‘A person of good character’

Travesties of justice aren’t exclusive to the United Kingdom.

Elvira Sacirovic couldn’t bear going to court for the sentencing of a P-plater who killed her father while drag racing, out of fear he would walk free – and he did. Raymond Grech, 26, was given a wholly suspended sentence of 18 months in the Victorian County Court for killing 78-year-old Mehmed Bajric.

He and two other drivers had sped off from an intersection in the western Melbourne suburb of Cairnlea on March 6, 2008, and had been weaving in and out of traffic before Grech hit Mr Bajric, a Bosnian refugee, as he was leaving a mosque. Another of the drag-racing drivers then ran over Mr Bajric and dragged him for some distance. Eyewitnesses estimated Grech was travelling between 90km/h and 100km/h in the 80km/h zone and several witnesses said the cars had appeared to be racing each other.

Grech’s probationary licence had been suspended at the time for three speeding offences and he was allegedly driving an unroadworthy car, the court heard. He had also been caught speeding once more since the fatal incident.

Mrs Sacirovic said she could not bear to attend the sentencing on Friday, having suspected Grech would walk free. “I was thinking that he was going to walk free, because they said, `He’s a good man,'” Mrs Sacirovic told AAP from her Cairnlea home. “To me, he is not a good man. He was drag racing. He didn’t have a driving licence and after he killed my father, he was speeding again. What’s going to stop him doing it again? He kills a man and he walked free – where is the justice there? What kind of message does it send to other people who want to speed?”

Mrs Sacirovic remembered the grandfather of eight, who had lived with her family, as a man dedicated to his family and his faith. “He was a very, very good man, a very quiet man, very generous and very understanding,” she said. She expressed the pain of discovering for the first time during court proceedings that her father had been run over and dragged, something police had never explained to her, she said.

Grech, of Rockbank, pleaded guilty to one count of dangerous driving causing death. The court heard Grech had felt profound sorrow and guilt for Mr Bajric’s family. In sentencing, Judge John Smallwood said he took into account Grech’s undertaking to give evidence against a co-accused, and lengthy delays in the case, as well as his early guilty plea, remorse and strong prospects of rehabilitation. He was sentenced to 18 months’ jail, wholly suspended for two years, and is disqualified from obtaining a driver’s licence for 18 months.

The judge said he had to balance the fact that Grech was a young person of good character who, while driving like a hoon, had not been intoxicated. “That has to be balanced against the fact that you took a very worthwhile life,” he said.”I just don’t think young people in your situation understand the grief and the distress and the heartache that driving like that causes to people.”

Grech wasn’t intoxicated. Good for him. This ‘achievement’ on his part has to be balanced against the fact he took a life.

Still, I’m not quite sure how the ‘good character’ aspect of his personality corresponds with his repeated speeding offences, killing a man while racing an unroadworthy car and while disqualified from driving.

And then being caught speeding again, shortly after killing someone.

The way a person behaves behind the wheel evidently has no bearing on an assessment of his or her moral qualities, something I have remarked on recently with regard to another case, this time from the UK, in which the ‘good character’ of a driver with a prior speeding conviction who killed a cyclist was invoked in mitigation.

London’s cycle infrastructure, and reallocation of road space

This post is somewhat tangential to the big news today, of the Times’ launch of their Cities fit for cycling campaign, which I wholeheartedly support. I can think of no clearer reason for doing so than the words of Kaya Burgess, the friend and colleague of Mary Bowers, the young woman critically injured while riding her bicycle in November last year.

The reality with any major issue is that it only truly touches you when it comes close to home. However regularly you may cycle on Britain’s city streets and however aware you are of the risks of doing so, it is not until you have seen one of your closest friends and colleagues stretchered off the tarmac from beneath the wheels of a lorry only yards from the office that the vulnerability of cyclists hits home.

Mary Bowers is a news reporter at The Times. She joined the paper as a graduate trainee in September 2009, though her beaming smile and effusive personality were common sights around the office from previous roles as a researcher on the comment and foreign desks.

With a passion for social affairs investigations and witty features, she has a writing style that is as distinctive as her sharp, quirky dress sense. She also has a remarkable singing voice, and it is an honour to have been one of those lucky enough to perform with her on several occasions in the folk clubs of London.

Yet it is only by a hair’s breadth that we are still able to talk about Mary in the present tense. Her survival to this point, now almost three months since her accident in London at 9.30am on Friday, November 4, is down to the passers-by who stopped and called the emergency services.

It is down to the paramedics who arrived on the scene within three minutes, to the fire crews who cut Mary and her mangled bike from beneath the wheels of the lorry, and to the doctors and nurses in the intensive care unit of one of the city’s busiest hospitals. But Mary cannot thank them herself. Not yet. Not for a long time. Possibly never. Because, though she is stable, Mary is still not conscious and remains in a trauma unit. Her broken legs, arm and pelvis are slowly healing, but other damage sustained during complications in her treatment, almost inevitable after so traumatic an injury, will be far harder to overcome, though she is making slow progress.

There are also people Mary would not want to thank. There are the authorities who have neglected to ensure that junctions like those on The Highway in Wapping — or countless others where cyclists have been maimed and killed in Britain — are made safe for cars, lorries and cyclists to co-exist safely.

Ensuring that junctions in London – and elsewhere in other UK cities and towns – are far, far safer than they currently are for people using bicycles will necessitate more than  mirrors, and sensors, and training for cyclists and drivers (although these measures are, in and of themselves, useful); it will surely involve a major reassessment of how these junctions are configured. Far too often cyclists are expected to share space with fast flowing streams of traffic, or with large vehicles which can all too easily fail to spot a cyclist in a dangerous position around them. This must change.

