words, we still don’t have any evidence that driver behaviour is actually modified or improved by the presence of more cyclists to the extent that there might be pay-offs in terms of the safety of the latter group.

Beyond serious concerns about the lack of evidence for a plausible mechanism behind the ‘Safety in Numbers’ effect, the authors also provide a succinct discussion of the serious challenges to the relationship itself, namely Temporal Direction and Confounding (these two problems were touched upon in my hypothetical introductory discussion of shark attacks).

Clearly the temporal direction of the relationship needs to established; we need to see whether more pedestrians or cyclists on a street subsequently ‘create’ more relative safety, rather than safer conditions leading to more walking and cycling. However, just as with the ‘explanatory mechanism’, the evidence for the relationship running in this direction is lacking. The authors write

to our knowledge, there have been no experimental or prospective studies that have evaluated changes in pedestrian volume on changes in injury frequency or rates.

Conversely –

research demonstrates that walkers have a strong value preference for lower speeds, lower traffic volumes, and greater buffers between pedestrians and motorists.

(It is unstated in the paper, which largely focuses on pedestrians, but research into the preferences of cyclists quite obviously finds similar results). In other words, the best evidence suggests that the relationship runs in exactly the opposite direction to that commonly assumed – namely, it is safety that is producing numbers.

So if it turns out that people are staying away from beaches where there are shark attacks, quite obviously it shouldn’t be sensible policy to encourage more people to swim on those beaches. Yet that is what the Safety in Numbers concept, as so commonly and crudely interpreted, suggests.

Likewise on the subject of Confounding, Bhatia and Wier are quite clear that safer environmental conditions could result in both more walking and cycling, and fewer injuries; traffic law and enforcement, and social norms, could have similar (although less well-established) effects. This is the most plausible explanation for the relationship exhibited in the Netherlands; an explanation Jacobsen was quick to dismiss.

The authors further argue that

Since, at the population level, more walking typically means less driving, a reduction in collisions per walker could also potentially be explained by lower traffic volumes, an established and potent determinant of collisions

In other words, more people walking and cycling may indeed result in greater relative safety, but not because of the modified behaviour of drivers. Instead, more straightforwardly, the relative safety comes from the fact that there are simply fewer drivers on the road.

It is this explanation – alongside a failure to change the physical environment for cycling, like in the Netherlands – that I think most persuasively explains why the increasing numbers of cyclists on Britain’s roads has not seen a corresponding reduction in the rate of injuries and fatalities, Indeed in recent years, the ‘Safety in Numbers’ relationship has gone into reverse – despite more cycling, the rate of KSIs (Killed or Seriously Injured) has increased, which is the exact opposite of what the proposed effect suggests should happen. As The Times noted recently

The rate of cyclists killed and seriously injured measured as a proportion of distance travelled rose by 9 per cent in 2011. It was the third consecutive year in which the rate of death and serious injury amongst cyclists had increased. The data undermined Government claims that it is becoming ever-more safe to cycle as increased numbers of cyclists take to the roads in Britain.

This shouldn’t really surprise us – if we trace the graph of fatalities/billion km travelled against the amount of UK cycling presented in the Jacobsen paper, we could easily be heading back towards 1983.

The problem is two-fold. There are still plenty of motor vehicles on the roads, and the physical environment has not changed. Clearly if everyone stopped driving, then an unchanged road environment would become considerably safer. You would only see single person accidents, or cyclist-on-pedestrian,  or cyclist-on-cyclist collisions, which are far less serious.

But despite more people cycling, motor traffic has barely declined at all. So there is still, approximately, the same volume of hazard that cyclists have to deal with, on roads that are just as dangerous for cycling on. It is deeply unrealistic, therefore, to expect the rate of injury and death to decrease.

At some distant point in the future we may hit a point at which sufficient numbers of people walking and cycling, and few enough are driving, that relative safety is achieved, without any change to the environment, but that is some way off, and the route to that point is unclear, and may be littered with the bodies of cyclists and pedestrians.

In a paper published in 2009, Rune Elvik argued that a doubling of pedestrian and cyclist volume, with corresponding mode shift away from driving, would not, alone, reduce the KSI burden, and may actually increase it. Indeed, he suggests that, without any change in the environment, it is only when the amount of driving is reduced by 50% (with corresponding mode shift to walking and cycling) that we may see a reduction in the total KSI burden. That is an enormously long way to go by ‘Safety in Numbers’ alone, with an  increasing KSI burden in every year that we attempt to get people to switch to bicycles. Freewheeler parodied this attitude in a recent post, writing

In a lively question and answer session the speaker was asked about recent rises in cyclists killed and injured on Britain’s roads. Sam said this showed that more people were cycling, which was very good news indeed. However, numbers were not yet great enough for the safety in numbers effect to work, which is why we must get more people cycling by spreading the message that cycling is safe.

But unfortunately this parody is not very far from the truth.

This brings us to a final problem with the ‘Safety in Numbers’ thesis, again touched on in my ‘shark’ discussion. Namely, that it is not particularly concerned with the total burden of injury or death, only with the rate at which deaths and injuries are suffered by a particular group of road and street users. ‘Safety in Numbers’, crudely applied, is quite content to see an increase in the absolute numbers of people being killed or seriously injured, if the rate at which they are being killed or seriously injured decreases.

This has serious implications for the way the safety of pedestrians and cyclists might be dealt with. Just like our resort of Amity might have decided to forgo the expense of erecting shark nets to keep the sharks away – which would have provided a higher degree of both relative and absolute safety – opting instead for the cheaper option of encouraging ‘Safety in Numbers’, so transport and urban planners might similarly decide to forgo the expense of redesigning streets in order to lower both the relative and absolute KSI toll, likewise plumping for the cheapest, and politically easiest, option. As Bhatia and Wier write

A danger with the SIN [Safety in Numbers] policy prescription is that it potentially shifts the cause and responsibility of the problem to walkers – the victims of pedestrian-vehicle collisions – and shifts attention away from fundamental change in roadway design, revision of speed policies, increased investment in pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure, gross disparities in conditions that support safe walking and bicycling in our communities, and the high absolute numbers of people being killed or injured while engaging in these sustainable transportation behaviours in the United States and elsewhere.

There is, I think, an analogous situation in Great Britain, where very little attention has been paid over the last decade to adjustment of the physical environment to make cycling safer. (There are signs – small signs – that this is about to change). Most of the attention has instead focused on behaviour, particularly the behaviour of cyclists, with attempts to train them to become safer, and also on how they act and dress. How much of this is down to widespread adoption of the ‘Safety In Numbers’ hypothesis, I cannot say, but it has certainly provided an outlet for those in positions of power who might be less inclined to grasp the nettle and make hard decisions about changing the physical environment for cycling. Again, without wishing to single anyone out, I notice that Transport for London’s Ben Plowden was sticking to this script at the recent London Assembly Transport Committee on Cycling Safety –

I’ve been cycling in London for many years. You used to see hardly any other cyclists on the road, but it’s very different now. I think you can get a “virtuous circle” where you get more cyclists, and improved behaviour by road users, leading to a “tipping point” where things change significantly. Now I see in some places 40 cyclists at every cycle of the lights. That must be having an effect on people’s perception.

Quite where this ‘tipping point’ might lie is, as will hopefully be apparent from the discussion here, really quite unknown, and the effects of ‘Safety In Numbers’ in the meantime very questionable. (The report by David Arditti on this meeting is worth reading in full because it gives a real flavour of the pervasiveness of ‘Safety in Numbers’ thinking).

Bhatia and Wier argue that the environmental determinants of injuries to vulnerable road users have been studied in depth, and it is clearly and consistently motor vehicle volume and speed, and roadway design, that are the important predictors. This evidence suggests, in their words, ‘an urgent need’ to focus on policies that reduce exposure to risk. It does not – quite clearly – suggest that we should employ policies that simply ‘encourage’ more people onto the streets, when those streets have relatively undiminished numbers of motor vehicles on them, and that are still designed in ways that create conflict.

In other words, ‘Safety in Numbers’ is a serious distraction from the actual business of making cycling safer. It is deeply unfortunate that instead of talking about the real problems facing the safety of cyclists, that debate about danger – both actual and perceived – is often discouraged by people who fear potential new cyclists might be ‘put off’. (It is also a handy way – if we are being cynical – for politicians to silence criticism of the dangers on the roads they are responsible for).

