Why *would* you ride a bike? The UK experience

In my post yesterday on my partner’s first use of a bike in over 20 years, I mentioned how the street she first rode along, Biltstraat, was a busy road, connecting Utrecht’s ring road to the centre of town.

I decided to take a look at the conditions on an equivalent road in my town, Horsham. This is the Bishopric (also the Guildford A281 road), that is the main arterial route, from the west, into the town.

This photograph shows the end of this wide road, at the point, looking east, where it meets the pedestrianized centre of Horsham. The video below shows the conditions on this road, at 8:50 this morning.

No cyclists, despite this being (you would think) around the peak time for cycle commuting.

Further out of town on this road, there is a ‘cycle path’. But it is narrow, simply painted on the pavement.

The area to the left is for pedestrians, to the right is the cycle path – two-way! And yes, you have to give way (with dangerously limited vision, I might add) at every side road.

The cycle path simply stops at the traffic lights shown below, as you head into town. You have to cross here, and then brave cycling on the road itself.

Cycling into town, once you have got to the lights at the video, you meet Albion Way, the inner ring road of Horsham. You either have to turn left, onto this –

Or right, onto this –

There is – notionally – a 30 mph limit on this road, but in my experience most drivers treat it as a ‘proper’ dual carriageway. Speeding is rife.

Note also that this is a deeply hostile junction for pedestrians, with ‘holding pens.’ If I want to make it to the pedestrianized centre of Horsham, which lies to the left of the above picture, I have to make FOUR separate road crossings, from the point where I am standing. This is what a cyclist would have to do if – logically – they wanted to go straight into town, and dismounted at this point.

Furthermore, this is the junction at which a female cyclist was seriously injured last year when she was ‘in collision with a van.’ I notice that someone recently seems to have ‘lost control’ and crashed into the barriers on the central island, judging by their deformed nature.

Is this a good environment for cycling? Would using a bicycle on these roads be an attractive alternative to using them by car? Because these are exactly the kinds of roads and junctions you have to cycle on if you want to get anywhere in Horsham. And Horsham residents are voting with their feet. Journeys by bicycle make up only 1% of the total number of journeys made here. It’s not hard to see why.

At the end of our ride in Utrecht, my partner asked – ‘Why wouldn’t you ride a bike?’

Well, with conditions for cycling like this in my town, I can think of an alternative question.

Why would you ride a bike?

“Why wouldn’t you ride a bike?”

My partner has not ridden a bicycle for over 20 years. The reasons for this are manifold, but in essence, they boil down to the roads she would have to use being too unpleasant to ride on, in combination with the perceived difficulty of riding a bike in her ‘normal’ clothing. Until she met me, she had seen ‘cycling’ as something that was only carried out by hooligans on the pavement, or by ‘cyclists’, strange individuals who put on specialized clobber, and adopted strategies to survive on the road, which she saw as ‘the car’s environment.’ That she held this view, despite never having driven a car herself, only hints at the pervasiveness of this negative view of cycling, and cyclists, amongst the general public.

Well, she has now broken her cycling embargo.

Her very first journey, in two decades, was on a busy urban street, near the centre of a bustling city of 300,000 people,  a street undergoing roadworks, with buses, vans and other large vehicles overtaking us.

Hardly the best environment to start a nervous and wobbly ride, you might think, but of course, that street was not in Great Britain. It was in Utrecht, in the Netherlands.

Below is the video of that first ride, on Biltstraat. My partner is behind me.

We are separated completely from the main traffic flow, and can progress serenely at a modest pace. It was entirely relaxed. In fact the only thing we actually ended up worrying up was the rather large dog that appears at the 55 second mark – British dogs are often rather hostile to bicycles, but Dutch dogs seem to be more used to them.

Having paused for a coffee, we then discussed what to do next. I had only anticipated cycling up and down a few streets, just to give her a flavour, but having gained her confidence, we actually discussed doing something I hadn’t really anticipated would be possible – cycling all the way out of the city, into the countryside, to a pancake house she had read about in our guidebook, at Rhijnauwen, near Bunnik.