Quite what these changes will involve is something that will be discussed in detail, but it will surely necessitate the reallocation of some of the vast swathes of our streets and roads that are given over to the motor vehicle.

This is the focus of my tangentially-related post, which has been brewing since I attended a Transport Planning Society talk last week, and has been given impetus by today’s campaign. The talk was entitled Cycling infrastructure in London: have we got it right?, and one of the speakers was Lilli Matson, who is Transport for London’s ‘Head of Delivery Planning, Better Routes and Places’.

She spoke for nearly twenty minutes; strangely, for a talk specifically about infrastructure, there was next to no mention of it in her speech, let alone any assessment of whether it was being got right. There was a reiteration of the review of junctions on the TLRN (the roads that TfL administer), and she made the point that there was a ‘moratorium’ on any changes to roads until after the Olympics, but beyond that, her talk was entirely devoid of the subject matter that was under debate. We had lots of figures about how cycling was growing, how many people go on Skyrides (which she referred to, bizarrely, as a ‘strange event, because you cycle slowly’ – perhaps an accidental admission of just how fast you have to cycle ordinarily on London’s roads, and how unsuited they are for the typical participants in a Skyride), the glossy promotions that have happened, and that are planned, how Boris bike docking stations are going to be expanded eastwards, but nothing, at all, about how successfully London’s roads and streets are being designed for the bicycle.

Something of a disappointment.

A question came from the audience (I believe it was from Kate Carpenter of the Chartered Institute of Highways and Transportation) – which, after making reference to people switching transport mode if car use is confined – asked whether, in London, we will ever see a day in which road space – lanes for vehicles – are taken away and reallocated for bicycle use.

Mark Frost, a senior transport planner in the borough of Hounslow – who had spoken after Matson, with great enthusiasm about encouraging cycling in his borough, and who was about as critical as he could be about the limitations imposed on him by funding – responded that this was largely a political argument, that could be taken to politicians where they thought they had a chance of making the case.

Matson then answered that this reallocation has happened in London already, pointing to the ‘shared space’ schemes being implemented across London, which she was ‘very interested’ in. (This neglects, of course, the fact that nearly every single ‘shared space’ scheme in London involves no reallocation of space from the motor vehicle whatsoever, merely the belief that drivers will behave better around vulnerable users in these environments, which is a very different beast from reallocation of space). She said she was interested in wider benefits to roads and streets, beyond cycling (another coded reference to the perceived benefits of ‘shared space’), before finally stating that any reallocation that does occur will not come easily, and will be a slow and incremental process.

I have two fundamental difficulties with this position.

The first is ideological. I’m not expecting miracles from Boris and Transport for London, but it would be nice if they would at least make some kind of commitment towards genuinely fostering saner travel choices, beyond just talking about how wonderful cycling is (‘encouragement’) and putting down blue paint. The general thrust of Matson’s response was that it should be up to us – the current people cycling – to gain sufficient political weight to then influence politicians and transport planners.

But I’d like to see some people pushing from the top, while we push from the bottom. This is not completely pie in the sky – it’s happening in New York, where Janette Sadiq Khan has been very active in reallocating space away from the motor vehicle, quite often in the teeth of serious opposition, because she has a firm belief in improving her city for everyone. Getting more people on bicycles, and people making more journeys on foot, reduces congestion for those who continue to drive, as well as all the other attendant improvements for public health, noise, well-being, and the civility of our urban realm. Paris is also seeing an increasing number of road closures, and reallocation, as I’ve written about here.

Boris, and Transport for London, on the other hand, seem to be far more regressive – following, when they should be leading. Reallocation isn’t just about bicycles – it’s about public realm. Most notably we have the fiasco of Parliament Square, a place that Boris himself has proclaimed a ‘world heritage site’, yet one which is rendered inaccessible on foot, and clogged with motor vehicles. Boris has, of course, personally scotched a plan to remove vehicles from one side of this square, to open it up into a plaza (note – removed from just one side. Vehicles would still have been able to progress around the square, just as they currently do in Trafalgar Square). Boris is simply going along with what he thinks constitutes the majority – ‘the motorist’ – wants. I don’t suppose you can blame him for that as a politician (although his diagnosis of majority opinion is almost certainly wrong), but it would nice, just occasionally, to see him, and the bodies for which he is responsible, make the case for a saner alternative.

My second problem with what Matson said about the difficulty of reallocating road space, and the apparently slow and incremental way in which this will have to be achieved, is that Transport for London are already quite merrily reallocating road space away from the car. Take their latest scheme for Euston Circus, at the junction of Tottenham Court Road, Hampstead Road, and Euston Road.

Here’s how it is going to change. From this –

To this –

The six lanes for motor vehicles in the current arrangement at the top of Tottenham Court Road have been whittled down to three. This is reallocation of road space, away from the motor vehicle, on a grand scale. Indeed, space for motor vehicles has been halved. Did Transport for London have a grand battle on their hands coming up with these plans? Did they fight tooth and nail against the vested interest of the London motorist?

No. They just did it. They reallocated space all by themselves.

The only problem is, they just didn’t reallocate any of that space for bicycles. Worse than that, it doesn’t seem like the bicycle as a mode of transport has entered the design process at any stage (something I have remarked on before). Just two aspects of the design will quickly illustrate how the bicycle was not considered, at all.