It may or may not be true that people are actually discouraged from taking up cycling by how it is discussed (I personally believe any such effect must be negligible in comparison to the everyday perception people have of the streets and roads they walk and drive along, and how inviting they might be for cycling). But if the only reason we want more people to cycle is to diminish the relative risk faced by current cyclists, then frankly I don’t think we should really care about whether they are put off. Because that’s simply not the right approach, both morally, and practically.

The terrible journalist’s guide to writing an article about bicycles

You are a terrible journalist, so naturally enough you are struggling for something to write about. Maybe you’ve run out of things to say about your private life that might actually interest the reading public. Maybe you can’t think of some petty criticism to make of someone in the public eye for being too fat. Or too thin. Or too vulgar.

Maybe you are just lazy.

Well, thank heavens, help is at hand. Here it is, your free guide to writing a shabby article in five minutes flat, one that’s guaranteed to get published no matter how awful it is. Yes, bicycles are your meal ticket.

STEP ONE

Have bicycles appeared in the news recently? It doesn’t matter how, or in what form, or how tendentiously a self-propelled object with wheels relates to the actual news story. As long as there is some tenuous link to a bicycle, you are all set, and ready to go.

Did someone famous do something bad/good while riding a bicycle? Perfect.

Did someone do something bad/good while having a bicycle near them? Perfect.

Did someone do something bad/good while someone else was riding a bicycle nearby? Perfect.

Any of these scenarios will do, so long as somewhere, somehow, a bicycle is visible in the far distance. You have your starting point.

STEP TWO

Your next step is to make some positive-sounding noises about how you actually love (some) bicycles. This makes you seem open-minded, even though you are not.

The technique is very easy, especially at the moment, when the Olympics give you an excellent template. Everybody loved the Olympics, and some people who competed in the Olympics used bicycles. Say you liked these people, even if you don’t have really have a clue what it was all about. A couple of paragraphs will do, no more than that. Chris Hoy’s sideburns. Bradley Wiggins’ huge thighs. Blah blah blah.

You can also say that you’ve been so inspired, you’ve even considered taking up using a velocipede (it doesn’t matter if riding a bike is the last thing you would actually consider doing – no-one is going to know you are lying).

You might even use an exercise bike in the gym – conclusive proof that you have nothing against the activity of ‘cycling’.

STEP THREE

Having safely established that you aren’t a prejudiced moron (when of course you are), you can then move on to step three, which is to talk about the bicycle (and its user) featuring in the news. The golden rule here is to focus on the negative.

If the person on the bicycle has done something bad – yelled at someone, dropped litter,  robbed a bank – then find a way to link that to their use of a bicycle. Make it obvious that it is the use of the bicycle itself that has somehow precipitated the bad behaviour. If the person on the bike has done something good, then point out that this is the exception that proves the rule. (If the person in question isn’t riding a bicycle, but has one near them, or has only been using a bicycle recently, or is planning to use a bike, or is known for using a bike, the same rules apply. This is really very easy).

It might, of course, be the case that the person on the bicycle who features in the news is a victim. Don’t let that stop you! Insinuate that he or she might actually have been at fault, and that the fact we’re all jumping to conclusions proves that cyclists are uppity, spoilt and weird.

STEP FOUR

Having got this far, you’ve done the hard work, and you are now free to wibble on about how all bicycle users are innately bad, because they ride bikes, and how this latest incident of yelling/bank robbery by someone on a bicycle only serves to demonstrate this fact. It doesn’t matter if you’ve still got hundreds of words to write to fill out your copy; the field is now open for you to crowbar in as many of the trite and overused clichés about bicycles as you can. You might even start your article with a story about how your mother had an affair with a cyclist, which can be used to excuse away any prejudice that follows.

This step is the best bit, because you don’t even have to do any work. All of these boring tropes have been used before by many other terrible journalists; they’ve been recycled so often you should consider yourself free to just copy and paste their articles, perhaps switching around some sentences and adjectives. No-one will care.

The genius bit is that if you give it a year or so, you can recycle your own article (also known as ‘Doing a Petronella’). It’s the gift that keeps on giving.

Of course, if you are such a terrible journalist that you can’t even be bothered to do that, here are some helpful phrases and words you can just pop straight into your article to get you up to your word limit. It helps if you can get them all in. Your editor will be especially pleased.

Cyclists are superior/entitled/smug

(Hint – try adding the word ‘race’ or ‘tribe’ or ‘species’ whenever you can. It makes cyclists sound exotic and foreign, and allows you to use the kind of language that you would never get away with if you were writing about an actual race. Articles like this are the ideal way for you to sneakily get latent prejudice out of your system!)

Cyclists wear lycra

(Of course not very many cyclists actually wear lycra, but wearing lycra is weird, and so helps to reinforce the impression that cyclists are weird, even if they’re not)

Cyclists are louts.

(Perfect when used alliteratively with the above)

Cyclists wear luminous clothing.

(See above point about lycra. It’s weird. Cyclists are weird. Everybody loves this stuff)

Cyclists don’t wear luminous clothing, which means they are irresponsible and have no regard for their own safety.

(Obviously this slightly contradicts the above point, but no-one actually cares about consistency. In this vein, you can also label cyclists who don’t wear helmets as ‘irresponsible’, and also say they look weird for wearing them. Cyclists can’t win. It’s perfect.)

Cyclists are angry

(And nobody knows why! It’s completely inexplicable! It helps here if you have an anecdote about how, just the other day, you were driving along when a cyclist suddenly appeared on your bonnet, red-faced and yelling at you like a maniac. You had to swerve to get him off your car, and speed away. For your own safety)

Cyclists are foul-mouthed

(You merely held down your horn for five seconds to get a cyclist out of your way, and you were quite unreasonably met with a swear word! How dare they!)

Cyclists are sensitive

(You can use this both in the article, and in the inevitable flood of angry responses to your article, which will usefully prove your point that cyclists are angry, and sensitive, and that you were right all along)

Cyclists have no regard for the law

(It doesn’t matter if you don’t actually have any data or figures on law-breaking rates, or how this might compare with how often motorists break laws. Say you saw a cyclist going through a red light the other day. That will do)

I saw a cyclist on the pavement/in the middle of the road

(Helpfully, there is only a tiny, miniscule sliver of space in the public realm that cyclists are legitimately allowed in – ‘the cycle lane’. If a cyclist is not in ‘a cycle lane’, they are fair game for criticism)

Cyclists are slow

(They hold me up, and create traffic jams. And also ’cause’ accidents when I try to overtake them, as I am entitled to, whatever the circumstances.)

Cyclists ‘bomb down the road’

(They’re so fast, they come out of nowhere. Like Bradley Wiggins on the A5209. The important point to remember is that whether a cyclist is fast or slow, they are always at fault. Again, this is an open goal.)

A final tip – be creative. You might even manage to come up with some stereotypes of your own!

And remember, if anyone objects to your rubbish, you have two foolproof lines of defence.

The first is to write about how angry/sensitive/self-righteous cyclists are, and that only cyclists would not realise that you were never meant to be taken seriously – ‘The Parris/Nye defence’ (this works even if you’ve said they should be killed!).

And your second defence? Remember how you once rode a bike about a decade ago in France in the grounds of your friend’s chateau? Or how you stood over a bicycle once for a photoshoot that you had been chauffered to and from? Or how you use a stationary exercise bike?

Perfect.

You are a cyclist, and some of your best friends are cyclists too!

This post was updated on the 11th November to include more helpful tips from the Sunday Express

The Vondelpark – a route for bicycles, not just a leisure facility

The Vondelpark in Amsterdam is a large public park to the southwest of the city centre, located in a prosperous district of large houses that were constructed in the 19th century. It’s about the same length as Hyde Park, although somewhat narrower, which means that it’s around one-third the area of the park in London.

This substantial park is large and very attractive, with beautiful tress, sculpted gardens and lakes – it’s quite easy to get lost in the centre of it. On the times I visited, it was full of people walking their dogs, or jogging, or visiting the cafes within it, alongside groups of school children doing exercises, or other groups doing yoga.

Unsurprisingly for a park in a major Dutch city, it was also full of people on bikes.

These pictures have not been cherry-picked. They are entirely representative of the people cycling through the park; the young, the old, families, businessmen and women, and amongst them, the occasional ‘recreational’ cyclist, wearing a helmet and lycra.

