The death of Brian Dorling

On the morning of Monday 24th October, during the rush hour, a cyclist was killed by an HGV on the north side of the Bow roundabout. From the photograph on the London Cycling Campaign website here, the cyclist was hit at or about the traffic lights on the roundabout, at the end of the sliproad. At this spot here, in other words –

A ‘cycle lane’ described, in early September, as ‘appallingly dangerous’ by Diamond Geezer, who also provides the photograph.

On the 5th August, the BBC also visited this site to make a film, pointing out that the ‘Cycle Superhighway’ ends on the roundabout. They were told by local cycling campaigner Arnold Ridout that this was a ‘very dangerous spot’.

The Telegraph writer Jacquelin Magnay also wrote about the danger posed by this roundabout for cyclists, on September 5th.

I took the CS2 route from Aldgate, which took me fairly direct down Whitechapel High Street, Whitechapel Road, Mile End Road and Bow Road. It is dotted with traffic lights, I lost count after a while, but the widened lanes and clear directions made the route appear straightforward and feel relatively safe.

That is until I came to the Bow Road interchange. There is a large flyover above the Blackwall tunnel. Do I go over the flyover where the cars zoom past at accelerated speeds, or negotiate the traffic lights at the bottom of the hill? I took the safer, longer option but bizarrely the bike lane simply vanished. Visitors might be excused to think they took the wrong turn. Where to from here?

It now transpires that the killed cyclist, Brian Dorling (who was taking the same route as Ms Magnay), was a senior cost consultant for the Olympic site, and was presumably on his way to work there.

Appallingly, he was using the route to the Olympics recommended by Leon Daniels, Managing Director of Surface Transport at Transport for London, who wrote, back in August

One of my correspondents stated recently that there is no provision for cyclists at the Olympic Games. This is not true! Here is the real situaion!

Before going on to detail the eastbound route –

Heading north-east along Cycle Super Highway 2 up to the Bow roundabout. Dismounting here and using the access ramp onto the floating towpath in the north-west corner of the roundabout heading back under the flyover/roundabout using the new floating towpath.  Heading south on the Lea Navigation towpath to the road bridge into Three Mills.  Following the same route as outlined above to reach the cycle parking on the southern spectator transport mall.

The floating towpath is actually on the opposite side of the roundabout, which has to be crossed, either on foot, or by bicycle. You can see this arrangement in the official London 2012 ‘Getting to the Games’ map, of which the relevant detail is shown below –

Bow roundabout lies in the centre of this section of the map, at the intersection of the A11 and the Northern Approach. The green dashed line shows the ‘cycling route’ recommended by Mr Daniels, which involves crossing the roundabout and then using the new floating towpath to head south east (paradoxically, away from the Olympic site, but I would expect nothing more from a London cycle route).

Perhaps Mr Dorling could have dismounted on the west side of Bow roundabout and crossed on foot, but that would hardly have improved his safety because there are no pedestrian crossings at the roundabout, and according to Boris Johnson, there won’t be any time soon –

TfL has spent substantial effort looking at options for pedestrians crossings in this location and modelling various possible solutions. TfL have been unable so far to find an immediate solution for providing controlled at-grade pedestrian crossings at Bow Roundabout that does not push the junction over capacity and introduce significant delays to traffic. The feasibility of providing pedestrian crossings at the roundabout will continue to be investigated for the future. In the shorter term, TfL is providing on-highway facilities for cyclists at the roundabout, as part of Barclays Cycle Superhighway Route 2, and proposing to improve the urban realm in partnership with LB Tower Hamlets.

This makes my blood boil.

Last night the LCC published an open letter to Boris Johnson from a family friend of Brian Dorling. It is worth reading in full, but I quote the most pertinent passage here –

It seems frankly appalling that cyclists are actively encouraged to follow a corporate-sponsored cycle route that leaves them at a junction already and widely known as an accident waiting to happen. There is a ghastly irony that while London is promoting cycle access to the Olympic Park, Brian – himself a keen amateur sportsman – should die cycling on his way to work as a surveyor on this very project.

‘Ghastly’ just about covers it.

Enough.

What should ‘Going Dutch’ mean?

Matthew Wright’s article in the Guardian yesterday was entitled

There’s more to ‘going Dutch’ than having a separate cycling lane

To which the obvious, superficial, response is ‘no shit Sherlock’, and the longer, more detailed response would be as follows.

Of course the Dutch do not provide separated paths on all their roads. On most residential streets, there simply isn’t any need, because the traffic volume and speed is sufficiently low for people on bicycles to feel subjectively safe alongside cars.

Beilerstraat in Assen. No cycle path here. This used to be a rather busy road, but careful planning has made it a rather stupid way to access the city centre by motor vehicle – so motor traffic volume (as you can see) is now very low indeed. Coupled with a restrictive speed limit, no centre line, and a rough surface, it feels perfectly safe to cycle here, two or even three abreast, despite the absence of a cycle path.

Oosterhaufstraat, Assen. Again, no cycle path. Obviously. This residential area is impossible to rat-run through, by means of a combination of road closures and one-way streets. Consequently, the only people using these streets in cars will be those who live on them. Speed humps, tight radii corners and a rough surface all serve to keep speeds low.

Noordersingel, Assen. No cycle path here either. This is a street that features in David Hembrow’s recent post, Transformation of a city street. You can read there how this once-busy road through the centre of town is now rather quiet. Cyclists have been ‘segregated’ from motor traffic here, not by cycle paths, but by deliberately making the roads difficult to use by car.

Vredeveldseweg, Assen. No cycle path. Safety is provided by similar methods to Beilerstraat. This road is a direct route into the railway station from the east of the city – but for bikes, not cars.

Vaart Noordzijde, Assen. A road shared with cars, but one that leads only to dwellings on this side of the canal (except if you are on a bike, where it provides a direct route to outer suburbs). Consequently, only residents will be driving here. Notice also the design of this ‘bicycle road’, designed to make it appear as if you are driving on cycle lanes.

I could go on. It is quite obvious that the Dutch do not segregate (in the obvious sense of providing cycle paths) on every road. So it is quite true, as Matthew Wright argues, that there is more to ‘Going Dutch’ than the provision of separated cycle lanes.

But while acknowledging this, it is almost impossible to overstate the importance of direct segregation on main routes; those roads where it is not feasible to constrain or remove motor traffic. This is an integral part of the Dutch approach. The Dutch make it safe to cycle on these roads, by separating you from higher traffic volumes. Allowing people to cycle in safety on these roads is very important, because ‘main routes’ are main routes for a reason – they are usually the most obvious and direct ways to get to and from important destinations. Places that cyclists will quite obviously want to go. So, from a Dutch perspective, not providing cycle paths on these routes would be a grotesque failure to accommodate the needs of cyclists.

