AN INEXPERIENCED driver knocked a cyclist off his bike after a “momentary misjudgement”. Susan Maries, from Parkfield Close, Gossops Green, pleaded guilty to driving without due care and attention, at Mid Sussex Magistrates’ Court last Friday (January 6). She knocked the cyclist off his bike when driving along Crawley Avenue on August 11 last year.
Richard Lynn, prosecuting, told the court that Maries, 46, was driving behind the cyclist. She decided to pull out into the next lane and checked her mirrors to see if any other vehicles were coming. Mr Lynn added: “She noticed a car behind her and thought she had time to pull out but the car closed the gap between them rather more quickly than she expected and so she pulled back across quickly. She knocked the cyclist off his bike and he sustained some injuries.”
Maries had clipped the cyclist with her wing mirror but told the police she felt the other vehicle behind her was as much to blame. However, David Street, speaking in mitigation, said the grandmother was still a new driver and fairly inexperienced. “Mrs Maries only passed her test in October 2009 so she had been driving for less than two years,” he said. “She doesn’t drive great distances, only to her job at Holy Trinity School as a teaching assistant three days a week, to her church and occasionally to Haywards Heath.”
Magistrate Graham Staples ordered her to pay a fine of £82, court costs of £85 and a victim surcharge of £15. Four points were also added to Mrs Maries’ licence.
Crawley Avenue is a dual carriageway, forming the northern bypass of Crawley. Not a great place to be on a bike, especially with drivers as incompetent as Mrs Maries around you. Bizarrely, Mrs Maries felt the vehicle approaching behind her – the speed of which she hopelessly misjudged – was ‘as much to blame’ for the injuries inflicted on the hapless cyclist as she was.
Not so.
But perhaps I am being too harsh on the ‘inexperienced’ Mrs Maries. As she says, she only drives ‘3 times a week’ to her job at Holy Trinity School –
A journey which, as you can see, is barely a mile in length (I refrain from comment about the absurd degree of car dependence in Crawley that this kind of trip demonstrates). That means she is racking up six miles of driving a week – setting aside her journeys to church and Haywards Heath.
Over the two years Mrs Maries had been driving, that equates to ‘only’ 600 miles of driving distance. Factor in her other trips, and it’s a conservative estimate that Mrs Maries has covered around 1000 miles in her car.
How competent at driving should we expect her to be after passing a drivingtest (you know, the kind of test that is supposed to establish and guarantee proficiency with regard to the operation of heavy machinery on the public highway) ‘only’ two years ago, and subsequently racking up 1000 miles? Is she really that ‘inexperienced’, as the article – and her lawyer – would have us believe?
Evidently David Street, ‘speaking in mitigation’, thinks it quite reasonable to suppose that ‘new’ drivers will still be exhibiting this degree of incompetence with that amount of distance – and that amount of time – after passing a test that is supposed to establish competence in the first place.
If that’s the standard we demand from drivers, expect many more ‘momentary misjudgements’.
As you can see, the road is aptly named, given that its conditions for cycling match up so perfectly with the Dutch model.
It took me six minutes to negotiate the length of this road, just over half a mile long – little more than walking speed, a frustratingly slow rate of progress.
Ostensibly, it is a single carriageway stretch of road –
but at times of traffic chaos (this was at 4pm on a Tuesday, while the nearby Hammersmith Flyover was closed completely) we have two streams of traffic in one lane, making progress by bicycle a frustrating experience.
Despite it having carriageways that are wide enough to accommodate two lorries, side by side – and despite it being designated as a single carriageway road – I’m sure Holland Road is one of those London streets where, as Boris argues,
the existing layout of roads and buildings means that there is simply not enough space to provide segregated cycle lanes without adversely impacting other users.
A cycle path along this road would make using it by bicycle – in rush hour, or otherwise – a pleasure, rather than a somewhat hellish and unnerving experience. It might even give some of those people sitting in this horrible jam in their cars an incentive to switch to a bicycle, and in so doing reduce congestion, improve public health, reduce road noise, improve house prices and amenity, and air quality.
As things stand, however, they have no such incentive; negotiating this road by bike is slow, dangerous and unpleasant.
There comes news today of the sentencing of Lee Cahill, an eighteen-year-old who killed a man on a bicycle, Rob Jefferies, with his car. Cycling Weekly reports
Lee Cahill was driving along the A351 near Wareham, Dorset, on 26 May 2011 when he struck Jefferies from behind. Jefferies was on a training ride with a friend.
Further
Evidence presented in court from the driver in front of Cahill at the time of the incident said that the college student had simply failed to move his Renault Clio around the cyclists, driving straight into them.
Prosecutor Andrew Newman read a statement from Mr Brown, who had been driving the car in front of Cahill’s during the incident. He said: “Mr Jefferies was cycling inside the white line on the road. I made an exaggerated overtake to give the cyclists room.” Mr Brown said the Clio seemed to be in line with the cyclists. “I was expecting the car to pull out to overtake them, but it did not.”
Total negligence on the part of Mr Cahill, in other words. While Mr Brown was capable of steering out and around some human beings on the road in front of him, as should reasonably be expected of any person licensed to use our roads, Mr Cahill was not.
What could possibly be the reason for this failure of Mr Cahill?
Cahill claimed in his defence that he had been dazzled by the sun.
A difficulty that didn’t seem to affect Mr Brown’s ability to drive correctly, as we have seen. Curious.
More details about this ‘dazzling’, again from the Bournemouth Daily Echo –
Speaking for the defendant, Robert Grey told the court that Cahill had been dazzled by the sun when he was driving along the road. He said: “The police arranged for a road traffic expert to attend the scene the following day. His report stated that drivers travelling north-west at the time of the collision would have had the sun shining almost directly across the road.”
All becomes clear.
The sun was shining directlyacross the road, which would dazzle anyone driving north-west along the A351 while… err… looking off to the side, and not in the direction they were travelling.
Robert Grey, again speaking for the defence, admitted that the driver had done something wrong –
“My client should have slowed down or stopped. Perhaps a more experienced driver would have done. But that is what he has done wrong.”
Indeed. Looking left, directly into the sun, is probably something that should be done while stationary, not while driving along.
To me, this bears all the hallmarks of lazy, stupid and reckless driving – an attempt to buzz past a cyclist who quite obviously would have been visible with the sun lighting him from the side. It went terribly, tragically wrong.
Mr Cahill had only been driving for four months, during which time he had already clocked up a speeding conviction – one month before hitting and killing Rob Jefferies. Despite this conviction, he was described as
of previous good character
by this same defence lawyer, presumably on the basis that motoring convictions – even in a case which involved the negligent use of a motor vehicle – aren’t ‘proper’ convictions, and can conveniently be ignored. Mr Cahill is also ‘extremely remorseful’ –
The consequences of this accident have been devastating for Cahill, who is extremely remorseful.
Sentencing?
Cahill was given a 12-month community order by magistrates, and ordered to do 200 hours’ community service. He was banned from driving for 18 months, and ordered to retake his test. He was also told to pay costs of £85.
At Mayor’s Question Time on the 10th of November last year, Boris Johnson was quizzed at some length on cycle safety. Shortly after making his now rather infamous remarks about Elephant & Castle being ‘fine’ to negotiate on a bike, ‘if you keep your wits about you’, he made the following comments about cycling facilities –
There will be different strokes for different folks. Some cyclists will want to use… I mean, for instance, last night I was going along the Euston Road, and you get to that bit where you come to the underpass, and then the cycle route takes you on a sort of fiddly thing, where you go over… there’s a path, and you’ve got lots of oncoming pedestrians, and then you’re invited to cross at a traffic light, and so on and so forth. Or you can just scoot down the underpass. I just go down the underpass. And there are many, many other London cyclists who will do the same. And I go round, y’know, Hyde Park Corner – there’s no problem. For me. Because I’ve become used to it.