None of the cyclists pictured here, however, are wearing sporting equipment or clothing that would mark them out as ‘cyclists’ once they step off their bikes. Superficially it might appear as if they are all out on a ‘leisure’ ride; the sort of activity you might see in a British park, where families go to ride around for fun, safe from interactions with motor traffic.

But in reality nearly all the cyclists in these pictures are actually going somewhere, making a trip, rather than going for a bike ride for the sake of it. They might have been shopping or working in the city centre and are returning home; they might be meeting up and heading into the city for an evening out; they might have picked up their children at a nearby school and are escorting them back to where they live.

The park – although a very attractive place to cycle – isn’t somewhere that people need to go to cycle in comfort, because the rest of the city is pleasant to cycle around. The people pictured here are only using the park as one leg – a quick, convenient leg – of their journey across the city. More about this below.

As you can see in these pictures, the ‘path’ that people are cycling on isn’t really a ‘path’ at all, instead being what could reasonably be called a wide road.

That means there’s very little conflict between the large numbers of people cycling through, generally at quite a reasonable pace, and the other people who might be walking or ambling about. (The only motor vehicles in the park are the occasional police patrol car, or park maintenance vehicle.)

The width of the equivalent path in Hyde Park – remember London has aspirations to be “a world-class cycling city” – compares very poorly, despite there being, quite literally, acres of space available.

At best, half the width of the route in the Vondelpark, even without counting the gravel tracks that exist alongside the tarmac road in the park in Amsterdam for joggers and walkers.

It’s noteworthy, however, that this route in Hyde Park is where you are most likely to find people cycling in ordinary clothes in London. In particular, there’s a high percentage of tourists trundling back and forth on Boris bikes.

The reason for this aren’t hard to discern – it’s a safe environment, with no interactions with motor vehicles. I’m sure more tourists would like to cycle around Parliament Square or Trafalgar Square, but frankly I expect very few are willing to do so. And that brings us to a major problem with the route across Hyde Park. Unlike the Vondelpark, that safe environment in Hyde Park stops rather rapidly at either end of the route across it, meaning that the use of this path is quite limited as a route to anywhere else for the more nervous or less confident.

Quite a large number of people are using it as a route, but they are either negotiating Bayswater Road or Kensington High Street at the western end (hardly pleasant places to cycle), or, at the western end, Grosvenor Place or the West End itself once the eastbound off-carriageway provision ends with the Mall – and hence they tend to be young or middle-aged men capable of cycling at faster speeds and more confident at cycling amongst motor vehicles. Indeed, last summer I cycled through the park on my way to Shepherd’s Bush, observing how the numbers of females, the elderly, or the young, on bikes – quite high in the park itself – dwindled to zero as I cycled along Bayswater Road, entirely the domain of fit young men.

Likewise if you are coming from Victoria station – one of the main transport hubs in central London – and you wish to cycle across Hyde Park towards west London, you will have to negotiate this stretch of Hyde Park Corner, holding a line approximately in the middle of the road so that you are in the best place to take the exit for the park.

Perfectly fine if you keep your wits about you (this video was taken immediately after Boris’s underwhelming performance at the Times’s Mayoral Husting on cycling in April). But in reality only a place for the quick and the brave. There’s an enormous amount of space here for a safe cycling route – it’s at least five or six lanes wide – but at present you have to hold your nerve and cycle in the middle of the road (or failing that, cycle up the left hand side, then abandon and use the pedestrian crossings).

Bayswater Road, or Kensington High Street – the natural exit points at the western end of the park – are hardly any better. So demand for the route across Hyde Park is obviously being suppressed by the conditions outside of it. This isn’t true of the Vondelpark, where, as I hope to show now, cycling across it simply forms part of a smooth and continuous network, with conditions that feel – and are – just as safe as within the park.

The map below is taken from a Fietserbond cycling route map of Amsterdam, covering the area around the Vondelpark. At the top of the map you can just see the start of the outermost of the rings of canals in the city centre; the park runs along a diagonal axis, pointing towards the city centre.

A green line runs straight through the park (I should stress that these green lines only represent cycling routes recommended by the Fietsersbond – you can, in practice, cycle anywhere in Amsterdam without encountering hostile conditions, and no need to “keep your wits about you”).

At the southern end of the park, you can see how the route continues directly straight across a major road, the Amsteleveenseweg. Like this –

A bicycle-only street (which you can see in the background of the photograph above) forms the continuation of this route –

It then proceeds over a bicycle-only bridge, before heading off into the suburbs on a wide track, separated from the road.

You can see how the conditions for cycling here are just as safe and pleasant as in the park itself, and that the park is just a segment of the wider network.

Likewise to the north of the park, heading into the city, a major road passes over us on a bridge – we don’t have to negotiate this road at all.

As we hit the canals, coming out of the park gates, there is a wide, signalled crossing for bikes to take us across a major road –

And then a bicycle- and pedestrian-only bridge over the canal –

And a bicycle-only road through a recent development.

Every effort has been taken to make sure that the route as a whole is safe, direct and easy to use; just as enjoyable as cycling in the park itself. Separation from motor vehicles is the guiding principle outside the park, and that makes cycling outside of it just as pleasant as cycling in it.

The same cannot be said of Hyde Park.

A ‘cycling safety’ campaign from Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Birmingham

From the Birmingham Post –

Hospitals see 50 per cent rise in cycling accidents since Olympics

Cyclists inspired to hit the streets by Britain’s Olympic and Paralympic stars have left medics battling a 50 per cent rise in bike accidents. Figures collected by Birmingham’s Queen Elizabeth Hospital showed falls from bikes had increased from an average of 20 per month last year to 30 this year.

It is, of course, entirely possible that there are 50 per cent more people riding bikes in Birmingham compared to the equivalent period last year, as a result of the ‘Olympic fever’ this story talks about, in which case the 50 per cent rise in bike ‘accidents’ might not be quite so alarming. But we don’t know. The rise in casualties are presented in isolation, which isn’t helpful.

And more than 70 people went to the A&E department last month suffering cycle-related injuries, while four people died in collisions.

Two of these people who died in collisions in and around Birmingham were 18-year-old Anthony Phillips, who was killed when a car mounted the pavement in Droitwich, and an as yet unnamed 19-year-old who was hit by a bus while cycling in Wolverhampton. Another cyclist, Paul Lake, was found dead by the road in highly suspicious circumstances in Kingswinsford, near Wolverhampton. He had suffered ‘serious injuries’; it is still unclear what happened to him. The fourth cycling death in the area appears to be that of 78-year-old Arthur Bough, who was hit by a lorry in Kidderminster, some 20 miles from Birmingham.

A flavour of the other ‘accidents’ involving cyclists around Birmingham comes from this incident in Ashchurch where a cyclist was struck by a Range Rover towing a caravan. He suffered ‘serious injuries’ and was airlifted to the aforementioned Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham. Likewise this cyclist was also airlifted to the hospital with ‘multiple injuries’ after being hit by a van in Solihull. The article notes that

the van also hit a house after colliding with the bike

Which gives some idea of the force with which this man must have been hit.

What does the hospital have to say about these incidents? Margaret Garbett, the hospital trust’s matron for A&E –

“Over the last two months we have seen minor injuries, such as cuts and broken bones, and some very serious injuries, including four fatalities. The majority of those patients were not wearing protective equipment such as helmets or brightly-coloured clothing.

“Cycling is a great sport and we actively encourage our staff and the public to keep fit by cycling but, first and foremost, we want people to be safe on their bikes. We hope our campaign will encourage cyclists to wear protective equipment and clothing, to ride safely on the roads. We also hope motorists will be more aware of cyclists when they are driving.”

I hate to break this to Margaret Garbett, but brightly-coloured clothing is not ‘protective equipment’. (Cycling isn’t necessarily a ‘sport’ either, nor is it a ‘hobby’, as the BBC journalist in this now lapsed video about the same story described it).

Nor is a polystyrene hat going to be any use at all when you are struck by buses, lorries, or cars mounting the pavement, or vans that subsequently damage houses.

Frankly this is an insane response to cyclists being killed and seriously injured on the roads around Birmingham. It appears to me that the hospital is not paying any attention at all to the circumstances under which people are being maimed and killed while riding bikes, and only observing the absence of day-glo jackets and polystyrene helmets when they arrive broken and bleeding in their accident and emergency department.

