Kulveer Ranger on BBC Radio London, and how safety is not a priority for the Mayor

The Mayor’s Director of Environment and Cycling Kulveer Ranger appeared on Vanessa Feltz’s BBC Radio London show this morning. Below is a transcript –

VF – Let me go straight to Kulveer Ranger. He’s director of environment at the Mayor’s Office, he’s responsible for all of this. Hello Kulveer.

KR – Hello Vanessa.

VF – Okay, I’ve got a question for you straight in front of me from Ozzie, and Ozzie says, could you please ask Kulveer Ranger why we don’t have cycling proficiency tests for anybody who fancies taking out a Boris Bike, because we do see Boris Bikers wobbling about the place, they are a danger to themselves, they are a danger to everybody else. Everybody loves the fact that they’re cycling, it’s good for their figure and it’s good for their heart, we’re all going to save money in the long run when they don’t have a heart attack and go into hospital – but in the immediate hour, it’s terrifying.

KR – You know, that’s a very sensible question Vanessa. And what I will say is that we do fund all boroughs to provide free training for anybody who wants to have cycle training, which used to be called cycling proficiency, and is now called Bikeability. And we’ve been funding that as part of a programme – an ongoing programme – to enable as many people as possible to get trained. In fact in the last year we’ve had 48,000 people be trained through boroughs, and this is there. So I say to anybody who wants to get some additional training before they get on a bicycle, or now they’re cycling, just speak to your local borough – through Transport for London and the Mayor’s office, we do fund them, and if you can’t get it through your borough, just contact TfL, and we’ll make sure you get some training.

VF – But what about the idea of making it not optional, but compulsory? Because obviously if you don’t bother going, and you decide it’s going to be great to do a bit of cycling, off you go… you know, sometimes you can see these people, it’s almost as if they’re wearing badges saying ‘I don’t really know how to ride a bike and yet here I am in Piccadilly Circus’. And you’re thinking, ‘hang on a minute mate, this is ridiculous’.

KR – It was one of my primary concerns – and the Mayor’s – before we launched cycle hire, that we wanted to make sure that anybody who got on a bike would have a sense that they need to be aware, they need to feel safe and confident, which is why a lot of the process that people have to go through as they either register, or even as a casual user, try to get a bike out, means they must read the safety code that there is, and understand some of the issues there are. And we do see a lot of people doing that, and making sure that they’re aware of being aware of other traffic, being aware of safety equipment, and so on and so forth. Which has resulted in us having, thank God, so far, very few accidents with the cycle hire scheme.

VF – And what about these two fatalities at the Bow roundabout, and the Superhighway? We’ve had all sorts of suggestions about what’s wrong, about the convergence of the Superhighway with this roundabout, about the fact that it is an unworkable combination factors, it’s incredibly hard to get round it safely, and that something needs to be done right now. Does it, and if so, what will it be?

KR – Well I have to say we are looking at this roundabout specifically. Obviously there was a previous incident on it, you know, firstly, the tragedies are immense. We feel the immense sadness that the families of these people have when they lose a loved one, and I want to say that absolutely first up. But we are looking at this roundabout. We are going to make sure that every single… Any accident, any fatality, on London’s roads, with a cyclist… Transport for London, working with the Metropolitan Police, investigate absolutely, to understand what exactly happened, was there something we could have done better, or was there something that the driver or the cyclist could have… We try to work out what happened, and then we make the difference. We do make the change to whatever that specific engineering change could be, or if there’s signage, or if there’s something else we can do, we will definitely do it. The fundamental point is that over the last ten years, there has been a huge increase in cycling in London. When the Mayor came in, we realised this was just going to continue, and I brought in a lot of cyclists’ groups, to say, ‘what is it that you want in London, to help cycling?’ And what they said to me – and to the Mayor – was, ‘we want to drive… to cycle, on the main roads, because we want the quickest routes from A to B. We don’t want to be going around the back streets, we want to be with traffic.’ And the difficulty there was, how do we make it safer? And what we decided was, that we would create these routes of Cycle Superhighways, to define the space, on those main roads, where cyclists can know that they can be on, and be clear, that’s an area for them, and other road users would find that they could understand, that’s where they’ll see cyclists. But apart from that, we’ve also, as I say, part of this programme, worked with hundreds of businesses, I think over two hundred businesses, as part of the Superhighway work, to provide safety information, about parking information…

VF – But Kulveer, what happens if there’s another death? I mean, we can’t just sit around waiting, and then when there’s another one – God forbid – do another programme on it, and ask you to come on again, and say look there’s another dead cyclist. We just can’t, can we?