Would this be possible for a novice, who hadn’t ridden a bicycle for decades?

Our first challenge was to negotiate the ring road.  As we approached the large roundabout at then end of Biltstraat, my partner said, quite anxiously, ‘This looks dangerous!’ And indeed it did. There was no way she was going to cycle anywhere near it. But having reassured her that we would not have to worry about traffic at all, we continued, as shown below.

Easy. We then found ourselves alongside a busy dual carriageway, on this path.

The very idea of us negotiating this kind of road in Britain, given her nervousness, would be ludicrous, but cycling along it here was wonderful.

Eventually we entered the suburb of Oost. Here it was slightly more challenging. The cycle paths were not separated from the road.

However, the motor traffic was low in volume, and considerately driven. There were plenty of other cyclists around, and the path was wide enough to give my partner confidence. A van actually followed us as we crawled along (well, ‘crawled’ according to my ‘British’ urban pace) for a few hundred yards, before turning in behind us, rather than risking a pointless overtake. A revelation.

Back onto separated paths –

Huge numbers of cyclists, mostly children. (In fact it was the numbers of cyclists that would present the greatest challenge to my partner, especially as we returned to the city centre at the end of the school day).

We then found ourselves on this access road, alongside the main road, leaving the city limits.

We only encountered one motor vehicle – the van seen in the photo below – during the couple of miles we cycled along this access road.

Plenty of other cyclists though, mostly teenagers, cycling into the city.

Eventually, as we neared Bunnik, our access road switched sides of the main carriageway.

A ‘lycra cyclist’ happily used this path. We only had to push the yellow button on the post to the right, and the lights changed instantly (there also seemed to be an induction loop that our bicycles set off). A large articulated lorry was forced to wait as we crossed to the path on the other side.

Another mile or so of cycling on quiet rural roads, and we were at our destination.

We had negotiated our way out from the very centre of the city, on bikes, to a country house, and it had been remarkably easy.

As we saw these other cyclists arriving at the pancake house, my partner – perhaps a bit exhilarated at having made it to our destination with so little difficulty – turned to me and said,

‘Why wouldn’t you ride a bike?’

And this was coming from someone who had not been anywhere a bicycle for two decades.

Why wouldn’t you, indeed?

Make cycling an obvious and easy way of getting about, and people will do it.

Impressions of Paris

I’m recently back from a short trip to Europe – a few days in Paris, and then a longer period in Utrecht (about which more later).

Paris has always struck me – at least on a few previous visits – as a highly car-centric city, one that is certainly not very friendly to cycling or walking. But while large parts of the city are still deeply unpleasant to navigate on foot, or by bike (the whole shopping district around the Opera is frankly a disgrace, and the Place de la Madeleine, which could be an extraordinarily beautiful open square, is a car-choked nightmare) I think things are improving. At least, that’s the impression I got from the few days I was there.

One of the most striking things I noticed was the partial closure of the Voie Georges Pompidou.

This busy dual carriageway beside the Seine normally looks like this –

But on the Sunday and Monday of my visit, it looked like this –

A convivial riverside walking and cycling environment, presumably created at the expense of ‘smooth traffic flow.’ (It is interesting to note that this section of the dual carriageway is now closed every summer for one entire month, to allow the construction of the ‘Paris Plage‘ – which suggests to me that the use of this road by motor vehicles is not particularly essential in the first place.)

Of course, these restrictions on motor traffic only apply a few days a week, and outside of commuting hours, but it was deeply refreshing to see a major road completely closed to ‘traffic’, coming so soon after the dispiriting Blackfriars saga. And the road closures are not limited to this dual carriageway. A large number of streets in the Marais district have similar closures –

Streets for people.

The result is that the Marais is – during the day, at least – a lovely place to explore. Huge numbers of pedestrians were milling about, across the width of the street.