(Jack Thurston of The Bike Show has captured the audio – this passage is at 32:30)
The general thrust of Boris’s comments – at least as I interpreted them – are that what few cycling facilities are present in London exist only to allow people to ‘build up their confidence’ before they venture off into the underpasses, around the gyratories, and along the dual carriageways that Boris himself evidently finds so suitable for cycling. Once people have their ‘confidence’, then they can assert themselves on the road, and the facilities are no longer necessary.
For Boris, cycle facilities don’t exist to make cyclists’ lives easier, or more pleasant – they’re just a training device.
The video below shows a stretch of road that Boris evidently feels that any cyclist with sufficient confidence should be using. It’s the Euston underpass on Euston Road, that he refers to in the comments I have quoted.
The video largely speaks for itself, but I can make a couple of observations.
Firstly, the underpass itself – while unpleasant – is not the most hazardous part of this short stretch of road. The main safety issue is the crossing of slip roads, both before and after the underpass, where you have to merge with vehicles that are travelling at or around 30 mph – much faster than most cyclists (and even ‘confident’ cyclists) can manage. These are roads that are simply not designed for bicycle use; I find it quite incredible that Boris feels comfortable in exhorting people to use ‘confidence’ as a compensatory measure.
Before the underpass, you have to hold the middle lane to avoid being ‘left-hooked’ by vehicles turning into Gower Street; as this lane splits in two, you have vehicles overtaking you in your lane, like the van in my clip. After the underpass, you emerge with vehicles passing you on both sides, and have to negotiate your way back to the nearside. These are serious challenges that are quite obviously going to put off most people, even those who currently cycle in London.
The second point is that while I didn’t necessarily fear for my life, this is not a strip of road that is at all pleasant to cycle on. It’s stressful; just like cycling around Hyde Park Corner, or Elephant & Castle. This is a fact Boris doesn’t seem to consider when he encourages people – ‘confident’ people – to use the road network. Staying alive is one thing – actually enjoying your journey is surely something else. Using a bicycle to get from A to B in a city shouldn’t feel like a white knuckle experience; people will want more from a bicycle journey than mere objective safety. They will want it to feel safe, not just be statistically safe, something Boris – perhaps for expediency – fails to grasp.
The third point is that ‘confidence’ is not going to be enough for everyone – it’s only going to be enough for young to middle-aged males who are more comfortable asserting themselves and are athletic enough to move at closer to motor vehicle speeds. Children are not going to have the confidence to use the Euston underpass (in any case, I can’t imagine any parent letting their child use it), and nor are the elderly.
There is, however, the alternative that Boris talked about.
Again, the video largely speaks for itself. The route – while useful in that it allows you to cycle westbound without using the intimidating underpass – is, speaking frankly, a pile of crap. It is, as Boris says, ‘fiddly’. There are, as he says, lots of oncoming pedestrians, and you do have to wait at the lights, for some time.
These are, however, not innate characteristics of off-road cycle facilities. They are characteristics of shite cycle facilities.
Cycle tracks should not re-emerge back onto a slip road right by a parking bay.
Two-way cycle tracks should not be this narrow, nor should pavements disappear alongside them –
Especially when there is a vast amount of underused carriageway space that could be reallocated.
It’s all very well for Boris to talk down these kinds of routes as alternatives to the underpasses and gyatories he is comfortable with using – but they are part of his remit! They should not be this bad, and it is his responsibility to sort them out, so that they are a decent way, indeed the quickest, safest and best way, for cyclists to negotiate intimidating road layouts. (Setting aside the fact that plenty of gyratories – for example King’s Cross – have no alternative at all). Cycle paths like this one are typical of those implemented, and unmodified, by transport authorities that don’t care about cycling (and indeed walking), and are uninterested in doing things properly.
Boris could change this, quite easily. He chooses not to. He’s happy cycling through underpasses and around gyratories, and that means we all have to be.
Note – The upcoming Street Talks on Shared Space, and a recent Radio 4 programme, have generated a number of critical pieces of the concept. This post is my contribution, which I hope can be read alongside the articles written recently by Joe Dunckley, Londonneur and David Arditti (as well as older, lengthy pieces from David Hembrow, David Arditti and myself) especially as it covers slightly different ground, being perhaps more ‘historical’ . Warning – it is long.
A better street should be one that is a place, a destination in and of itself, rather than simply a through route, a way of getting somewhere else – although streets do have this function as well.
This is what ‘shared space’ – a design philosophy that is rather nebulous, but which I can think be summarised as the removal of demarcation, signage and regulation on our streets – aims to achieve; to shift the emphasis of our streets from being simply somewhere you drive, walk or cycle through – a road – into an environment you would be happy to stop and mingle – a street, in the proper sense. The ‘civic’, versus the ‘traffic’ function of a street.
In this post, I’m going to look at some streets where I think shared space has worked, and also at some streets where I believe it hasn’t, while giving my take on how and why.
But I’d like to start with some pretty pictures of a town in Sweden.
This is Marstrand, just north of Gothenburg. As you can see, the street environment here doesn’t have any real ordering, or signage. It’s informal. People are quite happy to walk in the centre of the street, shops are putting their wares out in it, and so on.
In another street we see dogs, people on bikes and on foot, all milling about, quite happily.
There are rather ancient pavements – but as you can see, they’re not really necessary. This is a genuine ‘shared space.’
But the streets here haven’t consciously been reorganized to encourage sharing, in ways that we are increasingly seeing in London, and other towns across the United Kingdom. They’ve been like this, unaltered, for centuries. They have always been shared by the various people using them; there’s no need for pedestrians to stick to the pavements, even though they exist.
There’s a fairly simple reason for this – Marstrand is an island on which motor cars are prohibited. The only motor vehicles you will see here are little motorised scooters – one of which you can see in the square, in the last picture – used to ferry heavier items around the island.
Why have I started with this example? Well, I’m not trying to suggest that the way to achieve better streets is simply to ban motor vehicles. I am making the point that in the absence of motor vehicles, there isn’t really any need for the excess of signage, rules and regulations that shared space advocates tend to dislike.
These things have arisen in response to the rise of the motor vehicle. Places like Marstrand, and indeed the cramped centres of medieval cities across Europe, where it is very difficult to accommodate motor vehicles, and to use them – show us that streets that have never had to adapt to motor traffic remain civilized. They are shared innately.
[Streets] have to serve a variety of functions, principally those of movement on the one hand – transport, traffic – and on the other hand, of exchange – interaction, trade, people conversing with one another. And I like old images, like this one of Brighton in about 1830, because they so well illustrate the way those two functions have historically interacted.
In other words, look how wonderful the street environment is, with people happy to mill about. This isn’t a road, it’s a place! And there aren’t any traffic lights, or pedestrian crossings, or speed limit signs, or any other examples of bossiness. People are quite capable of interacting with each other.
‘Something has been lost’, is what is being implied when images like this are shown. And I agree – these kinds of streets are far better than most of those we see on a day to day basis in our towns and cities. We can see this deterioration in this series of photographs of the Carfax, the old centre of my town, Horsham.
In the first picture, from the 1890s, children are standing right in the middle of a space in which any vehicle could drive through.