If you read the London Cycling Campaign’s brief summary of their ‘Go Dutch’ strategy (which Matthew Wright links to in his article) you will see that they have got this exactly right. The headline explicitly refers to these ‘main routes’.

Londoners deserve real freedom of choice. We should be able to chose to cycle wherever we live, whatever the route, and whatever the destination. But years of car-centric planning has squeezed cyclists off major routes across and between boroughs. Unsurprisingly too many people are scared to get on their bikes to use these roads due to the high volumes and speeds of motor traffic – or else they simply put up with long, circuitous and inconvenient detours…

Ensuring that people feel happy riding along London’s major roads and routes is a key barometer for how cycle-friendly our city is. That’s why the ‘Go Dutch’ campaign option calls on all authorities to ensure there is clear space, Dutch style, for cycling along major roads in every London borough.

So the LCC are explicitly calling for cycle paths – but only on major routes. This is the Dutch approach. They are not calling for segregation everywhere.

Now it is true that this brief summary makes little or mention of the (Dutch) strategy the LCC would like to employ on London’s minor or residential roads, beyond stating that these new major routes will

require safe access to them from residential areas, promoting joined-up thinking across local areas.

which will undoubtedly encompass the kinds of solutions detailed in the photographs at the top of this post.

But this is a function of the overriding importance of making cycling safe on the most dangerous roads, the roads where cyclists are currently being killed, and the roads which are most off-putting to people who do not currently cycle. You also will not get the lower traffic volume on the quieter residential and back streets – the lower traffic volume essential for the Dutch strategies shown above – without making the bicycle a convincing alternative on the main roads.

I cannot stress this enough. This is something that David Arditti has recently written about in great detail, and convincingly so.

I think the new LCC campaign, Going Dutch,  has it right, which is why I have been supporting it. The start of a real cycling revolution in outer as well as inner London must be to create “clear space for cycling” (as this campaign words it) on main roads. The main roads are the routes people actually need to use to get to the places they need to get to. They are in general the most direct and useful routes and the roads which have space that could be be reallocated with least political pain and most obvious gain. Like the A5, Burnt Oak Broadway, at the north end of Stag Lane. Here, a huge width available between building lines means that, with a proper re-design of the whole width of the road, it could easily include Dutch-style, high-quality, protected cycle tracks, plus good pavements, plus two lanes of general traffic in both directions, plus some parking for the shops. If it was all designed correctly, on Dutch principles, neither the parking nor the bus stops would interfere with the cycle tracks, which would have signalised priority at junctions.

David goes on to write that

This is the kind of thing the Dutch and Danes did at first. They put in the really useful cycle facilities in the places people really needed them on the main roads. They established the primary cycling network. That is the thing that really gets cycling up at first, and establishes in people’s minds the viability of the cycling option, with quality, high-profile provision.

I can’t put it better than that.

Needless to say, you will find, on the LCC website, and in the current edition of their magazine, plenty of detail about what they want to achieve on residential roads. For instance

Cycling on minor roads to and from main roads will be safe and convenient through the application of measures such as: a universal 20 mph speed limit where people live, learn, work, and shop; use of cycle lanes; universal two way flows for cyclists; and filtering cyclists and pedestrians smoothly through restricted access routes for motor traffic (whether right at the junction with main roads themselves or at key locations nearby).

But Matthew Wright obviously isn’t happy with the LCC strategy, otherwise I doubt he would have written his article. He thinks, quite plainly, that there is far too much emphasis on the ‘main routes’ aspect of the Dutch approach, and, in short, he wants a different kind of ‘Going Dutch’ campaign – one that emphasises speed limits, and strict liability.

[LCC] campaigns for a 20mph speed limit (widespread in the Netherlands), and the crucial issue of strict liability would make a more sensible centrepiece for Go Dutch.

And he concludes his article –

 the biggest barrier on the road to creating a widespread cycling culture in the UK is tackling speed limits and a pro-motorist legal bias.

Is it? Maybe. Maybe it isn’t. Wright does not back up this statement.

Now I’m not disputing that these are genuine problems, but I think the importance of ‘strict liability’ when it comes to building a mass cycling culture is vastly overstated. As Freewheeler has written, strict liability

is often misinterpreted as referring to criminal law, meaning that responsibility for a crash is attributed by default to the least vulnerable road user, i.e. in a collision between a car and a cyclist the car driver would automatically be held responsible. In fact in European law it has no such meaning. Rather, it refers to civil law and has no relevance to criminal law whatsoever. Its application largely relates to insurance and makes road users liable to compensate for any injuries arising from the use of their vehicle on the road, whether it is a car or a bicycle. Under Danish law a car driver who hit a cyclist would be held liable by the driver’s insurance company. However, if the driver was not charged with a criminal offence and the cyclist was held to be at fault the insurance company would seek to be reimbursed by the cyclist.

It is worth reading the piece in full, particularly the detail that Ontario in Canada has a version of strict liability, which has had no effect on cycling levels whatsoever, and also Norman Baker’s (correct) opinion that

driver behaviour change is more likely to be motivated by serious personal consequences, whether it be death or injury to themselves or others, or criminal punishments such as loss of their licence or imprisonment, than they are by any insurance issues.

The deeper problem is that Matthew Wright isn’t convinced by a strategy of building cycle paths at all. This is not immediately apparent from his article, but there are a number of clues. He talks about a culture of mutual respect between cyclists and drivers in the Netherlands as being a crucial part of the success of cycling –

Dutch perceptions of their system are as much about a culture of respect as they are about separate lanes

But this fails to acknowledge that the culture of respect is built upon the fact that (nearly) everybody is a cyclist. There is no such thing as ‘a cyclist’ in the Netherlands, no ‘them and us’; just someone choosing to use a bicycle instead of their car. Crucially, this mass-cycling culture has only been made possible through Dutch cycling policies, of which an integral part has been cycle paths on direct routes. The culture of respect flows from the subjective safety (cycle paths included) which allows everyone to cycle.

We further have an illuminating section, from Wright, on the safety of cycle paths –

The safety of having separate lanes has often been questioned. Though there are many variables, and conclusions are contested, most studies suggest that separate paths, if anything, make cycling more dangerous, because junctions – where most accidents occur – are more complicated.

‘Most studies’ being those cherry-picked by John Franklin. It is noteworthy that not one of the studies in the list linked to dates from later than 2001, and the only Dutch study referenced by Franklin dates from 1977. Given that the Netherlands is effectively a country-wide testbed for separated cycling facilities, this is an astonishing omission. Franklin’s own bias against cycle paths, and how it intrudes into his supposedly objective research, is increasingly well-documented.

