Cycling On Piccadilly

Just before Christmas, I had the opportunity to cycle along the new two-way layout on Piccadilly.

This used to be a one-way street, with vehicular traffic only allowed to travel in an easterly direction between St. James Street and Piccadilly Circus. A contraflow bus lane ran westwards, as you can see in the picture below.

Five lanes wide.

Over the course of this year, this arrangement has been stripped out, replaced by two lanes in each direction, and a central median strip, a kerbed lane divider principally designed to help pedestrians cross the road.

It’s not great for using on a bicycle.

For a start, you used to be able to make a right turn onto Piccadilly from St James Street. For some reason, you can’t any more. There is a ‘no right turn’ symbol on the traffic lights at the top of St James Street.

If you do attempt to turn right here, you will end up coming into conflict with pedestrians crossing on a green phase at the lights on Piccadilly. Now, it’s good that pedestrians have a single phase to cross the entirety of Piccadilly, rather than the unpleasant, and often caged, two- or even three-stage crossings that are prevalent across the rest of London. But evidently the time allocated for this has come at the expense of a right-turn light phase.

I decided to dismount here and use the pedestrian crossings to get onto Piccadilly eastbound, rather than head north on an uncertain detour.

Once on Piccadilly, it quickly becomes clear that the whole length of the street is clogged with vehicles. The view from the pedestrian crossing by St James Street –

All the way to Piccadilly Circus – jammed.

This is not nice to cycle through.

At several points, despite the extraordinary width of the vehicle lanes here – especially the bus lane, which looks as if it could accommodate two cars side-by-side – my progress was completely blocked.

It would have been very easy to allocate some of the large amounts of space on Piccadilly for a safe, direct and continuous route for bicycles, that allowed them to bypass all this traffic without difficulty. It hasn’t happened, probably because the bicycle as a mode of transport was not even considered when the plans were being drawn up. So people using bicycles have to struggle through a clogged and hazardous road environment.

Not good enough.

Cycle safety in London – getting worse, not better

Transport for London’s latest Travel in London report is out – the fourth.

In the section on ‘Road Safety’, we are told that

The year 2010 was the target year for both national and more stringent London-specific targets for the reduction of road casualties to be assessed (in absolute terms, comparing total casualties rather than casualty rates) against the average for the period 1994-1998.

One of these ‘stringent’ targets was to reduce the absolute number of London pedal cycle KSIs (killed or seriously injured) by 50%, against that 1994-98 baseline.

This target has not been met, as TfL admit –

the actual reduction achieved was 18 per cent.

Some way short of that 50% reduction. But TfL do have an excuse –

However, the substantial growth in cycling, which had doubled since the early 1990s, implies a much higher reduction in the collision risk per trip.

Fair enough, you might say – more people are cycling, so it’s not surprising that the absolute number of people being killed or seriously injured has not declined by as much as we would hope, and the target has been missed.

But this begs the question – surely some growth in cycling was accounted for when the target was set? If it was not, then the required reduction in the absolute number of people killed or seriously injured while cycling could have been achieved simply by a 50% drop in the number of people using bicycles, compared to the 1994-98 baseline – without any genuine increase in safety. Indeed, when the target is an absolute number, it almost gives a perverse incentive to not encourage more people to cycle. Transport for London should have been aiming for growth in cycling, and for the target they have been set by the Department for Transport – it’s a bit weak to use partial success on one front as an excuse for failure on another. A target is a target – and it has not been met.

In any case, is cycling even getting safer in relative terms, as Transport for London would like to have us believe?

According to the same report, the number of cycling ‘journey stages’ in London increased from 0.51 million in 2009, to 0.54 million in 2010 – an increase of nearly 6% (Table 3.6, p.63).

But if we refer to Table 6.1 on page 146 of the report, we see that cycle KSIs have increased from 433 in 2009, to 467 in 2010. An 8% increase in casualties.

It’s worth noting two other standout features from this data.

1. KSIs for all other mode users have decreased, in most cases by over 10%, while cycling KSIs, alone, have increased (pedestrian journey stages are up, overall, by 0.9% in 2009-10, while car journey stages fell 1% over the same period. See page 24 of the report, and the comments below).
2.  ‘Slight casualties’ have also increased markedly, by 5% across London – up by 1250 over 2009-2010 – which to me is suggestive of an increased rate of ‘collisions’. Put this ‘background’ against the KSI pattern and it’s not hard to work out what’s happening.

But the standout feature is the 8% increase in the number of cycle casualties, which actually outstrips the increase in the number of journey stages over the same period. It’s clear that – for 2009-2010, at least – cycling was getting less safe, in both absolute and relative terms.

Given that we have just seen one of the worst years for cycle fatalities in some time, I’m not sure 2010-2011 is going to turn out any better.

Thanks to Jim Gleeson for bringing the report to my attention

Just what is ‘smoothing traffic flow’?

In last week’s London Assembly motion on Cycle Safety (which you can view again here, around four hours in) Labour’s AM Val Shawcross made the following comments about Transport for London’s ‘smoothing traffic flow’ agenda, and how the policy is, in her opinion, weighted against the interests of vulnerable road users –

I do feel that, essentially, there is a design guidance within Transport for London, but that design guidance, the balance of judgement, at the moment is falling in favour of the Mayor’s smoothing traffic programme, and is disproportionately not representing the interests of cyclists and pedestrians. We saw that in practice, on the decisions being taken on the layout at Blackfriars Bridge. We can see it in the developing discussions about the layout of the Elephant and Castle; Vauxhalll; the King’s Cross layout. Many Assembly Members have been involved in discussions – as you have Chair – about road junctions in your own area, and you can see that the underlying judgements – the balance of the decisions that have to be taken – is wrong. TfL and the Mayor are not favouring cycle safety, and pedestrian facilities, as they now should be, in this modern age.

AM Andrew Boff, in a subsequent speech, refers back to this, saying –

Can I take some issue with Val Shawcross… on the ‘smoothing traffic’ agenda. Actually, ‘smoothing traffic’ is better for cyclists. It’s where traffic stops and starts, [that’s] where the dangerous moments are, for cyclists. Y’know, I don’t just get on a bike for photo opportunities. I do it every day. And actually, it’s where you stop and start that are the dangers. And actually smoothing that traffic flow will be safer for cyclists.

From Andrew Boff’s comment, you would think that the ‘smoothing traffic flow’ policy is simply an attempt to smooth off ‘spikes’ in traffic speeds.  To get technical, we might say that the standard deviation of the speeds of vehicles on London’s roads will decrease. That this is what Boff actually meant is further confirmed by some tweets he made later in the day, namely

Smoothing is not speeding

and

Are repeated periods of motorised acceleration and deceleration safer for cyclists?

He also made a further comment on the Cyclists In The City blog, namely

 As to smoothing, I’m afraid there was, in the debate, confusion between smoothing and speeding. The stops and starts of motorised traffic, apart from being more polluting, makes my cycle journeys less safe but that is, admittedly, just my experience. From the tweets I’ve seen, other people don’t agree with me but I’d like to see some evidence either way.

Which again suggests that Andrew Boff thinks ‘smoothing traffic flow’ is simply about eliminating ‘stops and starts’.

So we have a choice, it seems, between vehicles trundling along quite happily at a steady, moderate speed, or the hard acceleration, fast speeds, and subsequent hard deceleration of vehicles on the current road network. ‘Smoothing traffic flow’ is the cyclist’s friend, because it tries to create the former conditions.

Who wouldn’t want that option? Isn’t the Mayor’s ‘smoothing traffic flow’ policy something we can all sign up to?

Of course not. For the simple reason that this version of it I have just presented – Andrew Boff’s version – is not what ‘smoothing traffic flow’ is about, at all.

He is confused.

