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Dave Hill
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Cycling and safety: some top comments
Mar 12th
My latest for Cif went live this morning. It’s about Boris’s Cycle Safety Plan and the majority of commenters have, all too predictably, been ignorant and boring Boris trolls. However, there were welcome exceptions. I thought some of their contributions deserved highlighting here. Here’s one from Constituent:
In Copenhagen, many roads have cycle lanes between the pavement and the road itself, higher than the road, lower than the pavement. These can be blocked by pedestrians when buses arrive at bus stops, and conversely I’ve seen pavements blocked by parked cycles, forcing pedestrians to use the cycle lanes.
Here, a bit of paint isn’t going to help much, unless we are talking about replacing the red and yellow lines telling you where you can’t park your car with green lines showing where you can park. The target should be for no one to go into London without having off-street parking arranged.
As things start, the biggest problem for cyclists is parked cars, and there’s a strong argument for more multi storey parking towers all over the place, perhaps with a café on the top where you can enjoy the view. Local residents currently using street parking in trafficked areas could rent spaces in the towers at greatly reduced rates.
And from Laurie1984:
Most of the traffic nowadays in central London is white vans, black cabs and lorrys. Very few ‘normal’ motorists drive into central London, as they have enough sense to not even try. Van drivers and cabbies depend on getting from A to B quickly for their livelihoods, and so make the more dangerous drivers. In my entirely anecdotal experience of a pedestrian in central London, it’s the cabbies and van drivers who seem to regularly try and kill me. Find a way to make them more careful drivers and I’ll start cycling. (In fact, use the carrot approach – convince them by driving safer, more people will cycle, thereby freeing up the roads for them to get around quicker).
This struck a chord with the reverent:
I have to agree with Laurie1984 above that there is a big problem with commercial vehicles in central London. Delivery van and private hire cars seem to be driven particually badly. With the delivery van they are often hardly full (when I’ve seem them open) so this could be done with far fewer vans, or even some delivery bikes. Private hire cars need much better regulation, as TfL give them a badge for the back of the car but won’t do anything about their driving afterwards.
I write having almost been wiped out by a Addison Lee car this morning on Threadneedle St as he was trying to get the red light first. He then tried to run the cyclist behind me into the pavement on Bishopsgate (who had some words at the next set of light).
Earlier, thereverent had observed of Boris’s approach:
[There] are some steps in the right direction, but still far too little. I still think that when transport planners re-design roads they only look at the car and bus point of view. This is why you get one-way systems with no cycle provision (when one could be easily put in) or a really poor one (Vauxhall). Or cycle lanes which either disappear, have bus shelters or other obstructions in them, and then throw you back on the road at a dangerous point. Certainly some of the roads in London that have tried to get two narrow lanes should be only one lane. Some driver re-education about Advanced Stop Lanes (ASLs) is needed.
Two small steps to make the superhighway much better would be:
- Ensure none of the cycle highway was part of a car lane (which some of it in the youtube clip). This might mean making some double lane roads single lane.
- Provide traffic light which have cycle-only phases allowing cyclist to get clear of the traffic (particularly left-turning traffic).
Thanks for all these comments and also to everyone who contributed so thoughtfully here and here and here earlier this week. This is the Mayor’s “year of cycling”. There’s lots to talk about. Keep the useful comments coming and have a collision-free weekend.
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TfL: staff cuts and future funding
Mar 12th
The start of my latest newsletter:
Cynicism is a dreadful thing. But when you receive a press release from a major public sector employer proclaiming a “vision for the future,” promising greater efficiency and containing a pledge on staffing that is hedged like the maze at Hampton Court, the jaded eye skips instinctively down the page to find where the job cuts have been hidden.
There will be 700-800, TfL thinks, 450 of them among ticket office staff (it’s all in here). Its defence is that more and more people are using Oysters and they have more points at which to purchase them, which means the need for ticket office staff is shrinking. It addresses concerns about safety – deserted stations and dead of night, that kind of thing – by pointing out that there are more police officers patrolling.
The Lib Dems aren’t impressed and neither are Labour, though their guns are semi-spiked by the fact that Ken Livingstone planned to close ticket offices too. I’d guess that Boris’s rationalisation for breaking a manifesto pledge, “ensuring there is always a manned ticket office at every station” (see page 2) may draw on this fact at next week’s MQT. Meanwhile, the RMT has pledged “an all-out fight”.