By the 1930s, we see quite a number of motor vehicles, and the introduction of a ‘no entry’ sign. No pedestrians in what is now, clearly, a road.
And by 1980, we have even more ‘formalism’ – double yellow lines, give way markings, and parking bays.
Exactly the same pattern can be observed in London. At Piccadilly Circus, in the nineteenth century, people were quite willing to walk in the street, sharing the space with the ‘vehicles’ in it.
But, through time, the pedestrians disappear from the road –
until by the mid-1960s, they are actually fenced off from it.
But I think some shared advocates misdiagnose what has caused this loss, this erosion of the quality of the urban environment. Consider this quote from one of the most prominent advocates, Ben Hamilton-Baillie –
It is not difficult to identify what it is about UK streetscapes that make them so unattractive as places to attract informal public activity and human presence. Take a snapshot of the ‘centre’ or focal point of almost any neighbourhood, town or village, and it is likely to be dominated by the standardised features associated with conventional traffic engineering. White lines, yellow lines, zig-zags and garish cross-hatching will
characterise the asphalt of the horizontal plane; traffic signals, road signs and steel pedestrian guard rails will fill the vertical plane
What has made our streets so unattractive? Why, it’s the features associated with traffic engineering, as standardly applied.
What is causing the real ‘impact’ on the urban environment is, apparently, the engineering measures – not the dozens of motor vehicles clogging up the space.
The problem I have here is that a symptom – the clutter, the rules and the control – is being treated as if it is the problem itself, the root cause of the decay of our urban environment.
Now while I accept that excess clutter and demarcation can be an issue, per se, Hamilton- Baillie is missing the point. There is a correlation between street clutter, rules and control, and the decline of the quality of our urban environment – this much is true. But fundamentally, it is the emergence of the motor car, and its gradual dominance of our street environment, that is responsible both for the declining quality, and the increase in rules and regulations. It has also eroded the natural sharing of spaces that we see in historical pictures, or today in places where the motor car does not exist, or is only present in low volume.
So we have to be very careful not to assume that simply stripping away the clutter, rules and signage of our present-day streets – returning them, essentially, to a nineteenth-century street – will result in a civilized environment, because that clutter did not arise spontaneously. It emerged, as I have said, in response to the motor vehicle, and it is quite clear, to me at least, that if you don’t take action to tame the motor vehicle – not to get rid of it, but to tame it – then you won’t see a civilized street, the kind in which vulnerable users are genuinely happy to mingle, which is surely a prerequisite of a street being shared. Bear this in mind as I now move to consider those streets where I think shared space does work.
This is East Street, again in Horsham – a recent ‘shared space’ project, completed last winter.
As you can see, pedestrians are quite happy to mill about across the entire width of this street. (Weirdly, and tangentially, it has near-identical diagonal markings to those seen on Exhibition Road, which there are designed to subliminally indicate pedestrian crossing paths – not really necessary on a street of this restricted width.)
Prior to conversion, this was a one-way street with a contraflow cycle track, and very narrow pavements.
Not the greatest environment, either for pedestrians or cyclists. Now it is officially a ‘pedestrian zone’ through which bicycles can travel in both directions, and motor vehicles only in one direction.
I think it’s safe to say this a successfully re-worked street. From what I understand, pedestrian movements are up significantly, and the street is now something of a restaurant hub, when previously it was rather dominated by dowdy charity shops. In the summer the street is occasionally closed to vehicles entirely, and we get this – a proper ‘continental’ streetscape.
But we have to be careful, again, in diagnosing the reasons for the success. Certainly a part of it is due to the new surface., and also to the shrubbery and street furniture that encourages cautious driving.
Crucially, however, this is firmly an environment in which very few motor vehicles are permitted – only drivers with disabled blue badges, for whom there are a couple of parking spaces on the street, and vehicles which are delivering or loading.
Nobody else should – should – be driving a motor vehicle on this street. Even if you are pig-headed enough to drive down here illegally, it is not a sensible through-route to anywhere in particular – the only people doing so, in my experience, seem to be ‘cashpoint cripples’ who are making a lengthy detour in their cars into the centre of the town so as to access the banks in the Carfax, or to pick up people from the centre of the town. Illegally. The local council has been reasonably assiduous in patrolling this street to make sure the rules are being adhered to, and I think that’s an important part of the success of this street as an urban environment.
Much the same is true of New Road in Brighton, which is frequently hailed as an exemplar of the shared space technique.
It’s a remarkably civilised street, with pedestrians again happy to mill across the entire street width, sharing that space with bicycles (which, like East Street, can travel in both directions) and the occasional motor vehicle.
But again, like East Street, there are measures to reduce the numbers of these motor vehicles.
While ‘ordinary’ motor vehicles have not been banned outright, as on East Street in Horsham, New Road has been made impractical as a through-route. It’s not a sensible choice to use as a road to anywhere, so the only people driving on it will be those using it as a destination. Combine this with a few parking bays, which only those with disabled blue badges are eligible to use, and to all intents and purposes this has become a ‘traffic’-free environment.
These streets, then, are both environments where the civility has been achieved almost entirely by restrictions placed upon motor traffic – not simply by making them ‘shared’ in the sense of removing clarity and distinctions in the surface. It is the rules about parking and access, the control over who can drive down these streets, and the regulation of surrounding streets to make these ‘shared space’ environments impractical as through routes, that are actually a vital part of their success as civilised environments – despite the attitudes towards those very same rules and regulations exhibited by some shared space advocates.
I can think of no clearer illustration of how disastrous it is to make a space ‘shared’, without enforcing rules and regulations, than Park Place in Horsham.
This small (dead-end) street actually adjoins East Street (the entrance to East Street is to the right, opposite the newsagent) and has some similar ‘shared space’ design cues – a uniform surface, trees, attractive street features, absence of signage, and so on. The only concession to rules are some (barely visible) double yellow lines, which are, as you can see, consistently ignored.
Around the corner of this street we have this attractive pedestrian cut-through.
Note – again – the ignored double yellow lines, and (absurdly) the multi-storey car park, directly behind these obstructive vehicles.
To my mind it is almost certain that East Street would start to look like this if the rules about no waiting on it were not being enforced so rigorously. Human beings are lazy, and given the choice between using a car park a hundred yards away (even a few feet away, as above), or parking right in front of where they want to shop or eat, they will always choose the latter. This is what Park Place tells us – despite its appearance, people will drive and park on it at will, if no-one stops them from doing so.
If you feel it’s okay to park here, you can park here. If you think that’s a decent thing to do, park the car. If you don’t feel comfortable doing it, don’t park the car.
Because a lot of our citizens feel it’s perfectly okay to park their car wherever they like, and in the absence of restrictions, will do just that, parking at their convenience, at the expense of everyone else.
Below, we have two casually parked cars, blocking East Street for other motor vehicles. The one on the left has ignored the ‘no waiting, except in marked bays’ rule. Neither car was displaying a blue badge, or ‘loading’.
It’s all very well relying upon the benign instincts of road users, but unfortunately we are not all saints. We need rules need to be enforced, not removed, because without them, you will get chaos. Rules are necessary to protect the quality of our street environments – be they no parking or waiting, or no entry signs, or limited permeability for certain types of motor vehicles.
But shared space advocates, as I have demonstrated, tend to have a bee in their bonnet about rules – even when they serve to create a better street environment.
Now, I can agree that some signage may be superfluous – like the ‘20 mph sign’ at the entrance to East Street – but that does not mean all signage is unnecessary. Take away rules about parking on streets – particularly those ‘destination’ streets in the centres of towns and cities where shared space has the best chance of succeeding – and you will quickly find that your street becomes clogged, which is bad for everyone.