Needless to say, there is plenty of evidence out there that cycle paths can and do improve the safety of cyclists – but for some reason Wright chose not to look for it. He also has a curious attitude towards the fact that Dutch cyclists are more safe than any other cyclists anywhere in the world, despite cycling on separated paths for a considerable portion of their journeys, which you can read in his response to an Amsterdamize post on this topic here (again, worth reading in full). Wright’s argument is that cycle paths are in effect a ‘placebo’ (a word he uses elsewhere) which despite being more unsafe to cycle on than the road itself, encourage more people to cycle, so creating the ‘safety in numbers’ effect, that apparently outweighs the safety disadvantage of using the paths in the first place.

separate lanes make people feel safer, which makes more of them cycle, which creates a virtuous circle with more drivers aware of cyclists’ needs, etc.

Even if  this is true, cycle path critics still have to acknowledge that cycle paths – in the end – make cyclists safer, as they have in the Netherlands. In other words, we should not forget that placebos work. Simply pointing out that – in isolation – paths can be more dangerous than the road neglects the overall, documented, improvement in safety, and cannot therefore be used an argument against them on these grounds.

We finally have the passage in Wright’s Guardian article that I take most issue with –

LCC’s emphasis on “London’s main roads” is also strange. With the exception of short stretches of essential main road-sharing (over bridges, by stations etc), why would you want to cycle in such noise, danger and pollution, when there are faster and more pleasant routes through back streets, parks and towpaths?

It is not ‘strange’, at all, to emphasise boosting cycling on main roads, for the reasons I have outlined, at length, above. These are the roads that people want to use – self-evidently, that is why they are ‘main routes.’ Routes through ‘back streets’ are rarely faster (and indeed, often just as unpleasant, in that you will often encounter belligerent drivers on streets narrowed by parked cars). I raised this subject with Wright last night on twitter, pointing out that taking ‘back routes’ for a journey I used to make from King’s Cross to UCL would require me to more than double my journey length, if I chose not to cycle on Euston Road.

His response was not satisfactory.

I am not going to cycle all the way south to Tavistock Place – to use a segregated facility of the kind that Wright opposes – to avoid Euston Road, especially when I would still have to deal with the King’s Cross junction, and the busy roads around Euston. Nor am I going to cycle through Somerstown, which also involves the busy York Way and Goods Way, and again, negotiating Euston. These are lengthy journeys – more than double the direct route – and still involve danger.

So why can we not campaign to have cycle paths on Euston Road? There’s plenty of space, given that it is three lanes wide in each direction, with a central divider as well.

But Wright disagrees, asking me

Where would Euston Rd Lane go? Or Piccadilly?

‘Where would it go’, indeed. Likewise on Piccadilly, there simply isn’t the space for a cycle path.

I’ve documented plenty of other London streets where there just isn’t the space.

Wright also argues that nobody would want to cycle on Euston Road, because it is heavy with traffic, polluted, and there’s nothing to see. The fact that encouraging cycling on Euston Road – by taking some space away from motor vehicles and reallocating it for bicycles – would go some way towards solving each and every one of those problems apparently escapes him. He also takes a worst-case scenario, suggesting than any cycle paths that are built would be stopping at each and every side road – but this is hardly what LCC are going to campaign for.

I can see that proper Dutch-style cycle paths on our main roads might be an unrealistic goal, to those critics and campaigners like Wright. That we should instead go for the ‘low-hanging fruit’ like lower speed limits, stricter enforcement of road traffic laws, and so on – the kind of ‘Dutch’ solutions that Wright wants LCC to campaign on, apparently because we’re just never going to get proper Dutch-style cycle paths on our main roads.

But that’s no reason to not even campaign for it in the first place. Why don’t we try? LCC are doing it, and I’m going to back them wholeheartedly, not least because I fail to see how we can genuinely get more people cycling in London by ignoring the busiest roads, and telling people to take piddling diversionary routes around back streets.

Taking responsibility

Last Thursday, I published a piece entitled ‘Road peril’. It addressed an article published recently in my local paper that, in referencing the concerns of a local councillor about poor parking, reckless driving, and dangerous cycling, decided for some peculiar reason to focus entirely on the problem of dangerous cycling, and ignored completely the problem of poor and inconsiderate parking, and reckless driving.

I found this choice of focus rather strange, given that in recent memory, no-one has been injured by someone on a bicycle in Horsham, and in the month subsequent to that article being published, at least five Horsham cyclists have been struck by motorists – myself included.

One of those incidents – the most serious – involved a man cycling along Blackbridge Lane in Horsham at around 6pm on Thursday 29th September. As I wrote –

I attended the scene about an hour after the collision, after the man involved had been airlifted to a London hospital (St George’s, Tooting) with serious injuries. I was prevented, wrongly, from taking pictures of the crash site by the police, but from the position of, and damage to, the bicycle, it was quite clear he had been driven into from behind, at some speed, by the driver of the Audi parked some distance down the road. Given the smashed-in rear wheel of the bicycle, it is almost impossible to conceive of a scenario in which the man ‘collided with’ the car, contrary to the quoted report above. From my most recent inquiries with Sussex police, the man is still in a very serious condition in hospital.

Then, on Saturday evening, ‘Liam’ left the following, illuminating, comment below the piece –

It seems cyclists aren’t willing to take responsibility for anything. The blame lies with everyone else! As a very close friend of the man driving the Audi involved in the incident that occured on September 29th, I can say without question that he was driving within the speed limit, as he always does, and that the collision happened simply because he was momentarily blinded by the low sun. The first police officers at the scene even commented on it as they got out of the car. To suggest that the accident occured through reckless driving is insensitive and offensive and entirely sensationalist. Especially coming from someone who turned up at the scene an hour after it happened! It proves how eager cyclists are to blame everyone else whilst ignoring their own failings as road users. This was a tragic accident that really could have happened to anyone. I’m literally praying that the poor cyclist pulls through, my friend is absolutely devastated and despite driving for 20 years without serious incident he is now considering never driving again, he’s THAT shaken by what has happened. I only hope that when/if this goes to court that those overseeing the case are not as narrow minded and self righteous as you! Of course, my support for my friend is in no way meant to undermine the suffering of the cyclist and his family and my heart truely goes out to them and I know my friend shares that sentiment. Try to bare in mind that there are real people behind the assumptions you make in the name of your little crusade, try and be a bit more sensitive when twisting the truth to suit your needs.

The first allegation Liam makes is that ‘cyclists aren’t willing to take responsibility for anything’, because they apparently believe that ‘the blame lies with everyone else’.

How true. I am quite sure that the Horsham postman pushed off his bicycle by a man leaning from a car no doubt blames that individual for the injuries he received.

I mean, how self-righteous can you get!?