These photos are taken on streets that weren’t even closed to traffic – pedestrians seemed to be ‘owning’ the road in the face of motor vehicles attempting, mostly carefully, to make progress (note also the 30 km/h speed limits). I can’t imagine similar scenes in an equivalent district in London – the closest I can think of is Soho, where milling about in the middle of the street would most probably get you run over.

I also noticed, in many areas, a basic presumption that all streets should be two-way for cyclists, while remaining one-way for motor vehicles (other areas, as I have mentioned, remain unpleasant for ‘casual’ cycling). You can see these contraflow lanes in all three of the photographs above. More examples –

Again, it is worth comparing this approach with, say, Westminster, where the very idea of opening up one-way streets to two-way cycle flow seems to be anathema.

Finally, some well-designed separated cycle tracks are also in evidence –

A decent width, a good surface, with clear demarcation from the pedestrian areas of the pavement, and with priority over side-roads. Surely this could be achieved in London?

Paris is still certainly not brilliant, but I must admit I was quite impressed with the measures I saw. Steps seem to be being taken in the right direction. Maybe my sunny disposition was a consequence of being on holiday, or because I arrived on the back of total disillusionment with Transport for London, and its seeming hostility towards walking and cycling as a mode of transport, but there are surely lessons for London here. Huge volumes of motor traffic do not a pleasant city make. Is it not time for a change of priorities, not least for those tourists who are now experiencing more convivial walking and cycling environments in other major European cities?

UPDATE – I have just noticed that David Arditti, who blogs at Vole O’Speed, has also recently visited Paris, and his impressions are slightly different from mine.

West Sussex County Council member for Highways and Transport, Lionel Barnard, admits that Sussex roads are lethal for children attempting to cycle to school

Lionel Barnard, West Sussex County Council Cabinet member for Highways & Transport

I wrote recently about the plight of the villagers of Cowfold. West Sussex County Council is proposing to axe the number 86 bus through the village, which would leave the children of the village with no way to get to school, except by being ferried by motor vehicles.

These children, and other residents, could, of course, use a bicycle to get to school, or to nearby towns. But this is Britain in 2011, and attempting to travel a distance of a few miles on a major road is seen as a dangerous and reckless act by most sane-minded citizens, and also by councillors responsible for transport.

Yes, councillors responsible for transport, like councillor Lionel Barnard, the deputy leader of West Sussex County Council, and the Cabinet member for Highways & Transport.

Cllr Barnard bravely (it has to be said) attended a public meeting at Cowfold Village Hall on Wednesday 8th June, organized by the many residents of the village who are understandably upset at staring down the barrel of total car-dependency.

A village parent, Anita Casey, had the following questions for Cllr Barnard.

Where parents cannot take their children to school for good reason, where they cannot get time off work or because of financial reasons, will you accept that some of these children will have no choice but to cycle to school? Are you happy for young cyclists to cycle on the main A272? Is it a safe road for young cyclists to be on? And what is the risk to your political reputation for putting children’s lives at risk because you have removed their safe and preferred option, the 86 bus?

Here is Cllr Barnard’s response –

Nobody wants to put lives at risk. That’s certainly something we would not do. We’ve found an answer that we are looking at very, very closely with Heritage [a private bus company] to get children to school. Where there’s a viable bus service, the bus operators will pick that up and run with it.

I had to read it twice, but it’s there in black and white. Cllr Barnard does not want to put children’s lives at risk by leaving them with the frankly insane option of cycling on his county’s roads.

He is going to keep them safe, of course, but not by ameliorating the conditions of the road for its most vulnerable users – rather, by arranging for a private hire company to ferry them by bus (at a cost to their parents) to their schools.

What I find remarkable is that this kind of attitude is completely unremarkable. West Sussex County Council’s member for Transport openly states that children simply cannot cycle short distances to school without putting themselves at serious risk of death, and nobody bats an eyelid.

No amount of Cyclecraft is ever going to make these roads attractive for children to cycle on, in theory or in practice. But that’s all there is for cyclists in Sussex, in the form of Bikeability. And on top of that, we have the cabinet member with responsibility for transport agreeing with Cowfold residents that cycling to school is an unthinkable option.

