Martin Porter, who blogs at The Cycling Silk, has recently mentioned the case of Karl Austin, the time-trialling cyclist who was killed on a dual carriageway in Derbyshire in June last year when he was struck from behind by an HGV driven by Michael Bray.
Mr Austin is, unfortunately, just the latest in a long line of time-trailling or sporting cyclists who have been killed after they were driven into on dual carriageways; Anthony Maynard, Rob Jefferies, Tomas Barrett, Pat Kenny, Gareth Rhys-Evans and William Honour the ones that immediately spring to mind, although there are undoubtedly more.
In all of these cases, the drivers had – or should have had – ample opportunity to see the human beings travelling along the road in front of them, yet somehow managed to take no avoiding action whatsoever. Several of these drivers – those who killed Maynard, Jefferies and Barrett – claimed to have been blinded by the sun. The unnamed driver who killed Maynard escaped any prosecution whatsoever, as did the three who collectively killed William Honour.
This issue of ‘dazzling’ has been discussed at length in this excellent previous post by Martin, so I won’t revisit it much here (the post is particularly worth a read because it notes how one case – that of a young woman who killed a child in a car park while learning to drive – far outstrips the others in the severity of sentencing because the woman was uninsured). Suffice to say I don’t think, like Martin, it is much of an excuse, especially given that the amount of time the individuals had to adjust their driving was ample, and that the sun didn’t seem to affect the ability of the countless other drivers who were on these roads at precisely the same time to observe and move around the cyclists who were later killed. Unfortunately it is seemingly still being accepted as mitigation.
As Martin remarks, this excuse again resurfaced in the Karl Austin case; there was some vague talk of the sun ‘troubling’ Michael Bray in the minutes before he killed Karl Austin –
Bray, 61, told police he had not seen Mr Austin. He said he was unsure why this was the case but it could have been because they were driving into the sun. Alex Wolfson, prosecuting said Mr Austin was wearing brightly-coloured clothes and had a bright, pulsating light on the rear of his bike. “Without explanation, he went straight into Karl Austin,” said Mr Wolfson. He said another motorist told police the sun had been “an annoyance” but the visibility was good.
Part of [Bray’s] defence was that the sun was bright and posing a problem to him; he had lowered his sun visor and was ‘thinking of pulling in and putting on his sun glasses’. Yet a police questionnaire sent to 300 drivers using that road on that evening found that most had no real problem with the sun.”
To be clear, driving towards the sun is not as easy as driving away from it, but it should not be any impediment to spotting ‘obstacles’, human or otherwise, in the road in front of you.
The police themselves state that Bray had 45 seconds to spot Austin ahead of him, presumably taking into account the speed of Austin (no doubt well over 20 mph) relative to the speed of Bray, 56 mph. This is an incredible period of time to be effectively driving blind, which is what this amounts to; it is even more incredible when you consider that Austin had a 75 lumen Exposure Flare attached to his bicycle, a particularly bright rear light that I believe far outstrips the brightness of car tail lights. Frankly I have no idea what Mr Bray was doing over that period; it is, to me at least, incomprehensible that he could fail spot Austin, and take no avoiding action whatsoever.
Now my personal opinion is that the speed differentials involved when cycling along dual carriageways with national speed limits are too great for safety, particularly of the subjective kind, and that cyclists should, in an ideal world, have the excellent dedicated provision alongside these kinds of roads that you can see in the Netherlands. Be that as it may, however, I do not believe that ‘accidents’ involving cyclists who currently use dual carriageways (as I myself occasionally do when I have to) are somehow inevitable. Drivers should expect to see cyclists on these roads, and should drive in a manner that will enable them to take sensible action around them. That is; sticking to speed limits; keeping a safe distance from the car in front; spotting cyclists early enough to enable action to be taken smoothly and sensibly (namely merging into the outside lane sufficiently in advance).
All of this is, or should be, standard practice. Unfortunately it is not, given the extraordinary rate at which the few cyclists who do use these roads are being killed or seriously injured. Perhaps it is a function of scarcity – drivers do not ‘expect’ to see cyclists on these roads, precisely because they are so uncommon. (This is not surprisingly, given how unpleasant these roads can be, even for experienced cyclists.) But even if you do not expect to encounter something (setting aside how arguments about competent drivers should expect to encounter cyclists, however scarce they may be), part of being a competent driver should surely include an ability to react safely to the unexpected, something all these drivers who killed manifestly failed to do.
This behaviour is treated as simply careless, both in common everyday parlance, and also judicially. The drivers who were charged – with the notable exception of Katie Hart – were convicted of causing death by careless driving. Martin Porter is quite right to question why, if Katie Hart’s failure to see a cyclist over a considerable period of distance and time, and her failure to take evasive action, should be seen as dangerous, Michael Bray’s similar failure to see Karl Austin should be treated as merely careless – especially given that Bray was driving a vehicle that posed a substantially greater danger, relative to Hart’s small car.
It is noteworthy that Level 3 – the lowest –of the sentencing guidelines [pdf] for causing death by dangerous driving covers
Driving that created a significant risk of danger
I think there is something seriously wrong when the behaviour a man who piloted a 26 tonne vehicle along a road for a nearly a minute, apparently completely oblivious to any human beings who might be the road ahead of him, is not considered to fall into this category, and is instead treated as ‘careless’.
A story from Kelowna, in the Central Okanagan, British Columbia, Canada –
RCMP gearing up for bicycle safety blitz
A warning to Kelowna bicyclists. Kelowna RCMP is getting ready to do a blitz in the downtown for unsafe bicycling practices. Constable Kris Clark says the common sites are people traveling on the wrong side of the road, on a sidewalk, or not wearing a helmet.
“That helmet is there for a reason. Without your brain you don’t function. That’s obviously the most important part of your body. The fine is only $29, it doesn’t really reflect the importance of that but it’s very important that you wear a helmet.”
Wearing a helmet is the law in British Columbia.
A reminder that cyclists have the same rights and responsibilities as motorists under the Motor Vehicle Act which means they must obey stop signs, traffic lights, and traffic directions.
Already two cyclists in the Central Okanagan have died this year, neither of which were wearing a helmet.
Clark adds they’re not going to be going after kids. “It’s not like we’re going to be handing out fines to children. That’s really not the point, we want to educate. But if you’re a parent or guardian and allowing your child to ride without a helmet, then the onus is on you.”
One of these two cyclists to have died was Gordon Wilde, who was killed on March 17th. He was run over by the wheels of the trailer of a ‘semi truck’ – in other words, the trailer of an articulated lorry; something like this.
He suffered serious and fatal injuries to his torso, neck and head.
Police believe Wilde who was riding his bike, was hit by the rear drive wheels of the semi as it was making a right hand turn onto Baron Road, at Leckie, March 17 at about 9 p.m.
“Witnesses say that the cyclist did not have any lights on his bicycle and there was no indication that he was wearing a helmet at the time of the crash,” said Const. Kris Clark.
A deformable polystyrene shell apparently being able to protect you while you are crushed under the wheels of an HGV.
The other cyclist to die in the Central Okanagan this year while not wearing a helmet was Arthur Allan Cottie. He was struck by a White Mack commercial truck on 16th February, a vehicle that probably looked something like this
Again, Constable Clark is on hand.
Kelowna RCMP say the death of a 62-year-old cyclist, while tragic, should serve as a warning to other cyclists. Cst. Kris Clark says the unidentified man was not wearing a helmet when he was hit by a vehicle about 6:30 a.m. last Thursday morning.