Likewise, take away the rules that contrive to make shared space streets impractical as through-routes, and they will quickly become through-routes, dominated by motor vehicles passing through.
__________________
Moving on from how rules – or their absence – affect the way in which streets are shared spatially, we can consider how streets are shared in a kinetic sense; how its users, of whatever mode, interact with each other.
Shared space advocates are, again, fans of a lack of regulation. The analogy Ben Hamilton-Baillie often gives is of an ice rink, or a camp site. Indeed, he gave the ‘ice rink’ example in the recent Radio 4 programme, Thinking Streets, on shared space.
These are environments with no formal rules or regulations, yet with people (and in the latter case, vehicles) moving around and interacting with each other quite happily, and in reasonable safety. Surely we could apply the logic of the campsite, or the ice rink, to our streets? Why can’t we interact freely with each other on our streets the way we do in these other unregulated environments, by getting rid of the rules and regulations that differentiate a street from a campsite?
There is a superficially attractive logic in operation here, but it rapidly falls apart when we start to consider the details. A campsite is, typically, a field with lots of pedestrians in, with perhaps one or two cars actually driving around at any one time. Shared space advocates argue that despite the absence of a regulatory framework, these environments are quite safe. This is obviously true. But they go one step further, and argue that it is the absence of the regulatory framework itself that makes the environment safe. Add more rules about how to drive, they say – treat drivers like idiots – and they will behave like idiots. Putting up lines about where to drive in the campsite might a good example – drivers would probably drive faster, and perhaps with less caution, within those lines, for instance.
So far as it goes, this is plausible. But let’s imagine a parallel example – exactly the same field, but this time, instead of it being full of people on foot, milling about unpredictably, this field is now full of cars being driven about, in just as unpredictable a way. And instead of just the one or two cars you might find being driven in a typical campsite, we now just have one or two pedestrians, inching their way through this field full of unpredictable cars.
Is this field just as safe for pedestrians as a ‘typical’ campsite? If safety was only about the absence of regulation, then it must be – but I don’t think that is true. You wouldn’t feel as comfortable letting your child run around in a field full of cars driving around unpredictably as you would be for them to do so in a field that was like a genuine campsite; likewise an ordinary ice rink is very different from, say, an ice hockey game. There are seven foot Kazahks wearing body armour, whizzing about. Even if they’re being careful, that, again, is a very different environment to introduce your child into.
My point is that power relations are an important component of safety; even if we assume that all those drivers moving their vehicles around the field are experts, or the giant ice hockey players will be more than capable of avoiding your offspring, there is an unequal distribution of risk, that will quite obviously affect how the more vulnerable parties will behave in that environment.
This doesn’t seem to be acknowledged by shared space designers – I haven’t encountered it, certainly, beyond an acceptance that vulnerable users are unnerved, initially, by the idea of interacting directly with large, fast-moving lumps of metal. I think this is something that is fundamentally missing from the shared space template – a failure to understand that some road users are more equal than others, which will in turn influence the extent of negotiation and sharing that will take place.
What we have are appeals to the better nature of motorists – that they will behave sensibly if they know they are mixing in an environment with pedestrians.
The first thing [principle of shared space] is to do with respect for other people, and acknowledging their rights and their autonomy, their responsibility to make sensible decisions for themselves and in relation to others.
(Daniel Moylan again, 2 minutes 35 seconds into the video below)
I think this is – generally – a reasonable principle – the majority of people will make sensible decisions for themselves and in relation to others.
But not everyone is sensible, and, more importantly, people are not infallible. They will make mistakes. And behind the wheel of a motor vehicle, those mistakes can be quite serious, even at low speeds. As someone who has been hit recently by a motor car, at quite a low speed, below 20 mph, I can tell you – as if you needed telling – it’s not a pleasant experience to be catapulted through the air, to land quite hard on the road.
Here’s an example from the shared space at Sloane Square. A young man starts to cross, without checking to see that a white van is approaching.
You can see in this picture that he has heard the van, and has suddenly thought better of crossing. Simultaneously, his partner reaches out to grab his arm.
He has a laugh about how silly he was, and they step back as the van roars through.
Now, it may have been the case that the van would have stopped had they been in the road. Perhaps 999 times out of a 1000, or 9,999 times out of 10,000, vehicles will yield here, although at Sloane Square I think these odds are rather generous. (I have my own experience of vehicles failing to share, or yield, on Exhibition Road). But this couple – like most people – did not think the chance of an injury, however small, was worth it. You can see the interaction at the start of the video below – the full video gives some idea of how willing pedestrians are to negotiate with motor vehicles in this space.
What this tells us is that for a space to be genuinely shared, pedestrians need to assume that all the drivers of the vehicles around them are sensible and infallible, and will be so at all times. If they can’t assume that, then pragmatically they will tend to yield in scenarios like the one above, and cross a shared space in precisely the same way they would cross a street that isn’t formally shared. Take away the paving here, restore it to a tarmac ‘road’ (but keep the speed bump) and I can guarantee that people will cross here – and interact with vehicles – in precisely the same way.
We have an example of how this automatic deferral has happened, historically, on our extant streets. Pedestrians have priority across side roads over vehicles turning into those side roads, if they have started to cross. Motor vehicles wishing to turn in should yield to them. But this right of priority has, to all intents and purposes, been surrendered. Observe a typical junction in a typical town, and you will see pedestrians waiting until motor vehicles have passed before they attempt to cross. Although motorists should yield, over time it has proven just too risky for pedestrians to expect them to, and that priority is now widely disregarded, to such an extent that I expect most people are not even aware of it. This is, of course, a consequence of the design of our street environment, and what is suggests to motorists, but it’s surely also a consequence of the unequal risk to the parties involved.
Another aspect of the interactions between vulnerable road users and motor vehicles that doesn’t seem to be considered in ‘shared’ designs – and one that I touched on in my campsite example – is the ratio of numbers between these two groups. If you have lots of pedestrians milling about in a street, then people behind the wheel of a motor vehicle will be more inclined to ‘share’ than they would where there are only one or two pedestrians. The respective numbers are important.
You can see this for yourself on Exhibition Road – at the southern end, where most of the museums are, and where there is a much higher density of pedestrians, drivers seemed more willing to yield. At the northern end, however –
where cars are far more likely to be equal in number to, or even outnumber, pedestrians, I struggled to find any drivers prepared to yield to me as I crossed. Presumably it just seemed like more of a road to them, regardless of the appearance of the surface.
Precisely the same is true of Byng Place – we have a thoroughfare, rather busy with motor vehicles, and very few pedestrians who want, or indeed are willing, to mingle in the shared space. As a woman is nearly run down at about the 30 second mark in the video below, you can hardly blame them.
So it remains unshared, as I discussed in this post here. It was hopelessly unrealistic to expect otherwise, given the volume and speed of motor traffic passing along this street, and the low numbers of pedestrians present on the street as a whole, especially those choosing to cross at this particular point.
This is not rocket science – Kensington and Chelsea’s own Environmental Impact Assessment of Exhibition Road tells us that –
if vehicle flows are greater than 100 per hour, pedestrians will not use the vehicle zone as a shared space
A study undertaken by TRL in 2003 for TfL’s Bus Priority Team indicated the limits to which pedestrians in London may be prepared to share a surface with traffic. This study found that below flows of 90 vehicles per hour pedestrians were prepared to mingle with traffic. When flows reached 110 vehicles per hour pedestrians used the width between frontages as if it were a traditional road, that is the majority of pedestrians remained on the equivalent of the footway and left the carriageway clear for vehicles.