Likewise, the young Horsham cyclist driven at by a man in a 4×4, who had to leap from his bicycle to avoid being run over while stopped on the verge, probably blames that driver for the attempt to injure him! Take some responsibility, for God’s sake.

And here, I must also confess my sins. For I too have stooped so low as to blame the driver who crashed into me while I was stopped at a junction, waiting to turn right.  All the driver did was to turn right into the side street, on the wrong side of the road (come on, we all have to cut corners), completely failing to see a human being stopped in front of her. I must take responsibility for being in her way.

Finally, there is the case of the Horsham cyclist seriously injured by Liam’s friend. This individual had the temerity – the sheer, impudent nerve – to be cycling west in the early evening. Another cyclist who failed to take responsibility, this time for the consequences of his chosen direction of travel upon motorists who can’t be bothered to properly assess whether the road in front of them is clear of obstacles.

Clearly, all of these examples, as Liam wrote, ‘prove how eager cyclists are to blame everyone else whilst ignoring their own failings as road users.’ So thank you, Liam, for allowing the scales to fall from my eyes.

But seriously now.

Liam’s account is rather useful in several respects. Firstly, it serves to substantiate what was blindingly obvious to me when I attended the scene. That, far from the cyclist ‘colliding with a blue Audi A4 saloon‘, as the local paper reported, the man was driven into from behind. That is the only conceivable way in which the rear wheel on a mountain bike could become so seriously mangled, and that has now been confirmed.

Secondly, it provides an insight into the rather cosseted mindset of a British motorist. Laced through Liam’s account is the tacit assumption that someone obeying the speed limit (which I have no reason to dispute in this particular scenario, nor did I in my initial post) cannot possibly be ‘reckless’. To refer back –

I can say without question that he was driving within the speed limit… To suggest that the accident occured through reckless driving is insensitive and offensive and entirely sensationalist.

Setting aside the fact that at no point did I use the word ‘reckless’ to refer to the driving of Liam’s friend (you can see what I wrote in the quoted passage which starts this post, which mainly takes issue with the newspaper’s account of the incident – the worst I say is that the cyclist was driven into from behind at some speed, which is factually true), this, I am sorry to say Liam, is utter drivel. If I choose to travel at 70 mph on a motorway or dual carriageway in thick fog, I would be driving within the speed limit, but I would undoubtedly be being extremely reckless, and I doubt police would see otherwise. Likewise, if I choose to travel at the national speed limit on some of the country lanes around Horsham, I would not be breaking the speed limit, but I would again be being extraordinarily stupid.

Precisely the same logic applies when you are dazzled by the sun. If you cannot see what is in front of you, you moderate your speed accordingly. You do not plough on regardless, apparently safe in the knowledge that you are obeying the speed limit, and that therefore no terrible consequences could possibly ensue. You are driving blind, and you should recognize that fact. Your friend, I can entirely accept, did not set out to injure anyone that evening, and is undoubtedly devastated by what happened, but that should not absolve him from his responsibilities when behind the wheel of a motor vehicle. It might not have been a cyclist that evening – it could have been a child crossing the road, and the consequences would have been precisely the same. I’m sorry for bringing this up, but frankly it affects me rather personally to know that when I am cycling around Horsham, into the sun, there might be people out there in motor vehicles who apparently cannot see me.

Let us revisit the accident scene. The pictures that follow were taken at approximately 45 minutes before sunset; roughly the same interval as on the day in question, when the sun set at 6:45 pm, and the accident occurred just after 6 pm. They date some three weeks after the incident, in similar light conditions – that is, towards the end of a bright, sunny day. They should therefore be a reasonably accurate reconstruction of what the road looked like when the cyclist was driven into, allowing for some slight, but marginal difference in the horizontal position of the sun in the sky. I have tried my best to expose the photographs in a way that matches what I perceived with my eyes.

The entrance to Blackbridge Lane, at the junction with Worthing Road, looking west. Both the motorist and the cyclist would have been travelling away from us. The accident site is some way distant, well beyond the parked cars on the left. At this point we are shielded from the sun.

Above, we are coming to the end of the parked cars. Here, the road stops bending left, straightening out, and from this point, we have a clear, uninterrupted view, up to the point at which the car struck the cyclist. We are still – just – shielded from the sun. The white board attached to the lamp post in the distance is a police accident board, appealing for witnesses. The impact occurred beyond that point, in fact probably adjacent to the two storey building on the right.

Some twenty yards further on. Now we clearly have the sun in our eyes. Fortuitously, for the purposes of comparison, a cyclist is passing the accident board, without lights. At a moment’s glance, she is indeed possible to miss, at least in this photograph. But as we will discuss below, the driver would have had rather more than an instantaneous moment observe the presence of a cyclist.

After the accident, the Audi was stopped just short of the concrete parking area on the left of the road, in the distance, and the damaged bicycle was lying in the road just beyond the entrance to Hengist Close, the turning you can see on the right, beyond the parked cars and the two storey building. (It is, in hindsight, rather frustrating that I was erroneously prevented from taking pictures of the scene by the police, but you can gain a gist of the positioning from this West Sussex County Times picture of the crash site, which is looking back in the opposite direction. The ambulance is parked at the entrance to Hengist Close.)

It is now worth considering the claim that

the collision happened simply because he was momentarily blinded by the low sun.

which to me is absurd as suggesting that a collision happened ‘simply because of fog’, or ‘simply because of a corner’, but nevertheless –

From the point at which the last photograph was taken, to the point at which the impact occurred, is approximately 60 metres. At a speed of 30 mph (which equates to 13.4 metres per second) this distance would be covered in around four and a half seconds. This, it is important to note, is the absolute minimum time for which the cyclist would have been visible, if we ignore the influence of the sun. The driver, by his friend’s account, was travelling at no more than 30 mph, and it is quite probable that the cyclist was (or should have been) visible to the driver much earlier, while he was driving around the parked cars – especially so when we consider that at this point he was shielded from the sun (the view in picture 2). 

Quite obviously, no avoiding action was taken by the driver – the cyclist was driven into, when he could have been swerved around – suggesting that he was still being ‘blinded’ at the point of impact. So, for Liam’s account to exonerate the driver, rather than being

momentarily blinded by the low sun

the driver must have been ‘blinded’ for something approaching five seconds, at least, an interval in which he apparently took no action to adjust his speed, or to look hard for obstacles – human beings – that might be in the road.

It speaks volumes that this is the best possible spin I can put on this incident.

Taking responsibility?

Friday Facility No.5 – Springfield Road, Horsham

In which an initially promising idea – a kerb-separated contraflow cycle lane – disintegrates into a confusing mess in the space of a few yards.

The entrance. So far so good. We can turn left here, but motor vehicles can’t.

We are also separated by a kerb from oncoming vehicles coming out of (the one-way) Springfield Road.