Firstly, if you are coming south on Hampstead Road (the road we are looking towards in the photographs above), you used to be able to turn left onto Euston Road, to head eastbound, be it on a bicycle, or in a car.

Under these plans, you won’t be able to do that any more.

The left turn into Euston Road has been eliminated for vehicles. And the designers have evidently not thought about the possibility of an exemption for cyclists – perhaps a dedicated left-turn cycle path around the apex of the corner. This kind of thing is evidently far too radical. I can only guess that the left turn here has been sacrificed to allow pedestrians to cross Euston Road more easily, but without having an effect on ‘smoothing traffic flow’. Precisely the same kind of arrangement is now in place on Piccadilly, where pedestrians have a single stage crossing (good) but at the expense of right turns from St James Street, for all vehicles, including bicycles (bad).

The second clear indication of how the bicycle has not been thought about is the treatment of the cycle path that runs east to west along the (dualled) slip road into Gower Street. This is the path that I wrote about here. It’s dreadfully narrow, and in places it has to be shared, by default, with pedestrians.

None of the £10 million being lavished on this redesign will be used to rejig or improve this path, to make it wider and more suitable for use alongside pedestrians. The unnecessary three lanes of width of the slip road, pictured, will remain, as is. And where the cycle path meets the top of Tottenham Court Road, we have what I consider a frankly dangerous arrangement.

After you’ve crossed the slip road and proceeded to Tottenham Court Road, at the very bottom of the map above, you are simply dumped into the ASL (Advanced Stop Line). Now a natural continuation of many cyclists’ journeys will be westbound – carrying on in the same direction. That means they have to get to the left-hand side of the ASL, to make a left turn from it.

Unfortunately while they are moving across the ASL in this horizontal fashion, they will have no indication of when the lights are going to change. This is apparent when we look, again, at the artist’s mock-up –

The cycle path (the barely visible dark grey strip on the pavement) emerges into the ASL, at right. To continue west (leftwards), you have to get across to the left-hand side. But the traffic lights for vehicles queuing at the top of Tottenham Court Road could change at any moment, leaving you stranded in the middle of the road.

The cycle path has just been drawn so it meets the road, and that’s about it. It’s completely half-arsed. A real design would have a proper off-carriageway cycle path that continued across the top of Tottenham Court Road, with a dedicated signal-controlled crossing, and thence west-bound, alongside Euston Road. Ample space has been taken away from cars here, that could have been used to achieve this.

This is not an argument for taking space away from pedestrians – I think wide pavements are fantastic. But the pavements that would be created in this scheme are so wide that pedestrians would not suffer from some of the space they have gained being given over to bicycles – indeed, the pavements would still be substantially wider than they are currently, given that TfL have taken away 3 vehicle lanes here.

It’s worth bearing these kinds of schemes in mind the next time you hear TFL or Boris talking about the political difficulties they face in reallocating road space. They can do it all by themselves, quite happily.

Looking at that last photograph, it’s horribly easy to imagine a cyclist using the filter lane to enter the ASL, alongside an HGV that might be intending to turn left, as the lights change. Mirrors, sensors, and training can mitigate this danger, but the ultimate safety advance would be in keeping the bicycle and the HGV separate entirely. The space is plainly there. Let’s start using it.

Cyclists In The City has more on the Euston Circus scheme. The TfL plans can be seen here, and the consultation is here. 

Friday Facility no.10 – Ampton Street, Camden

The segregated cycle track along Tavistock Place in Camden often gets a lot of attention – it’s one of the few examples of separated provision for cyclists in London of any length. It is not adequate in width, nor is it helpful that the two-way track runs alongside a two-way carriageway. These are flaws that the advocates of the path never wanted, and that were forced upon them. It’s worth reading this post by David Arditti, which sets out the background, most notably, the original plan to convert the road into a one-way street, with a two-way track alongside it. This would have allowed the track to be far wider, and would have eliminated the more dangerous turning conflicts.

I’m interested here in the continuation of that route, eastbound, as it heads across Gray’s Inn Road, into the residential Ampton Street. You can see the route below.

Importantly, this is a journey that you can only make on foot, or by bicycle, because the entrance to Ampton Street at the junction with Gray’s Inn Road is closed off to motor vehicles. Looking west from Ampton Street, towards Gray’s Inn Road –

Similarly, the eastern end of Ampton Street is also closed off to vehicles. Below, we are looking west into Ampton Street, from Cubitt Street –

The only way you can get a motor vehicle into Ampton Street, therefore, is via Frederick Street to the north, turning into Ampton Place.

Both these streets have become a dead-end for motor vehicles – and consequently the only vehicles using them will be those gaining access to the residences on them.

For this reason, it feels very safe to cycle on this short stretch of street – you will very rarely encounter a (moving) vehicle along it. This is a form of segregation rather different to that of the cycle path on Tavistock Place, but just as effective in making the street seem safe to use by bicycle.

You also have a fun little path to use at the eastern end, which wiggles past a small piece of park that has been constructed on what was once the roadway.

The street is quiet, too. You can hear birds singing, even at the start of the rush hour, when the video below was taken. (Note the total absence of moving vehicles.)

I expect the houses here are worth considerably more than they would be if this was a road fully open to motor vehicles.

Despite the lack of this form of traffic, the street is not ‘quiet’ in the sense of lacking busyness, because as you can see, there are plenty of people walking and cycling through it, which gives enough activity to make it feel subjectively safe.