Is it any wonder that levels of cycling in this county are flatlining?

Taxis and congestion

Here are some vehicles causing congestion in central London.

Great George Street, queuing to enter Parliament Square.

The Mall, queuing to enter Trafalgar Square.

I have a couple of questions.

Why should these congestion-causing vehicles be exempt from the congestion charge?

Equally, given that the purpose of a bus lane is to allow buses to negotiate congested streets, can someone explain to me why the capacity of these bus lanes should be greatly reduced by allowing vehicles that cause congestion to use them?

What the average British bicycle used to look like

My grandmother’s BSA Star Rider.

Built like a tank. 3 speed Sturmey Archer hub gear. Mud guards. Dynamo lights. Chain cover.

A bicycle that is nearly maintenance-free, that you can just jump on and off, in ordinary clothes. Practical, in other words.

50 years old, and still ridden every day.

(Nice bell, too.)

Transport for London, are you listening?

An excellent video from the London Cycling Campaign, which shows precisely how hostile Blackfriars is for vulnerable road users, even with the current speed limit set at 20 mph. Transport for London want to raise that speed limit back to 30 mph, without any justification.

Add your name to the motion here, if you have not already done so.

Cyclist fatalities due to left-turning lorries

Paula Jurek, a 20-year-old student from Poland, was crushed to death by a left-turning lorry at the junction of Camden Road and St Pancras Way on the 5th of April this year. The lorry driver was arrested on suspicion of causing death by careless driving. (The incident has been covered extensively by the Crap Waltham Forest blog).

Sadly Paula is only the latest in a long line of cyclists who have been killed in London. What is remarkable is how many of these deaths involve left-turning lorries. Off the top of my head, I can immediately think of three this year alone – Paula herself, David Poblet, and Daniel Cox. Other cyclists killed recently by HGVs turning left include David Vilaseca, Haris Ahmed and Everton Smith in 2010, Catriona Patel, Chrystelle Brown, Rebecca Goosen, Adrianna Skrzypiec, Meryem Ozekman, and Maria Fernandez in 2009, Wan-Chen Chang, Nga Diep and Anthony Smith in 2008. There are others.

In most of these cases (with a few notable exceptions), the drivers have escaped any punishment whatsoever. The main explanation seems to be that they could not see the cyclist, or that they were not aware of a cyclist being put into danger around their vehicle. There is some truth to this – lorries on London’s roads have quite significant blind spots, a gross deficiency which, at long last, is hopefully on its way towards being remedied. Whether these drivers are progressing on the assumption that there might be a human being in their blind spot, or on the assumption that there is nothing there at all, is of course another matter.

I have no doubt that cyclists do find themselves in these blind spots, and the lorry drivers, quite obviously, cannot see them. A problem is that the current layout of cycle lanes and ASLs (Advance Stop Lines) actively encourage cyclists to put themselves in the most dangerous positions possible around unsighted HGV drivers (see here and here for the desperately tragic symmetry between the layout of an ASL and that of a lorry blind spot).

But at the same time, there are undoubtedly lorry drivers who take stupid and dangerous risks around cyclists, particularly on left turns. Here is an example.

The flatbed lorry driver who appears in this clip is plainly determined to overtake the cyclist, at all costs, before he turns left (the video appears to show where the Tottenham Court Road race track meets the Euston Road). But there simply isn’t the time or space to do so, meaning that the cyclist is forced to abort his turn, almost coming to a halt to let the lorry proceed first. He notes  – quite correctly – that had he maintained his road position

I would be a gonner! 

The stupidity and recklessness of the lorry driver is apparent from this still photograph.

Only a few yards from the junction, he is still in the ‘Ahead Only’ lane, having failed to complete his overtake of the cyclist. Undeterred, yet quite obviously aware of the cyclist alongside him, he simply moves into the left hand turn lane, without even the courtesy of any indication.