But never mind. They’ve teamed up with Halfords to launch a ‘cycle safety campaign’.

QE staff are dealing with so many biking accidents that the hospital has launched a cycle safety campaign with store chain Halfords and safety charity RoSPA. It aims to encourage motorists and cyclists to take more care on the roads and urges them to wear protective gear such as helmets and high-visibility clothing.

This poorly-worded sentence appears to suggest that motorists in the area are also being ‘encouraged’ wear high-visibility clothing and helmets, but of course that can’t be right. Motorists never suffer head injuries.

Some cycle tracks and junctions in Amsterdam

Inspired by a recent post from the Alternative Department for Transport about cycle tracks crossing minor junctions, I spent some of my time wandering and cycling round Amsterdam last week examining the kinds of arrangements of cycle tracks at junctions of various types and sizes.

Starting with smaller junctions, here’s what looks to be a rather old cycle track (judging by the undistinguished grey paving, which is no longer favoured) alongside a major road, crossing a minor side street.

The important elements here are the extensive pavement continuity and the steep ramps on both sides of the pavement/cycle track. It’s quite clear to any driver moving through this area that they should do so with caution.

Below, another older cycle track, across a minor road to the right, again with ramps and pavement continuity. Ignore the white car; it is parked, slightly illegally.

In this case there is actually no entry for vehicles into this residential side road (indicated by the circular sign at upper right), so conflicts for vehicles turning across the track don’t exist. Drivers will only be arriving from the right. Indeed, it’s very common for Dutch residential streets to have one-way restrictions like this; it cuts out through-traffic, as well as having the secondary benefit of eliminating many turning conflicts across cycle tracks and pavements.

A more recent example, in a new development in south Amsterdam. The track is smoother.

Again there is pavement continuity on both sides. The tactile paving on the right is to alert the blind or partially-sighted that they are crossing a side road.

Nearby, this example involves a track crossing a one-way minor road. In this case only entry by vehicles is possible, not exit.

This is the Google Streetview image of the same location.

Note that on-street parking stops some distance before the junction, providing good visibility for any vehicle that might wish to turn into the residential side street.

Another side road with vehicles turning in off the main road, into a residential cul-de-sac.

The cycle track is set back, after a raised ramp and large paved area.

Here’s a cycle track in the centre of Amsterdam, running alongside a one-way street, and crossing a side road, into which the van is waiting to turn.

Again, it’s obvious to the driver that he will be crossing an area in which there will be pedestrians and cyclists.

In the example below, a cycle track has continuity in a situation in which drivers are forced to turn right across it.

Interestingly this cycle track is created just in advance of the junction; it’s a cycle lane alongside a vehicle lane beforehand. The movements are deliberately separated. The zebra crossing and the ramps, along with the sharp turn, serve to keep vehicle speeds low.

This cycle track crosses a larger side road, with priority –

As in the previous example, being placed adjacent to a zebra crossing helps to lower vehicle speeds, as well as to establish priority.

Not all junctions are minor, of course. Where turning traffic might be more substantial in volume, cycle track crossings become signalised.

With these types of junctions, turning conflicts are almost completely eliminated, as the straight-on movements of bicycles are separated in time from the right-turn movements of the vehicles, as in this example –

Right-turning vehicles are held at red, while bicycles have a green light to progress across the junction.

The light sequence coincides with a green crossing for pedestrians.

While you may have to wait for a green signal, you do have the benefit of a ‘free’ right turn (or, equivalently in this country, a left turn) at any time. I also came across induction loops placed in the cycle tracks; these are triggered by bicycles, and give you a green signal instantly, depending on traffic volume.

Even larger junctions are crossed in one signal. I moved through both these large junctions on just one green light.

It’s smooth, easy and simple. So often I caught myself instinctively looking back over my left shoulder for a UK-style ‘life preserver’ safety check, which simply wasn’t necessary.

An article published yesterday by David Arditti about the London Assembly Transport Committee on cycling safety (worth reading in its own right) contains an interesting fact, as reported by Rachel Aldred – namely that there were only four right-hook (the equivalent of our left-hook) cycling deaths in the entirety of the Netherlands last year, despite their vastly higher cycling rate.

I don’t know how many of the cycling deaths in the UK last year involved left hooks, but I can immediately think of five in just London alone; Paula Jurek, Paul McGreal, Daniel Cox, and the two deaths at Bow Roundabout, Brian Dorling and Svitlana Tereschenko. This leads me to suspect that a substantial proportion of UK cycling deaths involve left hooks, certainly far outstripping the mere four recorded in the Netherlands last year.

This is important, because we are consistently told that separation is unsafe, especially at junctions. This may be true of the way off-carriageway provision is currently designed and implemented in Great Britain, where priorities are often unclear, and cyclists often have to cross roads while yielding and looking in several directions. Indeed, the latest Department for Transport guidance on Shared Use Routes for Pedestrians and Cyclists [pdf] contains this picture of a particularly hopeless two-way pavement cycling route which is almost inviting a collision.

However, it is certainly not true of the way the Dutch separate cyclists at junctions. I hope the pictures of Amsterdam in this post have illustrated that there is a way of treating junctions correctly, to allow cyclists to progress through them safely, without abandoning them like the current British fetish for ‘shared use pavements’ seems to do, as shown in the picture above, which continue, sadly, to be the only official way of accommodating cyclists’ movements away from the carriageway.

With Dutch design, motor vehicle turning movements are often eliminated altogether, but where they are not, the design is clear, vehicle speeds are kept low, and at junctions where turning movements are greater in number, the movements of bicycle and motor traffic are kept separated in time. Dutch cyclists are very often safe at junctions because of separation, not in spite of it.

Signs of hope

You may remember that in August, Philip Circus, a Horsham District Councillor, wrote a piece for the West Sussex County Times entitled Why British cyclists are not always heroes.

The article, which I responded to here, actually bears a great deal of resemblance to the recent editorial penned by Richard Nye of the Richmond Magazine, in that it uses general goodwill towards (sporting) cyclists during the Olympics as a base camp en route to the summit of latent prejudice.

Where Richard Nye wrote about finding himself with ‘strange feelings of attachment’ to British Olympic cyclists, so Philip Circus wrote of the ‘joy’ of seeing those cyclists perform well. Both then quickly use these feelings as a counterpoint to their more general dislike of cyclists. Nye was happy to find himself swearing and cursing at them, ‘back to normal’ after the Olympics. Likewise Circus quickly swerves into talking about how cycling being placed on a ‘national pedestal’ could further exacerbate the sense of ‘superiority and self-righteousness’ that cyclists exhibit, and contribute to yet more ‘selfish’ cycling.

It is quite obvious to me that both of these men misjudged their audience. Maybe a decade ago it would have been safe to write articles with lines about the only good cyclist being a dead one, or that choose to drag up all the hoary old clichés about how badly behaved they are. That’s not safe any more. While prejudice against cycling as a mode of transport is undoubtedly still widespread, the greater public exposure to cycling as a simple means of getting about means that men like Nye and Circus can’t get away with it so easily.

Don’t get me wrong; cycling is still very much a minority pursuit, and stupid opinions about cycling, and people using bicycles, persist. But I think we’ve reached a bit of a tipping point. There’s now sufficient public weight – albeit small – behind cycling to push back against ill-informed diatribes.

Mr. Circus has written his last column for the West Sussex County Times (this was nothing to do with his ‘cycling’ column – he has just come to the end of his run). In it, he wrote about being ‘misunderstood’, just like Richard Nye. Indeed the ‘misunderstood’ angle is set out in his email to Mike Stead, published here. He wrote

I am disappointed that some people, not necessarily yourself, have misunderstood the point that I was making. I was not saying that cycling is bad or that all cyclists are irresponsible, or that there isn’t a case for more emphasis on dedicated cycle routes. The point of my article was to point out that a minority of cyclists behave in a very selfish and unacceptable fashion without any regard to the normal laws and rules of the highway and with no regard for the interests of other road users. Everybody knows and accepts that there are motorists who behave irresponsibly and the law can penalise those people quite harshly. In fairness, it also needs to be recognised that some cyclists behave irresponsibly as well. So often, it tends to be assumed that cyclists are always on the side of the angels and it is always motorists who are in the wrong. Well, it isn’t true and the point of my article is to provoke interest and discussion on this point.