He also was attempting to cross Harvey Avenue at Pandosy Street against a red light. Clark says the man suffered serious head injuries when he was hit by a delivery truck and never recovered. “This was a tragedy that could have been avoided,” says Clark.
It’s hard to draw definitive conclusions about what happened in both cases from the reports, but it seems both men may have been partly at fault, the former for cycling on the wrong side of the road, the latter for trying to cycle across a busy road against a red light.
What can be said definitively, however, is that a cycle helmet would not have made the slightest bit of difference to the outcome in either case. Quite obviously, a bicycle helmet will not protect you when you are struck by a lorry travelling at high speed, or when you are run over by one. Polystyrene does not have the requisite properties, whatever Constable Clark appears to think.
Of course, if it does, maybe it’s about time the RCMP themselves starting wearing helmets, perhaps when out riding on horseback, for instance?
THE STAFF, parents, governors and children at Leechpool Primary School are having a triple celebration after winning their six-year battle for a pedestrian crossing and successfully passing two inspections.
The Horsham school’s active Travel Plan committee consisting of parents, governors, staff and pupils have worked tirelessly to see a crossing in Harwood Road.
Many of the original parents have children who are now leaving Millais and Forest, but have not given up the fight to realise this much needed safety addition.
The school’s business manager Caroline Dedman said: “We are delighted all our hard work has been worthwhile and now all our children in the catchment area have a safe route to school. This crossing will give our older children the independence to walk to school and safely cross the busy Harwood Road and for our younger children.
“Their parents will have peace of mind as they cross with youngsters and pushchairs without having to dodge the traffic.”
It is noteworthy that the battle to get this crossing has lasted so long that plenty of the campaigning parents no longer have children at the school in question; they have grown up and moved on to secondary schools.
The crossing is now in place across Harwood Road. You can see how the road used to look in Streetview.
The crossing now runs across this busy main road – which retains its 40 mph speed limit – from the footpath visible by the brick wall on the far side. It enables all the children and parents on that, the eastern side of Harwood Road, to cross it safely, and to get to Leechpool School on the western side. Before it was put in, the safest place to cross this road was at a pedestrian ‘refuge’ (a revealing word) some 100 yards further south. This was, with one other refuge, the only concession to pedestrian movements across the entire length of this three-quarter mile stretch of road.
On the separate, southern section of Harwood Road – also about three-quarters of a mile long – there is this charming, fortified arrangement to allow children to cross ‘safely’ into Kingslea Primary School.
Amazingly, the at-surface light-controlled crossing here was only installed in 2006. The barriers and fences at surface level were presumably designed to force impudent pedestrians to use the bridge, before the crossing came into existence in response to local objections.
Parents with pushchairs were complaining about the difficulty of using the bridge, with its stepped access. The most ideal solution, from the perspective of ‘traffic flow’, was to have added ramps to the existing bridge. This was rejected, but, it seems, only on the grounds of cost.
the local desire for a road crossing which also meets the needs of those with pushchairs, cycles and very young children is well known. The decision not to amend the existing bridge with stepped access, to one with a ramped access, to provide this facility has already been taken on the grounds of suitability and cost. Experience of ramped access structures in other places shows that there are numbers of potential users who consider the length of ramp (up to 60m long on each side of the road) too long and therefore try to cross at road level – for example when in a hurry. The potential length of the ramps raises doubts whether there is sufficient land in the ownership of the County Council and the cost could be in the order £0.5m.
Trying to cross at road level? And with all those fences we’ve put in stop that nonsense? How impudent!
Naturally some parents and local residents expressed concern that the speed limit would remain at 40 mph once the light-controlled crossing had been installed.
local concern exists that this is to be installed in a 40mph section of road. There have been strong calls, including from local members, for a reduction in the speed limit to 30mph in the vicinity of the crossing, as an extension from the existing 30mph limit approximately 150m from the west.
The call for a lowering of the speed limit was rejected by the council, because drivers couldn’t be expected – according to the Police – to stick to it.
such a change would fall outside of the speed limit criteria currently adopted by the County Council. The criteria have been developed in association with Sussex Police and takes into account local and national research which shows that drivers generally select their speed from the messages given by the surrounding roadside development and the prevalent traffic conditions. It is considered that lowering the speed limit alone in this location would have minimal effect on the average speed of traffic.Sussex Police would not support such a lowering of the speed limit here.
It is revealing that, in the opinion of the local police, drivers simply cannot be expected to stick to posted speed limits (that is, to obey the law); instead they have to rely on ‘messages’ sent out by the surrounding roadside environment, which in this location consists a gigantic steel gantry, pedestrian fencing and extensive run-off areas.
70 mph it is, then.
Although the concern regarding safety for those crossing the road is understood, national guidance only recommends NOT installing such crossings within speed limits of 50mph or more. To assist in alleviating concerns and to enhance safety, it is proposed that high skid resistant surfacing be installed on approach to the crossing in both directions.
I’m not sure my concerns would be alleviated by ‘skid resistant surfacing’ – a more sensible policy might be to eliminate the kind of driving that needs assistance with the prevention of skidding. But sticking plaster solutions, and all that.
To return to the new crossing for Leechpool School, there is some interesting background on why these crossings take such an age to arrive, despite massive local demand for them.
The location exceeds the threshold determined by the Accident and Difficulty weighted Pedestrian and Vehicle count (ADPV2) for installation of a controlled pedestrian crossing. The priority of sites is determined by utilising the number of vehicles and pedestrians and incorporates the pedestrian casualty figures into an approved formula, which includes a factor to reflect the degree of difficulty experienced in crossing the road. There have not been any accidents at this site within the last 3 years. Applying these figures to the formula the resultant score for Harwood Road is 0.86 where 0.7 is the accepted justification point.
This really is quite an awful way to assess whether a crossing should be built, because it makes the decision almost entirely on the basis of danger, and of the numbers of people who might be attempting to cross the road, without an appreciation that the danger itself might be discouraging people from even attempting to cross the road in the first place. If a road is extraordinarily hostile, then nobody in their right minds is going to go anywhere near it.
Crossings should, in my opinion, be put in to faciliate pedestrian movement; they should be designed to encourage people to make journeys on foot that they might otherwise make by car. This is not happening under the current system.
To take the example of this new crossing on Harwood Road. As it happens, it has met the criteria for installation, despite there being no accidents there in the last three years (this is, of course, a statistical measure of safety that takes no account of relative risk). But that could be because many parents on the eastern side of the road were packing their children into cars and driving them to school, because crossing Harwood Road on foot felt too dangerous. Or they might have been taking longer, circuitous routes on foot to avoid it; hardly convenient. Both these types of behaviour would have the additional effect of lowering the pedestrian count, and making a crossing even less likely under the ADPV2 criteria. I suspect it is largely the volume of motor traffic (and HGVs in particular, which count as 2.5 cars) on Harwood Road, along with its width, that might have pushed this location over the threshold for installation of a crossing, despite the attempts of a local Victor Meldrew to stop it.
You can see a long list of proposed crossings in Horsham here, many in desperately unpleasant locations for crossing on foot, most of which have been rejected because at present their ADPV2 rating is too low, below the 0.7 justification point. The lack of safe crossing points at these locations makes walking less likely, which in turn makes these places ‘safer’ and reduces the numbers of people attempting to cross. And so crossings continue to remain unconstructed.
Car dependency is inbuilt, and car use privileged, under such a system.
Still, it could be worse. I could live in Hull, where residents have been waiting 16 years for a crossing.