KR – No, God no, Vanessa. We are not waiting for fatalities, we are working on this immediately. We’ve been working on this constantly. Behind this increase in cycling, the primary focus has been safety. The very first thing we did on cycling was to issue a cycling safety action plan, with 52 specific actions, including the use of new kinds of mirrors, better lane management technology, the civils run engineering [I think? garbled], looking at how we actually identify conflicts between cyclists… an immense amount of analysis has been done, and will continue to be done, and we will continue to put cycling at the h… safety at the heart of cycling, because we know, that’s where we need to focus.

VF – Kulveer, thanks very much for joining us.

And that was it. An extraordinary, dissembling performance. If it seems garbled, that because it was, the garbling stemming from Ranger continually having to stop himself from saying that safety itself on London’s roads is the Mayor’s overriding priority. He has stop himself from saying this, not just because it would be an outright lie, but also because it would commit Transport for London to making changes – changes that would affect the flow of motor vehicles.

It is ‘smoothing traffic flow’ that is at the heart of the Mayor’s transport policy, not the safety of people using the road network, which is subordinate to pumping motor vehicles through junctions. If safety was the priority, Bow roundabout would have pedestrian signals, and it wouldn’t be a deathtrap for cyclists either. As it is, the safety and convenience of pedestrians and cyclists has been sacrificed or ignored, as it has been across London, where Ranger’s much vaunted Superhighways disappear just where they are most needed, at junctions.

This is the junction of Millbank and Vauxhall Bridge Road. I do not have a more recent photograph, but the cycle lane and ASL here has simply been repainted blue – it is part of Superhighway 8. Now, a genuinely safe design here would involve taking one of those four lanes away from motor vehicles, but that would, of course, increase the amount of ‘stacking’ of those vehicles at this junction, and interfere with ‘smoothing traffic flow’.

So the real priorities of the Mayor of London, and Transport for London, are transparently obvious from photographs like these, which you can take at countless junctions across London. The safety of cyclists is subordinate to the number of motor vehicles that can be pushed through a junction during a green signal. The reason why cyclists are being killed by left-turning lorries at locations like this is because the cycling facilities – many of them Superhighways – are utterly compromised, and utterly superficial.

All Ranger can do is say that the Mayor and TfL will put ‘safety at the heart of cycling’, which is meaningless.

Please pick apart the rest of his waffle in the comments.

UPDATE – Correction. The Superhighway at the location shown above – Millbank – actually disappears, as you can see in this picture from Cyclists in The City.

The entire left turn lane has been painted blue after this photograph was taken, but it is simply a vehicle lane. This is safer than the ludicrously narrow cycle lane that previously existed here, but still serves to illustrate how provision for cyclists is compromised, given that the paint suggests they scoot up the inside of vehicles in a left-turning vehicle lane, in order to go straight across the junction.

The Tour Du Danger

Some thoughts on Saturday’s Dangerous Junctions Tour – or, as it has come to be known, the ‘Tour du Danger.’ The original purpose of the ride, as stated by one of its organisers, Danny of Cyclists In the City –

I have decided a ride around London’s top 10 killer junctions is in order. I am asking as many people as possible to join me. It is an informal ride, to take in these horrific junctions we all have to cycle through every day and to stop and take photographs and film just how awful they are. I don’t really fancy taking on the might of Transport for London’s killer road designs all on my own. So I am asking for people to join me. I hope perhaps 40-50 people will turn up.

was rather subverted by the huge numbers of people who took part, but in the best possible way. The actual ride itself was – barring a handful of ignorant or impatient drivers – very relaxed indeed, and not the least bit dangerous (although I did observe one bike-on-bike crash from which both parties seemed to escape unhurt), thanks to the size of the ride, and the excellent marshalling. A big ‘thank you’ is due to everyone who turned up, and especially these marshals (who had a very stressful job) and the organisers, the aforementioned Danny, and Mark of ibikelondon. No doubt another ride is in order – perhaps just a handful of brave souls – to really document how dangerous and unpleasant these junctions are for cyclists, and indeed pedestrians.

All in all though, the ride was a great success, and certainly seems to have hit the news agenda, coinciding as it did with the tragic and unnecessary second death at Bow roundabout. A board member of Transport for London, Steve Norris – a Conservative politician who thankfully has that rare quality of not being afraid to speak his mind – has now apparently broken ranks with the official line from Boris and TfL, and is openly stating that these junctions are not safe enough for cyclists. This is very different from Boris’s opinion – expressed the very same week – that these junctions are fine, ‘as long as you keep your wits about you’. If Transport for London’s bullheaded strategy of ‘smoothing traffic flow’ through junctions at the expense of the safety and convenience of existing (and, crucially, potential) pedestrians and cyclists can be represented by one gigantic oil tanker at full speed, I can only hope that this represents the first small step in an attempt to slow it.