On the contrary, I don’t think anyone ‘misunderstood’ Mr. Circus. Nobody who responded to him was disputing that some cyclists behave in a poor manner, or was arguing that he had pretended all cyclists are irresponsible. Indeed, I think Mr. Circus is being disingenuous.

Nor can it legitimately be claimed that there is somehow a widespread public perception of cyclists being ‘always on the side of the angels’, and that motorists are always in the wrong, and that this perception needs to be ‘challenged’ by the likes of Mr. Circus. Local newspapers like the West Sussex County Times regularly feature articles about ‘selfish’ cycling, cycling on pavements, inconsiderate cycling, and so on. It is hard to escape them, in fact. Articles about dangerous motoring are, by contrast, few and far between.

This brings us to the core of all the objections to his article; namely that for an article purporting to be about the safety of pedestrians being put first, his focus was entirely misplaced. The real danger posed to pedestrians (and indeed to cyclists) comes from motorists, not from bicycles, however much columnists like Mr. Circus chooses to fulminate against their misbehaviour. The statistics do not lie.

Nor, indeed, do the general public share Mr. Circus’ views about the most pressing dangers facing pedestrians. They are most concerned about speeding motorists and reckless driving. They are, in reality, not at all concerned – despite the weight of material that appears in local newspapers – with people cycling on pavements or trundling through red lights.

To repeat, Mr. Circus has misjudged his audience, and his voters. Here is an article from this week’s County Times, featuring Horsham residents concerned about the serious dangers on their streets. It is not about bicycles.

“A child is going to be killed”

A crash which wrote off two cars parked where children were playing just hours before has prompted residents to band together and campaign to reduce the speed limit in Orchard Road, Horsham.

Scot Grant, a resident and former special constable for Sussex Police in Horsham, says a ‘child could have been killed’ in the latest collision, which forms part of a catalogue of incidents his family have endured since they moved to the area in September 2007.

“We very quickly became aware of cars driving well in excess of the speed limit along the road,” Scot told the County Times. “And only a few months after moving we awoke one morning to discover a car had gone through the fence at the front of our property.”

Due to Scot’s role at Sussex Police, his wife became the neighbourhood watch co-ordinator for Eversfield Road and Bennetts Road, which join Orchard Road. During 2009 and 2010 she received countless complaints about how people would drive up and down Orchard Road, and concern drastically mounted when a child walking to school was in a collision with a car in the road. As a result, anti-social behaviour signs were erected in the area.

Scot continued: “We have many friends that live in the various roads off Orchard Road and have young children that play and use the road to walk to the local Kingslea Primary School, or Millais and Forest, and on numerous occasions in the playground the talk has been ‘did you see that idiot this morning’, or ‘how he missed us I don’t know’.

“We have learned to live and not let our children cross the road.”

Now residents have joined forces in a bid to get traffic calming measures implemented in Orchard Road. Scot, who is spearheading the petition online, says he wants to see West Sussex County Council ‘lower the speed limit in the estate.’

The former special constable aims to knock the limit down to 20 mph – a proposal which has been welcomed by numerous residents keen to see change. He added: “I believe that if something is not done now, a child is going to be killed.”

The article – not available online – has a picture of the crashed BMW.

More detail on the same story from the Resident newspaper –

Residents who fear someone will soon be killed by a speeding driver have started a petition to council chiefs.

Sarah Leadbetter, Scot Grant and Jo Grant are calling on West Sussex County Council to introduce traffic-calming measures or a 20 mph speed limit in part of Horsham, including Orchard Road, Bennetts Road and Depot Road.

Mrs Leadbetter, 53, of Orchard Road, told The Resident: “For years, this area has been used as a race track on a Thursday evening, Friday evening, Saturday and Sunday. Cars have been destroyed, fences have been destroyed and bins have been knocked into the road. One resident actually downsized her car because a mirror got knocked off her last car. Another lady had someone drive through her fence into her garden because the driver was speeding.

“We now have a very young generation of children living in this area and it would only be a fate of God if no one got killed or injured. We also have a lot of the older generation in Orchard Road. I have talked to a lot of the residents and they all say the same – that on a weekend they lay in bed waiting for the screech of brakes.

“Residents around this area have said the situation has got worse, with a lot of residents putting in driveways to protect their cars. Of course, not everyone can do this.”

Mrs Leadbetter and Mrs Grant, who are going door-to-door with the petition, collected about 200 signatures in the first three days. Petition forms are available from One Stop in Station Road and the campaigners have also started a petition online.

A spokesman for West Sussex County Council told The Resident: “According to our records, between August 1, 2009, and July 31, 2012, there were two reported injury collisions on the roads you mention. Both were serious. One happened on Depot Road and the other on Orchard Road, at the junction with Oakhill Road.”

These are serious, legitimate concerns about the safety of pedestrians; children walking to school, or playing out in front of their houses. It is absurd, even insane, to pretend that bicycles present the most pressing safety issue in our towns and cities when you read stories like this, about parents not letting their children cross the road, and waking up to find cars in their garden, or smashed up cars where their children were just playing, or trading stories about their latest narrow escape walking to school.

The streets in question are not main routes; they are all residential streets which should not have a 30 mph limit, nor should they be being used as a rat run. They are highlighted on the map below.

Courtesy of Google

As the article states, children have are being seriously injured on these streets, which is unacceptable. Cars should not be racing through them; they should be made safe for children to walk and cycle along.

This is what Mr. Circus should have been devoting his attention to; reducing the actual dangers faced by the residents of Horsham. All the residential streets in Horsham should have 20 mph limits at the very minimum. Indeed, this is something that has already been mooted by a Lib Dem councillor last year, but I can’t find any reference by Mr. Circus (who let’s remember is concerned about pedestrians) writing in support of such a proposal. We need further measures to reduce the rat-running seen on Bennetts Road, and Orchard Road – filtered permeability, which is a cheap and easy way of cutting out through-traffic.

Men like Richard Nye and Philip Circus need to wake up and appreciate – just like the majority of people in the areas where they live are starting to appreciate – that people riding bicycles are just like them; people simply wishing to get from A to B, without any assumptions being made about their mode of transport. In reality, people on bicycles pose an absolutely tiny risk to themselves or to other people, compared with the risks posed by motor traffic. We should be encouraging and facilitating people to use bicycles, not making mean-spirited assumptions and generalisations about them when they do. I hope this trend is dying out.

How seriously should we take the ‘Skycycle’ idea?

The idea of attaching routes for cyclists to the sides of railway lines in London – the so-called ‘SkyCycle’ – has again appeared in the press, this time featuring in the Daily Mail. The article contains a number of fairly strange claims, principally from the man responsible for the idea, Sam Martin of Exterior Architecture, who we are told argues that

the raised network was the only option left to expand cycling in London.

The reason being, in his words,

TfL estimate the number of journeys made by bike will treble to around 1.5 million by 2020. Where are they meant to go? SkyCycle is the next logical step, because you can’t realistically build more cycle lanes on ground level. You have to start knocking down buildings and there will always be the problem of traffic. It will be less safe than it is now and you can’t persuade people to get on bikes as it is even if you keep raising taxes on cars.

Given that this target of 1.5 million journeys, while sounding impressive, actually amounts to only around 5 to 6% of all trips in London being made by bicycle, this is patently wrong. You don’t need to knock buildings down to get a modal share that small, let alone one of 30-40%, which is consistently achieved in Dutch cities, where, you won’t be surprised to hear, no buildings have been demolished, and no tracks for bicycles have been put up in the air when they could quite easily have been put on the ground. (Indeed, ironically, buildings were demolished in Dutch cities, but only to make way for motor traffic. They have in many cases subsequently been rebuilt once the cars have been kept out.)

Oddly, however, Sam Martin believes that

London is not blessed with spare horizontal space….. It’s streets pre date those of any of the cities you mention [CPH/AMS] & there is simply no capacity to include pedestrians (who are poorly serviced enough); buses; vans & eventually perhaps not cars & TfL’s projection of tripling bike journeys from the existing 0.5mill per day to 1.5mill by 2020 to me speaks of an issue that needs to be resolved sooner rather than later.

The age of London’s streets is irrelevant, and the idea that London is somehow cramped for horizontal space by comparison with Amsterdam is unserious. Its streets are wide; very wide in comparison with the medieval centres of plenty of Dutch cities, which don’t seem to have any problems at all in accommodating high numbers of bicycles.