Another problem, of course, is that these crossings are very expensive, more so than a zebra (and even more than a ‘continental’ zebra, which is simply paint on the road), which are seen, incorrectly, as being less safe. They are usually funded from Section 106 money, and that very often dries up before crossings are even considered
The village of Southwater, which lies around 2 miles south of Horsham, has expanded at an incredible rate over the last two decades. In the early 1990s, its population was just over 5,000. In the 2001 census, the number of residents had increased to over 10,000 – a doubling in just ten years. Now new plans for 550 homes to the north west of the village will add, at a rough guess, another 1500-2000 to Southwater’s population.
The increase is due, almost entirely, to new-build developments that have ‘filled in’ the space between the old village and its bypass, constructed in 1978.
The A24, which runs from London to the coast, at Worthing, used to run through the village – the aptly named Worthing Road. Once it was diverted to the east, sent onto a dual carriageway that now runs continuously to Worthing, there was ‘dead space’ between the village and the new bypass which was just begging to be filled with new housing. Lo and behold, it is now filled, right up to the green line of the A24 bypass on the right.
The demand for housing here is still high, and so a place has had to be found for new development – the proposed 550 houses will go on land to the west of Worthing Road, approximately indicated on the map below.
A problem that would be posed by this development is the further strain it would place on the transport infrastructure as a result of another 500 or more vehicles regularly making journeys into and out of the village. There is already an issue with queuing to get onto and across the gigantic Hop Oast roundabout, where the road coming northwards out of the village meets the bypass.
This is the irony – Southwater has become so bloated with car journeys – its residents dependent on the car for commuting and most day-to-day trips – that a bypass constructed thirty years ago to relieve ‘traffic’ within the village faces the prospect of itself becoming overwhelmed by the motor traffic it has induced within the village. Southwater has swamped its own bypass. As Horsham District Council write, in relation to a different development –
The Hop Oast roundabout is already operating near capacity in both the base and future years without development scenarios
Rat-running on country roads that bypass the roundabout on the A24 is already a problem, principally because these rat runs often form a more direct, and unrestricted route into and out of Horsham, and also because of the queues at the Hop Oast roundabout. The problem will only get worse with more traffic queuing there. It is this possibility that has been reported in the local paper this week.
‘RAT-RUNNING’ is feared by a Southwater campaigner as a 550-home development proposal threatens to increase traffic on the A24. West Sussex County Council asked Berkeley Homes to provide plans showing how they intended to reduce traffic on the A24 therefore reducing its development’s impact on congestion and ‘rat-running’.
The routes that WSCC believe motorists might use to avoid the Hop Oast roundabout on the A24 are Worthing Road, Southwater Street and Kerves Lane, or Church Lane and Two Mile Ash.
The first mentioned ‘rat-running’ route is shown on the map below.
Instead of following the Worthing Road northbound, which is the main route into and out of town, you can choose to divert onto the Two Mile Ash Road to the west, which is a country lane with, absurdly, a 60 mph limit for its entire length – something which greatly distresses many of the residents who live along it.
Home-made speed limit signs are about the only thing they can do at the moment.
As things stand, this is a very attractive alternative route for people who might wish to avoid the prospect of queues to get across the bypass roundabout.
The other mentioned rat-run, that of Southwater Street and Kerves Lane, is to the east of the main road.
This route – again, almost entirely on country lanes – is particularly attractive as a short-cut for people who are going to, or coming from, the east of Horsham. Again, it allows drivers to bypass any queues to get onto or across the A24, by using inappropriate roads. At rush hour, it can become unpleasantly busy. Below is the junction of Kerves Lane with Coltstaple Lane – traffic heading out of Horsham, towards Southwater. This road is not really suitable for this volume of traffic.
Further towards Horsham, on Kerves Lane, at rush hour –
No obstacles are put in the way of drivers who might choose to use either of these routes, instead of the trunk road.
Given that the back routes cut off much of the queue into Horsham in the morning, and in the evening avoid the Hop Oast queue altogether, it is clear why rat running can only worsen in the future.
But fear not! For Berkeley Homes – the developers behind this 550-home scheme – have a solution to this problem of cars tearing up and down country lanes to bypass the queues their development will contribute to.
What it could possibly be? Surely it must involve some measures on these country lanes, like much lower speed limits? Or turning restrictions at crucial junctions, to block rat-running routes? Or – crazy thought – improving the routes for cycling into and out of Horsham from Southwater, so that fewer journeys might be made by car, and queues reduced?
ISSUE Traffic congestion and delays at the Hop Oast junction.
SOLUTION This development will provide a filter lane from Worthing Road on to the northbound A24 to reduce existing queues.
That’s right – yet more capacity for motor vehicles!
As the County Times reports
Berkeley has provided a plan which it says solves the issue by widening the entries and exits to Hop Oast roundabout and providing a segregated left turn with a merge taper onto the north-bound A24 from Southwater to decrease congestion.
In other words, a dedicated slip road for north-bound traffic coming out of the village, which will allow vehicles to turn left onto the (north-bound) A24 dual carriageway without using the roundabout at all.
This aerial view of the already enormous roundabout is looking south, towards Southwater, from the Horsham area. The A24 runs from top left, to bottom right; the road from village of Southwater is the one that curves from the top; access to Horsham is at bottom. If built, the slip road will presumably cut across the wooded area to the right of the photograph, bypassing the roundabout completely (the wooded area is also visible, to the left, in the aerial view of the roundabout earlier in the post). This proposal has apparently been accepted, in principle, by West Sussex County Council, who had, let us remember, ‘asked Berkeley Homes to provide plans showing how they intended to reduce traffic on the A24’.
Problem solved!
Err, except it isn’t, really. (Let’s set aside the obvious fact that building a new slip road isn’t any way of ‘reducing traffic on the A24’; I suspect WSCC meant to say ‘congestion’ instead of ‘traffic’.)
While the slip will solve the problem of queuing at the roundabout for left-turning traffic coming out of the village (at least until that filter lane becomes bloated with car journeys, and may itself need to be widened, or bypassed), it won’t do anything to address the problem of people queuing to get across the roundabout, and into Horsham. Nor will it solve the problem of people queuing southbound at the roundabout in the evening, coming out of Horsham, either to get into Southwater, or to access the A24.
Unfortunately it is precisely these queues that rat-runners are attempting to avoid on the country and residential lane routes; so while the new filter lane will add capacity to the network, it won’t do anything at all to discourage the rat-running. I am at a loss, therefore, as to see what this extra road-building will achieve, beyond making A24 north-bound commuting journeys from the village slightly quicker, at least until the sliproad itself becomes swamped with induced demand.
There is quite a good bus service running between Southwater and Horsham – every 15 minutes or so, and well on into the evening. There might, sensibly be a case for a bus priority lane to get onto and across the roundabout but this has not apparently been considered.
Equally, it is entirely possible for most reasonably healthy people to cycle the 3 miles or so between the centres of Southwater and Horsham. Unfortunately the routes are not particularly brilliant.
The most direct route is to take the main road across the Hop Oast roundabout – the red route on this Cyclestreets journey planner. This is something I do, occasionally; but it’s not particularly fun, especially with 70 mph traffic approaching from two arms of the roundabout, and high speeds around it. I am reasonably fit and keep a good speed up; this is definitely not a route I would advise for someone who is slower or more nervous. It also involves cycling the length of Worthing Road into Horsham, which is often quite busy, and has a 40 mph speed limit.
The green route is the quietest, but it is a little ridiculous. As you can see, you head south east (away from Horsham) on the Downs Link, the old railway line to Shoreham, which is lovely. You then wind your way northwards on an attractive country lane; a country lane which has, unfortunately, been severed by the A24 bypass.