A near-identical finding.
So we quite clearly need to consider the numbers of vehicles, the ratio of those numbers to the numbers of people on foot and bicycle, and also the unequal vulnerability of these users, for these spaces to be shared in any genuine sense; the sense of vulnerable parties being happy to mingle in any part of the shared space. This is plainly not true in the northern part of Exhibition Road, or of Byng Place, or of Sloane Square.
Yet it is true of New Road, and East Street. Why? In my view, precisely because of the different ratio and numbers of vulnerable users. Measures have been taken to control and restrict the numbers of motor vehicles on these streets; this has meant that the numbers of pedestrians and vulnerable users significantly outweighs the small number of motor vehicles which use these spaces. This is not the case with the three London examples I have given, which have heavy motor traffic flows by comparison.
The fundamental point, which I have to make again, this time in relation to the kinetic nature of these streets, is that a simple absence of rules and regulations is not sufficient to guarantee sharing. Without measures to reduce the number of motor vehicles using that ‘shared space’, or to ensure that the numbers of pedestrians in it is sufficiently high, they will be utterly indistinguishable from ‘ordinary’ roads, as we see at Byng Place.
But Daniel Moylan, the current deputy chair of Transport for London – who besides being Deputy Leader of Kensington and Chelsea Council until 2011, was that council’s ‘Design Champion’, responsible for Kensington High Street, Sloane Square, and Exhibition Road – thinks that shared space, while obviously not appropriate on motorways or similar roads, is universally applicable across our urban spaces, even those places where the numbers of vehicles will be much greater, and the numbers of vulnerable users much smaller, than on the ‘shared space’ streets in London I have discussed here. You can hear his remarks in this video, at about the 3:30 mark; they are transcribed below.
I’m not saying that the shared space concept is suitable for motorways. There are spaces where there are roads, where the dedicated purpose of the road is to carry large volumes of vehicular traffic at high speed. They’re not intended to accommodate pedestrians, even bicyclists, and so forth. I understand that. But in urban environments, and even in suburban environments, the principle idea – the idea that negotiation with other road users is a safe and responsible and adult way forward, it seems to be of pretty universal application.
I’m not quite sure on what grounds Daniel Moylan thinks shared space is ‘universally applicable’ on nearly every single London road, barring those ‘high speed’ arterials he refers to – presumably, roads with speed limits greater than 30 mph. Doubtless his threshold of an acceptable environment for pedestrians to ‘negotiate’ with cars – both in terms of the outright volume, and the ratio to pedestrians – is evidently far lower than mine, or, as the evidence already cited would suggest, most normal people. The research carried out by Kensington and Chelsea, and Transport for London – as well as the unfolding empirical evidence of current shared schemes – quite obviously suggests that these roads, if converted, are not going be ‘shared’ at all, without measures to reduce motor traffic volume. They will look prettier, and presumably have fewer restrictions and rules, but that’s about it. The behaviour of the users of the street is not going to change in any fundamental way.
So it’s quite hard to escape the conclusion that this is dogma masquerading as policy; a dogma that in Moylan’s case seems to arise from a dislike, rather prevalent among conservatives, of restrictions about how they can behave on the road. We can revisit his quote about shared space being, essentially, about the
responsibility [of users] to make sensible decisions for themselves and in relation to others.
The implication being that it is the rules themselves that generate bad behaviour. Strip them away, give people the responsibility to behave like mature adults – and they will behave like them. Conversely, if we use ‘nanny state’ principles, and treat people like idiots with signs about how they should drive, and where they should park, and they will behave like idiots.
The rhetoric mirrors exactly the libertarian attitude towards state meddling in private life (indeed Moylan goes on to note, in the same interview, that these principles are ‘partly a vision of how you see society.’) It is not suprising, therefore, that shared space has proved – and is proving – so attractive a concept to conservative politicians.
The cultural historian Joe Moran writes in his book On Roads about the emergence, and uptake, of shared space as a concept in Britain, noting that
In Britain’s very different road culture, [the Dutch idea of] shared space took on a life of its own. In particular it became part of a long-running campaign against traffic lights. In 1984, the libertarian Tory transport secretary, Nicholas Ridley, had announced that he wanted to get rid of half of London’s traffic lights. He disliked them for the same reason that he hated one-way streets and wheel-clamping: they interfered with the freedom of movements of motorists. ‘The private motorist… wants the independence and status of his motor car,’ he had told Parliament in 1977. ‘He wants the chance to live a life that gives him a new dimension of freedom – freedom to go where he wants, when he wants, and for as long as he wants.’ The Tories have remained the anti-traffic light party. During the run-up to the 2001 general election, they pledged to introduce a ‘left on red’ rule, a version of the North American ‘right on red’ which allows drivers stuck at traffic lights to turn right if the road is empty.
Moran goes on to write that
the road has long been a fraught social space. Without being aware of this history, the idea of shared space… risks becoming a Trojan horse for a certain sort of personal libertarianism that is really about giving free rein to the motorist.
The only problem, of course, is that the country these principles are being borrowed from – the Netherlands – has a far from libertarian attitude towards road- and street-use across the rest of its network – that is to say, the vast bulk of Dutch streets, which do not have ‘shared space’ designs. Dutch streets are typically quite prescriptive about what you can and can’t do; there is a great deal of clarity.
In addition, those Dutch designers who are in favour of shared space are quite clear that the concept, pace Moylan, is far from universally applicable; indeed, they argue that where it works, it relies upon rather different attitudes to street design in the surrounding environment. This is something highlighted in a recent paper, somewhat critical of the claims made for ‘shared space’, by Steve Melia and Simon Moody –
The original intention behind schemes such as the celebrated Laweiplein [in Drachten], Monderman explained, was to reduce accidents and congestion and to increase the flow of traffic. There was no expectation of any effect on modal share, and no one had attempted to measure this. Drachten also has a substantial network of segregated cycle routes. In common with many other Dutch towns, the network was designed to give an advantage to cyclists, by offering them shorter, more direct routes than those available to motor vehicles. The traffic engineers believed this form of segregation to be an essential corollary to the sharing of space on some other streets.
Here is a video I took of the ‘shared space’ in another Dutch town – Haren, near Groningen.
There are a couple of things to note. Firstly, the high numbers of bicycles in this space, as a ratio to car users. Needless to say, this high ratio is not a function of the shared space itself, but instead of the segregation on the roads surrounding this high street, just like in Drachten. This is the road just north of the shared space in Haren –
Secondly, the rather poor driving around the people on bicycles, particularly the desperately close pass at around the ten second mark. Also, not captured on this video – but at around the same time – we witnessed a car honk with impatience at a couple riding two abreast, preventing the motorist from overtaking. (Haren is the only location in which David Hembrow has experienced Dutch road rage.)
Watching this kind of video, it is quite clear to me that the transference of shared space to a UK high street, without measures to reduce traffic volume – or to actually encourage modal shift – will do little if anything to change the environment for vulnerable road users. Indeed, cycling in this ‘shared space’ in Haren felt very similar to cycling on a standard UK street, with close passes and impatience from motorists. The logical conclusion is that if you convert your average UK high street – which does not even have the advantage of the high bicycle modal share seen in Haren – to ‘shared space’, without any attendant measures such as those seen in the Netherlands, then it will have precisely the same forms and volume of ‘traffic’ on it as it did before, and the gains for vulnerable users will consequently be minimal.