Here are some photographs from Saturday’s ride.

Getting ready for the off.

A huge number of cyclists on Kennington Park Road as we head towards Elephant & Castle, as it dawns on me just how many people are on this ride.

Legally parked lorry, in the ‘superhighway’.

Fatal collision, Kennington Park Road.

Onto the Elephant & Castle gyratory.

Coming off the roundabout, onto London Road. In the very distance, just in front of the cream building, I can see cyclists at the front of the ride making a right turn onto Blackfriars Road.

Stopping to boo TfL, outside their headquarters, Blackfriars Road.

Good natured curiosity from passers by as we head from Waterloo towards Lambeth.

Congestion.

Cyclists as far as the eye can see, Lambeth Palace Road.

Towards Vauxhall Cross.

On the gyratory.

From Vauxhall Bridge, onto Millbank. Behind us, a driver impotently held his horn down for about 30 seconds, in apparent rage at being held up for no more than a minute on a Saturday morning. One of the few poorly behaved motorists on the day.

Up Constitution Hill. Here another angry man in a taxi decided to try to overtake us all, while ranting about road tax and insurance. I ignored him.

Christiana bike on Hyde Park Corner. Not a mode of transport usually seen here.

Back down the hill after stopping briefly in Hyde Park. (A cacophony of horns – the last I was aware of – greeted our reemergence onto the roundabout.)

Keep your wits about you. Thanks, Boris.

Some chaps sitting outside this pub decided to offer us their beer.

A friendly wave from this mother and her child, cycling on the pavement on Farringdon Road.

More good-natured curiosity.

Downhill to the final junction on our tour, the intersection of Farringdon and Clerkenwell Roads.

Finally, a small reminder of why these junctions are so bad not just for cyclists, but also for pedestrians. I stopped at the north-western corner of Parliament Square to film the procession of cyclists through the gryatory, and accidentally left the camera on the front of my bike running. You can see the result in the video below.

Notice how pedestrians have to wait to cross here. This isn’t actually because of the ride itself (although in other locations we did, unfortunately, have to stop pedestrians from crossing the road when they would otherwise have been able to do so). It’s because there is no pedestrian crossing phase throughout the entirety of the clip. 300+ cyclists are able to move through this crossing without pedestrians getting a green man signal. A sure sign of how the signal timings are utterly biased against pedestrians at this busy location.

(See also reports from Cyclists In The City, At War With The Motorist, and ibikelondon.)

Time to get angry

I can’t think of a better illustration of the CTC’s preoccupation with appearance over substance than the comments from Chris Peck, their policy co-ordinator, that appear in this Guardian article about ghost bikes.

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.”

As far as I can tell, this is the only comment the CTC have made on the story of the death of Min Joo Lee, and on the wider issue of safer junctions in London more generally.

To me, it is quite extraordinary that the CTC’s principal concern here seems to be the message that ghost bikes send out. Evidently it might suggest to people that cycling in London is a hazardous thing to do, when in reality – if we look at the statistics – it would actually extend your life by two years. Even when cycling in heavy traffic! So – hey – put those ghost bikes away, fix your rictus-grin-I’m-really-loving-cycling-amongst-HGVs-oh-yes-really-because-I’m-healthier smile on your face, and enjoy it. Because the last thing we want to do is to send out the tiniest signal that cycling in London is really just a teensy bit dangerous or unpleasant. Someone has died, but let’s ignore that, because cycling will, on balance, extend your life.

This is a strategy that is doomed to failure. No-one is going to be convinced to cycle in London if we hide away the deaths, and the casualty figures. The CTC need to face up to the fact that cycling is seen as dangerous, highly dangerous, not just by the vast majority of people who don’t cycle in London, but even by those that do – with or without the absence of ghost bikes, or ‘danger rides.’ When I told two of my friends – both of whom cycle in London – that I would be cycling around London’s ten most dangerous junctions this Saturday, their immediate response was

Why would you want to do that?!?

These are places in London that cyclists – current cyclists – are desperate to avoid, at all costs. And of course the danger isn’t limited to just the ten junctions we will be visiting tomorrow. I’m sick and tired of the tendency, exhibited by Boris Johnson this week, to just pretend that these places are fine to cycle in. Even if – statistically – I know that my death is very unlikely, at the very minimum they are horribly unpleasant, not least because I continually have to keep my wits about me. It might be good advice to cycle around London assuming that every driver is going to kill you – Boris actually volunteered this nugget of wisdom in that same GLA session! – but, really, should it have to be like this?