Easteds Lane to the south, Reeds Lane to the north. No way, now, of getting between the two, except via this.
An at-grade crossing of a 70 mph dual carriageway. As you can see, there are also steps either side to get you down to road level. This is a footpath, not a route for bicycles.
This pitiful crossing is all that is left of the former route. Reeds Lane, coming from the north, is now a dead-end, terminating in some bushes – the A24 roars through, behind the fencing.
You can just about see the path here, an entrance in the bushes, up against the fence. The narrow path skirts a field, before dropping down to cross the A24.
A footpath that cannot sensibly be used with a bicycle, even walking with it. It’s not even really a nice footpath, given the nature of the crossing involved. This is a typical example of how bypasses and dual carriageways have been constructed across Horsham, and probably across much of Britain. Country lanes were split in two, and nobody thought about appropriate ways for keeping them in use, or allowing them to be crossed safely and conveniently.
If you can get across the A24 on this crossing with a bicycle, you will end up merging with the ‘amber’ route, which takes the rat-run of Kerves Lane. This road is reasonably quiet for cycling, but as described above can become unpleasantly busy at peak hours. I have, as it happens, encountered some of my worst driver behaviour on this road, usually from commuters in a hurry on this shortcut (it seems I am not the only person of this opinion).
You have your reward, though, on both these routes, with some attractive, quiet, traffic-free cycling, almost all the way to Horsham – the ‘Pedlars Way’ bridleway, which takes you from Kerves Lane into the quiet residential streets of southern Horsham. It’s a lovely route, but unfortunately it is only really appropriate for those with mountain bikes, or sturdier commuting bikes. The first section is a tarmac lane, but one that is extraordinarily pot-holed.
Beyond this, the route becomes more of a bridleway. The scenery is fantastic,
but further south it is definitely a ‘track’, which can become quite muddy after rain, and during the winter.
It’s a pleasant route, but is not exactly direct, and is hobbled slightly by the poor surfacing. It also involves cycling on busier roads to get to it; not just Kerves Lane, but also Worthing Road, the main street in Southwater.
Another option is to use a bridleway that cuts through from the top of the village to Kerves Lane – this might be appropriate for people who live in the north of the village, and wish to cycle into Horsham without negotiating the Hop Oast roundabout.
Unfortunately, like the severed lane further south, this also involves an at-grade crossing of the bypass.
This one is in quite a precarious location, located just after a slight bend where motorists are accelerating off the roundabout itself.
The bridleway itself is in an appalling condition.
This is definitely a route for mountain bikes only, especially given that the construction work going on here – a redevelopment of the golf course to the east of the Hop Oast roundabout – has not only churned up this bridleway, but has also seen this helpful ramp being built across it.
Hopeless.
In nearly all of these example routes, you will most likely have to cycle part of the way through the village of Southwater itself along the old Worthing Road. Unfortunately the village seems to be something of a haven for boy racers with noisy exhausts, who I find like to use this straight road as a drag strip.
Even on a lazy bank holiday afternoon, when this photograph was taken, it’s still quite busy (so much for the bypass alleviating ‘traffic’).
There is some ineffectual traffic calming on this road –
A well-meaning cycle cut-through, but with, absurdly, ‘END’ painted on the road, along with yield markings; a dangerous and confusing merging back into the traffic stream. The kind of badly designed ‘traffic calming’, in other words, that makes things worse for bicycle users.
In short, it’s not exactly wonderful to cycle on the main road through Southwater. Perhaps the new development – which if it goes ahead would be built on the fields to the right, seen in the photograph above the previous one – could allow, or fund, improvements to this road, to make it safer and more pleasant to cycle on (genuine improvements, that is, not hopeless measures like the ones that currently exist). But I’m not holding my breath.
Faced with developments that will create more motor traffic, the tick-box solution in West Sussex seems to be to build more roads to accommodate it, rather than to encourage people to abandon their cars for some of those journeys. Some of the routes for cycling are insultingly poor, and will apparently remain so even with the addition of much new development. Likewise, the A24 and the Hop Oast roundabout will remain a significant barrier to cycling (and walking) in and out of Horsham. It’s high time some of that developers’ cash was used to improve routes for walking and cycling, and not just used to facilitate more road construction.
You are no doubt aware that Jeremy Clarkson has been singing the praises of Denmark, and Copenhagen particularly, in his latest Sunday Times screed/car review; he names the Danish capital one of the world’s best cities because, in his words
best of all: there are no bloody cars cluttering the place up. Almost everyone goes almost everywhere on a bicycle.
Having conceded that this might sound, to his readers, ‘like the ninth circle of hell’ (and implicitly to Clarkson himself, before he experienced how it might work), he writes that such a mistaken impression might be formed
because you live in Britain, where cars and bikes share the road space. This cannot and does not work. It’s like putting a dog and a cat in a cage and expecting them to get along. They won’t, and as a result London is currently hosting an undeclared war. I am constantly irritated by cyclists and I’m sure they’re constantly irritated by me.
Clarkson is no doubt coming at this from the perspective of someone who doesn’t really like bicycles being in his way when he is behind the wheel of a car, but he is at least generous enough to concede that those people on bicycles might be ‘irritated’ by him in his car.
The more important point is that, in a roundabout way, Clarkson has grasped that cycling becomes attractive when you are not having to negotiate, incessantly, with motor vehicles. Remove conflict, and life becomes easier, principally for cyclists, but also for drivers.
To achieve this, of course, space has to be reallocated in the carriageway, taken away from the motorist, and given over to people choosing to cycle; or, some streets have to be made difficult or circuitous for people using them in cars, while remaining direct routes for bicycles. These are both forms of segregation. As Clarkson puts it
City fathers have to choose. Cars or bicycles. And in Copenhagen they’ve gone for the bike.
This is the first thing I think Clarkson gets wrong; it is needlessly oppositional. Cities do not, necessarily, have to choose between the car and the bike. The real choice is between whether our cities remain entirely motor vehicle-dominated, like London, or whether provision is made for safe and convenient journeys by bicycle, and by foot, as is the case in Copenhagen, and the Netherlands. This isn’t, or shouldn’t be, a car versus bicycle issue – it should be about providing people with a choice about how they make their journeys. At present, for most people in UK towns and cities, there is no choice at all, because road conditions are so hostile.
If you do provide people with a realistic choice – if you genuinely facilitate cycling – then it becomes an ordinary, everyday activity, and not a confrontational extreme sport that is only ever likely to appeal to a tiny minority. This is where Clarkson is actually really on the money –
in Britain cycling is a political statement. You have a camera on your helmet so that motorists who carve you up can be pilloried on YouTube. You have shorts. You have a beard and an attitude. You wear a uniform. Cycling has become the outdoorsy wing of the NUM and CND.
In Copenhagen it’s just a pleasant way of getting about. Nobody wears a helmet. Nobody wears high-visibility clothing. You just wear what you need to be wearing at your destination. For girls that appears to be very short skirts. And nobody rides their bike as if they’re in the Tour de France. This would make them sweaty and unattractive, so they travel just fast enough to maintain their balance.
Frankly, this is amazing stuff, coming from a renowned petrolhead like Clarkson, who has, in the past, made quite a number of unhelpful, not to say incendiary, comments about cycling, which even if they were meant as a ‘joke’ are sadly almost certainly not taken as such by much of his target audience. So I’m really glad that he has seen for himself how cities and towns can function with a large proportion of journeys being made by bicycle, and indeed how you achieve those numbers of journeys.