What happened to that no-strike deal (see page 6)? And what will happen to the flow of investment if and when George occupies the Treasury? Or indeed if Alistair remains there? Ponder this from Regeneration and Renewal:
Mayoral agency Transport for London is to publish a report next month to make the case for using a US infrastructure funding tool to fund a £600 million extension of the Northern Line to the Nine Elms area in Wandsworth.
Speaking yesterday in London at a conference organised by real estate advisers CB Richard Ellis, Matthew Hudson, head of corporate finance at TfL, said the report would set out a “concrete example” of how Tax Increment Financing could be used to unlock the regeneration of the Nine Elms opportunity area.
The Tif model, widely used in the US, finances infrastructure projects by borrowing against future tax revenues resulting from regeneration. “We have a report coming out in five weeks time, that will set out a concrete example of Tif, Hudson said. “It will have all the cashflows, all the structures, which I hope will stimulate the debate and move things forward.”
Remember Tif? Sounds like a nice girl. Boris thinks thinks so too.
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Tony McNulty under pressure
Mar 12th
Newly-added to our elections-minded list, Stanmore Politics reports news and views about its piece of the borough of Harrow. Today, it links to one right-wing populist criticising another. The latter is local MP Tony McNulty, who has so personified the authoritarian and arrogant strands of “New” Labour that he’s become target number one of a campaign to bring such offenders to justice. It says:
Our aim is for a list of MPs from all major parties who we will then call out for their “crimes against democracy” and launch major campaigns in their constituencies, highlighting their poor record on democratic reform and civil liberties…
Ex-minister Tony McNulty is first in our sights. [He] resigned in disgrace last year following allegations over his expenses, [and] is a well-known champion of the government’s unpopular ID card scheme and an opponent of a transparent Parliament.
In June 2009 the MP for Harrow East resigned having claimed expenses on a second home, occupied by his parents, just eight miles away from his primary residence. He had previously supported MPs’ bid to keep their expenses secret by exempting Parliament from freedom of information.
Power 2010 volunteers and organisers are planning to descend on Harrow East, beginning next week, plastering “Wanted for crimes against democracy” posters across town, whilst thousands of “swing” voters in the constituency will receive targeted campaign literature highlighting his opposition to a cleaned up reformed politics. You’ll be hearing more about the campaign in Harrow East in the days to come.
You might be hearing about it here too. Is a bluewash on its way? If so, “New” Labour, it will serve you right.
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Elections in Hounslow: bad news for the Keens
Mar 12th
Andrew Sparrow, writing yesterday:
The Labour MPs Alan and Ann Keen were today ordered to repay £1,500 after an investigation found that they had broken Commons rules in relation to second home expenses. The Commons standards and privileges committee said that the couple had claimed money from the second home allowance to which they were not entitled because their main home was empty and uninhabitable.
But the committee said that they should not have to repay all the money they were deemed to have claimed wrongly because the Commons authorities told them twice their arrangements were acceptable. In a report, the committee also said the pair had been the victims of “malign and sometimes false” reporting in the media.
Well, we’ll have none of that here. We will, though, link to a story in the Hounslow Guardian which says:
The borough’s Conservative group has been accused of misusing £13,200 of taxpayers’ money in a “pre-election advertising blitz”. Tory-led Hounslow Council erected 50 banners and signs – each costing £264 – highlighting the administration’s main achievements, including freezing council tax and its new recycling services.
But Labour expressed concern that the adverts looked like they were part of the Conservative central office’s election campaign. Steve Curran, chairman of the Brentford and Isleworth constituency Labour Party, said: “The Tory council’s cynical use of taxpayers’ money in a pre-election advertising blitz across the borough is a disgrace.”
And so on. Personally, I’m not sure which I am more sick of: boroughs of whatever political complexion hanging banners off every lamp post or their boasting about freezing (or slightly cutting) their Council Tax when the financial benefit to those who pay it is miniscule.
Sorry, have I wandered off the point? Oh yes. Anyway, this latest publicity for the Keens can’t help them in their already difficult battle to retain the Tory-run borough’s two parliamentary seats for Labour. “No comment from Alan Keen about this on his website yet,” remarks the latter’s Tory opponent, icily. The beast.