If you do some careful digging through the paperwork, motions and pamphlets released by the Mayor’s Office and Transport for London, it becomes quite clear that ‘smoothing traffic flow’ is nothing more than a strategy to reduce motor vehicle congestion. It has nothing to say about vehicle speeds – their acceleration, deceleration, speeding or otherwise. Where Andrew Boff got this notion from, I don’t know – at a guess, he has just taken the words ‘smooth’, ‘traffic’ and ‘flow’ and interpreted them to mean what he likes (which, interestingly, was precisely the strategy used during the public consultation on this policy).

Simply put, the Mayor is trying to reduce the severity of traffic jams, with the aim of  making journey times more predictable. Indeed, this is how the success of ‘smoothing traffic flow’ is being measured – by something called ‘Journey Time Reliability’, or JTR. If jams and queues are severe, then JTR decreases, and traffic is not ‘smooth.’

Andrew Boff’s version of ‘smoothing traffic flow’, therefore, is muddled, to put it mildly. The policy has nothing to do with vehicle speeds, at all – certainly not the instantaneous speeds he was referring to. Instead, ‘smoothing traffic flow’ is simply about mitigating the queuing at what TfL calls ‘pinch points’ in its road network. If you can get traffic (motor traffic, that is) flowing ‘smoothly’ through these places, then queues are minimised, and journey times are more reliable. The only, tangential, sense in which ‘smoothing traffic flow’ is about getting rid of ‘stop-start traffic’ is the way in which it attempts to reduce queuing times for motor vehicles.

‘Smoothing traffic flow’ cannot be about tackling ‘stop-start traffic’ in the sense Boff describes because the traffic is, of course, still stopping and starting. ‘Smoothing’ does nothing more than attempt to reduce the time for which it is stopped – but this is very different from getting rid of stopping and starting altogether.

The periods of acceleration and deceleration that Boff refers to – that he thinks ‘smoothing traffic flow’ will deal with – will, of course, remain, because quite obviously the Mayor is not eliminating stopping, at all. (Not even Boris would make so ridiculous a claim.) More precisely, he is attempting to eliminate gridlock, congestion and jams. But queues, quite naturally, will still form, and cars will still race from one queue to the next. It’s just that, if ‘smoothing traffic flow’ is successful, those queues will be shorter.

This is quite obvious when we look at what Boris himself actually says (pdf) –

I have launched a comprehensive effort to tackle the congestion conundrum and to smooth traffic flow so that Londoners no longer have to sit for hours fuming in the fumes.

‘Smoothing traffic flow’, therefore, is about tackling queues of motor vehicles. Indeed,  we see elsewhere that ‘smoothing traffic flow’ is, for Boris, a way of ‘preventing traffic jams.’

If there was any doubt remaining about the real purpose of ‘smoothing traffic flow’, the clearest evidence imaginable comes from the Blackfriars Bridge saga, and perhaps the early defining feature of the debate, that enflamed it – the 20mph speed limit.

If ‘smoothing traffic flow’ was really about eliminating ‘stop-start’ traffic in the conventional sense, and not, as it really is, about eliminating queues of motor vehicles, then at the very least Transport for London would have been keen to implement a 20mph speed limit across this bridge, to keep the traffic flowing at a more reasonable average speed.

In reality, of course, they took quite the opposite view, rejecting the proposed 20 mph speed limit, claiming that (pdf)

A permanent 20mph speed limit is not appropriate for Blackfriars. A temporary 20mph limit was introduced whilst the new station is being constructed. When completed, the new road layout, and in particular the new pedestrian crossings, mean that speeds during the morning peak are expected to be around 12mph through the junction – significantly slower than at present. For this reason a 20mph limit with additional signage and enforcement measures are not required.

Setting aside both a) the fact that pedestrian crossings have, in reality, been removed at Blackfriars, and b) the utter speciousness of this argument (quite plainly an average speed of 12 mph at the morning peak gives no indication of the maximum, and therefore most dangerous, speeds) the passage illustrates most vividly that Transport for London have no problem at all with traffic haring at crazy speeds from the queues at one end of the bridge to the other – the very definition of ‘stop-start traffic.’

Transport for London are not concerned in the least with addressing ‘stop-start’ traffic in the actual sense of keeping it moving at a more reasonable overall speed, as Andrew Boff would like to think.

All Transport for London are concerned about is minimising the length of the queues of motor vehicles at either end of the bridge, and by assocation the time spent queuing in those vehicles. The genuine ‘stop-start’ nature of the traffic simply does not enter into the equation.

It should now be entirely clear that every time Transport for London talk about ‘stop-start traffic’, what they are actually referring to are ‘queues of motor vehicles.’

To further illustrate, let me quote, and correct, Kulveer Ranger’s introduction from the same Transport for London pamphlet on ‘smoothing traffic flow –

The Mayor’s aim in managing the road network and smoothing traffic flow is to increase the reliability and predictability of  journeys, including tackling ‘stop-start’ traffic conditions queues of motor vehicles which increase emissions  of harmful pollutants.

Far more honest.

You can perform precisely the same correction every single time the phrase ‘stop-start traffic’ appears in the Mayor’s, or Transport for London’s, literature.

For if the intention really was to reduce emissions caused by ‘stopping and starting’ – hard acceleration and deceleration – we would have that 20 mph speed limit on Blackfriars, and indeed on nearly every road in London, without question; this would eliminate, at a stroke, a great deal of the ‘stopping and starting’, as vehicles travelling at the lower speed of 20mph would continue rolling towards traffic lights or junctions, rather than arriving at the queues there earlier, and sitting in them for  longer periods of time.

But Transport for London, as we have seen, are not keen on this lower speed limit. Indeed, quite the opposite – they seem rather set against 20mph limits on all the roads which they administer, and not just Blackfriars. The only conclusion that can be drawn is that they aren’t concerned with ‘stop-start traffic’ at all, but only with how lengths of queues of motor vehicles might impact about Journey Time Reliability. Which is, of course, what ‘smoothing traffic flow’ is all about addressing, not ‘stop-start traffic’. That’s why most of the measures being used to bring about ‘smoother traffic flow’ are designed to mitigate queuing times for motor vehicles at junctions. Including –

• Signal timing reviews – an issue I have written about before. Quite simply, the reallocation of traffic signal time, from pedestrians, to motor traffic.
• SCOOT (Split Cycle Offset Optimisation Technique) – the careful management of traffic signals, to give more time to vehicles queuing from a certain direction.
• SASS (System Activated Strategy Selection) – similar to SCOOT, this changes traffic signal timings according to a particular traffic problem.
• Pedestrian countdown – again, more allocation of signal time phases to motor vehicles.
• Signals removal – the stripping out of traffic signals that are deemed unncessary, or unjustified, for pedestrians, or ‘traffic’.

Needless to say, every single one of these measures is designed to reduce queuing time for motor vehicles, which is what ‘smoothing traffic flow’ is ultimately concerned with.

Although ‘achieving modal shift from car journeys towards more sustainable modes’ is listed as a ‘theme’ in implementing the smoothing traffic agenda, we have precious little in these documents about how that shift is actually going to be achieved. There’s absolutely nothing here, for instance.

Indeed, it is hard to escape the impression that ‘modal shift’ isn’t at all interesting for the ‘smoothing traffic’ bods at TfL, especially when, in their own documents, they describe how measures to achieve it have a ‘negative impact’ on ‘network capacity for motorised vehicles’ –

The causes of motor vehicle congestion are complex and actual traffic growth over the last few years has been small, partly due to investment in alternative modes (e.g. walking, cycling, and public transport improvements). Some of these modal shift measures, along with the impact of major utility infrastructure improvement programmes, and urban realm improvements, have impacted negatively on network capacity for motorised vehicles.

Measures to achieve modal shift, in other words, are antithetical to ‘smoothing traffic flow.’