The upshot is a city [Copenhagen] that works. It’s pleasing to look at. It’s astonishingly quiet. It’s safe. And no one wastes half their life looking for a parking space. I’d live there in a heartbeat.
Welcome to the club, Jeremy.
Unfortunately there is one final thing he gets wrong –
But I don’t live there. I live in a country with Ben Nevis in it. And as a result we have to have cars.
I don’t take this comment too seriously, because in the context of the piece as a whole it is simply a rather clumsy and cack-handed way of moving on to a car review, but nevertheless it should be pointed out that not everyone in Britain lives on Ben Nevis, or indeed anywhere near it. Most people in Britain live in places that are, by and large, quite flat. London, for instance. I don’t think the presence of Ben Nevis some 400 miles away should tell us anything about the geography of London, or indeed whether people who live in Zone 1 ‘have to have cars’.
In any case, London itself is rather flatter, for the most part, than the Danish city of Aarhus, where 25% of all trips are made by bicycle. There are, likewise, parts of the Netherlands that are also very hilly, and which have modal shares far in excess of an equivalent British area.
Suffice to say, the link between terrain and the practicality of the bicycle as a mode of transport is a bogus one. There are very flat areas in Britain, where cycling is almost totally non-existent as a mode of transport. Gradients are quite unimportant when compared to how practical and safe cycling is felt to be. Car journeys should not be described as essential because of the presence of mountains somewhere else.
But overall, much as it pains me to say this… thank you Jeremy Clarkson.
I have, as it happens, already written about Paris, following a short visit there last summer. That post focused, rather positively, on the aspects of the city that I found to be slightly better than London. These included the street closures to motor traffic, common in the Marais district; the closure of the Parisian equivalent of the Embankment to motor traffic on Sundays; the slightly greater ease of walking about the city; and some small measures being taken to improve the cycling environment, including two-way cycling on one-way streets, and some off-carriageway cycle paths.
Indeed Paris came to be mentionedrecently for the notable fact that there was not a single cycling fatality in the city last year, compared with the 16 in London. I have to say – and I hope this will become apparent from what follows – I think a large part of this discrepancy must be down to luck and fate, rather than more intrinsic merit in the way the streets are arranged. It did appear – to me at least – thatthere were fewer HGVs, particularly construction lorries, using the streets. This is probably because central Paris is not so much of a building site as much of central London is at present. Large new buildings and construction projects are few and far between. Equally, while there are Parisian gyratories and one-way systems, they are not quite as obviously like a motorway as they appear to be in London, and other British cities. Both these factors could be influential.
But Paris is not all it is cracked up to be.
Perhaps it was because I had just arrived in Paris from the relative paradise of Strasbourg, but I found myself less inclined to be generous towards Paris this time around. Those cycle paths were still in evidence, and they were of a reasonable quality. However – being less generous – while the width and surface is adequate, many were quite clearly pavement conversions, rather than an appropriate reclamation of carriageway space.
Below, a particularly noticeable example, near the Gare de l’Est.
The amount of street width available here is incredible; the pavement itself is enormously wide. The path itself, however, is not, and seems more than slightly half-hearted. (Note also the discontinuity at the start, by the junction where I am standing.).
Elsewhere, there were rather better cycle paths – this example is in the Bastille district.
Cycle paths like this one, separated from motor traffic, either by vehicles, or with a kerb, or with both, appeared to me to be more common than they are in London, although as I have said the quality leaves something to be desired.
However, these Parisian cycle paths that involve some form of carriageway reclamation only seemed to be in evidence in places which were already reasonably quiet, like the location in the photograph above, or here along the Canal Saint-Martin.
My impression was that on busier roads, cycle paths would either go on the pavement, creating conflict with pedestrians and taking space away from them, or they would be non-existent. The Parisian version of ‘smoothing traffic flow’, in other words, seemed to be setting the priorities – the reduction in carriageway space for motor vehicles was rare indeed.
In fact, in places, the amount of space given over to motor vehicles in Paris is quite absurd; for instance, the Place de la Concorde.
It is hard to imagine anywhere in western Europe where such an extraordinary acreage of urban space – prime urban space – is allocated entirely to motor vehicles. Spot the three people stranded while trying to cross this vast desert.
As this road meets the Rue de Rivoli, we have a street arrangement that makes even the Elephant & Castle look slightly sane – a 12 vehicle wide queue at the lights, all about to scream off in the same direction. This cycle rickshaw was the only bicycle I saw passing through here. I don’t envy the passengers.
The Rue de Rivoli itself is, note, a one-way street. I was walking through here at mid-morning, a reasonably quiet period of the day. Google Streetview provides a good indication of what the Rivoli looks like at, and around, rush hour.
Imagine being on the right of this street, in the cycle lane that is just about visible behind the dark car, and negotiating your way across to make a left turn, on a bicycle.
No thanks.
Most Parisian streets are plentifully wide, quite obviously wide enough to accommodate segregated provision for cycle tracks. They’re just not there when they needs to be. Spot the cyclist here, on the Quai de Montebello by Notre Dame. There is a narrow cycle lane here, where on another occasion I saw a bus squash a cyclist up against the kerb as it rolled up to the lights.
Likewise, how inviting is the Place de la Madeleine for this barely visible cyclist?
It’s a fairly horrible gyratory; just one that is Parisian, rather than British.
There are marked cycle lanes on the roads approaching the church, marooned as it is in a sea of swarming cars, but they are pretty useless – often blocked by vehicles, just when they are needed.
Another gyratoriously inviting street for cycling – Boulevard Haussmann.
There are bus lanes in Paris, and most of them are kerbed off. Unfortunately the width at which they have been kerbed off is often sufficiently wide to make squeezing past someone on a bicycle, in a bus, quite tempting. Unfortunately the width of the bus lane would probably make this a bit unnerving for the person on the bike.
Note also the taxi racing down here – the signs don’t explicitly permit taxis, but I didn’t see much evidence of compliance.
Probably not much fun to cycle in, in short.
There are one-way streets on which it is permissible to cycle in both directions (this is something which I noticed, on my previous visit, as being rather more prevalent than in London, although this may swiftly change now that UK guidance has been amended). Unfortunately the typical solution is a desperately narrow contraflow lane.
Other streets have no provision whatsoever, and are clogged with parked vehicles on both sides.
Many streets, which should in principle be calm shopping environments, have appallingly narrow pavements, and two lanes of traffic speeding in the same direction.
Other streets, such as the Rue Saint Germain, are enormously wide, yet have no contraflow provision whatsoever. This chap is taking matters into his own hands, briefly cycling against the flow of traffic, at great personal risk.
Others use the pavement to negotiate one-way streets.
And the pavement is, more generally, quite often an inviting way of cycling on busy and hostile roads.
Paris does, of course, have a hire bike scheme that is even more widely used that London’s (indeed, it provided the template for the London scheme). A close inspection at the controls of a Velib machine, however
reveals plentiful warnings about staying out of the blind spots of vehicles, and about not going up the inside of them; warnings that wouldn’t really be necessary in a civilized city, that didn’t expect vulnerable users to mix it with heavy goods vehicles.
There are European cities from which we can learn lessons about how to improve conditions for cycling; I’m far from sure that Paris is one of them.
A letter published in the County Times of Thursday, 29th March –
Safe cycling
I am pleased that our MP, Francis Maude, has shown an interest in the safety of cyclists in the Horsham District (County Times 22 March 2012). Unfortunately Horsham District Council does not seem to share the same interest, as it has failed to consider cyclists in any of its development schemes with the result that cycling around Horsham is downright dangerous, and no fun at all. No wonder one hardly sees anyone cycling to work in the town centre, to the station or to school.