This brings us, of course, to the root issue – what Sam Martin calls ‘the problem of traffic’, presumably the reason why we ‘can’t realistically build more cycle lanes on ground level’.

Well, of course we can. It’s a simple question of priorities. The amount of motor traffic isn’t immutable (the experience of Games Lanes during the Olympics has shown us this). It will adapt and adjust to the amount of road space allocated to it. Prioritise cycling by giving it space and making it safe, pleasant and convenient, and plenty of those 50% of trips in London that are under 2 miles will switch from being made by car to being made by bike. That’s a sane solution to the traffic problem; it doesn’t involve expensive engineering structures attached to railways; structures that cyclists will, apparently, have to pay to use, and which don’t do anything to address the issue of excess motor vehicle capacity.

Needless to say, I think there are several further problems with the concept of these tubes, despite their superficial appeal. The first, and most obvious, is how you get on and off them. This would surely involve ramps, which depending on the height of the tubes, will be long, and consequently quite land-hungry. If you’re not going to waste the space on the land that you’re attempting to ‘free up’ by building tunnels in the sky, then presumably you are only going to have a few access points along the length of the route (another consideration here is that limited access points are beneficial from the point of view of charging for use). So that immediately places a constraint on the usefulness of the tubes for people who might want to make trips that don’t intersect with the access points.

With long distances between access points, we have a further problem of safety and security. There is, presumably, going to be no way to get on and off these things mid-route – otherwise how would you charge for it? And with a railway to one side, and a drop to the other, it’s not something you’re going to want to do anyway. What this adds up to are long stretches with no option of escape should you be confronted at night, or at times where there are fewer people about. The effective equivalent of very long subways. Not a great recipe for the more nervous.

And finally, there is the issue of where these ‘highways’ are going to go, and how expensive it is going to be to fit them onto the sides of railways. As Cycalogical has written,

there isn’t a huge amount of spare room on the elevated tracks in London. It’s not like they were built with a wide strip of surplus land on each side. (That’s the great thing about railways – they are extremely compact in terms of space used per passenger journey.) You can’t have cyclists riding a foot away from trains whooshing by at 60MPH, for the same reason you’re advised to stand back from the platform’s edge at a station, although Boris would probably tell you that it’s perfectly negotiable if you keep your wits about you. I suppose you could have some kind of cantilevered arrangement to hang a cycleway off the side of existing viaducts and bridges, but that would be very complex and cost a fortune. Some parts of the railway do have enough spare land to form a cycle track, but there are so many bridges and points where the spare width isn’t sufficient.

At a guess, such a scheme would be very expensive indeed; without the surplus land, the SkyCycle is effectively going to be an enormously long bridge (indeed, this is what the artists’ impression looks like).

So my concern is that this isn’t a very realistic solution to a problem that could be solved much more cheaply and sensibly at ground level, and with much greater benefit for the city of London. Namely, the construction of cycle lanes and tracks, on the street, which would allow people to make journeys where they want to go, without being constrained in tubes or on bridges, without having to go up and down ramps, without great concern` about being mugged, and without having to pay for the privilege of use.

Just how on board with this scheme are Transport for London and the Mayor? You might think, on a quick reading of both this article in the Mail and an earlier one in the Times of the 16th August, that this is something they are seriously involved in. The Mail article, after all, is headlined

stunning vision of Boris’ planned elevated London bike network

giving the impression that this is his pet project; an impression reinforced by his image appearing prominently in the article, and a brief quote from him.

But if we look a little closer, we only have an assertion that Boris is ‘considering’ ‘an architect’s proposals’. And what does Boris himself actually have to say?

‘There is a proposal, which is very interesting, to hook up mainline stations in London along the side of raised railway tracks, with a new cycle path.’

This is, in fact, the very same quote that appeared in the earlier Times article; it’s been recycled here. The Daily Mail apparently didn’t bother to phone up Boris to ask him for his opinions.

The quote might sound like an endorsement, but all Boris is effectively saying is that there is an ‘interesting’ proposal which he is aware of. This impression is further reinforced by what a spokesperson had to say in the Times –

“The Mayor is committed to leading a cycling revolution in London. The use of railway land or elevated cycleways to provide fast and direct cycling routes around the capital is an exciting idea that his team are looking into.”

‘An exciting idea’ that is being ‘looked into’.

I could be wrong, but to me, this is suggestive of little more than some glossy pictures and videos that have arrived on Boris’s desk, perhaps with a ‘pitch’, and which journalists – with or without prompting – have phoned up to ask him about.

Exterior Architecture – the people behind this proposal – are a garden design and landscape architecture firm. Their latest project appears to be a garden for the New Zealand Kiwi House at the Olympics. They have completed other gardening and landscaping projects.

They certainly don’t seem to have a background in the kind of structural engineering involved in designing and attaching bridges to the sides of existing railway viaducts. I put this to Sam Martin on Twitter, asking him if his company had ever designed anything like this before. He replied

it will be a world first. So no one has. I have the support of Buro Happold & a very good architecture firm too.

I’m not entirely sure that nobody has ever designed structures like this before. But I was interested by the support of Buro Happold. I asked him who he might be involved with at the engineering firm, and how they had helped him with the design. He didn’t answer my question, responding instead

feel free to call me or email, you have found our website obviously. We might help you with your garden needs!

I didn’t need any help with gardening, but I did send him an email the next day, setting out why I was interested in his scheme, and whether he could give me the details of the department at Buro Happold who were supporting him. He replied –

Hi Mark,

i would be more than happy to discuss this with you once I have met you & understood from which angle you are approaching this.

the reason why this was released now was to ‘de politicise’ the entire discussion as Boris made mention of it a bit earlier than i had expected, because ultimately if it is political it has less chance of happening.

so any cynicism & doubt you have about it needs to be addressed by myself before i set you off talking to the people i have been engaged with as this has evolved.

so feel free to call me to arrange a meeting as this idea & the momentum behind it is solely myself & Oli whose original idea sparked this all off over 2 years ago.  we have invested a lot of time & money into this.

I’m not sure this version of events is correct; certainly, I can’t find any reporting of Boris discussing these elevated routes before the stories started appearing in newspapers in the last couple of weeks, although I am ready to stand corrected.

I also rang the London press office of Buro Happpold in an attempt to gain some information, but they didn’t even know what I was talking about. They hadn’t heard of any scheme to build infrastructure alongside London’s railways. Now, to be fair, they are a big firm, and I didn’t have a name or a department, but this did strike me as a little odd.

A further attempt by email to get some answers from Sam Martin remains, at present, unanswered, so this is as far as I can take it. He seems reluctant to give me any more facts until he has addressed my doubt and cynicism, or at least ‘my angle’.

My impression is that this is a scheme that, for whatever reason, is being spun as something that is far more advanced, and officially endorsed, than it actually is. I would be more than happy to have that impression adjusted.

UPDATE

I spoke to Sam Martin on the phone this afternoon, and he very kindly spent some time giving me more detail; detail that is missing from the news reports that have appeared thus far.

He admitted that the whole scheme is very much at an early ‘conceptual’ stage, and that discussions with Network Rail are ongoing. Indeed, the impression I got from my chat with Sam is that if there is any impetus here, it is with the aim of easing the burden of congestion on overground trains.

I asked him how far apart he thought entry and exit points would be, and he suggested they would of the same order of distance as the (rail) stations themselves – kilometres apart. This reinforces my impression that the scheme is a supplement to rail travel; aimed at getting people to switch from the train to their bikes, and thus to free up space on the trains themselves. You would use your Oyster card to touch in as you enter the tunnels, and £1 would be deducted from your account (although I suspect this sum could of course be higher, should the bridges be built).

Sam maintains that the scheme would be privately funded, in entirety, with National Rail land leased to the company building the structures, and TfL then operating it once it is open.

I suspect it is on the issue of charging that the scheme might fall apart; if you have pedalled your bicycle to an access point, for free, I imagine most people would be disinclined to pay for the continuing use of their bicycle, when they can just use the roads for free; roads that they have, after all, used to get to the access points, and will also have to use to continue their journey once they have arrived at their most suitable exit point. Some people (myself included) might be willing to pay £1 to have an entirely traffic- and stress-free journey; but you won’t get that for your £1. I can’t see much demand from cyclists willing to pay to eliminate the stresses of traffic from only a part of their journey.