An empirical demonstration of these attitudes within TfL came recently, with their open  willingness to prioritise the reduction of queuing times for motor vehicles over measures that could genuinely save the lives of vulnerable road users – even when those measures would quite reasonably be expected to achieve a modal shift.

So every time you hear the claim that ‘smoothing traffic flow’ is designed to ‘tackle stop-start traffic’, understand what is really meant by it.

Reducing queuing times for motor vehicles.

Is the bicycle being forgotten about in London’s new street designs?

Danny of Cyclists In the City has been tireless in documenting the increasing rash of widened pavements and narrowed carriageways that are springing up all over London. In his most recent piece on a location where a street has been redesigned in this manner, Cheapside – where the carriageway has been narrowed significantly, cycle lanes have been removed, and the pavement extended – he notes that

My own view is that the schemes [on Cheapside and St. Pauls’ Churchyard] are a disaster for cycling. Anecdotally, I sense that cycling numbers along these roads have also decreased since the changes…

Firstly, the roads are now so narrow, that motor vehicles can’t really get past people on bikes. And vice versa. That means you’re either stuck between buses or you have to overtake by crossing the middle of the road. Which is also largely impossible, because the motor traffic on the other side is stuck in a queue as well…

The other clincher is the addition of new pinch points, particularly on Cheapside. Motor vehicles try to overtake you between the pinch-points, then realise there’s not enough room, then slam in behind you or literally scrape past you.

My personal feeling is that the narrowing of the carriageways, and the widening of the pavements, have been undertaken in a genuine attempt to improve the street environment for pedestrians. A narrower carriageway will be easier to cross, and vehicle speeds should be lower; this in addition to the obvious benefits of a wider pavement. Unfortunately it seems that little or no consideration has been given for how these changes might affect people on bicycles.

Having just returned from the Better Streets conference on the 29th November, these issues suddenly sounded rather familiar. One of the speakers at the conference was David Moores, Technical Director of Public Realm for Project Centre, the consultancy responsible for the redesign of Kensington High Street. Like the streets Danny Williams has been talking about, this redesign features a wider pavement, narrowed carriageways for vehicles, and a ‘median strip’, a kerbed separator that lies down the centre of the road. You can see it in this photograph below, which I have taken from David Moores’ own presentation –

Like the other measures, this  kerbed divider is designed to improve the environment for pedestrians, making it easier for them to cross the road, where they choose. They can cross one side, and wait on the divider until the other side becomes clear. In essence, it’s an extended ‘pedestrian refuge.’

As you can see, it’s also used as a cycle storage area. Cycle stands are great, of course, but I’m not tremendously enthusiastic about them being placed in the middle of the road. For a start, you’ve got to get to the central island in the first place, which means negotiating your way across to the centre of the road. You then have to cross the road to get to the shop you intend to visit, before having to cross back again to retrieve your bicycle, and then cross back again to the edge of the road to resume your journey. Cycle stands placed at the side of the road – by the shop, restaurant or place you actually want to visit – are far more convenient.

The principle of using such a divider for making it easier to cross the road has a sound basis, but David Moores talked at length about wanting to make it wider – to make it a ‘third footway’ in its own right. The logic of this escaped me slightly. I’m not sure people really do want to walk down the centre of the road – there’s nothing there, really, apart from the odd tree, and the pavement itself. They just want to cross it, to get to the shops, facilities and destinations on the other side. It didn’t seem necessary, to me, to make this a place where people could walk longitudinally more easily, because people have no reason to do so.

The other troubling aspect of this widening – which of course didn’t take place here on Kensington High Street – was that it would have involved narrowing the carriageways still further. This narrowing was something David Moores was enthusiastic about, in its own right, particularly when it came to interactions with people on bicycles. You can hear what he had to say on this issue by clicking here (the full speech can be listened to here), but I have transcribed the relevant passage below –

Cyclists… We have looked at additional design work since then, on Walworth Road, where, with a narrower carriageway, cyclists get to the front at the signals, and they set off, and they effectively monitor the speed of the traffic. Because we provided slightly wider lane widths here [on Kensington High Street] you actually get vehicles trying to get past the cyclists, so it’s sort of evidence to suggest that a narrower carriageway protects cyclists, particularly when you’ve got a large number of signals, because it acts like lock gates, down through the design.

I must say I muttered something under my breath while I was sitting in the audience listening to this.

This is the ‘narrower carriageway’ on Walworth Road, of the kind that David Moores was talking about, below –

Again, we have the ‘median strip’, designed to help pedestrians cross the road. But crucially the carriageway is considerably narrower than that on Kensington High Street. For David Moores, this narrower carriageway is a much better idea. In his words, it ‘protects cyclists.’ Unlike on Kensington High Street, where vehicles ‘try to get past’ cyclists, on Walworth Road the vehicles are stuck behind cyclists, where their speed becomes ‘monitored’ by those people on bicycles (I think this is just a more attractive way of saying the vehicles are ‘held up’ by bicycles).

My problem is that, for cyclists to ‘get to front at the signals’, the carriageway will quite obviously have to be wide enough for them to move past a car; but if that is the case, then it is wide enough for a car to attempt to squeeze back past them once traffic starts moving, regardless of how safe this might be. The only way to stop this is to adopt an ‘assertive’ road position, which is little understood by most drivers, and can quite often be seen as an act of provocation. It’s certainly not a recipe for harmony between drivers and people on bicycles, to say nothing of the safety consequences for the more timid people on bicycles – possibly the majority – who tend to hug the kerb as they cycle.

To be cynical, it almost appears as if bicycles are being used, deliberately, as a traffic calming measure. Maybe that isn’t the intention, but that is certainly the outcome, and an outcome is being talked about, positively, by the designers of these streets.

It comes as no surprise to me that Project Centre are also responsible for the redesign of, amongst other locations, Cheapside, Walworth Road, Rye Lane, and proposed changes to Holborn Circus (the consultation for which showed absolutely no bicycles at all). Every single one of these redesigns involves wider pavements, more pinch points, and increased conflict between bicycles and motor vehicles. Even if the traffic is stationary, it remains deeply unpleasant to cycle on these kinds of roads, because it is either impossible – or worse, dangerous – to filter, due to the narrowness.

My impression, looking at these schemes, is that very little thought has gone into making these places environments where people might actually want to cycle. And it’s not just Project Centre who are overlooking cycling. Farrells – the architects who elected to remove the cycle track on Byng Place in Bloomsbury and replace it with a rather pointless ‘shared’ space, that in reality is not shared at all – have put forward a proposal for Euston Circus, at the north end of Tottenham Court Road. They intend to turn this large, unpleasant, grade-separated, multi-lane junction into a…

large, unpleasant, grade-separated, multi-lane junction. But with wider pavements.

Better for people on foot, but again, no consideration for anyone using a bicycle. (Indeed, it is telling that not a single bicycle appears in this illustration, just as with Holborn Circus).

We’ve also seen the formerly one-way streets around Piccadilly converted to two-way by Atkins; in principle, a good idea, but implemented with no thought for how their designs might turn out for someone cycling along them.

This street – Pall Mall – once a wide, one-way street, is now one giant pinch point, in both directions, thanks to the combination of parking on both sides, and the new median strip. When traffic is flowing freely, you have to ‘take the lane’ to avoid people attempting to squeeze past you. When it is congested, it is unpleasant or impossible to filter.

And at Russell Square, yet another design that is antithetical and hostile to the needs of cyclists.

This used to be a bus contraflow. It is now a four lane road, with a wider pavement, and narrow carriageways. Unpleasant for cycling. And dangerous. Camden Cycling Campaign have an ongoing safety issue with right turns at the junction behind where I am standing, something that was also highlighted by the late and lamented Crap Waltham Forest blog.

On other sides of the square, carriageway space has been reallocated for more pavement, and for parking.