Enough sunny optimism – it’s time to get angry. I hope you can join me and more than a hundred others for our ride tomorrow, starting at 10:30 am from St Mark’s Church, Oval. Full details are here and here.

Assenizing a street in Horsham

New Street is possibly one of the narrowest streets in Horsham. At the location shown in the picture below, the carriageway is 5 metres wide, with pavements of 2 metres and 1.5 metres wide, giving a total width of 8.5 metres.

At the northern end, it is about a metre wider – 9.5 metres – each pavement being 50cm wider. Unfortunately it is now, despite its width, something of a rat run. You can see in the map below that it forms an attractive shortcut for people travelling north to south in the town – or vice versa (New Street is the long straight road in the centre of the map).

The particular route I have marked is one I often encounter drivers using after picking up their children at St Mary’s school (point A), heading back to their homes in the north of Horsham. Instead of using the trunk roads of Park Way and North Street (the orange and yellow roads), which involve traffic lights, they have looked at a map and seen that the most direct route is along New Street, and several other residential streets, further east.

This kind of rat-running is totally inappropriate, given that the drivers are avoiding what I would call the ‘car-specific’ roads, designed to accommodate these kinds of journeys by car, and instead are forcing themselves through a narrow residential street. It’s all the more absurd given that this shortcut is, in reality, not at all quicker, because despite the absence of traffic lights, it involves several junctions, and the narrowness of New Street, allied to all the cars parked on it, means that it becomes clogged very easily by more than two drivers travelling in opposite directions. In practice this means that the frustrated drivers attempt to ‘make up time’ on the sections of their journey where they are not being held up by other cars, driving at inappropriate speeds on the more open sections of New Street, and the other residential roads.

Streets like New Street should be enjoyable to cycle on – it should be a quiet, residential street, with little motor traffic. In reality it is rather unpleasant to use on a bike, because of the inappropriate speed used by motorists in sections of it, as mentioned above, and also because some drivers think it is acceptable to drive towards you on a narrowed section like in the photograph that starts this post. I have often had to take to the pavement on this street, purely to avoid being squashed. I am also held up quite frequently as cars travelling in opposite directions negotiate their way through the parked cars on both sides of the street. New Street was actually the location for my Bikeability Level 2 lesson, and involved much ‘taking the lane’ and assertive cycling for my beginner companions; it really brought home to me how needlessly difficult it is to cycle on this kind of street.

So what is needed?

A Dutch solution. Here is Oosterhoutstraat in Assen.

It is a residential street, of approximately similar width to New Street. It is slightly wider, at around 10 metres in total width, while the pavements are slightly narrower than those on New Street, about 1.5 metres. It is also very close to a station – Assen central station. It could form a useful shortcut across the city for drivers, travelling from the west, to the southeastern suburbs. But as you can see in the map below, it is not possible (or, more precisely, practical) to use Oosterhoutstraat as a route. In this first attempt, we are sent far to the south of Oosterhoutstraat (and the surrounding suburbs) –

Or, in this second attempt, we are sent on a different journey, to the north –

It simply isn’t practical to rat-run through Oosterhoutstraat.

Why is this? It’s partly through a combination of one-way streets in the surrounding residential area, that make it rather difficult to make direct journeys through this suburb. But mainly, it is through the closure of the eastern end of the road that would have emerged near point B on the map, Burgemeester Jollesstraat.

Here’s what this junction looks like, as the road emerges onto the busy Overcingellaan –

Presumably at some point in the past, this was a ‘normal’ road junction, but it is now accessible only by bike or by foot. The result is that the entire neighbourhood of Oosterhoutstraat is pleasant and quiet.

As it happens, it is still possible to use the street immediately to the south of Oosterhoutstraat – Bosstraat – as a rat-running route –

But you would have to be pretty stupid to choose this as a route over the more southerly Port Natalweg, because Bosstraat looks like this –

And Port Natalweg looks like this –

A much wider and clearer road (although notice that the surface is composed of rough blocks to discourage fast driving).

Interestingly, we can see on Streetview that the layout on Bosstraat – designed to discourage it from being used as a through-route – is quite recent –

As the Streetview car came past, the street was being redesigned to make it more difficult to drive through. It looks like the speed hump you can see in the picture of the finished Bosstraat is being added in the photograph above. Presumably drivers needed a little extra discouragement, to push them onto Port Natalweg.