We can close roads without them becoming stagnant – we just need to do it in the right way.

(There is some good background here on how the eastern end of the street was opened to bicycles as part of the London Cycle Network, and how the changes were consulted upon with local residents.)

The Association Of British Drivers

On Tuesday morning, Malcolm Heymer, of the Association of British Drivers, was a witness at the House Of Commons Transport Select Committee, discussing ‘Road Safety’. You can hear the whole session here, if you choose to, but I have transcribed some of his more interesting responses to questioning below.

On the effect of lower speed limits on road safety –

Question: Do you consider yourself to be a road safety organisation?

Answer: Yes.

Question: So why is it, then, that the views of the Association of British Drivers are so at odds with every other road safety organisation?

Answer: Well, we believe that our views are based on empirical evidence which goes back decades, and particularly in the case of speed limit-setting… that evidence has now been dismissed. And speed limits are being set at lower levels. And that’s having an adverse effect on compliance, and therefore on road safety generally.

Ellman (Chair): Are you saying – can I just clarify – you’re saying that lower speed limits are having an adverse effect on road safety?

Answer: No, not lower speeds – lower speed limits. Because speed limits are set below the level at which the majority of drivers consider to be reasonable, you get a very high level of non-compliance. And you get a greater disparity of speeds – you get more frustration, because a small minority of drivers will obey the speed limit, even if they think it’s really silly, and that will result in a large queue of drivers behind, who simply want to drive at what they consider to be normal speeds, and that leads to frustration, dangerous overtaking… It also can lead to long queues of traffic, which prevent side road traffic from entering, or crossing, a main road. So you get these additional conflicts, even road rage, as a result. So if you have sensibly-set speed limits, which means set at the 85th percentile, which is the level that 85% of drivers wouldn’t exceed anyway, experience has shown – this goes back, certainly in the United States, to the late 1930s – that is the safest level at which to set speeds, speed limits, and you get the lowest casualty rates.

Quite why or how drivers come to consider a certain speed ‘reasonable’ is not addressed. A large part of that equation is surely the existing speed limit on a road in question. Drivers increasingly feel it ‘reasonable’ to exceed speed limits by 10% or more, because they know that’s what they can get away with. The breaking of speed limits isn’t a rebellion against an ‘unreasonable’ speed limit – it’s a reflection of how fast you can go without expectation of getting into trouble. It’s not hard to imagine the effect of raising the speed limit to match what people feel they can get away with.

On the potential raising of the motorway speed limit –

Question: The Association of British Drivers supports the increase in the speed limit on the motorways to 80mph. Given that we have amongst the safest motorways in the world, why would we want to change the speed limit and risk – regardless of whether or not it does have an impact – why would we we risk the chance of making our motorways more dangerous?

Answer: Well obviously the ABD doesn’t believe that it would make motorways more dangerous. Department for Transport figures actually show that, averaged over the motorway network, the 85th percentile speed for cars on motorways is 79mph. And that will vary, of course, from motorway to motorway. That means that, with the 85th percentile being the ideal speed at which you might wish to set the speed limit, 80 mph is in accordance with that, and therefore the right speed limit for motorways in the majority of cases. Of course there are places where a lower speed limit may be necessary, and there are sections of that today, 50 mph and 60 mph motorways, which will no doubt remain the same.

Question: So if the 85th percentile is currently 79 mph, is there not a suggestion amongst different organisations that if you increase the speed limit to 80 mph, the 85th percentile will go significantly above 80 mph?

Answer: I know a lot of people believe that, but the evidence is that it’s not so. I mean I’ve  got a case in point. Admittedly from the United States. But it’s a dual, three-lane freeway, which is equivalent to one of our three lane motorways. Where, in the 55 mph era, the 85th percentile speed was 73 mph. That’s 18 mph over the speed limit, and in fact 98% of drivers were exceeding the speed limit. When the limit was raised to 70 mph on that road, the 85th percentile actually fell to 72 mph. The mean speed only increased by just over 1 mph. So there was a reduction in the spread of speeds, as a result.

Question: Would you not accept that there is a significant difference between a speed limit of 55 mph, and a speed limit of 70 mph?

Answer: Indeed.

Answer comes there none, from the ABD, as to why drivers see our current 70 mph as so ‘unreasonable’ a speed limit, and yet 80 mph would be seen as eminently reasonable. It cannot be a response to the road conditions, because motorways are the same, everywhere, and have been since their inception, and permit driving at speeds far greater than 70 or 80 mph. The real reason why 80 mph is ‘reasonable’ (and 90mph, or 100 mph, is not) is that it lies around the 10% threshold of what drivers can get away with. Their logic here is just as flawed.

A question on the relationship between speed limits and accidents –

Question: Is it your view that when a speed limit in a local area is reduced, then the road rage becomes so intense, that accidents actually do go up? That there’s a direct correlation between lowering the speed limit, and an increase in the number of road accidents?

Answer: There can be, if the limit is reduced to well below the 85th percentile.

Question: That’s not anecdotal, that’s actual empirical evidence that you can submit to us?

Answer: Well there’s evidence, for example, from the county of Suffolk, which at the end of 1995, I think it was, introduced some 300… 450 new 30 mph speed limits, within a three month period. Some of those were on roads that were previously national speed limit. And when you look at the trend in casualties for that county, it was continuously downwards from 1990 to 1995, and in 1996, it reversed direction and started going upwards. And that was for the county as a whole, not necessarily individual roads.

Chair (Ellman): So it wasn’t necessarily on those roads?