It is worth noting how earlier in this video (at around the 4:06 mark) this same HGV driver has progressed well beyond the ASL, let alone the stop line, at the previous junction, completely obstructing a pedestrian crossing in the process, which gives an indication that this was not a momentary lapse in driving standards. With HGV drivers like this on London’s roads, it is not a great surprise to me that so many cyclists are killed or injured by these vehicles. Note also that additional conflict is created by a lorry parked illegally on what appear to be double red lines, just prior to the junction in question.

(Incidentally, I would suggest you watch this clip right to the end for some lunatic driving, moments later, by a ‘professional’ van driver).

Had this flatbed lorry driver ended up killing or maiming a cyclist who had not been so alert to the danger, would he have escaped punishment? In the absence of witnesses, or camera evidence, I sadly think it is quite possible. An investigator would have to discern whether the cyclist “went up the inside”, or whether the lorry driver simply left the cyclist no choice but to find himself trapped on the inside of his vehicle. If the cyclist is dead, the balance tips a little further towards the former conclusion, as the lorry driver’s word is effectively unanswerable.

Looking at this image of the positioning of the lorry that killed Paula Jurek

I find it difficult to believe that Paula “went up the inside”. I used to live very close to this junction, and it is a particularly tight corner. Any long vehicle is simply not able to proceed around it at anything much greater than walking speed. Would Paula have opted to place herself on the inside of a vehicle that was plainly turning left, as would be obvious for several seconds, owing to the speed at which the lorry would have been moving? I doubt it. What is more likely is that the lorry was attempting an overtake before turning left into the junction, probably having misjudged the speed at which Paula was travelling (there is a long hill to the left of this picture, and it is quite easy for any cyclist to be travelling at or over 20 mph at this junction). The overtake would then simply have not been complete when the lorry started to turn left, and Paula would have found herself walled in by the lorry, with nowhere to go as it closed in on her.

Of course, this is mere speculation – it will be interesting, nevertheless, to find which version of events an inquest finds more plausible, or indeed whether the driver will indeed face charges of causing death by careless driving, at all.

The village of Cowfold moves one step closer to total car dependency

Back in the 1960s, the Sussex village of Cowfold was a short distance – a couple of miles – from a railway station that could take its residents south to Shoreham and Brighton, or north to Horsham.

That railway station disappeared with the Beeching Axe in 1966, along with the rest of the Steyning line, which connected Horsham directly to the south coast, despite strong evidence that the line was, in fact, profitable – or at least, certainly could be. (The closure of this line now means that if I want to travel from Horsham to Brighton by train, I have to journey north-east towards Gatwick Airport, and change at Three Bridges to catch a southbound train, a total journey time of around an hour, which compares poorly with the half an hour it would take to make the journey by car).

Fast forward to 2011, and the two thousand or so inhabitants of Cowfold are now dependent upon either local buses, or their cars, if they have them, to make journeys to Horsham, a distance of around six miles, or to Haywards Heath, eight miles away. (I don’t count the bicycle as a reasonable way of making either of these journeys – going to Horsham from Cowfold involves using the A281, a twisty single-carriageway road, much of it with a 60 mph limit, that I tend to avoid as much as I can when I am out on my bicycle. Likewise, the journey to Haywards Heath would necessitate the use of the similarly cycling-hostile A272.)

So – in short – if you live in Cowfold, and don’t have access to a car, the bus is your only option to get anywhere. And now

Villagers say they will be cut off if councillors press ahead with controversial plans to axe their bus service. Cowfold residents have launched a determined bid to persuade West Sussex County Council not to scrap the 86 bus as part of its cost-cutting measures. The 86 serves Horsham, Southwater, West Grinstead, Partridge Green, Shermanbury, Cowfold, Bolney, Ansty, Cuckfield, including Warden Park School, and Haywards Heath, including the Princess Royal Hospital. The service was one of dozens highlighted by The Resident as being recommended for removal by a cross-party group of councillors, originally in September, but now scheduled for October.