The net effect of all these measures is to make this residential neighbourhood particularly quiet. We were on Oosterhoutstraat, and the surrounding streets, for around half an hour, and in that time I think we encountered no more than a handful of cars. This is because it is deeply impermeable to motor vehicle journeys – but, crucially, highly permeable by bike or by foot. Not only is there the direct access through the end of Burgemeester Jollestraat, but all the one-way streets in the neighbourhood are two-way for bicycles.

No entry, except (uitgezonderd) cycles. And the vehicles that are driving through here will travel slowly, because of the rough surface, speed humps, and tight radius corners, protected by bollards.

It would be very easy to apply precisely these solutions to New Street, to turn it from an unpleasant rat run, into a quiet street which is safe for pedestrians and bicycles. Most simply (and most cheaply), the northern end of the street, at the junction with Oakhill Road, could simply be closed to motor traffic, in precisely the same way that Burgemeester Jollestraat has been closed at its eastern end. This sounds extreme, but if we look again at the map of Horsham, this is not really going to present much difficulty to drivers, because there is an alternative route adjacent to New Street, only a hundred metres or so to the east –

This is Clarence Road, which is actually designated as a B-road.

As you can see, this road is much wider than New Street, and is far more appropriate as a through-road. Yet, absurdly, it is far quieter – principally because it is less direct than New Street for those who are choosing to rat-run. Drivers need to be forced to use this street instead. Certainly doing so would discourage the kind of journey I highlighted in the first map in the post, because drivers would have to travel further east, and then back west, to cut through this residential area.

Needless to say, even if New Street is closed at one end, we could still apply the traffic calming solutions – such as rougher surfaces, speed humps, tight corners, and so on – to both these streets. The parking could also be moved on to just one side of New Street, as it is on Oosterhoutstraat, providing clearer sight lines. We could also introduce the street planting seen on the Dutch streets, giving a far more pleasant street environment.

In an ideal world, both these streets would be made difficult to use as through-routes – perhaps by introducing one-way restrictions on Clarence Road, that would send drivers on a circuitous route around New Street – up and down Oxford and Cambridge Road, for instance. But Clarence Road, for the present, has to be maintained as through-route because of a low bridge limit in the centre of town (the railway bridge on the A281 you can see towards the bottom of the map above) – some taller HGVs currently have to use Clarence Road to travel from the east of Horsham to the north. It would be impractical to force these lorries on diversions around tight residential streets.

How easy would it be to sell this kind of street conversion to the residents of New Street? Maybe I’m of an optimistic bent, but I think it would be entirely possible. Granted, the residents would not be able to drive directly northwards out of their road any more (or directly into it from the north) and would have to divert around Clarence Road. But the trade-off for this minor inconvenience would be a far more quiet street, where their children could play in the road, and where they could cycle without encountering numerous cars. Doubtless their property values would also increase substantially, so we would have the Daily Mail readers on board too.

Chris Juden wrote on a recent At War With The Motorist post

I don’t expect many rat-runs to be closed so long as such decisions are made by the rats.

Well, that’s obviously quite true, but the people who live on these streets, although they might rat-run elsewhere, are hardly going to be keen on rat-running on their own streets. If we can get the local residents on board, that’s a first step towards a consistent application of these principles across our towns and cities.

Stupid letter of the week

From The Resident, November 4th –

Barbara Duggan writes –

With reference to the campaign to stop speeding traffic in Southwater, why should the responsibility always be put on the motorist to slow down below the official speed limit?

How true. What a crazy, mixed-up world we live in, when motorists have to be expected to obey speed limits, or even travel below them.

The war on the motorist continues!

 

What planet is Andrea Leadsom living on?

Andrea Leadsom is the Conservative MP for South Northamptonshire, who earlier this year proposed a Dangerous and Reckless Cycling Bill. You can read a more lengthy justification for this bill she has written here, along with some excellent legal background here, which I strongly recommend reading.

She appeared today on BBC Radio 4’s Law In Action, making much the same points she has made earlier about the apparent discrepancy in law, and about the lack of number plates for cyclists. I won’t comment on the legal aspects of her argument – the piece from Cycle Rules I link to above rather demolishes the foundation of her case – but my ears pricked up towards the end of her interview, when she made this curious statement –

I do think there is a cultural acceptance that cyclists just do what they do, whereas people are far more aggressive towards motorists who commit offences, and I think there’s a bit of a cultural tolerance, actually, towards cyclists jumping across zebra crossings as you’re walking across it as a pedestrian, and there isn’t any accountability – they don’t have a number plate and there isn’t any comeback.

This is laughable stuff.