I live in Worthing Road and have an eight-year-old son. We like to out for a cycle ride at the weekend, but where can we do so safely? Almost the only way is to load our bicycles into our car, which rather defeats the objective.
Could Horsham District Council’s Leisure Department suggest a couple of safe cycle routes through Horsham, say, North/South from the Boar’s Head to the Norfolk Arms and East/West from the Shelley Arms to the Hornbrook Inn?
Not only does cycling contribute to the health of the nation, in these difficult economic times it can save scarce resources, and benefit families’ budgets. All of these benefits must be dear to the hearts of our financially-minded councillors.
JOHN BAUGH Worthing Road, Horsham
Mr Baugh’s letter references this piece Francis Maude wrote for the paper, a week earlier. I have to say I am not quite so convinced that our MP is showing the level of interest Mr Baugh recognises. There are some good bits in his article, namely the recognition that while more people are cycling, ‘the infrastructure has some catching up to do’ – quite an understatement. He also acknowledges constituents’
sheer frustration at being urged to cycle for environmental and health benefits, but without the proper safeguards that some of our European neighbours seem to take for granted.
A clear enough statement that conditions for cycling in the United Kingdom lack ‘the proper safeguards’ that you can find quite easily across the North Sea. This is, like David Cameron’s statement that cycling in Britain involves taking your life in your hands, a remarkable open admission of a failure, not just to create attractive conditions for cycling, but even to keep current cyclists safe.
A sensible policy would, of course, be to look at those ‘proper safeguards’ that our European neighbours employ, and to include them in future development, and in new guidelines about how our roads and streets should be constructed and maintained.
What is on offer, though, from Francis Maude and the government is decidedly much weaker.
The Times campaign has in some sense crystallised the case for a national cycle safety strategy. But it’s important to look at what actions are already in hand if we are to avoid the impression of much talk and no action.
The Government already provides funding for cycling initiatives through the Local Sustainable Transport Fund (Sustrans) worth £560m in this Parliament.
Some £11m has been earmarked for Bikeability training for school children which Transport Minister Norman Baker has referred to as ‘cycling proficiency for the 21st century’. And the good news is that this funding will continue until at least March 2015.
Some £15m will be split between Sustrans – the charity set up to help us ‘make smarter travel choices’ – and the Cycle Rail Working Group. Sustrans will spend the funds on further calmed routes for cyclists and pedestrians; the CRWG will use the money to improve integration between cycle and rail at stations across the country – a regular plea in MPs’ postbags.
Ministers also want to see more innovative measures being put in place to improve cycle safety. So it’s good to know that following a successful trial in London, councils across the country can apply to use Trixi mirrors to make cyclists more visible to drivers at traffic lights
The £560 million figure is meant to sound impressive, but is a sum of money being spent over the course of this Parliament, and is being spent on all sustainable modes of transport, not just cycling. The West Sussex County Council bid for £2.6 million includes spending on bus, walking and cycling improvements, and in perspective, this figure is rather dwarfed by the estimated £30 million cost of a 2-3 mile section of bypass for Arundel on the A27, which West Sussex County Council are still desperately keen to have built.
Indeed, the cost of this one proposed road – just like the £56 million Bexhill to Hastings link road, which is now going ahead – outstrips the £11 and £15 million scraps on offer for cycling for the entire country. That gives some indication of how seriously cycling is actually being taken, despite the apparent reaction to the Times’ campaign. These figures are fob-offs, designed to sound impressive in isolation. What is needed is a firm commitment to ensure that our roads and streets are designed better for vulnerable users. This won’t – indeed cannot – happen immediately. But it must be a part of how roads and streets are rebuilt and repaired, and how they are built as part of future development.
Mr Baugh’s letter makes reference to how Horsham’s spate of redevelopment over the last three decades has taken almost no account, whatsoever, of cycling as a mode of transport. New roads have been built, and other streets have been pedestrianised, yet the humble bicycle has been forgotten about in the configuration of these designs. The end result, as Mr Baugh says, is that parts of the town centre are difficult to access directly by bicycle, and cross-town journeys are circuitous, or involve hostile roads. This could have been addressed during those phases of development, but wasn’t.
The weekend before last, I spent an afternoon in Horsham Park, where cycling is now, wonderfully, legal, thanks to the efforts of local campaigners. There were plenty of very young children cycling – or being cycled – around.
I suspect a good number of these children’s bikes arrived at the park packed in the boots of cars, just like Mr Baugh has to do with his son’s bicycle when they wish to go cycling.
Other children were cycling away from the park, accompanied by their parents, but the routes and means they chose were revealing.
Into the subway under the inner ring road. Technically illegal (although you would hope any PCSOs or street wardens would not be petty enough to stop young children cycling here), and not all that appropriate as a shared route between pedestrians and cyclists.
Through Medwin Walk. Again, illegal by the letter of the law, and I have seen a lady cyclist being issued with a ‘yellow card’ warning for doing so at this very location, by a street warden and PCSO.
Then across the pedestrianised Carfax, where cycling might, again, land you in trouble thanks to local bylaws.
Up East Street, a street which only allows vehicle deliveries, and disabled access – a successful recent development.
Unfortunately, if you wish to continue eastwards from this point, the roads become fairly hostile, and this young chap and his father sensibly decide to dismount and walk.
It’s roads like this, across Horsham, that despite the clear evidence of local children wanting to cycle – out in their droves in the park where it is safe – result in no children, at all, cycling to the primary school near where I live. (A good number do use mini scooters on the pavement, which are slower, and allow their parents to walk with them). By contrast, the equivalent busy roads in a Dutch town or city present no obstacle to the very young.
The areas shown in these photographs of Horsham have all been subject to development since the 1970s, yet over this long period these major developments – with the honourable exception of East Street – included no measures to make cycling feel safe or convenient for the young, the nervous, and the old, or to accommodate and facilitate it within the improvements for pedestrians.
The investments proposed by the government that Francis Maude references are welcome, of course, but the root problem is a failure of planning and guidance. I’m not seeing much in the government’s response to the Times’ campaign to suggest that is going to change.
The programme focused on how local councils are increasing the fees for the services they provide. This is either – depending on who you listen to – a direct response to being asked to freeze council tax by central government (this is what the councils would argue), or a collection of ‘stealth taxes’, a surreptitious way for councils to raise the revenue they receive while keeping council tax low.
We start off in the London Borough of Haringey, where people on the street are presented with facts about how the charges in their borough have increased. A woman living in what appears to be a rather large house finds it ‘absolutely ridiculous’ that the cost of removing a cockroach infestation has gone up by £17.
Enter Grant Shapps, the Minister for Local Government.
He is of the opinion that councils are simply failing to become more streamlined, and have responded to a cut in central funding by raising charges, instead of becoming more efficient at what they do.
We don’t think it’s right for local councils to use their tenants, and their residents, as cash cows. They need to realise that the way to come in on budget is to look at how you’re doing things yourself, how you’re operating as a council, not to go, ‘Oh, we’ve got less money from the Government, therefore we’ll go and tax our residents more through parking charges, or any other wheezes they come up with.’
Parking charges are a ‘tax’?