And incredibly, on the west side of the square, a kerb-separated cycle contraflow has been ripped out, and replaced with… nothing. You can see the old design in Streetview –

It is here that Velorution have been forced to improvise a solution, protecting themselves with cones as they cycle legally against the flow of traffic, as below –

So it seems that at every location in London where a road is being dug up and redesigned, while some improvements are being made for pedestrians, little or no consideration is being given to how the street could be made better for cycling. Indeed, in some cases, the street is being made objectively worse, or even dangerous.

Is the bicycle being forgotten about? It certainly looks like it.

How ‘smoothing traffic flow’ is needlessly causing death and serious injury

I am indebted to Olaf Storbeck of Cycling Intelligence for the background to this post. He has published an open letter, written to Camden’s Culture & Environment Scrutiny Committee, by Kenji Hirasawa, the boyriend of Deep Lee, the young woman killed on a bicycle at King’s Cross on 3rd October, 2011.

The letter can be read in full on Olaf’s blog, but the substance of it is that, at the junction where Kenji’s girlfriend was run over and killed by a lorry, cyclists are forced into a position close to lorries where they are particularly hard to see. Kenji writes that, with an increasing number of cyclists using the junction, particularly with the new campus of Central St. Martin’s to the north, it is surely necessary to provide a safe cycle lane for these cyclists so they can pass through the junction without risking their lives – a solution ‘like those used in the Netherlands’, in his words.

Failing that, he writes, the council should make other roads safer, and actively inform cyclists to use those routes instead.

You are probably already aware of Transport for London’s response to this request, as reported by the Camden New Journal –

On Monday night, Kenji listened patiently in the Town Hall chamber – a perfect picture of dignity in his blue suit with top shirt button done up – as council officials argued they were mostly meeting cycle safety targets in a presentation of endless graphs and pie charts. A TfL representative insisted that introducing a cycle lane at the junction would “cause considerable queues”, stressing that there was “limited time” to conduct a review of the proposed changes for the junction because of a “commitment” to make them in time for the Olympic Games. “We have taken the comments on board from day one – it is more about whether it is workable,” said Nigel Hardy, TfL’s head of capital development.

Installing a cycle lane would not be ‘workable’, according to Nigel Hardy – presumably because of the ‘considerable queues’ that would result to motor traffic.

So nothing is going to change at this location (although it was worth noting that TfL were quite keen to make one change – removing the ghost bike marking the location of Deep Lee’s death.)

There is a ‘redesign’ planned for the junction next year, but – as Olaf Storbeck points out – the only change at the point where Deep Lee died is a repainting of the advanced stop box, as you can see in my clipping below from TfL’s ‘Improvement Plan. The pavement on the north side is being rejigged, and expanded, but the issue of cyclists being left in the blindspot of vehicles, and completely unprotected should they fail to be seen, remains entirely unresolved. This is not at all surprising, because Transport for London have made their priorities quite plain.

So the position can be summed up quite simply.

Transport for London have chosen minimizing queueing times for motor vehicles over the safety – indeed, the lives – of vulnerable road users on their network.

It cannot be stated more plainly than that.

At the approach to the lights where Deep Lee was killed, there are two lanes, designated for motor vehicles, as you can see in the photograph below. Both of these lanes are for north-bound traffic, heading into York Way.

Let us ignore the other three lanes of this five-lane gyratory for now.

A safe solution for the two lanes heading into York Way, like that suggested by Kenji Hirasawa, would require stripping out one of those lanes, and installing a kerb separated cycle track in its place.

But, for Transport for London, this cannot possibly happen.

Why, you might ask? Surely the amount of vehicles queuing in the two lanes could simply be redistributed into a longer queue, in just the one lane? There is, you might think, enough space for traffic to back up into along Gray’s Inn Road, behind these vehicles.

Furthermore, to the north, York Way – the road that both these lanes feed into – is, despite its width, essentially a single-carriageway road. Vehicles travel along it in single file. Drivers do not treat it as a dual lane road. You can see this behaviour in this video –

So why shouldn’t the queue of motor vehicles waiting to enter this road use a single lane, instead of two? After all, the vehicles queuing in two lanes have to merge, almost immediately, down to one lane anyway, as the passage through the junction itself is too narrow to accommodate two vehicles side by side. Looking back towards the lights where Deep Lee was killed, you can see how vehicles merge into a single file as they set off from the lights –

Having two queuing lanes which immediately merge down to one here is, in my opinion, hazardous in and of itself, because the narrowing encourages jockeying for position, and fast starting, from the lights, at a point where drivers should really be looking out for vulnerable road users around them. You can see the behaviour this road layout encourages in my photograph above, where the driver of the car in the right hand lane quite deliberately invaded the cyclists’ advance stop area, presumably to gain an advantage over the driver beside him as they set off from the lights. The ‘jockeying’ for position is also apparent in the video below. Notice again that, on the other side of the junction, all the vehicles end up travelling in single file.

So – to repeat – why do we have two queuing lanes here, and why can one not be reallocated to provide a safe space for cyclists to proceed through the junction?

The answer lies in the number of motor vehicles you can get across the junction in a green phase of the traffic lights. If you have two lanes of queuing vehicles instead of just one, then in a green phase of, typically, 15 seconds, you can get double the number of motor vehicles through the junction.

In reality, the ‘throughput’ is probably far smaller – nowhere near a doubling – because of the jostling of merging vehicles through the junction. But this is how Transport for London’s logic works. In their ideal world, they would probably want three queuing motor vehicle lanes here – that would enable them to pump even more vehicles through the junction.

This is the pernicious logic of ‘smoothing traffic flow’. It is defined by the percentage of queuing motor vehicles that can get through a junction in a green phase. If all your queuing vehicles pass through – as was the case at King’s Cross while I was standing at this fatal junction – then you have 100% efficiency, and your flow is ‘smooth’. If not, then your junction is inefficient, and probably needs more lanes for queuing motor vehicles. (Transport for London boast that, averaged across all their signalled junctions, they have boosted this ‘efficiency’ from 72% to 80%, following a review of signal timings, covered in their Network Operating Strategy Document).

So ‘smoothing traffic flow’, while sounding quite fluffy and neutral, in practice means the near-total allocation of junction space to motor vehicles. This is why Cycle Superhighways disappear at the locations where they are most needed – junctions which are usually the most dangerous.

(Picture courtesy of Diamond Geezer)

The space is required for queuing motor vehicles, allowing more of them through the green phase on the lights, and ‘smoothing the flow’. This is, as we have seen with TfL’s response to Kenji Hirasawa, their absolute and overriding priority.

‘Smoothing traffic flow’ is also why TfL are refusing to put in pedestrian crossings at the location in the photograph above, and, where pedestrian crossings do exist, they are taking time away from them. Measures like this allow longer green phases for motor vehicles, so more motor vehicles can pass through the junction on their green phases, and, thus we have ‘smoother traffic flow’. As I have written about before, this removal of time for pedestrians is justified by an absurd method of measuring ‘delays’ for pedestrians – namely, by whether queuing pedestrians can cross the road on their green signal, without any consideration of how long they might have been waiting for that green signal in the first place. You could wait for a whole day, a whole month, a whole year, and as long as you manage to cross the road during your brief ‘green man’, you won’t have been delayed at all, according to Transport for London. The fact that you quite obviously cannot measure pedestrian delay in the way you measure delay cars apparently has not occurred to them.

Thus ‘smoothing traffic flow’ involves nothing more than worsening conditions for vulnerable road users, in order to minimise queuing times for motor vehicles.

That’s it.

I have already described the logic of this approach as ‘pernicious’. You can see why this is so when you consider that those worse conditions for pedestrians and cyclists will not only keep the drivers of those queuing vehicles in their cars – a bicycle is hardly going to seem an attractive option in locations where its users are being killed – but might actually serve to increase the lengths of those queues as the car becomes a more practical alternative, ironically due to the shorter journey times being created by ‘smoothing’ itself, and also as a result of the more hazardous nature of the environment for current vulnerable users. And so downwards we go in a vicious spiral – longer queues mean allocating more time and more space for motor vehicles, taking it away from vulnerable users, and consequently even less incentive to switch from motor vehicles to walking and cycling.