The notion that cyclists get a ‘free pass’ from the general public when it comes to committing offences – that there is ‘cultural acceptance’ of cyclists’ poor behaviour, or ‘tolerance’ of cyclists cutting through pedestrian crossings while people are attempting to cross – while motorists are regarded with much greater hostility, or indeed aggressiveness, is utterly absurd. Be it in Oxford, Cambridge, Shrewsbury, London, Reading, Bath, Chester,  towns and cities up and down the UK are awash with ‘zero tolerance’ policies towards pavement cycling – a direct reflection of the antipathy towards this kind of activity amongst the general public. Indeed, a search for ‘pavement cycling’ on Google merits 680,000 results, while ‘speeding motorists’ somehow yields only 571,000 results.

This is not immediately suggestive of cyclists ‘getting a free pass’ – quite the opposite.

Even the most minor infractions by cyclists are treated with an almost visceral hostility by some members of the general public, and not just the usual mouth-breathing suspects. As I trundled away from the supermarket yesterday at less than walking speed, I was angrily accosted by a man who pointed out that there’s ‘supposed to be no cycling here!’ Which was indeed true – I was breaking the rules – but for only a matter of few yards as I returned to the road across a wide pedestrian concourse, and at a speed which posed no danger to absolutely anyone. Meanwhile, the stupid and far more dangerous driving of a type I encountered barely a minute later – a driver pulled out of a parking bay without bothering to check whether a person on a bicycle might be alongside him – goes utterly unchallenged.

The attitude of the man who confronted me is symptomatic of a reflexive tendency amongst the British public to leap irrationally upon ‘misdeeds’ by cyclists, while the wider, and far more serious and prevalent, problem of speeding and reckless driving gets ignored – it’s just background. As I wrote recently, a piece in my local paper entitled ‘Road Peril’ focused entirely on the danger posed by ‘reckless cyclists’, and addressed none of the safety issues posed by reckless driving – an extraordinary oversight, given that I know of no injuries caused to anyone by cyclists in the Horsham district, and in the few weeks subsequent to publication, five cyclists were struck by motorists, three quite deliberately.

As Freewheeler memorably put it,

cyclists still seem to be among the folk devils of modern Britain.

Typically pithy, but I don’t think he is far wrong. I can’t think of many subjects more guaranteed to bring out a stream of ill-informed invective on discussion boards than cyclists. Below stories reporting the deaths or injuries of entirely innocent people who happened to be riding bikes, we find comments like

Cyclists will not learn! Nothing has changed since I lived in London! Going through red lights, squeezing through narrowing gaps! Worst of all squeezing down the LEFT side of large lorries!

Or

It is now norm that every time I cross the road when lights are red I have a cyclist going through lights and narrowly avoiding those crossing the road. And when one narrowly missed a woman with a pram yesterday morning the cyclist had the audacity to then threaten a passer by who had dared question his actions.

Or

Is it only I who see cyclists jumping red lights every day and expecting motorists to avoid them, not to mention pedestrians trying to cross the road whilst cars wait for them. None of these failings are ever mentioned after an accident. And the filthy language if anyone says anything !!

And so on, beneath any story mentioning a cyclist you care to mention. Comments which bear no relation to the story at all, but are merely an unloading of personal grievance against a despised out-group. No-one sees fit to leave comments about the poor behaviour of drivers below news stories about the death of a motorist, or an assault on a motorist, yet the word ‘cyclist’ in an article about an assault or death appears to trigger an idiotic Pavlovian reflex, a need to unburden a seemingly endless repository of stored-up memories of cyclists nearly killing babies or punching grannies.

Indeed, the notion that cyclists are getting a ‘free pass’ is rather contradicted by evidence Mrs Leadsom herself presents on the very same Radio 4 programme, only minutes before making her suggestion that offences by cyclists are subject to ‘cultural acceptance’. She says

Since my ten minute rule bill, I’ve received literally hundreds of emails letters from people across the country – and outside this country – complaining about accidents caused by cyclists on pavements to children, to elderly people, and so on. So it clearly is an issue.

This is a remarkable figure, given that only around 200-300 pedestrians are injured in collisions with cyclists per year, both on and off the pavement, and at a best guess (I do not have the breakdown for the number of these collisions that occurred on the pavement, except for 2001, when only 64 pedestrians were injured in collisions with cyclists on the pavement) at the very most a hundred of these injuries to pedestrians, per year – slight or severe – occurred on the pavement.

The amount of correspondence Mrs Leadsom has received, in other words, is suggestive of offences carried out by cyclists being taken very seriously indeed by the general public – quite the opposite of the ‘cultural acceptance’ she claims earlier in the interview.

Mrs Leadsom apparently believes that offences by motorists are treated most aggressively and severely by the general public, while infractions by cyclists are broadly tolerated.