No doubt Shapps is fully aware that taxes are a compulsory contribution to state revenue, and that since choosing to park a car in a particular place is far from compulsory, parking charges cannot possibly constitute a tax. But our Minister seems quite happy to dabble, just like silly motoring organisations, in this kind of ill-conceived rhetoric, the kind that panders directly to the misplaced sense of victimhood the ‘British motorist’ labours under. Incidentally, this isn’t the first time I’ve noticed Shapps talking bollocks about parking; he evidently believes that free parking, everywhere, is the solution to all our problems, which may be the main reason why he is so keen to take Councils to task for increasing this form of ‘tax’.
The presenter, Jonathan Maitland, visits Barnet, where an increase in parking charges is apparently provoking outrage amongst local residents and shoppers. After letting them have their say, he subsequently makes the point that
Many councils insist they’re increasing the cost of charges not to generate revenue, but to improve our behaviour. For example, by increasing parking charges, fewer people will drive, meaning less pollution, and a better environment.
We then arrive in Horsham, where the council are – as it happens! – increasing parking charges, although not for these high-minded, behaviour-changing reasons. The Council’s stated motive is to fund ‘car park improvements’, although what these improvements are, Horsham District Council have not explicitly said.
The programme looks at how these increases, along with other rises in Council charges, are affecting the Henshall family, who live in Horsham.
We are firstly told that Debbie Henshall goes to the bank in the town centre twice a week, ‘but parking has just gone up by 40p’. These two facts are cemented together; going to the bank now requires Debbie to pay an extra 80p a week, because there is no other way of getting to the bank, without parking in Swan Walk car park.
She also goes shopping at the weekend, ‘where parking has gone up by 10p’. In addition, parking at the leisure centre, which is used by the family ‘at least three times a week’, has now gone up by 50p. Again, in both cases, the increased cost of parking is presented as somehow inevitable and unavoidable.
The programme claims that the Henshalls will now be paying £105 more per year as a result of the extra charges Horsham District Council has imposed. This appears to me to be an underestimate, because if you tot up these parking increases, they alone come to £124.80 per annum (assuming the number of trips claims to make Debbie Henshall makes remains constant throughout the year) and his figure, from parking increases alone, doesn’t include the extra costs of school dinners and swimming, also mentioned in the programme.
In any case, what I find remarkable is that Debbie Henshall simply cannot conceive of any other way of getting to the bank, or to the shopping, or to the leisure centre, without paying for parking, despite stating that she is ‘scraping by’, and no longer buys any luxuries at all, barely managing to pay the bills.
I’ve marked on the map, taken from Cycle Streets, a journey the Henshalls could possibly make on foot, from their home, to the leisure centre, parking at which appears to form a large part of their weekly increase in costs. It’s just over a mile to the subway, marked by the red arrow. From that point you can pass under North Street, through Horsham Park, to the leisure centre, marked, approximately, by the red circle – around another five minutes walking.
This is not a long walk, by any standard of the imagination.
It’s a little further to the town centre, where Debbie Henshall has to go shopping, and to visit the bank – I would estimate that it is about ten minutes across the park from the leisure centre. Further, yes, but not an impossible journey on foot.
I said this is remarkable, and for the following reason. We have reached a situation in which a 30 minute walk into town is not just seen as impossible, or inconceivable; it’s not even considered in the first place. I don’t think Debbie Henshall is alone in thinking like this in Horsham; people will go on paying these ‘exorbitant’ increases in car parking charges in the District because they cannot imagine any other way of getting into town.
This doesn’t tell me that people who choose to use their cars are a persecuted group; on the contrary, it tells me that the use of motor vehicles as an everyday mode of transport in our towns and cities has been indulged, accommodated and facilitated for so long – and often at the expense of other modes of transport – that the notion of using these alternative modes has gradually been eroded, until it has now been stripped away. The County Times, which can normally be relied upon to be reasonably sensible, has an editorial accompanying this story, which runs
If people stop visiting town centres because the car parking is too expensive, the wellbeing of the whole are is put at risk. That is why supermarkets have never charged for car parking. They live in the real world.
The idea that out of town supermarkets, who apparently ‘live in the real world’ with their acres of subsidised tarmac, provide a model for improving the wellbeing of our towns is frankly ludicrous; editorials like this serve to illustrate how deeply bonded the misguided connection between unlimited and untrammeled use of motor vehicles and urban prosperity has become.
We are car dependent because the use of cars has been turned into the obvious, easiest and quickest way of travelling about our towns and cities. This speaks of a systematic failure at local and national government to address the problem. Unfortunately our current local government minister is – as this programme shows – seemingly quite willing to indulge the prevailing attitude that the car is the only logical and sensible way of getting into our towns, with his stupid talk of ‘stealth taxes’ and ‘cash cows’ in relation to parking charges, instead of trying to do something about fostering alternatives.
Horsham District Council might also start using the extra revenue they collect to improve conditions for walking and cycling in the town, instead of using it to fund nebulous ‘car parking improvements’. Setting aside the myriad improvements that could be made in the town to facilitate cycling as an everyday mode of transport (which could make it easy and pleasant for the Henshalls to cycle to the leisure centre), it is, for instance, quite appalling that the town has only one, much abused, zebra crossing – more of these around the town would be welcome. How about, in an enlightened move, using the increased parking revenue to make it easier to walk into town?
My local paper, the West Sussex County Times, have reported an apparent proposal to reintroduce motor traffic to a pedestrianised street in Horsham – West Street.
They write –
Could traffic be brought back into pedestrianised West Street?
Should traffic be reintroduced to West Street in Horsham town centre? That’s a question Horsham District Council will be asking of residents, despite the proposal being slammed by councillors this week.
On Tuesday HDC’s Strategic Planning Advisory Group met to discuss the updated Horsham Town Plan, looking at what the town could look like in the future. The area covered by the draft plan has now been extended to include The Forum, West Street and Swan Walk, and traffic using Horsham’s main shopping street in the evening is one of the proposals put forward in the report.
Produced by private consultancy Urban Practitioners, the Town Plan is designed to give the council a framework to refer to when considering planning applications and other proposals for Horsham. The council confirmed this week it will go out for a four-week public consultation on Friday May 4. This will include the proposal of reintroducing ‘two-way vehicular access’ to West Street to ‘introduce additional activity’ to the area.
The report says: “Activity in high streets is recognised to increase the feeling of safety and therefore use.” However, councillors were outraged by the idea. Roy Cornell (Con, Roffey South) said: “I find the idea quite incredible. We are trying to drive it to be a specialist shopping experience. I remember one-way traffic in West Street and it was absolute chaos. I think we should completely abandon the idea.”
Liz Kitchen (Con, Rusper and Colgate) added: “I entirely endorse Roy Cornell’s comments. I remember even further back when we had two-way traffic in West Street.” She added that priority should be given to improving the walkway from West Street to Sainsbury’s and The Forum.
Leader of the Liberal Democrats David Holmes (Horsham Town) said: “Do you really want to consult on putting traffic down West Street? I would think very carefully before consulting on this.”
The street was initially pedestrianised more than thirty years ago during extensive town centre redevelopment. Alternative options suggested are to have one-way traffic or to add authorised street parking to West Street.
Despite the opposition from members on Tuesday, a council press release issued the following morning announced the consultation will go ahead as planned. It called the plan for changes in West Street and other areas of the town ‘exciting opportunities’.
West Street was, originally, the main route for traffic through Horsham, for vehicles travelling from Guildford to Brighton, and vice versa – it formed part of the A281, the main road between the two. At the same time, it was (and still is) one of the main shopping streets in Horsham.
The street could accommodate this dual function – as a place for shopping, and also as a through route – while the volume of motor traffic passing along it remained low. Unfortunately, from the 1950s onwards, the use of motor vehicles in Britain exploded, and West Street became rather clogged. The street was too narrow for the two-way movements of vehicles along it, given the increasing number of parked vehicles at the side.