The notion that this cycle could be reversed – that we could have a virtuous, instead of vicious, cycle – is not on Transport for London’s radar.

This ‘virtuous’ circle would still involve ‘smoothing traffic flow’, but by a very different method. Not by allocating more and more space and time to the motor vehicle, and simultaneously risking the lives of vulnerable road users. Instead, it would achieve ‘smoothness’ by creating safe and pleasant conditions for walking and cycling. We could shorten our queues of motor vehicles quite easily, not by giving them more and more space, but by making junctions like King’s Cross not quite so subjectively – and objectively – terrifying for people on bicycles. By implementing the kinds of measures Kenji Hirasawa was talking about, in other words.

But TfL apparently only know one way to shorten queues of vehicles. Giving them more and more space and time.

They desperately need to start learning lessons – 40 year old lessons – from continental cities which decided long ago that attempting to accommodate growing motor vehicle traffic was a road to madness. Cities like Utrecht, the history of which you can see in this excellent video from Mark Wagenbuur.

This process of rolling back the time and space given to motor vehicles has not stopped. Indeed, the enormous dual carriageway that runs past Utrecht railway station –

which was constructed in the 1970s, was on my last visit being stripped out, and replaced with the original canal.

(The middle photo is not mine, but comes from this site). 

When finished, the dual carriageway will have disappeared, replaced by this –

What will happen to ‘the traffic’ that was once carried on this dual carriageway? Indeed, what has happened to all ‘the traffic’ in Utrecht?

The answer is that it’s still there. People are making just as many journeys as – if not more than – before. The only difference is that they are using bicycles, buses, trams and their own feet, in a city that feels safe, humane and civilized.

It’s all rather smooth.

We need to catch up.

Lethal drivers

On the 21st of November last year, Matthew Bailey, a 22-year-old scaffolder from Gosport, headed out into town for some drinks with friends. A few hours later, returning home, he was struck and killed instantly by a car as he used a pedestrian crossing on Park Road, Landport.

Mr Bailey’s mother Anne Hayes, 45, described the nature of his death as ‘selfish and pointless’ and said it had ‘shattered’ his family. She added: ‘I said goodbye to him as he went out with his mates, joking about Family Guy and Harry Hill. Eight hours later I was saying goodbye to him in hospital and being told I could not touch him as he was part of a crime scene. I have watched his brother carrying his coffin and the next day his sister carrying his ashes. These are images that will haunt me forever. I should be tidying up his bedroom, not his grave.’

The vehicle that struck Matthew Bailey was being driven on the wrong side of the road, at well over 40 mph, through a red light – the red light that should have guaranteed his safety as he crossed the road on a green phase.

The driver of that car – Claire Johnson – was, extraordinarily, engaged in a car chase with her boyfriend, Russell Bennett, who was attempting to flee from her with another woman in his car. Both drivers had repeatedly jumped red lights, driven their vehicles at speeds far exceeding the speed limit, and on the wrong side of the road.

Suspecting her partner was cheating on her, Johnson had waited for Bennett to finish work at Chiquito restaurant in Gunwharf Quays. When she saw Bennett drive off with his boss, Lisa Kearney, at 2am, she followed them in her car and tried to get him to pull over. Desperate not to let his girlfriend and his new woman meet, the 24-year-old learner driver sped through the streets of Portsmouth in his Ford Focus, going through three red lights in a bid to get away. Johnson kept up the chase in her BMW Mini, flashing her lights and calling him on his mobile. Tragedy struck as Bennett dashed through another red light in Park Road, Landport, on the wrong side of the road, while Matthew and his friends were crossing after a night out. Matthew stepped back and narrowly avoided the car but he was hit by Johnson’s Mini as she followed through the red light.Johnson, who had been travelling at between 42mph and 49mph in the 30mph zone, didn’t brake or swerve out of the way.

What sentence was handed out to these two lethally reckless morons, one of them a ‘learner driver’, the other using her mobile phone?

Former English teacher Johnson was jailed for two years for causing death by dangerous driving and Bennett got 14 months for dangerous driving.

And their driving licences?

Both defendants were also banned from driving for five years at the court hearing last Friday.

Obviously it takes a great deal of stupidity and thoughtlessness to engage in the kind of behaviour exhibited by these two criminals. But, without wishing in any way to excuse them, I think it is fair to say their conduct was partly facilitated by two factors.

Firstly, ‘minor’ driving misdemeanours like speeding, jumping lights or using mobile phones are widely tolerated. Even when they’re not, the fines and penalties are so desultory they are, essentially, ineffective as a deterrent. It’s perhaps not that suprising when, in the heat of the moment, two drivers who might already speed, talk on phones, or  jump lights, decide to take their law breaking just that little bit further.

Secondly, our streets are almost entirely planned around cars, designed to expedite their movement through our towns and cities. The subliminal message sent out by these layouts is that you will only encounter other vehicles in this space – again, it’s not surprisingly, therefore, that the most foolish people will, in exceptional circumstances, drive their cars in a way that assumes no pedestrians will ever be in ‘their’ space, even when crossing on a green signal.

Cases like this are a vivid demonstration of the need for stiffer penalties for, and less tolerance of, the dangerous use of motor vehicles, and, more generally, that it is time we reined in the motor vehicle in our urban areas – to take away the opportunity for people to engage in such tragic stupidity.

Coned off

Heading back from an excellent Street Talks at Look Mum No Hands on Tuesday evening, I found myself cycling south on Blackfriars Bridge, on my way to Waterloo. This is the location of a disastrously poor cycle lane, the lethality of which you can see in the video below from rogerhotuk –

The main problem is that it is far too narrow, especially with no escape to the left as a consequence of the hoardings, and, secondarily, that vehicles – especially longer ones like the bus in the video – will inevitably track across it at the kinks to the left along its length. Cycling in this lane is dangerous – full stop.

On my visit on Tuesday, however, it looked as if some action had been taken. Minimal action – but action nonetheless. Some cones have now been distributed outside of the cycle lane, offering some measure of protection to cyclists choosing to use it.

You can, however, see direct evidence of the ‘corner cutting’ issue I mentioned above – one of the cones on the apex has been knocked over.

An indication of just how close vehicle are passing here.

I wobbled around this cone, and progressed to the point where the hoardings end. This was where the cycle lane simply ceased, as you can see in the video; it has now been ‘extended’, but only with paint, which sadly doesn’t do anything to address the root problem. In any case, there is now a difficulty.

It is at this point that I realise that the cones ahead are in my way.

They’ve been placed in the cycle lane, at precisely one of the most dangerous points. Anyone using the lane has to weave their way through them, just as vehicles are, again, cutting the corner, like the taxi you can see whizzing past in the above photo.

So what’s the thinking here?

On reflection, the only logical explanation I can come up with for the presence, and distribution, of these cones is not protect the cycle lane at all, as I had first guessed.

It is to cone it off.

Doubtless someone has informed the authorities that the cycle lane is rather dangerous. The responsible parties have leapt into action, and used the standard technique to prevent the use of a lane – coning it off.

Cones. That’s how you stop motor vehicles from using a lane, isn’t it? They can’t get inside them.

It looks, to me at least, like precisely the same method has been employed to prevent the use of this cycle lane; unfortunately, it has been employed without any consideration of the fact that bicycles can, quite easily, get inside cones, and use the lane regardless.

So we have one of two scenarios playing out here.

• Cones have been deliberately put into this cycle lane in the most dangerous place.
• Alternatively, and more probably, whoever is responsible has attempted to stop the use of the lane, but in a thoughtless, motor-centric manner, that has done nothing to stop bicycles using it, and created danger in so doing.