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Metropolitan Lines: cuts and visions on the Underground
Mar 12th
Transport for London insist the Tube service will improve in spite of impending staff cuts, but even if they’re right how long can it last? Plus, the “cycle revolution”, a Spitalfields blog and ten years of the London Eye
Cynicism is a dreadful thing. But when you receive a press release from a major public sector employer proclaiming a “vision for the future,” promising greater efficiency and containing a pledge on staffing that is hedged like the maze at Hampton Court, the jaded eye skips instinctively down the page to find where the job cuts have been hidden.
Actually, that’s a bit unfair on Transport for London. The message it issued to the media yesterday wisely acknowledged upfront that “job reductions” are “proposed” on London Underground and commits to none being compulsory; wisely, because we all knew this was coming. Even so, there are seven paragraphs of softening up before the crunch number is declared: “a net reduction of around 700-800 posts.”
Two questions. The first is “what does it mean?” Mayor Johnson’s opponents have zoomed in on the staffing of Tube station ticket offices where 450 posts could go: so much for Boris’s election pledge to “defend local ticket offices” (see page 9) against a closure programme drawn up by his predecessor (see page 2). TfL points to increased Oyster use and purchase points and, in response to safety concerns, a larger police presence in trains and stations.
Expect lively exchanges on this theme at Mayor’s Question Time next Wednesday, where Boris will surely contend that even with the recession and the unending wrangles over the cost of the upgrades, the Underground is getting better all the time. But cuts are cuts are cuts, which brings us to the second question, one certain to be asked by LU employees and passengers alike: “Where will it end?”
Anniversary Eye
The capital’s big wheel is ten years old. Time flies – or maybe in this case it rotates. On Tuesday the Guardian’s Jonathan Glancey looked back to the impact of its birth:
Every view in and through Westminster, and along the Thames, was changed. Suddenly, this spidery and beautifully resolved ferris wheel crowned Victorian terraces, filled unexpected views along avenues of plane trees and sat like a tiara atop government offices.
Perhaps its best aspect is that it also offers awe-inspiring and uninterrupted views over London. From up top on a clear day, the entire city can be peered down upon and encompassed. The patterns of London’s growth can be seen spreading into subtopia and the green belt like rings marking the age of venerable trees.
Now read on.
On yer bikes
As I write this sentence, some that I wrote yesterday have just gone live at Comment Is Free. They form a piece about the Mayor’s policies for encouraging cycling and responses to these from London cyclists. The usual stage army of Boris trolls has invaded the comment thread, wasting the site’s space and their own time (I rarely pay them any attention and when I do they just send me to sleep).
My argument is that although “the cycling Mayor’ has taken steps to nurture recent increases in bicycle journeys in the capital, any “cycle revolution” truly worthy of the term will require much bolder measures. Read the article here. Should you feel moved to help combat the woeful standard of the early contributions “below the line,” please be my guest. You might be interested to know that the article is informed by the far higher standard of comment posted here and here.
London blogosphere
Pausing only to re-alert you to the Guardian’s lengthening, elections-minded list of Top London Bloggers, I urge you to discover Spitalfields Life. It’s a blog that provides portraits of its neighbourhood, both literary and photographic. Try this, on local barbers:
Starting in Brick Lane, Sarah and I wove our way through the sidestreets on our bizarre pilgrimage, drifting down through Whitechapel and further South as far as Commercial Rd in the unrelenting damp. We visited big salons and tiny salons, full salons and empty salons, sleek new salons and crumby old parlours. And every one secured a different place in my heart because each possessed a different poetry, a poetry that celebrates human life and hopes, equally containing the mundane need to be tidy alongside the aspiration to be be your best. The humble barber shop is an oasis of peace and reflection, where cares are shorn away to allow a fresh start. This is where men go to get renewed.
Such journeys of discovery are published daily. Join them here.
Coming up
On Sunday London celebrates St Patrick’s Day. Meanwhile, the month-long Open Jewish Culture festival continues. I have learned that on Tuesday evening there will be a talk on investigative journalism in London, but don’t ask me to reveal my source. Thanks for reading and keep in touch.