What planet is she living on?

Friday Facility no.6 – Comptons Lane, Horsham

Was this a challenge to fit the maximum number of give way lines into the smallest possible space, or a genuine attempt to construct something useful?

Either way, it’s a winningly pointless facility.

It does allow you to move from the quiet, concrete access road on the left, to the main road on the right, about two metres earlier.

Small details

Mark Wagenbuur has published a piece today about Maastricht, with an accompanying video showing a typical journey by bicycle in the city. In response, Paul James observed on twitter that

Never realised until Mark’s video of Maastricht – Dutch drains are set into the curbs so they are not a danger to bikes

This is something I hadn’t noticed either, despite having cycled over a hundred miles in the Netherlands this year. It’s not a big detail, but it makes on-road cycle lanes just that little bit more pleasant. In the picture below, you can see how the drain – instead of being a hazardous grate directly in the cycle lane – is set into the curb to the left, and is completely inconspicuous.

Notice also where the potentially slippery manhole cover is positioned.

Outside of the cycle lane.

And again, in the centre of Assen –

The manhole covers have, very carefully, been put out of harm’s way.

A final example I found, looking back through my photos of Utrecht –

The manhole is in the centre of the ‘car’ lane, leaving the cycle lanes free of potential hazards.

On-road cycle lanes aren’t quite as pleasant as cycle paths, but it’s nice to know how much effort is being taken to make them as good as they can be.

                                                                                                                                                              

UPDATE – and here are some examples of perfectly-positioned drains in British on-road cycle lanes, all in Horsham –

Spot the difference.

The death of the zebra crossing?

The Daily Mail reports –

The zebra crossing is facing extinction just as it prepares to celebrate its 60th anniversary in Britain, experts have revealed. The iconic crossing is being phased out and replaced with more sophisticated substitutes after a rise in deaths in the last four years. Ironically, the crossings were first introduced in Britain to tackle mounting road deaths in the late 1940s and early 1950s. But it seems the effectiveness of the crossing today could be in decline as it emerged many drivers fail to stop for pedestrians walking over the black and white painted pathway.

… during the last five years more than 1,000 zebra crossings have vanished and many others have been replaced by fewer more sophisticated alternatives with lights and flashing signs. Low fines and the reluctance of motorists to stop have also seen deaths on zebra crossings double in the last four years. Andrew Hammond, head of road safety at the AA, said: ‘Zebra crossings are looked on as inferior to other pedestrian crossings as there is no red light telling cars to stop. ‘In towns and villages there is a pressure from residents for councils to fit pelican crossings as they believe they are safer, so zebras are being phased out. I suspect zebra crossings will continue to have a role in some busy town centres where they can be effective at helping people cross without constantly stopping the traffic. But in villages and towns I think they will eventually become extinct.’

Mr Hammond said the solution is having more crossing points for pedestrians, even if they are not fully-fledged zebras or pelicans. Zebra-crossings could be down-graded so they indicate a good place for pedestrians to cross and motorists know to watch out for them, but are not legally obliged to stop,’ he said.

The first thing to observe is the entirely car-centric perspective of the AA’s ‘road safety’ representative, Andrew Hammond. For him, zebra crossings are considered useful only in locations where they can help people cross ‘without constantly stopping the traffic.’ The type of crossing, in other words, is entirely dependent upon the impact on motor vehicle flow, which should naturally come first, even in towns. The idea that pedestrians should be able to cross roads in towns and villages when they want to (which is the key advantage of zebra crossings) – even if that might mean stopping the traffic, momentarily – is apparently anathema to the AA.

Likewise, for Mr Hammond, a better ‘solution’ for allowing people to cross is to replace the zebra crossing with a down-graded version, at which motorists merely have to ‘watch out’ for pedestrians, while not being ‘legally obliged to stop.’ Of course, what this actually means are that zebra crossings are being ‘downgraded’ to the status of ‘a road’ – although the ‘motorists watching out’ part of this equation is increasingly denuded.

The evidence that zebra crossings do actually ‘stop the traffic’ (beyond the trivial sense of stopping it while pedestrians are crossing) is not provided. I’m not at all sure how or why the presence of these crossings increases overall motor vehicle journey times – in my experience, they merely delay the time at which a motor vehicle arrives at the tail end of the next queue in a town or city. Slow journey times in built-up areas are entirely a function of other vehicles, not pedestrian crossings of any kind.