Answer: No, it was for the county as a whole.

Question: For your premise to stand up, you would have to show that the accidents on the roads where the speed reduction took place – that’s where the increase in accidents happened.

Answer: Not necessarily, because you can get migration of accidents. Because people have slowed down unnecessarily in some areas, they might try to make up time somewhere else.

Question: We’re talking about empirical evidence here, and you’re talking about supposition. You’re not talking about actual evidence.

Answer: There’s also a coroner’s inquest from late 1996 which specifically cited one of these new speed limits as a contributory factor to a fatal accident.

A coroner had the stupidity to blame one man’s fatal driving on a ‘low’ speed limit on another stretch of road – manna from heaven for the ABD, who have been trading on this anecdote for the last fifteen years.

‘Frustration’ at not being able to break a speed limit is no more an excuse for reckless driving than not being able to watch the TV programme you want is an excuse for murder.

Frankly it’s embarrassing that this organisation is given a platform by the House of Commons, with the concomitant credibility – especially when it can respond to a fact like this

The Kent and Medway Safety Camera Partnership (KMSCP)… said there has been a 74% reduction in the number of people killed or seriously injured at fixed and mobile sites in the county since 2002, the equivalent of 397 people. Ch Insp Andy Reeves, head of roads policing for Kent Police and KMSCP chairman, said the figures “speak for themselves”.

With a comment like this –

Terry Hudson, the Kent spokesman for the Association of British Drivers, which opposes speed cameras, said: “They may have saved a few lives, but we’ve got to remember, they’ve prosecuted a lot of people over a long period of time. And the effects of getting a driving ban or losing one’s job is never, ever taken into consideration.”

Yeah, I mean speed cameras may have saved a few lives (400 or so, in Kent alone – but who’s counting) but we should never forget some people have been trapped by them, and then – after quite reasonably failing to learn their lesson, and being trapped by them several more times – have actually been banned from driving! Temporarily!

I mean, what gives?

Where’s our sense of perspective? Surely everyone knows temporarily losing your driving licence is a fate worse than death?

Road safety update

Some ‘road safety’ news from the last few days –

In Sussex –

A 61-year-old man has sadly died from injuries sustained when he collided with a white Ford Focus on the eastbound carriageway of the A27 at Chichester, between the Stockbridge roundabout and the Whyke roundabout on Friday 20 January. Police and emergency services were called to the scene at around 5.30pm but sadly the man was pronounced dead at the scene. A 42-year-old woman, from Bognor who was driving the Ford Focus was uninjured.

Sergeant Melanie Doyle from the Road Policing Investigation Team said: “This is sadly the third road death on the A27 since Friday 2 December, 2011 [all pedestrians]. We are currently working to locate the next of kin for the deceased man in this latest fatal. Following the first two fatal collisions Sussex Police officers visited the area and provided people who are living near to the road with high visibility jackets. We would encourage anyone walking in the area at night to wear these jackets to help prevent another tragedy. The area where these three deaths have taken place is very dark at night, making it very dangerous. All pedestrians should try to use the pedestrian crossings along the A27. This may add a few minutes to your journey, but it could save your life. Officers have been in the area talking to local residents and giving advice on how to keep safe while walking near to roads at night. Police have also been monitoring the road during the hours of darkness to ensure that drivers are complying with the speed limit.We have also been talking to the district council and the Highways Agency to see if there are any measures that can be put in place to prevent any further tragic deaths.

In Cambridgeshire –

‘Dangerous’ speed cut scrapped

Plans to slash the speed limit on the A10 between Cambridge and Ely have been scrapped after they were branded “potentially dangerous”.

Highway chiefs had proposed to introduce a 50mph maximum along the length of the route but councillors and residents argued this was unenforceable and could actually cause accidents by triggering frustration among motorists.

In Stoke-On-Trent –

A drink-driver who treated city streets ‘like a racetrack’ has been jailed for killing a taxi driver and his passenger in a head-on collision. James Appleby, who was driving his late father’s Jaguar XK8 sports car after a visit to a lap-dancing club, reached 112mph on a 30mph road in the seconds leading up to the crash.

After the collision, Appleby managed to climb out of the window of the £60,000 coupe, which had a top speed of 155mph, and walk to a nearby friend’s house despite having a broken ankle, broken wrist and fractured rib. He was arrested there and taken to hospital, where at 4am he was found to have 133mg of alcohol in 100ml of blood, well over the legal limit of 80mg. Police established through ‘forensic techniques’ that Appleby had maintained an average speed of between 83mph and 91mph for the mile before the crash, and reached 112mph 550m before the collision point.

Appleby was jailed for nine years after admitting two counts of causing death by dangerous driving, two counts of causing death while uninsured, drink-driving and failing to stop at a crash scene. He was also fined £100 after driving himself to court for an earlier court hearing into the matter, despite still having no insurance, and was banned from driving for six years.

From Tyne & Wear –

Car ‘drives into man’on Washington pavementPolice are seeking a motorist they believe deliberately drove into a man on a pavement in Tyne and Wear. The 21-year-old was with friends in Washington, early on Sunday, when he was hit by an Audi A3 with blacked-out windows which had mounted the kerb. The vehicle then drove off at speed without stopping, leaving the victim with head injuries.