The first attempt at a solution was to make the street one-way. This is the situation we can see in the photograph below, taken from the County Times.
No space here for two-way traffic, given the number of parked vehicles.
At a later point, the direction of the one-way street was reversed (I have not been able to establish why).
Finally, in the 1970s, an ‘inner relief’ road arrived in the shape of the dual carriageway Albion Way. The section shown below looks much like it would have done after construction.
As the council put it in the 1970s –
Like other “picture postcard” towns which have managed to retain their character despite the changes of time, [Horsham] now faces an acute need for more room for people to shop and move about the town centre, and room for their cars.
The increasing numbers of cars moving through and into Horsham needed to be accommodated, in other words, without destroying the historic centre. Albion Way was built to solve this problem, to whisk cars through the town, and into its car parks, while ‘preserving the character’ of much of the centre.
To some extent, this was a fairly enlightened move from the Council; the cars were now to be kept out of West Street, which runs parallel to Albion Way. Some civility for the town centre had been purchased, at the expense of an inner ring road. Of course, Albion Way now presented a serious barrier to pedestrian movement in and out of the town centre, but this wasn’t apparent to the planners at the time, who thought that two murky subways, and no surface crossings, would be sufficient.
One of these subways was particularly hated, and was removed in subsequent redevelopment in the 1990s. But it doesn’t really seem fair to blame the planners of the 1970s for their lack of foresight; they underestimated how unpopular subways would prove. They also weren’t to know that, subsequent to the construction of Albion Way, Horsham would have a bypass constructed, which removed (or should have removed) much of the justification for the width and capacity of Albion Way. A dual carriageway running through the centre of Horsham shouldn’t really be necessary.
But Albion Way is now one of the substantial problems that this new Horsham Town Plan is attempting to solve; in fact I would say it is the most pressing problem. The situation has not been helped by the extension of the original 1970s dual carriageway at both ends in the 1990s, when we really should have started to know better. At the southern end, a supermarket was constructed on school playing fields, and Albion Way was smashed through a parade of shops to reach it. At the northern end, an insurance company wanted to expand their offices, and did so by building across a new extension of Albion Way, which incidentally necessitated the destruction of a church.
The Town Plan has some sound ideas for this road, about which I will have more to say later, but for now, I will turn to its proposals for West Street.
The suggestion that motor traffic could be reintroduced to West Street has, I think, been met with an almost universally hostile reaction, including from town councillors. Residents don’t seem particularly keen on sharing their shopping space with motor vehicles; the reports in the newspaper come at precisely the same time that traffic is now being banned from the ‘shared space’ of East Street during shopping hours, a decision I have commented on here.
At this point, I think it is important to consider what the Horsham Town Planactually says.
The town centre is extensively pedestrianised. Whilst at first glance this seems beneficial for pedestrians, it also limits on-street activity, and results in parts of the town which feel dead at night. It may be useful to consider ‘de-pedestrianising’ some streets. The recent redesign of East Street provides an indicator of how this could be done successfully, allowing traffic whilst still providing a high quality pedestrian environment.
Part of West Street could be re-opened to traffic, maybe just in evenings, with on-street parking and loading. This would provide additional activity in the evening when West Street can become quiet and inaccessible in the absence of any evening functions. Any introduction of traffic into part of West Street would require careful consideration. There would need to be significant physical changes to accommodate vehicles together with the necessary traffic orders and traffic/parking enforcement.
This advice, it has to be said, is rather more qualified than how it has been presented in the local press. Note the use of the words ‘careful consideration’, for a start. The Plan also talks of only re-opening a part of West Street to traffic, and only in the evening.
As the Plan states, the intention of such a re-opening would be to address the lack of activity on West Street of an evening, which indeed makes it feel ‘dead at night’.
This is definitely a problem. West Street is busy during the day – possibly the busiest street in Horsham – but at night, it becomes very quiet, and slightly intimidating. Female acquaintances of mine do not like to walk down it alone at night.
East Street, by contrast, feels rather safe of an evening; there are, typically, many more people on it, and many more people watching it.
One difference between the two streets is that East Street, of course, allows motor vehicles to progress down it, while West Street does not. If we were to take a superficial reading of the situation, therefore, we could suggest that East Street is lively because motor traffic passes down it, while West Street is not lively because motor traffic does not pass down it.
Sadly, it is precisely this superficial reading which appears to lie behind the well-meaning suggestion to reintroduce traffic to West Street of an evening by the authors of the Town Plan, who, unfortunately, have failed to assess the real reasons why East Street is lively, and West Street is not.
I do not dismiss the movement of motor vehicles out of hand – I think they can play some role in keeping a street lively, and observed. But they will do nothing to address the real problems of West Street, at night, the first of which, and the most serious, is a total absence of any activity on the street itself, from the hours of 5:30pm to 9:00am. Every single shop on the street is shut for this period, barring one coffee shop which stays open until 7:00pm, and one very small upstairs restaurant.
What is the point of reintroducing parking on this street of an evening, if there is nothing on the street for anyone to visit, or do? All that will happen is that the street will become a car park for people who will be moving to activity elsewhere. (Parking on it is the only reason anyone will drive down West Street, as there is a faster route, Blackhorse Way, which lies adjacent to it.)
People parking their cars on the street will introduce some activity to the street, it is true, but not enough to make it feel safer, and not enough to justify the disruption to the street itself caused by the reintroduction of motor traffic.
By contrast, East Street has, by my count, some eight restaurants on it, that are open until late into the evening.
The street is observed by the people eating in these restaurants, and by the people coming and going from them. There are also a handful of bars just around the corner, in Market Square, which also serve to keep the street observed and active. It therefore feels safe, unlike West Street, which is not observed by anything, and is instead a shuttered trench; an overground subway.
One obvious solution immediately presents itself, and that is to encourage, into West Street, activity that will go on late into the evening – those restaurants, or bars, which are so prominent on East Street, and which are so absent on West Street. This should not be beyond the wit of the Council; to prioritise the applications of these kinds of businesses into any empty units on the street.
Another problem is that West Street, of an evening, is a long, uninterrupted canyon, unobserved, and with only one side-street along its 300 metre length. You are effectively committed to walking all the way down it once you have embarked onto it, which can be a nerve-wracking experience.
East Street is very different; it has multiple side entrances, which permit movement across and onto the street, rather than simply along it. This is another reason why it feels lively and active, and West Street feels rather dead.
The pedestrianised West Street would perhaps also be a little more lively of an evening if more people were aware that cycling along it, out of shopping hours, is in fact legal. Unfortunately this legality remains unpublicised by the Council; to those not disposed to dig around on the Council’s website, cycling along West Street feels and appears illegal, with signage to suggest so, and consequently very few people do so.
In any case, there are two important reasons for the difference in character between the East and West Street of an evening; the amount of restaurants and bars, or any premises open until late, and the amount of cross-cutting streets and entrances. These are both far more important than the simple absence of motor vehicles on one of them. So it’s a real pity that the Town Plan, while correctly identifying a problem – namely the quietness of some streets at night – has diagnosed the wrong cause, namely, a lack of motor traffic.
The town centre is extensively pedestrianised. Whilst at first glance this seems beneficial for pedestrians, it also limits on-street activity, and results in parts of the town which feel dead at night.
East Street is lively with or without cars of an evening; this is because of the essential character of the street, not because cars are permitted onto it. The Council, and the authors of the Plan, Urban Practitioners, would do well to heed this lesson.
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