Take your pick.

(On a more positive note, things can be done properly, as this example on Royal College Street demonstrates –

Well done Camden Council, and Camden Cyclists)

Cycling as a stress-reliever, in Sweden and Horsham

Here’s a good comment piece from the West Sussex County Times, published in last week’s paper. Curiously, the paper’s website suggests that it was written by Conservative Party Chairman, and local MP, Francis Maude – but that isn’t the case. It was written by Sarah Page.

Rather pertinently, given my post yesterday, it addresses the issue of cycling, and stress and anxiety. It runs –

Why cycling to work is good… and bad

The secret of a good night’s sleep is to get on your bike and cycle to work. That’s according to a new scientific study which says people who drive to their job suffer from greater anxiety and are more likely to sleep badly. Whereas if you cycle to work, the exercise will prove an antidote to stress and promote feelings of wellbeing.

Mmm.

That’s all well and good – as long as your bike journey doesn’t involve cycling over the railway bridge in North Street, Horsham. There can’t be many more stressful routes for cyclists in the district. Or for car drivers, come to think of it. And there’s no way that cycling on that stretch of road could help to send you to the land of nod after a hard day’s work. It’s more likely to keep you awake. The road is on a hill with a blind bend and a living nightmare if there are two cars passing each other, let alone a cyclist or two as well.

The On-Yer-Bike study comes from Lund University in Sweden and is being highlighted by Halfords. Spokesman Charles Ashwell said: ‘Cycling builds exercise into the daily routine and is a fantastic antidote to the stressful lives we lead.’ No doubt it is. But it must surely depend on the state of the roads on which you cycle and the amount of rush-hour traffic whizzing past.

Quite.

Here is the road in question, looking down the hill, towards the town centre –

It’s an arterial road that carries almost all of the motor vehicles heading in and out of Horsham, from and to the north-east. Unfortunately, as it is composed of an embankment, running up to a dog-leg railway bridge, it feels narrow and claustrophobic, hemmed in on both sides by barriers. As you labour up it on a bicycle, you approach the blind corner that Sarah Page mentions.

In my experience, people often ignore the solid white line that starts halfway up the hill, and overtake without any thought for the fact that vehicles might actually be coming the other way. Below, you can see that blind corner, on a different day, outside of the rush hour –

Sarah Page – who I think it would be fair to guess does not ride a bicycle around Horsham, but I’m willing to stand corrected – is quite right to point out that is rather unpleasant to cycle on this section of road. I try to avoid it when I can, especially when I am going up the hill, and my speed relative to motor vehicles is lower. (The horrible surface doesn’t help matters much either – look at that tasty disintegration under the black car in the second photograph).

Riding a bike might relieve stress and anxiety in Lund – but not at this location in West Sussex. In fact it rather increases it.

Horsham is only around 2-3 miles in radius, and largely flat. To me, that suggests that the bicycle is (or rather, could be) an entirely feasible mode of transport for most residents, for a great number of trips, and should, given the right conditions, be used for far more journeys than that reflected in the current 1% modal share in the town. But I can quite understand why Horsham’s residents are not choosing to use their bicycles when they have to deal with these kinds of road environments.

It doesn’t feel safe.

If we dig out the actual piece of research that inspired Sarah Page’s column, by Erik Hansson, and published in BMC Medical Health (pdf), we find that it actually has little to say about cycling, using it only as a benchmark against which to measure the self-rated health, and sickness absence, of people who use cars to commute. The study was, however, carried out in southern Sweden, where the paper notes that

There are relatively extensive networks of bike lanes throughout the region, encouraging cycling

Hmm. Immediately I am put in mind of another variable that might in part account for why Swedish cyclists are less stressed and anxious than their car-using counterparts, beyond the simple choice of pedal power.

Funny that.

Using a bicycle to cross a railway on a road in Lund. Spot what may account for this Swedish cyclist’s low stress level.

‘A very safe activity’

David Hembrow has recently posted a piece about a family in Cambridge who are considering giving up cycling – this after a nasty incident on a roundabout, in which a van struck the mother’s bakfiets, with her baby in it. David’s main focus is on the number of accidents that have occured on this particular road, and how this compares – poorly – with the most dangerous junction in the Netherlands.

My attention was grabbed, however, by the comment from the Cambridge Cycle Campaign that concludes the newspaper article David refers to –

A spokesman for Cambridge Cycling Campaign said: “Cycling is a very safe activity, and safer in Cambridge than most places in the UK.”

Whether that is all they had to say on the matter, or whether space prevented them from saying more, nothing else appears.*

It’s a statement that is rather similar to comments the CTC’s Chris Peck made in response to the ghost bikes erected in London following the recent spate of deaths there –

Despite their eerie poignancy, some cycling campaigners worry that the memorials could, in fact, act in the main to put off would-be cyclists. “While ghost bikes may help ensure road users pay more attention to one another, they make [sic] give the impression that cycling is more dangerous than it actually is,” said Chris Peck, policy co-ordinator for the CTC, the UK’s main national cycling organisation. “Cyclists in general live two years longer than non-cyclists and are in general healthier – even in heavy traffic, a three-mile ride to work is healthier than driving to work every day and failing to get any exercise.”

The response to examples of danger, both perceived and quite real, is, in both cases, to highlight that cycling is statistically, objectively, ‘a very safe activity’; far safer than these isolated incidents might suggest.

Why does this seem to be the soundbite of choice for some cycle campaigning groups? No doubt they do acknowledge, privately or otherwise, that Cherry Hinton Road in Cambridge could be safer to cycle on. Likewise, they could admit that the gyratory around King’s Cross, where the ghost bike for Deep Lee has been erected, is a far from pleasant, or safe, environment for cycling. They could – when asked for their opinion by a local newspaper, or by the Guardian – state that these roads are actually far less safe than they should be, both in objective and subjective terms, and that something really should be done about them.

But, quite often, they don’t. In these two instances, they prefer to accentuate the positive – to highlight that using a bicycle is actually far safer than it appears to be, or indeed to point out that it has health benefits that will increase your life expectancy.

I think this is because cycle campaigners are terrified of ‘putting people off’ – the logic being that if we start talking about the horrible roads we often have to cycle on, and the dangerous junctions that desperately need improvement, then all we will be doing is fostering the perception – already widespread in the populace – that cycling is a high risk activity, and so in consequence we would be deterring many people from choosing to take up a bicycle as a mode of transport. Agreeing with Jane Richards – the Cambridge mother who feels like giving up cycling – that using a bike in Cambridge does indeed ‘feel like an extreme sport’ would have the net consequence of discouraging people from using bicycles, and worse, might even encourage some current cyclists to discard them.

Cycling is safer the more people who do it – so the mantra goes – and thus we need to do everything we can to hold on to the people who currently cycle, and encourage others to do so. That means we might have to refrain from speaking our minds about the danger some roads pose.

I can sympathise with this point of view. Indeed, I engaged in this kind of sunny optimism myself, as a younger man, attempting to convince my non-cycling friends that cycling around London’s busy gyratories was fine, once you got used to it. I was being honest – at the time, I genuinely felt that it was okay to cycle there, and that once my friends tried it a few times – despite probably being a little unnerving at first – they would grasp the cycling bug, and we would form a happy peloton.

They didn’t bite, though. The tube, and buses, remained a far more attractive alternative for them.

And I think this is, in microcosm, the problem. Whatever I said about cycling on London’s roads to my friends, however long I survived without incident, or injury, it just didn’t smell right for them. It didn’t seem normal. Cycling around giant roundabouts, with motor vehicles, large and small, moving all around you, just isn’t the sort of thing most people are going to engage in, however persuasive their friends are.