And from Guildford –

Woman Seriously Injured As Car Hits House

The bay window of a house in Aldershot Road damaged when a car went into it. A young woman is in a serious condition in hospital after her car hit a house in Guildford. The crash happened in the early hours of Sunday morning (yesterday) after the driver lost control of her Vauxhall Astra on Aldershot Road in Woodbridge Hill. A wall under the bay window of the house collapsed. The woman, who is in her twenties, was taken to the Royal Surrey County Hospital. It is believed the car was travelling up A323 Aldershot Road when it went off to the right colliding with two parked vehicles before hitting the house.

Location –

Thanks to @katsdekker, @thecyclingjim and @scsmith4 for the stories

The Evening Standard disappears up its own fundament

On 18th January, Michael Howie and Jonathan Prynn of the Evening Standard wrote a piece about the alleged swiftness with which Westminster Council were converting single yellow lines around junctions in their borough to double yellows; their purpose, apparently, to hint at some subterfuge on the part of the Council.

Campaigners fighting a parking “stealth tax” today accused Westminster council of a suspicious “display of efficiency” in its rush to paint new double yellow lines in the West End. Borough officials confirmed the painting of five miles of double yellows on 199 roads, mostly in Mayfair, Marylebone and Fitzrovia, was “nearly done”. The last stretches are expected to be laid today.

… Workmen began converting the lines from single yellows, which are free outside peak times, on January 9. The change was agreed on December 23, less than two hours before Westminster City Hall closed for Christmas. It sparked fury among business owners, night workers and church leaders. West End restaurateur Richard Caring is planning a High Court challenge. John Griffin, owner of minicab firm Addison Lee, said: “They’ve rushed out this conversion of single yellow lines in world-record time. It’s incredible efficiency – just so they can grab some money.” Michel Roux Jr, chef of Le Gavroche in Upper Brook Street, said: “There’s double yellows everywhere in Mayfair now. They are having exactly the same effect as the parking charges.” Tony Lorenz, chairman of the Residents’ Society of Mayfair and St James, said: “It’s an unbelievably rare display of efficiency. I believe it’s defiance – ‘You’ve beaten us so far, so we’re going to take more [parking] spaces away.” Westminster claims only 132 “genuine” spaces have been lost as most new double yellows are at dropped kerbs or near junctions where people should not park. The lines are needed to improve safety, it says.

No voice was given to those local residents in favour of these changes.

Setting aside the preposterous claims of these ‘campaigners’ that double yellow lines are a ‘stealth tax’ – don’t park on them if you don’t want to be ‘taxed’, you stupid idiots – what is missing from this storm of outrage is a recognition that these new double yellow lines are, as the highlighted passage shows, almost entirely being painted in places where it was already illegal to park, at all times. What the campaigners claim to be a ‘tax’ is in reality nothing more than Westminster Council making it clearer where parking your car will result in a fine.

Highway Code Rule 243 is quite explicit –

DO NOT stop or park

• opposite or within 10 metres (32 feet) of a junction, except in an authorised parking space
• where the kerb has been lowered to help wheelchair users and powered mobility vehicles

That is, the exact locations that correspond to where these double yellow lines are being painted. Westminster Council estimate that over 90% of these new double yellow lines are at locations where parking was already illegal, and liable to a fine. The Council could have issued tickets to vehicles that were parked in these locations in any case, in the absence of double yellow lines, so this policy really amounts to nothing more than doing motorists a favour.

Not content with merely giving free reign to this nonsensical ‘campaign’, The Evening Standard have now delved further into absurdity, with a piece published just two days later, on 20th January, again by Howie and Prynn. They now have a new theme – this time accusing Westminster Council of ‘double standards’. It runs

Almost four out of 10 West End junctions have paid-for or residents’ bays on stretches of road judged by Westminster council to be too dangerous for parking, official figures have revealed. The Tory-run authority has converted five miles of single yellow lines to doubles since the start of the year on safety grounds, mostly within 10 metres of junctions. But council leaders have been accused of double standards because they have left hundreds of parking bays – many generating revenue through charges – sited close to corners. In Mayfair almost half – 110 out of 233 – of junctions have bays within 10 metres.

The move has also infuriated businesses and residents who see it as a “backdoor” way of restricting parking after the council, headed by outgoing leader Colin Barrow, ditched plans for blanket evening and Sunday parking charges. The figures obtained by Westminster’s Labour leader Paul Dimoldenberg show that 254 of the 674 junctions, or 38 per cent, in the West End have parking bays within 10 metres of them. Almost half the bays are for residents, 30 per cent metered or pay and display and the rest a mix of spaces for motorbikes, disabled drivers, diplomats and doctors as well as taxi ranks and Boris bike docking stations. Mr Dimoldenberg said: “Westminster is happy to cite safety issues when it is getting rid of single yellow lines but doesn’t seem so concerned about spaces where it can charge up to £4.80 an hour.”

Of course, one implication of this new-found interest in ‘consistency’ on the part of the Evening Standard is that these remaining parking bays within 10 metres of junction should now be removed, and painted with double yellow lines. But of course this isn’t what the Evening Standard want at all – their interest in ‘consistency’ only seems to run one way; in allowing dangerous and illegal parking at all junctions.

The Evening Standard are also deeply confused. Referring back to Rule 243, we see that the Highway Code states that parking is not permitted within ten metres of junctions, except – and that is the key word – in authorised parking bays. The Highway Code doesn’t say that parking bays shouldn’t ever be within 10m of junctions, or that parking in a bay that happens to be within 10m of a junction is illegal. Parking bays can, and do, exist within 10m of a junction, quite legally.