But, shared space, as a concept, is continuing to be transferred wholesale to the UK, stripped of any of the accompanying Dutch attitudes towards road design – the principles of sustainable safety, and segregation of vulnerable users, that guarantee larger numbers of those vulnerable users in the shared spaces that do exist in the Netherlands. It is noticeable that while Hamilton-Baillie talks about Drachten at length in this paper, the only references he makes to ‘segregation’ are disparaging ones, to 1960s UK urban planning (about which more below).
It gets worse. As Moody and Melia go on to write –
In transposing Monderman‘s ideas to an audience outside the Netherlands, UK-based advocates of shared space removed the corollary about cycle routes and added to the list of claims made for it, presenting it as: “a key policy” combining aspirations for “efficient traffic circulation, modal shift to walking and cycling, enhancement to the public realm and improved health.”
In other words, advocates of shared space have not just comprehensively ignored the measures that actually serve to generate a high number of vulnerable users on these streets – namely their segregation on other streets (‘segregation’, of whatever form, being rather anathema); they have also wrongly attributed the high numbers of people walking and cycling in Dutch shared space to the nature of the shared space itself.
This is a desperate, double failure – but one that has resulted in the deputy chair of Transport for London proclaiming ‘shared space’ as some universal panacea for nearly every single road in London. We also have our traffic engineers, in a similar vein, seeking to reach ‘Beyond the low hanging fruit’ – that is, aiming to apply ‘shared space’ to ever more highly ‘trafficked’ UK streets, again without consideration of the ancillary Dutch measures, or why Dutch shared space users look like they do. The disease has even spread to some UK cycle campaigners, like Simon Legg of CTC, who apparently thinks converting Euston Road –
into a ‘shared space’ would represent some great leap forward in urban amenity. [But see here for clarification]
Now the Exhibition Road scheme, is, despite the criticism I have given it here, better than what was there before. Whether it is the greater uncertainty, that makes drivers that little bit more willing to yield, or the lower speed limits that can accompany these schemes, they do feel slightly better to use as a pedestrian, at least (although I am greatly unconvinced about the benefits of using them on a bicycle – and also whether that uncertainty drivers have is anything more than transitory, as these schemes become more common).
The problem I have is that, like the other shared space schemes that I believe are unsuccessful in their stated aims, Exhibition Road is nowhere near better enough – especially when you consider the costs involved. This reflects, I think, a fundamental blindness to different ways in which our streets could be transformed.
This was apparent in the Thinking Streets Radio 4 programme. Two of the main proponents of shared space – Hamilton-Baillie, and John Adams of UCL – were essentially given free reign to extol the virtues of these designs, at some length, without serious questioning (or any questioning at all). ‘Critics’ were obliquely referred to, but not interviewed – and they were superficially presented as people who wanted to keep the streets as they are, to ‘protect’ pedestrians from cars.
These shared space advocates, intentionally or otherwise, draw a contrast between the 1960s vision of herding pedestrians behind pens, and allowing them only to cross at designated places and times – keeping them entirely separate from ‘traffic’ – and their approach, of giving them the freedom to cross where and when they want, to become part of the traffic. This is how Hamilton-Bailie presents ‘segregation’ – the alternative to his approach of integration, in his Towards Shared Spacepaper –
As the 1960s, car-dominated version, in which vulnerable users are kept out of the way of cars, for the convenience of the latter. Hamilton-Baillie writes
The need for underpasses, bridges, traffic signals, barriers and controls, implicit in achieving segregation, has reduced accessibility for non-motorised traffic.
Presented like this, the choice is obvious. ‘The critics’ seem stuck in the past, with their fuddy-duddy ideas about concreting away pedestrians into underpasses and overpasses, and fencing them off from the street itself.
But there are two things missing from this analysis.
The first is that segregation, contrary to what Hamilton-Baillie writes, need not necessarily reduce mobility for non-motorised traffic. Although he argues that
In recent years there has been an increasing recognition of the widespread, unforeseen implications of a policy of segregation. It would appear to [have] contributed to the rapid decline in levels of walking and cycling.
the Dutch have shown how segregation can rather increase mobility for bicycles and pedestrians, at the expense of motorised traffic. Quite obviously, segregation is not automatically bad for non-motorised traffic, as Hamilton-Baillie would have us think (segregation done badly, as in the UK, is another matter). Even ignoring the Netherlands, where segregation has been instrumental in increasing levels of cycling, we have a rather obvious example of how segregation has worked for pedestrians in the United Kingdom – the pedestrianised street. It is one of the simplest forms of segregation imaginable, keeping pedestrians separate from cars, yet one which has increased mobility for the former, at the expense of the latter. (Again, it is worth noting in passing that Daniel Moylan seems to dislike pedestrianised streets, urging that they be opened up again to motor vehicles to ‘keep them lively’. Whether this is motivated by the ‘personal libertarianism’ impulses Joe Moran describes, or by a misguided belief in the revivifying power of the motor car, I cannot say).
So we have here a problem of attitude. In the UK, the vulnerable user is usually segregated away for the convenience of the motor vehicle. In the Netherlands, the vulnerable user is segregated away for the convenience of the vulnerable user. This is something Hamilton-Baillie – in his blanket dismissal of ‘segregation’ – has apparently, and strangely for a street designer, not taken into account.
The second is that this apparent choice between segregating and integrating is rather a false one, because it has nothing to say about reducing motor traffic itself, by getting people to switch away from the motor vehicle for some of their urban journeys. It is, after all – as I have been at pains to point out – the rise in the number of motor vehicles that has given rise to the horrible street furniture, and penning in of vulnerable users, that we see today – and has destroyed the sharing that occurred innately in Piccadilly Circus and the Carfax in the 19th century, and occurs today in places without motor vehicles, like Marstrand, or those with low motor vehicle volume, like East Street or New Road.
Worse, as Melia and Moody argue, there is very little, if anything at all, in the unadulterated shared space approach that serves to encourage this mode switching –
Neither the MVA study [a Department of Transport commissioned review of UK shared spaces] or any of the other research reviewed for this project provides evidence to support the assertion of Hamilton-Baillie (2008) that shared space can contribute to modal shift. In the absence of specific research (which would be difficult to frame in situations where small schemes are implemented incrementally over time) it may be noted that one observed outcome of shared space – increased vehicle flows through junctions – would facilitate movement by car. The pedestrian anxieties revealed by the case study would also suggest a disincentive to walking.
To which I can add another reason to be pessimistic about modal shift – the fact, if it is as easy to park anywhere, without restriction, as some shared space advocates would like, then I suspect we would again see rather more car journeys made in our towns and cities with more shared space, not less.
To me this is a disaster, and it should be for shared space advocates too, because whether or not they are aware of it – or whether they even care – too many motor vehicles will destroy the conviviality of their designs, especially for the most vulnerable users. But to repeat, shared space, in and of itself, does nothing to discourage motor vehicle use.
If shared space is to be anything more than just a passing fad in the UK (and not, worse, a total disaster), we have to think far more carefully about the kinds of streets we apply it to, and about the restrictions on those streets, and the measures on the surrounding streets, that serve to encourage the modal shift that shared space won’t accomplish, by itself.
Let’s treat the cause, not the symptoms.
UPDATE – This post was edited on 9/1/12 to make clear that the 19th century painting of Brighton seafront was included only because it was the scene used by Ben Hamilton-Baillie, himself, to illustrate how streets in the past had direct interaction between ‘transport’ and ‘exchange’ functions.