You do indeed ‘have to keep your wits about you’, in the famous words of our Mayor. And he was quite correct to say so. It would be beyond foolish to cycle around London without paying attention. The trouble is – and this is the crux of the matter – no other mode of transport in London requires wits to be kept, continually, about oneself. Catching a bus does not require ‘keeping your wits about you’. Nor does using the tube, or walking along the pavement. These are modes of transport that children can use without much formal instruction, beyond ‘don’t step off the kerb’. The same cannot be said, at all, for using a bicycle – not if you don’t want to come to grief.

And this is precisely why cycling, no matter how statistically or objectively safe, feels subjectively unsafe.

If you keep your wits about you, you will most likely be fine, but not everyone wants to keep their wits about them, at all times. I often remark that while cycling in London I feel like a harried fox. Although I am safe, the amount of attention I have to pay to my immediate environment is extraordinary; what a vehicle behind me is planning to do, and what measures I should take to encourage the best possible behaviour from that driver; what speed a vehicle is approaching from a side road; at what point I should start to move out around stationary vehicles; what position I should hold in a particular lane of a gyratory; how and when to filter; the list is, seemingly, endless.

This is not a recipe for subjective safety.

And this is why the responses from the cycling campaigners that provoked this piece are – at least in my opinion – misguided. It is the perception of danger that is the issue. You can tell people that cycling is statistically very safe until the cows come home, but it is how it actually feels that is surely the most important factor in whether people will take up cycling, or continue to do so. Very few people are going to be persuaded by the statistics that the likes of Chris Peck and the Cambridge Cycle Campaign are coming out with; it’s very hard indeed to imagine bicycles being wheeled out of sheds with the realisation that cycling is objectively very safe.

Indeed, if the intention of these kinds of comments is to attempt to shape public perception, then I’m afraid that as a strategy, it is very much a case of shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted. It’s too late. Cycling feels, and looks, like an unsafe activity to the vast majority of the population, and I don’t blame them for forming that impression.

We certainly shouldn’t exaggerate the dangers involved in riding a bike, but I think it’s time we saw an acknowledgement, in these soundbites, of the hostility of the environment we have to face when cycling, rather than attempts to persuade us otherwise with statistics. Who knows – it might be rather more useful in the long run.

________________________

*UPDATE – As you can see in the comments below,  Cambridge Cycle Campaign did send a rather longer response to the Cambridge Evening News, which runs as follows –

Being shielded from the elements through a ton of metal, drivers have large front, limited surround view and their senses are drastically reduced as they can’t properly hear what is going on around them. Ever thicker pillars have reduced drivers viewing field. Cut off from much of the exterior and helped by powerful engines drivers speed through congested urban roads at speeds that can kill, many not aware that pretty much all danger to life on our roads derive from motor cars and lorries.

Cycling is a very safe activity, and safer in Cambridge than most places in the UK. Gardening is dangerous, yet people take the risk of gardening all the time without thinking about it. If a car collides with another car, wouldn’t the police prosecute that driver for driving without due-care and attention, yet when a car hits a bicycle they don’t. We need road junctions that make pedestrians and cyclists feel safe and are designed to be safe for everybody, not just those in big heavy vehicles.

This is an excellent response – it’s a pity that the Cambridge Evening News didn’t see fit to include the last sentence, in particular, along with the brief sentence they did quote.

Cycling on the pavement

I wrote a rather long piece a few months ago about a West Sussex County Times article entitled Councillor warns of road ‘peril’. This was an article that, for some reason,  decided to focus entirely on the dangers of ‘selfish cyclists’ who are using pedestrianised areas in Horsham, and which simultaneously managed to ignore completely the (acknowledged) dangers of reckless driving.

Don’t get me wrong. Anti-social cycling – the kind in which pedestrians are passed fast and close, with scant regard for anyone’s safety – is unpleasant and stupid, not to say potentially dangerous. But I found this emphasis on the danger posed by cyclists rather odd, given the factual evidence of no cyclists being responsible for injuries to pedestrians in Horsham, ever, and five Horsham cyclists being hit by motorists in the few weeks subsequent to the article being published, myself included (to say nothing of the continual toll of pedestrians also being ‘in collision’ with motor vehicles in the district).

In this companion piece, I’d like to revisit that article, and take a closer look at why cyclists are using pavements and pedestrianised areas in Horsham. For the most part, they are doing so in an entirely civilised and safe way, although there are exceptions – precisely those idiots on bicycles who tend to generate these kinds of articles in the local press across the UK.

A common sight in Horsham is this sort of thing –

Young children, cycling on the pavement, accompanied by their parents – either on foot, or on a bike. I have never seen a young child cycling on the road in Horsham.

Parents aren’t stupid. They don’t want their children using the roads, because whatever the statistics about how safe cycling actually is, they feel subjectively unsafe to cycle on – deeply so. This kind of feeling is undoubtedly magnified when it is your rather vulnerable young child who might be being put at risk. So they make them cycle on the pavement, which feels a whole lot safer, even when it is technically illegal, as is the case in the photographs above.

Horsham District Council is obviously well aware that their roads are rather horrible to cycle on, because – as with most other councils – they are legalising pavement cycling by stealth.

A pavement on the south side of Redkiln Way, in Horsham, where it is now legal to cycle. Of course, there is plenty of space here for a proper cycle path, but the idea that anyone might want to ride a bike in Horsham as a means of actually getting about has been so far off the radar for so long that the best we can hope for is some paint telling us to give way when we come into conflict with (blocked) secondary entrances to small industrial units.

If the pavement is narrower than the above example – that doesn’t matter. Just put up a shared use sign.

Unpleasant roundabout to negotiate on a bike?

Fine, you can use the pavement here too. You’ll just have to engage in some ‘dismounting’ while you’re at it, because again, this sort of thing just can’t be done properly.

A useful cut-through link to a supermarket? We’ll make it shared use (even though there was ample space during construction for a wider path that would reduce conflict between pedestrians and cyclists), and tell you to dismount at random intervals –

In short, there are countless examples, all around Horsham, where you can cycle on the pavement, quite legally. Now because these ‘facilities’ amount to nothing more than paint being applied to already-existing pavements – pavements that were never designed for cyclists – the message that is being sent out is confusing and contradictory. One pavement is fine for cycling – another identical one is not. It is not surprising, therefore, that some nervous cyclists choose to cycle on pavements everywhere, regardless of the law, because they cannot see a logical and consistent reason why they should be prevented from doing so. The council obviously thinks its okay for people to cycle on some previously pedestrian-specific areas, so why not all?

It gets worse. Sometimes it almost seems as if the council is trying to create conflict between pedestrians and cyclists. Chart Way is a bridge that provides direct access from North Street (the main route to Horsham station, as well as an arterial road from the north of Horsham) into the largely pedestrianised town centre. It is actually legal to cycle on this bridge, because it lies along the line of a bridleway. It’s rather handy, too, because it means you don’t have to cycle across this pretty horrendous junction –

to get in and out of the town centre from the north.

How obvious is it that it is legal to cycle on this apparent footpath? Not very.

This is all we get. A small bicycle symbol on a sign. Now I can legally cycle across where those people are walking, but from the dirty looks I get, I often feel it is hardly worth it. I’m giving cyclists a bad name by ‘cycling on the pavement’. The southern end of this bridge is hardly any clearer –

Spot the small bicycle symbol on the sign, pointing vaguely in the right direction.

This is a recipe for hostility. A Horsham cyclist recounts here his account of being stopped by PCSOs while legally using this route. You can also find complaints being made to local councillors about cycling on this bridge here (pdf), all parties to the discussion again completely unaware that cycling on Chart Way is perfectly legal.