Things start to go wrong. A kerb stops our progress, and we have to take an impossibly tight turn to cross to the other side, yielding to motor vehicles.

Does the route end, or continue? There are some hieroglyphs on the opposite pavement, but what they signify is anyone’s guess.

Mmm. Two cyclists attempting to use this facility in opposite directions would surely make for some Three Stooges-style hilarity.

Is this is a shared use pavement? Is it not? Who knows. Probably best just to give up.

As this is a one-way road for cars, it is rather baffling why the carriageway is so wide here. There’s plenty of space for a proper solution (see below for a Dutch one-way street, with two-way flow for bikes) yet all we get is needless conflict with motor vehicles and pedestrians, and daubings of paint that are impossible to negotiate.

‘Road peril’

On the 22nd September, the West Sussex County Times printed this article. Entitled Councillor warns of road “peril”* it runs

COMPLAINTS of ‘rogue’ road users in Horsham has [sic] driven a district councillor to brand the town’s ‘great deal of reckless driving and poor parking’ an ‘epidemic’. Christine Costin (LDem, Trafalgar) has called for a ‘safety campaign’ in the wake of public concern over ‘dangerous cycling’. She said: “Motorists, cyclists and pedestrians should be able to go about their business without the fear of confrontation with road users who have no understanding of what their actions could mean to other people. “We should be able to expect cyclists to show consideration and proper responsibility towards other road users and to the pedestrians using our local streets; the dangers of such irresponsible cycling need to be highlighted through a suitable safety campaign, naturally those who show a dangerous disregard for others need to feel the full force of the law.”

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’. The councillor has since written to Horsham Police in a bid to stamp out the ‘peril’ pedestrians face on the town’s streets. In response, a police community support officer (PCSO) was called out Tuesday morning (September 20) to patrol West and East Street.

It is noteworthy that although Councillor Costin’s complaint seemed, justifiably, to be about poor road behaviour in general – encompassing reckless driving and pavement parking – the article that has appeared in the paper about ‘road peril’ deals entirely and solely with the apparent problem of dangerous cycling.

This is all the more extraordinary in the light of subsequent events. Exactly a week later, on Thursday 29th September –

A HORSHAM cyclist was airlifted to hospital after a collision with a vehicle left him ‘seriously hurt’ yesterday evening (Thursday September 29). The 36-year-old man collided with a blue Audi A4 saloon in Blackbridge Lane, near Hengist Close, Horsham, shortly after 6pm.

This incident occurred in broad daylight. I attended the scene about an hour after the collision, after the man involved had been airlifted to a London hospital (St George’s, Tooting) with serious injuries. I was prevented, wrongly, from taking pictures of the crash site by the police, but from the position of, and damage to, the bicycle, it was quite clear he had been driven into from behind, at some speed, by the driver of the Audi parked some distance down the road. Given the smashed-in rear wheel of the bicycle, it is almost impossible to conceive of a scenario in which the man ‘collided with’ the car, contrary to the quoted report above. From my most recent inquiries with Sussex police, the man is still in a very serious condition in hospital.

The very next evening, minutes after stopping on my journey home to discuss with a friend the above incident, I was also crashed into by a motorist in Horsham. Fortunately my injuries were far less severe, amounting to nothing more than a painfully grazed elbow and bruised knees (from where I landed on the tarmac after flying through the air), and the cost only a damaged wheel, and a couple of sleepless nights. This ‘incident’ is still ongoing, as the driver attempted to claim, falsely, that I was cycling without lights – but I will write about it in due course.

Then last Wednesday, the 12th October, at a roundabout on Horsham bypass –

…  The vehicle was approximately five metres away from him and he feared that it was going to hit him so he left the carraigeway and mounted the grass verge. The victim stood up on his pedals so he could jump from his bike but before he could the front driver’s side of the car hit him causing him to fall from his cycle.

A young man on a bicycle was deliberately driven at by a man in a silver 4×4, in an unprovoked incident. Fortunately he escaped unhurt.

Two days later, on Friday, the 14th October, on King’s Road in Horsham –

TWO postmen were targeted by a laughing yob in a car. The Royal Mail postmen were carrying out their deliveries when the attacks occurred. In both cases a car pulled up alongside the cycling postmen and slowed down. In the first incident the front passenger failed to push the postman off his bike. He was more successful during the second incident. This time the front passenger leaned out, took hold of the postman and then pushed him off his bike. He grazed his hip and elbow. Both incidents took place in Kings Road, Horsham, shortly before 2pm on Friday, October 14.

So in a two week period alone, at least five people on bikes in Horsham – one of them your humble blogger – have been struck by motorists, three of them quite deliberately. Another remains critically injured in hospital. Meanwhile – while I fully acknowledge that there are reckless and stupid idiots cycling around, both in pedestrianised areas, and on the road – as far as I am aware, nobody has been injured by a cyclist in Horsham, at least in living memory. Certainly I know of no news story as long as I have lived here. CYCLIST HITS PEDESTRIAN stories are rather hard to miss, given that they tend to feature rather more prominently and extravagantly than equivalent stories involving cars and pedestrians, for whatever reason, as James D. Schwartz has written.

It is also worth noting that an elderly pedestrian in Horsham was left with serious injuries after being driven into earlier this year, and also that the police have, yesterday, finally managed to catch up with Horsham driver Robert Freeman, who ploughed into two men waiting at a bus stop in the nearby village of Cranleigh, and now faces charges of dangerous driving, perverting the course of justice, driving whilst disqualified, driving without insurance, failing to stop at the scene of an accident and failing to report a collision. As I wrote at the time of this ‘accident’, one of the men involved (both were waiting for a bus, some distance from the road) has been left with ‘life-changing injuries.’

With a large number of pedestrians and cyclists injured, often quite seriously, by motorists in the Horsham area, in the last few months, and not a single injury, or even a hint of an injury, inflicted as a result of people on bicycles, it is, of course, entirely natural that the ‘road peril’ we must most urgently address is ‘rogue cyclists.’

(By way of an addendum, each and every one of those five cyclists struck in Horsham in the last two weeks was using the road, and in the proper manner. This does, of course, go some way towards explaining why a large proportion of cyclists in Horsham are using the pavement in the first place, coupled with the general unpleasantness of the road network for cycling. This is a matter I will return to in my next blog post, which will also detail the rather confused, contradictory and even hypocritical policy of Horsham District Council towards pavement cycling.)

*Changed in the online version to Campaign to stop ‘selfish cyclists’, which reflects rather better the thrust of the article

Cycling to the station

Yesterday afternoon I caught a train to Brighton from Three Bridges station, in Crawley. On the platform, I was one of three people with a Brompton. Each and every one of us had, presumably, arrived at the station by bike. And that probably meant negotiating Haslett Avenue to get here. Below.