Some video taken this Saturday afternoon, on East Street in Horsham.
Everyone rubbing up alongside each other quite happily.
Although this is often described as a ‘shared space’, it is instead – as you can see from the sign upon entry –
a ‘Pedestrian Zone’ in which the only motor vehicles allowed are those loading, or those accessing the two disabled parking bays on the street. It’s not really ‘shared’ at all, except between bicycles and pedestrians.
This is a pedestrianised street, that’s shared with bicycles. It’s great.
On the day that the Evening Standard publishes a letter from two trauma surgeons, urging action to separate cyclists from HGVs at junctions –
One of the immediate dispatch criteria for the aircraft or fast response car is when someone is trapped under a vehicle. This scenario all too frequently occurs when cyclists are trapped under a vehicle that has turned in front and then driven over them. These patients are often young women, travelling to or from work and are caught under the wheels of vehicles turning in front of them. A report by TFL in 2008 found that 86% of cyclist deaths were female despite there being three times as many male cyclists as females. At the scene of a road traffic collision, the team are often asked by the police if the injuries are deemed to be ‘life threatening or life changing’. The experience of being involved in a road traffic crash is life changing for all involved. Some will never cycle again for fear of suffering further injuries. This may be a manifestation of PTSD. Some people do not survive to make a choice.
Their mechanisms of injury include devastating chest injuries (rib fractures and underlying lung injury), abdominal injuries (splenic injuries and bowel injuries) and pelvic fractures and leg fractures. These patients are often initially conscious but are in danger of quickly bleeding to death on the roadside. The London Ambulance Service and Air Ambulance response is geared towards timely recognition and delivery of roadside intensive care. Patients may be given a general anaesthetic to help them breath, their pelvic fracture and limb fractures are splinted to reduce blood loss and they are given drugs to promote blood clotting. These patients are the most challenging on scene and result in an augmented response from the receiving hospital. If they survive their first day they are still at risk from overwhelming infection and organ failure. Their hospital stay is a long one and they may never return to their pre morbid state and may never work again.
These patients are sometimes deemed to be those who ‘talk and die’. They are initially conscious and able to talk to you and tell you their fears and tell you of their pain. One of the on scene standard operating procedures includes giving them a general anaesthetic. This is done to ease their pain and suffering for humanitarian reasons, assist with breathing, expedite their transfer from scene and speed up their time to definitive care. One always remembers these patients, when we are the last ones they ever speak to.
Both of us are cyclists, covering thousands of miles a year. We are both aware of the obvious health benefits of cycling to the individual and also benefits for the community and the environment as a whole. We believe that there are inherent dangers when cyclists and heavy goods vehicles share road space.
I thought I would share with you this passage from Boris Johnson’s execrable book, Have I Got Views For View –
D is for Death. Every successful bicycle journey should be counted as a triumph over this.
Unlike our ‘cycling Mayor’, who on the evidence of this passage seems to have a rather devil-may-care attitude towards simply staying alive while making a journey in his capital, I have somewhat higher aspirations for what a ‘successful’ bicycle journey should involve.
Boris has ruled out facilities that will keep cyclists apart from HGVs at King’s Cross. Every cyclist passing ‘successfully’ through that junction will doubtless continue to arrive at their destination toasting their triumph over death.
The facility in question is an off-road path of a decent width, that cuts between Booth Way, and Depot Road, in Horsham. It is shared with pedestrians – the white line divides the pedestrian side from the cyclist side.
The white line is rather superfluous, because despite this path being of a reasonable standard, it is rarely ever used by cyclists, principally because of the conditions at either end of it.
The main problem is that the northern end of the path dumps you onto a horrible gyratory, with no alternative but to use it. Dismounting and walking on the pavement is your only (legal) option.
Here we are looking towards the gyratory, from where the cycle path ends. This small road – Booth Way – is a dead-end, and quiet, but at the end of it, you have no option but to join the busy two-lane roundabout, with fast, heavy traffic moving around it. Or to walk.
These pictures were taken about half-past two, a quieter period. This roundabout is typically much busier, especially at rush hour, as it handles all the motor vehicles coming into and out of the centre of town from the north and east (the main commuting route, given that this is towards Crawley, Gatwick Airport, and London).
To continue northwards, you have to get into the lane that the large dark car is using, then make a right turn at the junction, before proceeding around the rest of the gyratory. Not ideal.
Conditions are a little quieter at the southern end of the path, but again, difficulties are put in our way.
This barrier chicane, virtually impossible to navigate, thankfully stops us from just cycling straight out into Depot Road.
Why on earth the designers of these horrible things assume I can’t be trusted to simply use my brakes and come to a stop, checking the road is clear before cycling onto it, is beyond me. I’m perfectly capable of stopping at a junction when I happen to be using my bicycle on the road. Likewise I can be trusted not to step off pavements without looking, or indeed even to stop at junctions in my car, without metal impediments being put in my way.
It’s a mystery.
Further difficulties await. The most natural route I would want to take, if I was heading south along this path, is to go straight across into Barrington Road. But there’s a problem.
I can’t cycle down it, because it’s a one-way street.
Naturally, at some point in the past, this was a normal, two-way street. But as the number of cars owned by the households here mounted up, something had to give, and that was the convenience of vulnerable road users. Extra parking spaces were bought at the expense of two-way flow.
This means that, again, you either have to dismount and walk along this road on the pavement, or you have to turn right and cycle on Station Road, conditions on which you can see below.
This is a rather busier road, with plenty of parked cars, and people coming and going to pick up their children from schools nearby, or from the railway station. Not brilliant to cycle on.
The arrangement is shown in the map from Cyclestreets, below –
Heading south from the gyratory in the north, the ‘quiet’ routes – marked in green and yellow – follow Booth Way, and the subsequent cycle path. We would naturally want to use Barrington Road, but because this is a one-way street, we are forced to head west to rejoin Station Road – the very road that we wanted to avoid in the first place. What incentive, therefore, do we have to use that cycle path?
Precisely the same dilemma applies in the case of heading north, already alluded to.
We can use the cycle path, heading north from Depot Road, but we have no option but to use the gyratory. And if you’re confident enough to use the gyratory, then you’re probably just going to cycle along the parallel Station Road, and not bother with the cycle path. At both ends of this cycle path, you are forced to either walk on the pavement, or to tackle busy roads that are just as, if not more, unpleasant than the road the cycle path provides an alternative to.
As with most UK cycle ‘infrastructure’, then, this serves nobody’s interests. Nervous cyclists, who might willingly use it, are going to be put off by the unavoidable busy roads at either end of it (or, alternatively, the sheer inconvenience of having to get off and walk). Meanwhile experienced cyclists just aren’t going to bother, because the road it bypasses, while not brilliant for cycling, is a cakewalk compared to the gyratory you are forced to use to get to or from it.
I wrote last year about the difficulties involved in getting to a couple of stations in West Sussex – Three Bridges, and Horsham – by bicycle and by foot. Horsham station is currently being redeveloped, with the western forecourt of the station being extended. Unfortunately, as I mentioned at the time, despite the opportunity for change, no alterations are being made to the unpleasant road layout on this side of the station.
But credit where credit is due – some new cycle stands were promised as part of the redevelopment, and they have duly arrived. They are rather good, as you can see in this picture below.