This confusion over which pedestrian areas in Horsham it is actually legal to cycle on extends to all the streets that are mentioned in the original County Times piece. Let’s take a look at what the gentleman making the complaint in that article, Brian Bateman, actually has to say –

Mrs Costin’s concern was sparked when Brian Bateman, who lives in the Horsham Town ward, wrote to the councillor after he was confronted by ‘yobs racing up and down West Street on mountain bikes’. He told the County Times: “I walk to work everyday and my route takes me along the Bishopric and up West Street. There are now more incidents daily of dangerous cycling on the street and the situation has got steadily worse over the years. I was nearly hit by two people racing up behind me. These were not children they were adults in their twenties. I was so shaken I reported the incident to the police. To add insult to injury when I turned to walk into the tunnel past Laura Ashley just off Middle Street I was nearly hit by a woman on a racing bike. This is supposed to be a pedestrianised area. There are warning signs at either end of West Street. There are also ‘Cyclists Dismount’ signs in the Market Square which are totally ignored. There are too many incidents of this type happening all over town and the people responsible are not all yobs – they come from different social groups and are of varying ages.” Mr Bateman believes “harsher penalties should be put in place before someone gets killed”.

I’ve highlighted the names of the streets that are at issue for Mr. Bateman. As it happens, they form a direct east-west line across the town. If we put aside the legality of the cycling for a moment, it becomes immediately apparent why people are cycling on these pedestrianised areas, when we look at the routes we can take to cycle from east to west – or vice versa – across Horsham.

I’ve plugged in a journey into Cyclestreets – a short one, across the centre of the town, from Brighton Road in the east, to Guildford Road, in the west. Here is the result –

You can see West Street and East Street, forming the most direct ‘desire line’, across the centre of the map. Middle Street is the short unnamed section that (unsurprisingly) lies between them. The red streets are all pedestrianised – the Bishopric, lying to the west, is pedestrianised to the east of Albion Way.

As you can see, we have a choice of three routes on a bicycle; the quietest (marked in green), the balanced (marked in yellow), and the fastest (marked in red). At this point it is important to note that none of these routes takes the direct, straight line along East Street, then Market Street and West Street, to the Bishopric. All of them are rather circuitous. Of course, the east-west route for cars, Albion Way – the large dual carriageway that arches around to the north of the centre – is not a straight line, but is nevertheless fast for driving.

So we immediately have a directional reason why people might decide to cycle on the streets that Mr. Bateman mentions. The other, perhaps more important reason, is that Albion Way, and Park Way, are both horrible places to ride a bicycle. This is the western section –

The middle section –

And Park Way, at the eastern end –

This last section is especially unpleasant; a thunderous subway with vehicles accelerating away from (or towards) the lights. The dual carriageway as a whole is a place I try to avoid as much as I can, and I am an ‘experienced’ cyclist.

But – as you can see from the Cyclestreets journey planner – you have no choice but to use it if you wish to cycle across the town, even using the ‘quietest’ route, marked in green*. All these routes involve making a right turn from the third lane of an urban motorway – the spot at which the lady is shuffling across the junction in the picture at the head of this blog. The red route simply involves cycling the entire length of the dual carriageway – not for the faint-hearted. The other two are ridiculously circuitous and twiddly.

My personal choice – and what I often do – is to cycle down East Street, across Market Square onto Blackhorse Way, and then walk the final section of the Bishopric. But even this is needlessly difficult, and I usually find myself resorting to the dual carriageway, simply because it is twice as quick as fiddling about with dismounts and walking.

In response to Mr. Bateman’s complaints (who I cannot help but notice is almost certainly related to a Catherine Bateman, the finance manager of the very same County Times newspaper), we find that

a police community support officer (PCSO) was called out Tuesday morning (September 20) to patrol West and East Street.

This particular PCSO must have been wasting at least half his time, because, as Greg Collins points out in the comments below the piece, cycling on East Street is, and always has been, legal. Here is a picture from just the other day of a dangerous maniac recklessly endangering pedestrians on East Street –

So this is another location – to add to Chart Way – in which PCSOs are hopelessly misinformed about the legality of cycling.

Market Street, West Street and the Bishopric are a slightly different matter, because these are most definitely pedestrianised areas. But what’s this? It’s an official Horsham District Council cycle routes map! You can download the pdf for yourself, if you so wish, but you can see the relevant section below –

The three streets that Mr. Bateman refers to – West Street, Middle Street, and the Bishopric – are all marked in purple. What does this mean?

Cycling is permitted outside of shopping hours.

When did Mr. Bateman encounter the rogue cyclists?

“I walk to work everyday and my route takes me along the Bishopric and up West Street.”

… When he was walking to work. That is, most likely at a time when the cycling on these streets was actually legal.

Now of course I don’t dispute that the cycling Mr. Bateman encountered may actually have been hazardous and/or reckless. But it would help if he, the council, and the police, could actually get their facts straight before blundering in to an issue like this. There are ‘no cycling’ signs on these streets, it is true, but they do not reflect the reality of the pragmatic allowance of cycling here outside of busy pedestrian times – something for which the council should be applauded, as they have given more nervous cyclists a viable alternative to an unpleasant dual carriageway.

This is West Street, at half past five in October. Cycling here at this time of day is now legal – sensibly so. But absurdly even the council don’t seem aware that they have made it legal at certain times! The ‘no cycling’ signs remain, unadjusted.

The final burst of ignorance in this story comes in Market Square, where Mr. Bateman complains

There are also ‘Cyclists Dismount’ signs in the Market Square which are totally ignored.

As those signs are right outside the County Times’ offices, I can’t help but be suspicious, again, that Mr. Bateman is perhaps being used as a mouthpiece for a newspaper employee’s own ‘concerns’. But no matter. In any case, cyclists are right to ignore those signs, because they are advisory only. As you can see in the picture below –

This looks like a pavement, but it was a road, for ‘vehicles’, well into the 1970s, until it was closed off with bollards. It is still a thoroughfare, but no apparent thought has been given to its potential use as a through-route for bicycles. Most weirdly, despite the sign having been erected here in an attempt to ‘advise’ people on bicycles to dismount, the bollard in the foreground actually has a symbol on it that indicates that this is a ‘cycle route’ of some kind. Looking the other way –

Who knows?

In fact signage like this is, in microcosm,  sympomatic of the fact that, when it comes to cycling and Horsham District Council, the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing.

To sum up, we have

• PCSOs being urgently despatched to stop cycling on a street where it is perfectly legal – East Street
• Other cyclists being stopped on another route where cycling is, again, legal – Chart Way
•  Citizens complaining about ‘illegal’ cycling on a number of streets, at a time of day when cycling is actually legal on those streets
• The council promising to do something about this ‘illegal’ cycling, despite the fact that they themselves have made it legal at these times
• Citizens not understanding the meaning of blue advisory ‘Dismount’ signs
• Cycling being permitted on some pavements, but not on other near-identical pavements

And so on.

It’s not easy cycling on most roads in Horsham, especially for the less confident. Now, to be fair to the council, they have opened up some pedestrianised areas for cycling, and made things slightly easier. They haven’t done much else, of course – I’d rather have proper routes across town that feel safe, not ones that bring me into conflict with pedestrians, and that are only legal at certain times of day. But credit where credit is due.

The only trouble with these minor improvements, of course, is that they are totally unpublicized, or officially signed. Even councillors, PCSOs and council employees (to say nothing of local residents and newspaper employees) don’t appear to know anything about where, and indeed when, cycling is, and isn’t, legal. Consequently people using bicycles can quite easily be branded as ‘criminals’ or ‘rogues’ – and be the subject of council ‘crackdowns’ – when they’re riding their bikes, perfectly legally, in these locations.

It’s not totally surprising, therefore, that the focus of these newspaper pieces about ‘road peril’ tends to steer, almost inevitably, towards ‘illegal cycling’, especially when there is so much confusion and ignorance about what actually is, and isn’t legal.

Thanks a bunch.

*this ‘quiet’ route is, actually, a little bit ‘screwy’ – the sensible option at the western end would be to dismount and just walk the final pedestrianised section in a westerly direction, rather than to do a loop to the north onto a ridiculously busy road.