This is the road I cycled on, from Crawley town centre; it is three lanes wide for quite some distance. At this point Three Bridges station is hoving into view – you can just see a train on the bridge, above the yellow HGV. As the station requires a right turn, this leaves a cyclist with something of a dilemma about which lane to take here. The left lane would be the meek option, and you would be storing up trouble, requiring you to shunt yourself across three lanes of traffic in a short space of time and distance. The right lane would be the most ‘advanced’ option, but requires pace and stamina to keep up with traffic in the ‘fast lane’. The middle lane, perhaps the most sensible, but unnverving, with traffic passing you on both sides. That was my chosen option.

Taking this middle lane leaves you, beyond the junction in the first picture, in the left hand lane shown above. Three Bridges station is the brick building on the right. I have to get into lane 3 (the right-hand filter lane) at the lights ahead, which is no easy task, with motor vehicles racing towards the M23, barely a mile away. There is no other way of getting to the station, short of cycling on the pavement.

I made it! I’m still alive.

Despite these appalling conditions, people are still cycling here – as shown by the numbers of Bromptons at mid-afternoon. But they are being forgotten about in the way our streets are laid out. I don’t really appreciate having to negotiate my way across two or even three lanes of fast traffic simply to to make a right turn into a station – it’s not pleasant, and for anyone who doesn’t cycle regularly, I am sure it would be seen as extremely hazardous.

It’s not much better on foot, as you can see from this satellite image.

The station is marked at the bottom of the picture. If you live to the north of this road, Haslett Avenue, your only way to cross from the station is to walk to the railway bridge at the extreme right of this image, cross there to the centre island, cross again to another central island, and then finally make yet another crossing to the north side of the street. You will have to wait for motor vehicles at each and every stage. Note, by way of contrast, that if you are exiting the station in a motor vehicle, and you wish to turn right, you have your own dedicated single-phase traffic light, that will take you across the road in one go.

Just to discourage any ‘walking’ nonsense, the rest of the central reservation has been fenced off to stop you crossing anywhere else, even at the junction 50 yards to the west with Hazelwick Avenue, shown below. Extraordinarily, there is no north-south crossing for pedestrians here.

The forlorn-looking lady standing on the island in this streetview image is not on a pedestrian crossing; she has simply skirted the barriers and is attempting to cross the six lanes of this road in stages. To repeat, this is by a railway station.

Cycling to the station in Horsham is less hazardous, but equally inconvenient.

The approach to the station from the town centre, along North Street. The building in the distance, on the right, is the station itself. There is a cycle lane painted on North Street (it is of reasonable width for the UK, but totally substandard by any Dutch measure, certainly for a road of this traffic volume, where you would be segregated from motor vehicles). Naturally enough, as soon as any conflict with motor vehicles arises, rather than design a proper solution that might allow you to cycle to the front of the station, the ‘provision’ simply evaporates, and you are forced onto the pavement.

Where the cycle path ‘ends’ for good. From here you have to dismount, wait for the signalled crossing, and walk the hundred yards to the station entrance. This is so time-consuming that I continue to the busy roundabout in front of the station, and use that to gain access.

Several million pounds are currently being spent on a redevelopment of the station forecourt and entrance area. Are things being improved for cycling?

No.

You will see, to the left of North Street, that the pisspoor ‘cycle route’ is being kept precisely in current form, except with the addition of a brand new blue ‘END OF ROUTE’ sign. Brilliant. The simplest way to access the station by bicycle will continue to be by looping around the roundabout. The new pedestrian area (marked in brick on the drawing) is fenced off from the roundabout, so presumably I will have to continue across the pedestrian crossing into the motor vehicle set-down area, before walking back.

Several complaints were made in the consultation (pdf) about the total lack of cycle routes to the station. The response?

These form part of the cycling strategy for Horsham

i.e., proper cycle routes to the station are not part of our remit, and will be covered by the ‘cycling strategy for Horsham.’

Sounds fantastic. Except there is no cycling strategy for Horsham. There are no proposals to do anything, anywhere, in the district, in West Sussex County Council’s latest Transport Plan for 2011-26. All we get is this mealy-mouthed paragraph –

Working with the local community and interest groups to identify priorities and encourage sustainable travel by improving the cycle and pedestrian network. This may include: new or improved cycle and pedestrian routes; signing; changes to speed limits; cycle parking; repairing and maintaining surfaces.

‘May include.’

And so there are no improvements to the station for cycling, and there won’t be for the next fifteen years, unless our governments and councils have some kind of epiphany. The important question is, why was a proper cycle route to Horsham station not considered to be part of the actual improvement works to the station in the first place? The report by the Direction of Operations for the improvement works (the pdf above) notes that

The objectives of the forecourt scheme are to establish an improved interchange at Horsham station that will facilitate modal exchange between rail and cycle, bus, taxi and car.

But nothing has been done to ‘improve the interchange’ for cycling, beyond some extra cycle stands. A grotesque missed opportunity.

If I lived in Assen in the Netherlands, and I wished to cycle to the station, not only could I do so in safety and with ease, I would also find a subway cycle path that allowed me to cycle directly onto the station platform –

Indoor, monitored cycle parking –

Both the bicycle repair shop and the cycle parking stay open until two in the morning (the time of the last train) –

Naturally there is also plenty of outdoor parking –

Or, if I lived in the larger city of Groningen, I would have a dedicated bicycle bridge to carry me across to the station –

Dedicated traffic lights, with an indicator, telling me how long I have to wait until I can cycle across (not long) –

A sign telling me in which sector of the cycle parking complex I am most likely to find a free bicycle space –

And lots of cycle parking –

With more, direct, bicycle-specific routes to and from the station –

In short, cycling to the station in a Dutch town or city feels safe, easy and convenient. Interactions with motor traffic are minimal or non-existent. The routes take you directly to the station entrance, or even onto the platform. Meanwhile, in the UK, it feels exceptionally dangerous, unpleasant and inconvenient. I have to cycle on fast roads that are three lanes wide, and take the outer third lane, to enter Three Bridges station. I have to fiddle around on tiny little paths that evaporate just when they are needed in Horsham, and therefore walk, or risk cycling all the way around a busy roundabout.

And nothing is being done to change it.

Friday Facility No.4 – Southgate Avenue, Crawley

I’m not sure whether the ‘Dismount’ is for the bin, or the bus stop.

Either way, this is one location where there is, quite clearly, no space for separated cycle paths of decent width. The photograph was taken at 5:30 on a Friday evening, and you can see how busy the road is here. Another three lanes run northbound on the other side of the central reservation (fenced to stop people crossing from the shopping centre to the library).