54 spaces here, at the eastern (rear) side of the station. The great majority are being used. Having spoken to the station manager on duty, similar parking will arrive at the front of the station as the redevelopment progresses. Both he and I agreed on the need for these stands – up until last year, I could not have been guaranteed a place to lock my bike, whereas I can now turn up to this rear entrance with some certainty of finding a spot. Previously, there were only about ten or so sheffield stands, which were nearly always full. Remarkably, before those stands arrived, there were no cycle stands at all on this side of the station – I had to resort to chaining my bicycle to the fence. Indeed, you can see this state of affairs in the pictures below, taken from Transport Initiatives’ Cycle Review of Horsham, carried out by Mark Strong, showing both the lack of stands, and the subsequent (now removed and replaced) covered Sheffield stands –
No cycle stands at all, only a few years ago. So this is valuable progress. I have noticed that the design of this new double-tiered parking is pleasingly identical to that used in the (rather enormous) parking at Groningen station –
So, in this regard at least, Horsham matches Groningen. I will be writing to the council, and Southern, to express my thanks.
London’s Cycle Superhighways are frequently referred to as ‘safe, direct and continuous.’ This was, for instance, the wording used in the Mayor’s Cycling Revolution document from May 2010 –
London’s Cycle Superhighways will provide cyclists with safe, direct, continuous, well marked and easily navigable routes along recognised commuter corridors into the centre.
Again, the word ‘continuous’ appears in a later description of the Superhighways, where it is asserted that they will
Provide routes that have continuous clear blue markings from beginning to end
Although less promisingly
Cycle Superhighways are trialling a system of continuous blue paint road markings providing a clear message to cyclists that they are heading in the right direction
A passage which suggests that the purpose of the paint is little more than a directional guide. The impression is further reinforced by another paragraph in the document –
All Cycle Superhighways will have distinctive blue markings to highlight the presence of cyclists to other road users and make them easy for cyclists to navigate. The use of road marking will reduce the need for signage and street clutter. Cycle route signs will have distinctive branding to distinguish the Superhighways from other cycle routes. There will also be cycle logos and route numbers on the road surfaces and in bus lanes to clearly identify the Cycle Superhighways.
The ‘Superhighways’ blue markings, in other words, are merely about ‘highlighting’ the presence of cyclists, and for making the routes easy to navigate. Whoop-di-doo.
But nevertheless, they’re continuous, right?
Some scenes from Cycle Superhighway 8, as it passes through Battersea.
Worse than useless, because this kind of road marking subliminally encourages people to duck back onto the blue paint between the parked vehicles, when they should probably be holding a straight-ish line between them, to avoid conflict when re-emerging into the ‘traffic’ stream.
It’s quite clear, therefore, that the Superhighways themselves are far from ‘continuous’. You can find scenes like this on any of them. So were TfL and the Mayor being dishonest when they said they were?
Not exactly. Because they haven’t described the Superhighways themselves as continuous. Only ‘the routes’, and the indication of where to go along them. This is clear when we refer back to the quotes that open this post. In the first, it is the routes that are described as continuous, and in the second and third, it is the markings.
Now, I’m not really clear why the Mayor and Transport for London feel the need to boast about a ‘continuous route’, because a ‘continuous route’ is simply anything that doesn’t turn into a dead-end, or stop in the middle of nowhere. The Superhighways are ‘routes’ that go from A to B, and they are ‘continuous’ only in the superficial sense that you can get from A to B without being forced to turn around and go back to A, or isolated at an impenetrable junction.
A ‘cycle route’ that doesn’t force cyclists to turn around and go back from where they came is not something that anyone in their right mind is going to get excited about, because that is the most basic requirement of any route. Indeed, a route that is not ‘continuous’ can hardly be said to be ‘a route’ in the first place.
But talking about ‘continuous routes’ is a neat, suggestive way of make the Superhighways sound fantastic, when in fact the superhighway itself – what really matters when you are cycling along it – is anything but continuous.
As for the ‘continuous markings’ – well, that means that we have square blue blobs of paint on those stretches of road where TfL haven’t been bothered to sort out the conflicts between parked vehicles and the Superhighways. These blobs helpfully tell us that we are still ‘heading in the right direction’; presumably we might swerve off into a side road without them. As long as we can see the next blob of blue, and head to it without getting lost, then the Mayor and TfL are doubtless satisfied that the markings are ‘continuous’.
While I was writing this piece yesterday, Kulveer Ranger gave an interview, in which he had the thankless task of not only attempting to defend this crap, but also sell it as somehow being about ‘safety’.
Listening to Ranger, it’s quite hard to escape the impression that he doesn’t have the faintest idea what he’s talking about, or that he’d rather be somewhere else, talking about something, anything, other than cycling. All he seems to have are tired soundbites and ‘initiatives.’ On interactions between HGVs and cyclists, he acknowledges that
The worst possible interaction on a road surface – and the scariest thing for a cyclist – is an HGV. There’s a myriad of things; it can be road design, it can be, y’know, the cyclist positioning themselves [poorly? garbled], it can be the driver. So there’s a whole number of things in there that have to be looked at.
But when it comes to things that are actually being ‘looked at’, all Ranger talks about is training, and ‘awareness’ – no mention of fundamental changes to road design that might keep cyclists apart from HGVs in the first place.
We’ve been running exchanging places events where we take drivers out of their cabs and put them on bicycles, and take cyclists into the cabs, to see if they can get a better understanding of how to be more aware of each other. It’s voluntary, but also if we find that you’ve done something wrong and you get a penalty notice, we actually say ‘you don’t need to pay the fine, you can go on the course, and find out how to be a better cyclist or a better driver.’ And we’re looking at more things like that.
Great. On the Superhighways, the subject of this post, Ranger has this to say –
The Superhighways were actually designed with input from cyclists. They wanted continuous, direct routes on the main roads, because that’s what cyclists want, especially commuter cyclists. So to reinforce safety, we wanted to define where other road users could expect those cyclists to be, but also help the cyclist have that continuous route. So fundamentally it’s been about improving safety. People say, ‘Oh, y’know, it’s a bit of blue paint.’ Actually, the cost of those range between £10-20 million a highway. Now if that was blue paint, that would be very expensive! What it is actually is the civils work, we look at key junctions on those routes and see how we can improve them.
Complete drivel.
What cyclist, commuter or otherwise, would want a cycle lane that is interrupted continuously by parking bays?
What commuter doesn’t know where he or she is going, and needs paint to remind him or herself of the route?
In what possible sense are these routes any more or less continuous after the addition of the Superhighways?
Can the point of the paint really be to simply ‘define where other road users could expect those cyclists to be’?
Does Ranger really think this ‘awareness’ is a genuine safety feature, that makes these Superhighways ‘fundamentally… about improving safety’?
And for Ranger to have the chutzpah to say that the expense of these Superhighways has been incurred because of ‘civils’ at key junctions, and not through the cost of paint, is, well, incredible.
It’s at junctions where Superhighways tend to disappear, or are compromised, because the space is needed for ‘smoothing traffic flow’. (It’s also where superhighways tend to become rather less ‘direct’, where off-road bypasses do exist, for instance at Elephant & Castle, or at the Trinity Road roundabout in Wandsworth). Cyclists and HGVs are consequently forced into the same space, thanks to TfL’s own policy priorities. Meanwhile TfL seem to content to rely on training and awareness to stop further fatalities and serious injuries, and don’t apparently see the need to fundamentally address the issue of the design of London’s roads, the safety of which has not be altered one iota by the addition of these ‘continuous’ routes.
RT @OxonCyclingNet: No consultation and against national standard LTN 1/20, Oxford's only central traffic-free cycle lane (Parks Rd) has be… 3 days ago