In any case, the motive behind the removal of these crossings is allegedly ‘safety’; they are, it seems, inferior to other crossing systems (which almost entirely involve pedestrian delay) because, in Mr Hammond’s words, ‘there is no red light telling cars to stop.’ Apparently motorists are increasingly having a hard time working out how to stop their vehicles without the presence of a light signal telling them to do so. This is rather interesting, given that there is no red light telling cars to stop at ‘give way’ junctions, yet they usually manage to stop there. The meaning of the dashed lines at junctions is well understood. Likewise, all drivers know they have to yield to pedestrians crossing on a zebra. They just know they can escape punishment for not doing so. In other words – despite the logic of the man from the AA – this is a problem of enforcement, not of a lack of a red light.

Despite the already rapidly dwindling number of zebra crossings in the UK, they (or their equivalent) are rather prevalent on the continent; indeed, they are in rude health. Here are some examples –

Directly outside the main entrance of Gare Cornavin, Geneva’s central station. An enormous crossing, on which pedestrians have priority.

Place du Neuve, Geneva. A large, rather busy square, across which there is a long zebra crossing. Not sure if it is legal to cycle across it, but cars were happy to yield to this family.

Intersection of Rue du Mont Blanc and Rue de Berne, Geneva. Zebra crossings where people want to cross. (To the left, Rue du Mont Blanc has been completely pedestrianised, although I am not sure how recently).

Other examples of the Geneva streetscape –

More photos can be found in my post here.

Paris also has rather a large number of zebra crossings –

My picture here gives the misleading impression that this is a quiet road, but this is actually the Quai des Grands Augustin, the racetrack running along the south side of the Seine. A zebra crossing here too.

More zebra crossings – again, these are rather typical in plenty of Parisian districts. More photos of Paris, and its zebra crossings, can be found here.

And in a typical Swiss town, plenty of zebra crossings too, precisely where pedestrians want them.

Rather hard to see, but there are in fact three pedestrian crossings here, within the space of a hundred metres. This is the main road into Nyon from the north, where it goes under the railway station. Because pedestrians will be walking to the station at these points, they have been provided for.

Other spots in Nyon town centre –

And directly outside the front entrance of Nyon train station, we again see a zebra crossing, meaning that passengers arriving by train can walk directly across the road, without delay, into the town.

Now to compare with my town, Horsham. At what is quite possibly one of the busiset locations for pedestrians in the entire town – the eastern end of the pedestrianised West Street – there is no zebra crossing. Pedestrians – despite vastly outnumbering the motor vehicles passing through – have to defer, as shown in the photos below.

Not good enough.

In fact, there is only one zebra crossing in the entire town; I strongly suspect it was only put in because it provides direct access from the town centre to a Sainsbury’s supermarket built on a school playing field in the 1990s. There was no pedestrian crossing prior to this development.

You can see it in use in Google Streetview.

 The Streetview car approaches! We can see a lady in blue jeans about to step onto the crossing, on the right. This road has a 20 mph limit.

It doesn’t like Google is going to stop though – and the lady thinks better of stepping onto the crossing in front of a vehicle on important business.

Wait there, lady!

As we look back after moving on, we can see that the car behind us grasps the concept of the zebra crossing.

Perhaps the Google Streetview driver was confused by the absence of a red light.

Streets safe for children

Sustrans have launched a new strategy, Free Range Kids. They write

As the clocks go back and children make their winter journeys to and from school in darker conditions, the need for safer roads is more urgent. Miranda Krestovnikoff, Ambassador for Sustrans’ Free Range Kids Campaign, says; ‘Britain’s approach to road safety is deeply flawed. Dressing our children in high-visibility clothes from head to toe does not tackle the source of the danger. What we need is to reduce traffic speeds in residential and urban areas to 20mph, and invest far more in creating safe walking and cycling routes, to school and beyond. If we don’t then our children will be denied the freedom we so enjoyed when we were kids, and miss out on so much that makes childhood special.’

Sustrans – and their ambassador Miranda Krestovnikoff – have it absolutely right. We should address the source of the danger on our streets, and not apply sticking-plaster solutions to the people who are exposed to that danger. Simply mitigating against inattentive driving is an incredibly short-sighted way of going about achieving ‘safety’, especially when you consider the consequences for the well-being of children –

Keeping children from walking and cycling is having a detrimental effect on their health and wellbeing. Thirty years ago 80 per cent of seven to eight year olds walked or cycled to school on their own. That figure has since been reversed, with 80 per cent of children of a similar age accompanied by an adult – increasingly in a car. As a result, children are less independent and less physically active.

Here are some children I spotted being escorted home from school in Brighton, a couple of weeks ago –

I think it’s desperately sad that, increasingly, British children can no longer be thought to be safe walking about on our streets without being plastered in reflective hi-visibility garments.

We need to make our streets safe for children.