If you wish to turn right here, towards Crawley railway station, you have the option of attempting to get into the third lane to make the turn with motor traffic.  Maybe you’re not feeling that confident; in which case, you will have to ponderously make your way around one side-road junction on the left-hand side, before dismounting and making four separate crossings at the junction itself, before rejoining on the left hand side of Station Way (there is no pedestrian crossing on the far side of the junction).

Enjoy.

The subtle enslavement of parents

Idly thumbing through a local freesheet while on my coffee break this morning, I encountered a news article entitled ‘Dads Sentenced to a Year Behind The Wheel.’ It turned out to refer not to a curious punishment meted out by a whimsical magistrate, but to the fact that fathers apparently spend one whole year of their lives ferrying their children around, until they reach the age of 18 (when presumably they are using cars of their own).

This wasn’t, of course, a genuine news story, but a Halfords press release from some months back, that has only just filtered through to the Horsham Advertiser – the company in question conducts some research, and then presents it as a piece of news that local newspapers can swallow up, using as content to fill their pages, in exchange for a plug for the company that commissioned the research. Everybody wins. (This is similar to the method that results in spurious mathematical equations constantly appearing in the media as ‘news’ – a transparent attempt to get a company free publicity in exchange for paying a scientist to prostitute themselves).

The facts and figures contained within such an article should therefore, of course, by treated with some caution, but with that caveat, this research is rather revealing.

By the time his children are 18, the average Dad has spent the equivalent of a whole working year Taxi-ing his children around. In fact modern Dads spend more time ferrying kids than almost anything else they do – apart from work and sleep. That’s more time than they spend in the garden, on DIY and even in the pub. Dads clock up an average 25 miles a week on 2.33 journeys, taking their youngsters to school, sports and social events – or 2hrs 16mins driving. A fith (20%) of dads, however, admitted to undertaking a journey of over 100 miles and 7% over 200 miles… A dedicated one in eight (17%) of fathers do more than five trips a week. Over four in five (81%) give lifts to the children of friends and neighbours.

There then comes the inevitable, crowbarred-in soundbite from someone at Halfords –

Rory Carlin, Halfords Autocentres Marketing Director said: “We spend a lot of our time caring for family cars to help customers live their lives on the move.We can’t do anything about our kids’ increasingly hectic social lives or the rising cost of fuel, but we can help by making routine servicing, maintenance and tyres affordable and accessible. We’re working hard to bring down the cost of motoring because we understand that dedication comes at a cost, both in terms of the fuel used and wear and tear on the car itself.”

Fair enough. Probably a good idea to look after your car, if you’re spending that much time driving your children about.

But Rory Carlin misdiagnoses the problem. Fathers are not driving their children around because of their ‘increasingly hectic social lives.’ At a guess, I would suspect that children are making fewer trips to visit their friends than half-a-century ago – they’re probably spending a bit more time at home, contacting them via the interweb.

The problem is rather that when they come to make trips to visit friends, or to school, they are no longer making those trips by themselves. Parents either don’t trust their children to make journeys on foot or bike by themselves, or the children don’t want to. This is why fathers are – apparently – spending more time driving their children around than any other activity, except work and sleep.

Dutch fathers presumably have it a little easier; the average age at which Dutch children start cycling to school by themselves is eight (as David Arditti notes, this is a source of concern to the Dutch authorities – because it is considered too old). In Assen, 100% (to the best approximation) of children cycle to school. And it’s not just the school run that parents are spared from. Visiting friends in town; sleepovers; going to the park; playing football; these are all things that children can do by themselves. Dutch cities and towns are designed to allow children to make their own way about, in a subjectively safe environment. David Hembrow assured us, on our Embassy Field Trip, that children using bikes with stabilisers can, and do, cycle into the centre of Assen city, with their parents (although they often can’t cycle back – it is some distance for young children).

Go to the Netherlands, and you will see incredibly young children cycling around.

These are children cycling home from two different primary schools, for lunch with their parents. They can do this because it’s easy.

Parents can also go shopping with their children, by bike – they don’t need to worry about packing them into cars (which was a serious concern voiced in the Understanding Walking and Cycling report) –

Teenage girls don’t need a lift into town to go shopping either – they can hop on a bike, and go with their friends (the gentleman is not their father – he’s just someone they’re about to overtake) –

The amount of time this independence must save their parents – both in leisure and work hours – is surely stupendous. We should be screaming this from the rooftops. Not only can our children be far more independent – which is good for their own well-being (as well as, tangentially, their health), but their parents no longer have to spend a vast proportion of their own time acting as a glorified taxi service. That means they have more time to relax, and also to be productive. There is a huge economic argument here. Parents can be working, instead of spending hours driving their children around (not to mention the savings that would result from the easing of the congestion caused by needless car journeys).

This isn’t some fantasy – the Netherlands is a country only just across the North Sea, one of nearest neighbours. Yet, for whatever reason, these kinds of solutions to our mobility problems are completely off the radar. I am firmly convinced that the great majority of this country’s citizens would leap at the idea of their children being able to go to school by themselves, or being able to visit their friends, by themselves; they just don’t know how it could be possible.

It’s up to us to show them how. And the Dutch tourist board.

A small slice of the Netherlands, in Horsham

One of the most pleasant streets to cycle on in Horsham is the Causeway.

(Photo from geograph.org.uk)

It’s a chocolate-box perfect Sussex street, that – despite being very close to the centre of town – has little traffic on it. Why? Because it’s a dead-end (for motor vehicles and bicycles, anyway). The road terminates at St. Mary’s Church, which you can see in the distance, leaving only a footpath which allows you access to Normandy, and the cricket field area of Horsham.

The only people driving on this street, therefore, are the people who are fortunate enough to live on it, or the few vans making deliveries down here. (Or the people who have got confused by their sat navs). So despite there being no separation from motor traffic, it feels very pleasant – and subjectively safe – to cycle here. No-one will be driving down here in a hurry. There are even speed humps to ensure they don’t.

This road layout has been arrived at by historical accident – a 13th century church in a historial area is something of an obstacle to anyone who might, in the past, have wanted to turn the Causeway into a through-route. Although I note that Horsham has been quite happy, in the recent past, to demolish a church to build an urban dual carriageway –

But, returning to the subject in hand, there are roads in Horsham that are nearly as pleasant to cycle on as the Causeway because, like the Causeway, they are not through-routes.

One of these roads is Comptons Lane, in east Horsham, marked on the map below.

Historically, this road connected the south-eastern suburbs of Horsham, to Roffey, in the north-east. It’s essentially an inner ring road. South of the Harwood Road roundabout (where it intersects with the B2195), it is rather busy, and unpleasant to cycle on. North of the Harwood Road roundabout, however, it is quite pleasant.