In addition – and this should be quite obvious to anyone with half a brain cell – the mere fact that some parking bays in Westminster are within 10m of some junctions provides no grounds, whatsoever, for permitting parking outside of those bays by junctions or dropped kerbs. The two issues are quite separate. Nor does the continued existence of parking bays within 10m of junctions suggest that the Council should not make that prohibition explicit by painting double yellow lines.

Finally, the continued existence of some parking bays within 10m of junctions gives no grounds for suggesting that Westminster council are engaging in ‘double standards.’ This is for the simple reason that these parking bays are, in effect, an exemption to the 10m rule. Contrary to what the Standard is claiming, the continued existence of some parking bays within 10m of junctions doesn’t suggest inconsistency on the part of the council; it suggests leniency and generosity.

A case in point is the location used to illustrate the Evening Standard’s own piece on the 20th January – the corner of Balfour Place, and Aldford Street.

Here we can see a marked parking bay, to the left, within ten metres of the junction; a parking bay which any sane person can judge to have no bearing on the decision of the council to convert the single yellows here to double yellows. Note also that these double yellows are not a ‘new’ restriction, as the Standard’s erroneous caption suggests – they are  merely, given the corner and the dropped kerb, an explicit clarification of an existing restriction.

Now the logical implication of the Evening Standard’s attack on Westminster Council on the grounds of ‘double standards’ is that this parking bay should be removed, and the double yellow lines extended for ten metres from the junction. Indeed, not just at this junction; the implication is that all parking bays within ten metres of any junction in Westminster should be removed, resulting in the loss of far more than the (mere) 132 marked spaces that Westminster Council say have been lost as a result of their new double yellows.

Such a move by the Council would be greeted by screeches of horror from the Standard, doubtless far more strident than their current complaints. The obvious conclusion, as I said above, is that the only ‘consistency’ the paper (and the businessmen and women who are currently using it as a mouthpiece) are interested in is the liberty to park anywhere, at any time, even in locations (illogically) where it was already illegal to park, like at the junction of Balfour Place and Aldford Street.

It’s worth noting, further, that if Westminster Council really were interested in raising revenue, as the Labour leader Dimoldenberg claims, then they would be extending the parking bays right up to the junctions, and so gaining revenue from people paying to park in them. They certainly wouldn’t be pursuing their current policy of painting double yellow lines showing where people can’t park at all, for the simple reason that double yellow lines, in and of themselves, raise no revenue. The fact that some people are arrogant or ignorant enough to park on double yellows, and thereby attract fines, is quite obviously not the responsibility of Westminster Council. It is only this idiotic campaign that maintains that double yellow lines are some form of ‘tax’ that might lead people to think otherwise, and the Standard and the Labour members should be ashamed of themselves for going along with it.

I leave you with the point at which the Evening Standard finally disappears up its own fundament. The point at which it publishes, at face value, this kind of complaint –

Sophia Madden, 20, PA to Michael Charalambous, owner of Mayfair hair salon Nyumba, whose clients include Samantha Cameron and Jemima Khan, said: “People are arriving late for their appointments because they cannot find a space. A lot have to park at Selfridges. You don’t want to walk that far if you’ve just had your hair done.”

As these new double yellows are – to state again – almost entirely in locations where it was already illegal to park, the only possible reason the Nyumba clients ‘cannot find a space’ is that they, or other motorists, are no longer parking illegally in the vicinity – obstructing junctions and pavements, and so on – and are now using the marked bays. This fundamental shortage of space for parking cannot, and should not, be solved by allowing obstructive parking.

The desperate straits of a woman who has paid at least £175 for a haircut being forced to  walk 700 yards from Nyumba back to Selfridges is not going to persuade me otherwise.

Thanks to @johnstreetdales for provoking this piece

A correction

In my post last week about shared space, I made the assertion that Simon Legg was apparently in favour of a ‘shared space’ solution on Euston Road – the A501 – based on a comment of his that appeared to express approval for ‘mingling’ users on that road.

My attention has been drawn to a prior comment of his – one I was unaware of – that proposes a quite different remedy for Euston Road, and which suggests I should have treated the comment of his I used with rather less seriousness.

Namely

There’s no real way in which the A501 serves the parts of London it bisects. It’s a smelly stop/start canyon, stripping the street frontages to either side of pleasure.

Now the irony is that billions are being poured in to Crossrail, which will, some time in the future (the latest date is 2017), take passengers from Paddington to Canary Wharf or Stratford. For a small proportion of that, and in a fraction of the time, the A501 could be civilised, could be carrying trolleybuses or bendybuses and could have a wide continuous red-tarmaced lane to give cyclists the same opportunities they enjoy on the A24 or the A13. The Kings Cross/St Pancras area could be re-jigged to give pedestrians half a chance of crossing the road without feeling as if they’re venturing in to a warzone.

The reduction of private car and taxicab traffic along the A501 would make London a nicer place. It would cut carbon emissions. It would be not wildly expensive. It would, almost by accident, make cycling to and from six railway termini less unpleasant. It would, critically, increase the capacity of the road.

I find little to disagree with here. Reducing capacity for private motor traffic in urban areas, and reassigning that space to public transport, walking and cycling, is what I am all about. Dare I say it, Simon Legg’s proposal for Euston Road – with wide, continuous, red-tarmaced surfaces for bikes – sounds rather… Dutch.

Take Potterstraat in Utrecht, which forms the central section of the main east-west thoroughfare in that city. In the 1960s, it looked like this (picture courtesy of Mark Wagenbuur) –

A dual carriageway for motor vehicles (albeit with cycle tracks alongside).