More here, with the comment

If these cuts go ahead, a lot of people’s lives are going to be made more difficult. They just won’t be able to get to work, school or college – or will have to pay through the nose to do so. I bet none of the people making the decisions ever use a bus, which is why they just don’t care. They exist purely in their own little Tory lala land of Range Rovers and taxi trips on expenses and have no idea how the rest of us live.

I get the distinct impression that West Sussex County Council doesn’t really give two figs about anyone who doesn’t have a driving licence, or would like to make journeys by any means other than a car. That means children, who, if this plan goes ahead, will be reliant upon their parents ferrying them everywhere by car – if they have one. Or those who cannot drive, or don’t want to – a significant portion of the elderly population.

All these people are one step closer to being trapped in Cowfold.

Dual carriageways, and how cyclists get hit on them

I wrote in April of the death of William Honour, a 79-year-old cyclist who was killed on a dual carriageway in Surrey after being clipped by two vehicles, and run over by a third. What was apparent from the inquest (yet not so apparent to the presiding coroner, who strangely decided to attribute most of the blame for Mr. Honour’s death to the absence of a thin piece of polystyrene on his head) was that all three drivers of the vehicles that hit Mr. Honour were driving without due care and attention. The first claimed not to have seen the cyclist before striking him, the second was wiping her windscreen as she also struck him, and the third was travelling at a mere two car lengths behind the second, leaving no time to react to the cyclist falling in front of him.

A recent youtube video, in which a cyclist captures an extraordinarily close pass, shows some resemblance to the incident in which Mr. Honour was killed.

The driver of the pale blue Honda Civic can, or should be able to, see the cyclist ahead of him at around the sixteen second mark. Six full seconds elapse before the driver passes the cyclist, and yet despite this lengthy interval, no avoiding action is taken at all, despite there being two opportunities to do so (either to move immediately out into the outside lane, or slow and move out behind the silver car in the outside lane). In the event, the driver passes the cyclist as if he was not there, with inches to spare.

This is, I imagine, how Mr. Honour was clipped. The driver in that instance only had to be a few inches closer, or Mr. Honour to have been slightly more ‘wobbly’, for contact to be made.

Mr. Honour would then have been unbalanced, and would have been struck by the cars behind, which by their own admission were following far too closely. Likewise, in this video, we also see a driver following the overtaking (or ‘overtaking’) Civic at a stupidly close distance. Unsighted, this driver – of the black 4×4 – is unable to see the cyclist, and because the driver of the Civic has not driven in a way that would suggest the presence of a cyclist, has barely a second to react to the cyclist in front of him once he is revealed. This car, again, passes far too close, largely because the driver has no choice.

Tailgating is a general problem on Britain’s roads, and this kind of poor driver behaviour has obvious explanations. But I’m not sure what reasons lie behind the kind of driving exhibited by the Honda Civic. I can only speculate. The most plausible explanation, to me, is a complete lack of awareness of how dangerous it is to pass that close to a cyclist, at that kind of speed differential, coupled with the rarity of seeing cyclists on these kinds of roads. In a minority of instances, I suspect the motivation might be contempt for the cyclist, but that is less likely.

In any event, I think national speed limit dual carriageways are highly dangerous to cycle on, because the aforementioned speed differential means that even competent and alert drivers have a limited amount of time to react to the presence of cyclists. The problem is compounded at busier periods, when movement into the outside lane to pass safely is more difficult. Even hardened cyclists speak of dual carriageways they avoid at all costs. They are a part of the road network that are essentially off limits to cyclists, no-go areas between towns and villages that cyclists have to find alternative routes to navigate between.

It shouldn’t be like this, of course. If we had a department for transport that cared to the slightest degree about cycling, safe, well-maintained and separated tracks would have been, and would be, constructed alongside these roads at little additional cost. As it is, cyclists are expected to take their life in their hands and use them, or make lengthier (and usually hillier) journeys than they would otherwise make if they were to use their car. They have been forgotten about.