The reason is simple. Below the roundabout, it is a through route. However, north of the roundabout, the road has, instead, been closed to through traffic. This means that I was able to stand, quite comfortably, in the centre of the road as it exits from the enormous Harwood Road roundabout, to take this picture.

Dead-end. Note – incidentally – the utterly superficial bicycle ‘infrastructure’ painted on the pavement to the left, that disgorges you back onto the road right by parked vehicles. As it happens, the poor design does not particularly matter in this case, because as the sign tells you, this is a dead-end, and, like the Causeway, the only people driving onto this street will be those seeking to gain access to the few dwellings along it. It’s fine for anyone to cycle along this section of Comptons Lane, without any particular worries about traffic – it’s a lovely, quiet street. It could perhaps benefit from speed humps, or a rougher surface, but it’s perfectly adequate as it is.

And it’s rather better than that for people travelling by bicycle, because – in a remarkably enlightened move for Horsham – the road is permeable for cycling at the northern end.

Not exactly done to Dutch standards, but fine enough. You can cycle through here to the shops that line Crawley Road (the new-ish building opposite is a Co-op supermarket), while motor vehicles cannot pass. Indeed, if you wish to drive to Co-op from the south, the closure of Comptons Lane means you are sent on a small diversion –

By bicycle or by foot, of course, you can go directly.

This kind of thing, as we discovered on our Cycling Embassy field trip last week, is standard practice in the Netherlands. Residential roads are generally impermeable to motor vehicles, while passable to cyclists and pedestrians. The road network is limited in such a way that, just as on this short stretch of Comptons Lane in Horsham, the only people driving on residential roads are those seeking to gain access to houses along them. It is virtually impossible to rat run in the Netherlands, through a combination of direct road closures, or through complex one-way systems (from which bicycles are, of course, exempt). That means that residential roads have low volumes of motor traffic on them, a precondition for pleasant cycling conditions on streets where you are not separated from motor traffic.

In this view of Assen, we see the busy main road running past the railway station. It is impossible, however, to access the residential area to the right by motor vehicle here (but, as you can see, very easy to do so on foot or by bicycle).

If you do have to drive inside this residential area, you are confronted by a network of one-way streets –

with tight radius corners, speed humps, a bumpy brick surface – all designed to ensure calm driving. Notice the one-way exception for cyclists. All the streets in this neighbourhood look like this. It felt entirely safe to cycle around it. (Once you are on a main through-route, however, you will be separated from traffic, as in the picture above.)

Unfortunately, back in Horsham, this section of Comptons Lane is the only part of town I can think of where this kind of impermeability has been applied. Everywhere else, it is simple and convenient to take the most direct route by car, whichever road that means you end up driving down. There is no competitive advantage for bicycle or foot, and furthermore, even on supposedly ‘quiet’ streets, you will find yourself being intimidated by drivers racing from A to B, because there are no restrictions on what roads they can drive down.

An appalling example of this is Harwood Road itself, and the knock-on effects on the parallel routes of King’s Road and Crawley Road. Harwood Road was built as a ‘relief road’ in the early 1960s, designed to take traffic away from these two predominantly residental roads, and speed it from the town centre to the ring road. You can see this layout in the map below.

Harwood Road (marked) forms, as you can see, a bypass around the direct route that runs along King’s Road and Crawley Road. It looks something like this –

A wide, fast road, with a 40 mph limit. Designed for getting cars away from the town centre quickly.

This is fine. The Dutch have roads like these. There would, of course, be proper cycle paths alongside them, something like Hoofdlaan in Assen –

This road (in the backgroound) is largely identical to Harwood Road in Horsham, given that it connects the ring road in Assen to the city centre road. It also has a higher speed limit. The difference, of course, is that there is a rather pleasant cycle path alongside Hoofdlaan, which allows these ladies to cycle into town without worrying about having to take the lane at pinch points. Or worry about anything at all, in fact.

The fact that Harwood Road is not at all pleasant to cycle on would not matter too much if King’s Road and Crawley Road (which, remember, are the direct route that Harwood Road was supposed to bypass) were enjoyable to cycle on.

They are not. (I have explained why King’s Road is hellish for cycling here).

No measures have been taken to restrict traffic on either of these two roads, beyond some superficial added pinch points on Crawley Road, which are, in my experience, lethal to cycle through, because drivers either fail to yield to you, or attempt to overtake through them. A large proportion of my ‘incidents’ in Horsham occur along this road, despite my limited use of it. Indeed, note this petition –

We, the undersigned, call on West Sussex County Council and Sussex Police to take urgent action to reduce the speed of drivers on Crawley Road, Horsham. Noting that there have been two serious accidents on the road in the last 9 months due to speeding drivers, that cars still regularly exceed 50mph in a 30mph zone, that the existing traffic calming scheme is totally ineffective, and that police speed checks are rarely, if ever seen. We are concerned that pedestrians or drivers on the road will be seriously injured or killed unless more steps are taken to reduce the speed of drivers and urge WSCC and the police to act now.

There are no measures at all on King’s Road.

You would have thought that the construction of an enormous inner ‘relief’ road would have led to measures to prevent vehicles from using the roads that were meant to be relieved. But in the absence of those measures, you find that most people continue to drive along King’s Road, and Crawley Road – because, looking at their sat navs, it is a  direct straight line route, with no restrictions. The only difference is that the speed limit is 30 mph, instead of 40 mph, but in practice that makes little difference. Meanwhile, Harwood Road – which is largely empty in comparison – encourages speeding driving.

Why not close King’s Road to traffic, by means of a barrier halfway along it? The residents would most likely welcome it – their road is currently a hellish race track. Slightly longer journeys around the diversion of the Harwood Road would be a small price to pay for a vast improvement in their quality of life. The only small difficulty I can see is that buses currently run along this road – but as the bus stops are at either end of King’s Road, they would only need to be moved a matter of  tens of yards onto the new arterial route. Harwood Road would become what it was built for – a busy arterial road. And there is plenty of space there for cycle tracks to be built alongside it. Meanwhile, King’s Road (and to a lesser extent, Crawley Road) would become quiet, pleasant streets.

Why don’t we start going Dutch?

Rush hour in Groningen

Some bicycle (and pedestrian) chaos for your delectation, taken in yesterday’s rush hour in Groningen – which just happens to be the bicycle capital of the world.

This is the north-west corner of Vismarkt. Most of the streets around here are closed to ordinary motor vehicles – but you would not get these numbers of people cycling into and out of the city centre without high levels of subjective safety elsewhere across the city.

Note also that pedestrians and cyclists – even in these great numbers – are quite happy to rub up against each other (almost literally). While typical of the Netherlands, this kind of interaction is, unfortunately, almost unthinkable in the UK, where scenes like this would no doubt prompt a thousand angry letters to the Daily Mail about ‘nearly being hit a cyclist.’