The parallels with Euston Road are far from exact, given that Utrecht is a far smaller city, and Potterstraat is rather narrower than the A501 – but it is instructive to see how this stretch of road looks today.

(Streetview here). The space has been given over entirely to public transport, walking and cycling. The ‘road’, or what remains of it, is now only used by buses, and the pavements and cycle paths on either side have been widened. It’s still a busy street – busier than it was in the 1960s photograph. The journeys along it are just being made by different – quieter, more pleasant, and more efficient – modes of transport.

I think it’s highly unlikely that we will see the complete removal of the private motor vehicle from even a short stretch of Euston Road in the foreseeable future (perhaps something to dream about, nevertheless). But we should certainly be aiming to greatly reduce private motor traffic along it, and to reassign the space that it currently takes up to public transport, and to vulnerable users.

So I’m happy to agree with Simon Legg, and to set the record straight.

A spot of road rage

Vehicular aggression being quite topical right now – Sharne Warne’s decision to drive into a cyclist being most notable, while Dr. C has also suffered recently, and Martin Porter has finally secured a conviction for his aggressive abuser – I thought I’d share a reasonably mild incident from last week with you –

The driver of P694 YGK was evidently infuriated by my decision to cycle past the dustcart, when I should have been ‘over to the left’, and therefore not ‘in his way’ for the  microsecond before he slowed to make his right turn.

The impossibility of my being ‘over to the left’ while passing a large vehicle did not seem to occur to him.

Driving a motor vehicle seems to affect some people’s judgement in curious ways.

In no hurry to get there

A short clip from the 1947 film The Bishop’s Wife, starring Cary Grant, David Niven and Loretta Young.

In this scene, Sylvester the taxi driver (James Gleason) identifies ‘the main trouble with this country’ –

There are too many people who don’t know where they’re going, and they want to get there too fast.

Unlike, of course, Cary and Loretta, of whom Sylvester says

You know your destination, but you’re in no hurry to get there.

Sound advice.

Blackfriars – redesigned for pedestrians

Much of the talk from Transport for London around the time of last summer’s protest on Blackfriars Bridge – a protest that centred on the failure to keep a lower 20 mph speed limit through the junction, and to design a junction adequately suited to the needs of vulnerable users, not simply an urban motorway – stressed that the redesign of the junction, while not what cyclists might have wanted, was largely necessary because of the increased pedestrian flows at the new station.

Take these comments from Ben Plowden, for instance –

Well the first thing to say is that it’s very important to remember why it is we’re doing these junction works. The junction works are necessary to allow the re-opening of Blackfriars Station after its three year, £550 million, upgrade, and there’s going to be a huge increase in the number of people going into and out of the station on foot. In fact there’s going to be a ten-fold increase in the number of people going into and out of the station on foot, and in order to accommodate that increase we’ve had to make more pavement space available for pedestrians and put in two new pedestrian crossings to allow street-level access to the station.

Similar comments were made by Plowden to the Evening Standard –

Ben Plowden, TfL’s director of better routes and places, said the changes were designed to cope with a huge increase in pedestrians using the pavements around Blackfriars station, as a result of extra trains and the closure of pedestrian subways. He said pedestrians would account for 57 per cent of people using the north-side junction, compared to six per cent of cyclists. He said the speed limit was temporarily lowered to 20mph because of construction traffic and not because of speed-related safety concerns. The final changes to the junction will not be completed until Christmas, when the station reopens. Mr Plowden said: “I understand the anxiety, but in terms of the practical experience for most people most of the time, the traffic will be going fairly slowly, and for those particular right turns, [cyclists] will have a chance to move across the lanes when the traffic is held at red. The whole point of the junction is to make sure pedestrians can get to and from the station in the morning and evening.“

And in this interview with BBC London News.

These comments are singing from the TfL hymnsheet, a.ka. ‘Boris’s script’ –

Blackfriars station will reopen in December 2011 following a £550 million, three year upgrade project. Over 24,000 pedestrians will enter and exit the station during the morning peak and the junction outside of the station has had to be redesigned to accommodate these hugely increased pedestrian flows. The need for new pedestrian crossings has created an opportunity to reassess the whole junction and deliver a new layout that would mean improvement for as many users as possible. This new design accommodates the huge increase in demand from pedestrians, who will make up 58% of all users of the junction whilst improving facilities for the estimated 6% of people travelling through by bicycle. This has been achieved without creating conditions which would severely disbenefit other modes, including bus and taxi passengers, who will account for around a fifth of those using the junction.

This same ‘hymnsheet’ also cites the new pedestrian crossings as a reason for rejecting the maintenance of the 20 mph limit – they would keep average traffic speeds down.

Now that the new layout is almost complete, what does the junction look like for pedestrians – the users for whom TfL say it has been explicitly redesigned?

As both Cyclists In The City and War On The Motorist have noted, there are now no pedestrian crossings across the southern end of New Bridge Street, where it meets the Victoria Embankment and Queen Victoria Street. It has been removed.

Here’s how pedestrians are crossing that stretch of road, on a relatively quiet afternoon last week –

To my mind, this is not evidence of a junction that has been redesigned for pedestrians; quite the opposite.

This is before the station, in the background, has even opened. The chances of a collision occurring once those ‘24,000 pedestrians’ TfL refer to are coming in and out of the station – many across this very road – are surely very high indeed. Especially when we consider that those vehicles coming from the right and left in the video are travelling in what is currently a 20 mph limit; a speed limit that will disappear once the junction works are complete.