Sam did make it clear that he is in favour of improving the streets themselves for bicycles; something that wasn’t immediately apparent from his comments in the press. He also said he was strongly in favour of the reduction of private motor vehicle use in central London. He is in favour of ‘cycling without putting himself at risk’, if I have quoted him correctly. So his aims are, I think, laudable.

He is, however, convinced that capacity for bicycles on the arterial roads into and out of London has to be boosted by his kind of scheme. I don’t agree, as I hope I have made plain here. My concern is that useful money – money that could be used to improve the London streetscape – could be diverted into these bridges, which, if one has to pay to access, could end up being seriously underused. That could prove to be the sticking point.

The effect of private car dependence on land use

In her seminal book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs observed that

The more space that is provided for cars in cities, the greater becomes the need for use of cars, and hence for still more space for them.

In real life, we do not suddenly jump five million square feet of city roadbed to sixteen million square feet, and so the implications of accommodating a few more cars and a few more cars and a few more cars are a little harder to see. But swiftly or slowly, the positive feed-back is at work. Swiftly or slowly, greater accessibility by car is inexorably accompanied both by less convenience and efficiency of public transport, and by thinning down and smearing-out of uses, and hence by more need for cars.

Horsham, where I live, is not a great American city – the subject of Jacobs’ book – or even a city. It is a town with a population of just 55,000 people, and with an approximate radius of only two miles. Yet despite its relatively small size, it has an extraordinary amount of space, and building, dedicated to the temporary storage of motor vehicles.

The implications for sustainable transport are not quite as severe as they might be in a city, where demand for space is much higher, and where the resulting ‘smearing-out’ Jacobs talks of is more serious when it comes to the consequences for transport choices. Nevertheless, in towns, the more space that is dedicated to parking inevitably means lower density of use, and the balance tips ever so slightly more in favour of the motor car as a mode of transport, and against walking and cycling. This is to say nothing of the large roads and junctions that are needed to accommodate the flows of ever-increasing numbers of motor vehicles, which in turn do much to discourage walking and cycling as modes of transport.

More than that, the use of urban space for car parking – which is, to repeat, only a temporary storing of motor vehicles – is extraordinarily wasteful. As Jacobs writes

Duplication of car parking is also familiar in suburbs: the schools, the supermarkets, the churches, the shopping centres, the clinics, the movie, all the residences, must have their own parking lots and all this duplicate parking lies idle for much of the time.

Jacobs also argued that car parks disrupt and disorganise the way we allocate public space in cities (and by analogy, in towns). The more we ‘duplicate’, the greater that disruption and disorganisation.

An examination of the idle space in Horsham is instructive. We have car parks for sixth form colleges.

Supermarket car parks (the first one built on a former school playing field).

Underground car parks (the first for the council, the second for a supermarket).

7-storey, 500 space car parks.

4-storey, 900 space car parks (this one, sadly, a regular suicide spot).

4-storey, 330 space car parks.

Secondary school car parks.

More council parking.

Railway station car parks.

Town centre public car parks.

Pet store car parks.

Church car parks.Car parks for masons.

Retail park car parks.

To stress again, all of these car parks, lying idle, are within a two mile radius from the town centre. And, while I’ve picked out some of the more obvious examples, there are plenty of large car parks I haven’t managed to get around to photographing. Or might even be unaware of.

In reality, I’ve only really scraped the surface of the amount of land space in Horsham that is dedicated to the temporary storage of motor vehicles, without even considering the amount of land space that is give over to their movement, and their storage at home. This is duplicated storage.

Storage at home isn’t so much of a problem; cars are often necessary for longer trips, or for transporting cargo that genuinely can’t be transported by bicycle or by public transport. The photographs shown here, however, are the direct consequence of a transport policy that facilitates and accommodates car journeys for short trips. There would be no need for such a vast allocation of space and storage if the bicycle modal share in Horsham didn’t stand at around a rather miserable 1% of all trips.

Sadly, the land use consequences of our unhealthy (in all senses of the word) dependence on the private motor vehicle for short trips are generally unnoticed and unappreciated; we’ve become used, over time, to the sprawling tarmac acres, and the looming ugly concrete buildings, that are necessary for accommodating our vehicles temporarily while we pick up shopping, go to the cinema or church, drop children off at school, or sit working at a desk. Doubtless if we could transport a Horsham resident of the 1930s through time he or she would be shocked; but for us it is mere invisible background.

 

Footnote – Joe Dunckley has pointed out to me that, so far, only one of the ‘Learning and Implementation’ sessions at the forthcoming ‘Sustainable Transport 2012’ conference has been filled. Appropriately enough, for a conference aimed at ‘enabling sustainable transport choices’, it is on the subject of Automated Car Parks.

Friday Facility no.13 – Merryfield Drive, Horsham

Yesterday I cycled over to Merryfield Drive, in the west of Horsham, to take some pictures of the town’s only stretch of segregated cycle track. Here it is, all twenty metres of it.

It’s a slightly confusing arrangement, because as you can just about see, there’s a cycle lane on the other side of the road, that starts by the blue van. This too, like the cycle track, stops just as quickly as it starts. Looking the other way from the photograph above, we see the junction with the Guildford Road –

It’s a mess of a junction, at least for bicycles.

The two-way cycle track on the right here at least has the virtue of allowing cyclists intending to turn right at this junction, and continue along the pavement (which they can, legally), to do so with relative ease. But of course they still have to cross the road to enter it, before the junction.

But the slightly shambolic, brief dollop of infrastructure here isn’t the real issue with Merryfield Drive. The real issue is that it’s a residential road that probably shouldn’t be a through-route, and yet it has a 30mph speed limit, is used as a shortcut, and is littered with on-street parking. It’s the marked road that runs through residential west Horsham on the map below, becoming Redford Avenue in its northern half –

Courtesy of Google Maps

A road that, with a little imagination, could be really quite pleasant to cycle on is actually rather hostile.

If you don’t believe me, let me show you some pictures I took in the five minutes I was stood at and around this junction.

You can see a lady cycling north, on opposite pavement. She has ignored the cycle track, with good reason, because it stops after a few yards, and would leave her having to negotiate her way around parked cars with vehicles approaching her fast from behind, and oncoming cars probably unlikely to yield and let her through the gaps between the parked cars.

Another cyclist voting with his wheels and choosing to use the pavement, rather than deal with parked cars and fast vehicles attempting to overtake him.

And another. A teenager this time.

And another, a young boy of about ten.

None of these people are anti-social, or yobs. They were not cycling fast, and came past me slowly and respectfully. They were not choosing to ignore the road for any reason other than the fact that to cycle on it is unpleasant and intimidating.

What parent would feel comfortable with their child cycling here, with parked vehicles on both sides of the road, and cars approaching each other at 30mph+?

The contrast with an analogous road in the Netherlands could not be more stark. This is the residential street of Bielerstraat in the similarly-sized settlement of Assen, which serves, just like Merryfield Drive, as a distributor road for several smaller residential streets –

There’s no on-street parking that has to be negotiated around. The speed limit is 30 km/h (around 18 mph). There is no centre line. There are marked cycle lanes of good width, but in my limited experience of this road, cyclists tended not to pay too much attention to them, happily cycling along two- or three-abreast. This was possible because of the calm environment. Unlike Merryfield Drive, Bielerstraat is not a useful cut-through road any more, and motor traffic volume is very low.

Consequently, it’s a residential street on which cyclists of all ages and abilities are happy to ride; it felt safe and inviting. There is no possible reason for riding on the pavement here.

Merryfield Drive, by complete contrast, has plenty of obstructive on-street parking that is entirely legal, despite nearly every single property along it having space for two vehicles on its driveway.

It also has a needlessly high speed limit, no cycle lanes, and no measures to reduce through-traffic. It’s no fun.

The simple truth is that the convenience of motoring has been placed far and above measures that would improve the street environment for cycling. When a road has, intentionally or otherwise, been made hostile for cycling, we shouldn’t be surprised when people choose to avoid it on bikes, and seek out the calmest conditions for cycling, even if that happens to be the pavement. As Mikael Colville-Andersen of Copenhagenize said recently –

“Badly-behaved” cyclists are usually just cyclists with inadequate infrastructure.

Make Merryfield Drive a pleasant place to cycle, and the problem of ‘anti-social’ cycling will disappear.

The stigma of cycling

I’d like to draw your attention to an interesting new article from Rachel Aldred which addresses one important barrier to cycling – stigma. Unfortunately the paper is not freely available, but you can read what I think is an early draft of it here, which differs only slightly from the published article.

As I have written, often, and at length, the most significant obstacle to the uptake of cycling by the general population is the perception of danger and inconvenience involved in using a bicycle. But the concept of ‘stigma’ is an interesting and relevant problem. Simply being ‘a cyclist’ can carry with it negative assumptions about behaviour and personal attributes, and I think this is also a serious issue that needs to be addressed; although I would stress that much of the stigma involved in riding a bicycle flows simply from the fact that it is, still, a minority mode of transport and activity, and poorly understood. To what extent the perception of the stigma of cycling, and the very low rate of cycling, in this country are mutually self-reinforcing is an interesting question; perhaps both flow from the hostile road and street conditions which do a great deal to suppress cycling as a transport choice.

Rachel references the important recent work from the Department of Transport, entitled ‘Sharing the Road’, on the way cyclists are still viewed as ‘deviant’ by wider society and, in particular, motorists. That 2010 DfT paper notes that

most people can empathise with car drivers because they drive a car themselves. Probably as a result, no stereotype of car drivers in general exists (although stereotypes of types of car driver do). By contrast, a stereotype of cyclists in general does appear to exist among ORUs. This stereotype is characterised by:

• serious failures of attitude, including a generalised disregard for the law and a more specific lack of concern for the needs of other drivers; and

• serious failures of competence and knowledge of the rules of the road.

This stereotype of cyclists is also linked to the fact that cyclists do not need to undertake training, are unlicensed and uninsured, and do not pay road taxes (at least not by virtue of the fact that they cycle).

This is, as Rachel argues, a form of stigmatising, a ‘discrediting within a particular social interaction’ – in this case, in motorised street space. The ‘cyclist’ is ‘otherised’, defined as suspect, with assumptions about their behaviour, knowledge and attitude. Importantly, as the Department for Transport research hints at, this ‘otherising’ takes place against a background of a normal ‘driver’ identity that is ‘both invisible and universalised’. ‘Everyone’ is a motorist, while the ‘cyclist’ is so rare and poorly understood that stigmatising their behaviour, where it conflicts with the dominant motoring identity, is almost inevitable.

The main focus of Rachel’s paper involves identifying two distinct strands of this stigma; being ‘incompetent’ as a cyclist, and also ‘too competent.’ These are quite different problems faced by people who choose to ride a bicycle, and Rachel explores them at length. Her conclusions are drawn from face-to-face interviews with cyclists in Hull and Cambridge.

The ‘incompetent’ stigma is probably all too familiar to you; a passage from Rachel’s paper is worth quoting at length here.

A defensive group identity was demonstrated by concern that bad behaviour by any cyclist reflected badly upon other cyclists. Cyclists drew boundaries around ‘who counts’ as a cyclist, drawing or breaking links with others who cycle, and making moral judgements (e.g. labelling as ‘risky’) about other cyclists’ behaviour. Interviewees seemed accustomed to looking at their own behaviour ‘from outside’, drawing upon experiences of driving or imagining themselves as a driver. Being a cyclist involves not just managing a stigmatised identity but managing other people’s identities by seeing oneself from their perspective

The irony, of course, is that many of those people engaging in the perceived ‘bad behaviour’ on bicycles probably wouldn’t even define themselves as ‘cyclists’. These are the people trundling to the shops on the pavement, using a mountain bike they’ve dragged out of their garage, hopping on and off the pavement when it suits them. It is helpful for some cyclists to define these people as ‘not proper cyclists’; however I doubt this ‘drawing of boundaries’ has any effect on the perception of cyclists as an out-group.

And of course the poor behaviour of some motorists is never seen as problematic by other motorists for their own reputation and identity. You will never hear reference to someone not being ‘a proper motorist’ if they are driving erratically or poorly, or breaking laws. This is because driving a motor vehicle is not stigmatised. As Rachel writes

The TfL report did not find an equivalent ‘motorist’ stereotype, with bad driving seen as an individual attribute not attached to drivers in general.

Some of the people Rachel interviewed stated that they chose to wear forms of clothing and equipment that marked them out as cyclists who knew what they were doing, and were entitled, therefore, to respect as ‘competent’. This seems to be the logic behind helmet use, and the wearing of hi-visibility jackets. One respondent –

It also makes a statement to people that you actually are not just somebody who’s jumped on a bike. You’re actually saying, I’ve got the uniform of a cyclist here. (Cambridge, male, 50s)

The effectiveness of this as a strategy of presenting oneself as a ‘proper’ cyclist is open to question. In any case, in addition to this stigma of lawlessness and incompetence, we then have the problem of cyclists worrying about being perceived as too ‘proper’ or, in Rachel’s words, ‘too competent’. This is the perception that being ‘a cyclist’ involves wearing special clothing, or requires a high degree of fitness, or necessitates putting in a serious amount of miles a week, and measuring themselves against this standard. There is a particularly interesting quote from one lady interviewed –

Well I cycle every day. I can’t say I cycle a lot. It’s daily trips to the shops and to visit my mother. (Hull, female, 50s).

In other words, despite the fact that the lady cycles every day, making ‘ordinary’ trips, she doesn’t think that she cycles ‘a lot’, because that would presumably involve more ‘serious’, sporting, cycling, or in Rachel’s words, making ‘cycling a central part of one’s identity’. The problem is that being ‘serious’ – wearing ‘proper’ clothing, and being able to go fast – is increasingly associated with ‘competence’ and a right to be on the roads. (A further, tangential, problem identified is that an association of cycling with ‘sport’ and as a ‘leisure’ activity can lead to it being framed as an ‘illegitimate’ use of urban space, by contrast with the more serious business of ‘transport’ – even just as an activity for children).

And therefore

These ‘everyday cyclists’ seemed caught between the stigma of the bad (incompetent) cyclist and the stigma of sport (or being too competent).

This problem of identity is a serious one, and needs addressing, because it is quite plain that assumptions about cycling are still widespread in the general population, and even, as Rachel shows, amongst the body of cyclists themselves. She has two policy recommendations;

• firstly, to note how influential the negative perception of cyclists as ‘incompetent’ and ‘lawless’ can be on those people who chose to cycle, and to ensure that public policy and promotion of cycling works to redress the problem of disproportionate focus on the dangers posed by a bicycle, at least relative to motorised transport.
• secondly, to appreciate that the promotion of cycling sport and sporting personalities will not necessarily make everyday cycling more attractive, given the problems of perception involved in being a ‘proper’ cyclist. As Rachel writes, ‘potential every cyclists are unlikely to see the accoutrements of sports cycling (helmets, Lycra, bright clothing) as representing an image that they want to portray on their way to the shops, despite a ‘toned down’ version of this kit being associated with ‘good cycling’.’

I wrote, last year, about the problem of ‘abnormality’ (analogous to ‘stigma’) involved in cycling, within a piece about the Understanding Walking and Cycling Report, which I think draws very similar conclusions to Rachel’s work here, despite focusing on those who currently don’t cycle, rather than those who do. I argued there that the problem of ‘abnormality’

 is largely contingent upon the fact that it is unpleasant, and objectively unsafe, to cycle around our towns and cities. Because it is seen as unpleasant, only a small ‘abnormal’ minority of people cycle, and because being safe while cycling currently tends to involves cycling as fast as one can, ‘sportier’ clothing is often required, alongside safety equipment, both of which are conspicuous by their absence in countries with a genuine cycling culture. Make it safe and attractive to ride a bicycle, and the ‘abnormality’ problem will simply evaporate.

I stand by this conclusion. The stigmatising of cycling, and the adoption of stigmatising discourse by cyclists themselves as they attempt to present themselves as serious and competent and worthy of respect, flow from the fact that cycling is still a mode of transport that barely registers for most people, and that the road and street environment is still designed around motoring. As Rachel writes

Those societies socially and spatially dominated by motor vehicles to the detriment of other road users are likely to generate essentialised and stigmatised ‘cyclist’ identities. Where cyclists are treated more equitably, a ‘cyclist’ identity may be constructed differently and perhaps be less salient.

To that extent, the problems created by that environment are self-reinforcing; not only does the environment discourage cycling, it also serves to create and perpetuate negative stereotypes about the few who do choose to use bicycles as an everyday means of transport.