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Jenny Jones calls for better London road safety
Mar 11th
The name of the young cyclist who died near Guy’s hospital on Tuesday has been released:
Friends of a medical student who was crushed to death in a collision with a tipper truck while cycling to lectures paid tribute to an “incredibly talented” young man today. Muhammad “Haris” Ahmed, 21, died instantly in the collision near London Bridge on Tuesday morning…Mr Ahmed was a fourth-year medical student at King’s College and was on his way to the Guy’s Hospital campus when he died at the junction of Weston Street and Snowsfields.
The piece in the Standard also quotes Jenny Jones AM. She refers also to the second cyclist to die this week:
Many of us feel a mix of sadness and anger at these latest deaths of cyclists in London. This summer the Mayor is encouraging thousands of inexperienced riders to use the cycling superhighways and share the roads with some of the main lorry routes through the capital. The most obvious action for him is to ban lorries from these cycling commuter routes at peak times. The least he can do is to re-engineer these routes to give cyclists priority.
The same comment appears here and Jones covers the waterfront of road safety issues in a piece for Progressive London:
Having spent nine years pushing for road safety to be taken seriously by the Met Police, I find that the previous slow incremental improvements are now being reversed with barely a guilty shrug from the Mayor’s office.
First, there is a decline of 20 police officers, 5 PCSOs and 5 staff working on road safety. Secondly, cuts to the London Safety Camera Partnership mean the redeployment of 45 police staff, which means it’s a way of letting off 280,000 speeding drivers and red light jumpers who would previously have been sent fines.
What is particularly worrying is that this cutback on enforcing the rules of the road is happening at the same time as the Mayor is promoting trials of the naked streets idea and the removal of traffic lights.
Now read on.
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Does switching off an escalator at Victoria station really save energy?
Mar 11th
His email describes an experience he had yesterday evening:
At Victoria Station tonight at 8.00pm London Underground closed down one of the up escalators from Victoria Line to the main concourse. They put up a sign saying it was “switched off to save energy”. It goes on to say that this would happen during quieter times of the day as a way of saving energy. But this happened at 8.00pm on a weekday night when trains were still pretty full, which meant there was a queue of people trying to get up one escalator, forcing others to walk up a non-moving escalator. See Picture.
I was sceptical that any saving made would be greater than the cost of the inconvenience to Tube users (especially as there are lots of travellers with suitcases going to Gatwick airport) plus the unintended side affect of some travellers deciding to use cars or other more polluting forms of transport than Tube travel.
Interesting. The reader asks?
How much money is saved per hour turning off the escalators? My original guess that it would need to be thousands of pounds per hour, to outweigh the potential dis-benefits of the above.
Helpfully the TFL website tells us how much per year an escalator costs to run. There is a report from 2009 which states: “The amount of electricity used by an escalator varies depending on how long it is and how far it rises but as a guide will cost in the region of between £7,000 and £12,000 each year.”
This is from page 33 of the London Underground Carbon Footprint report 2008, published in 2009. My reader continues:
I was surprised by these low figures. If we assume that the escalator at Victoria station is one of the more expensive ones, the hourly cost is less than £2.00 per hour: £12,000 divided by 365 days divided by 18 hours per day.
£1.83, to be exact. Well, that’s what my calculator says.
In July 2009 Boris Johnson said about the £695million plan to improve the station: “This key upgrade will transform the experience for those using the station – making life easier and more convenient.” But TfL’s own figures suggest it doesn’t make economic or environmental sense to turn off escalators at 8.00pm in busy stations like Victoria.
I should disclose two things about this reader: one, I know him to be a very competent person; two, he is a Labour Party member. That done, I’ll be asking TfL if they think he has a point.
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Top London bloggers: meet NW6
Mar 11th
I’m aware that there’s more than one top blog in the territory but I’ve picked NW6 to add to the Guardian’s list at this moment in history because it’s been doing plenty of politics lately – remember, the approach of the borough and general elections means I’m particularly interested just now in forging links with London bloggers who are that way inclined. NW6 has carried this and this and also this:
She’s a Cambridge graduate with a first class degree in English, she’s scaled the House of Commons to protest against a third runway at Heathrow, and she still fancies the idea of one day becoming a priest, but her most significant achievement could well take place this summer, as Tamsin Omond stands for election here in Hampstead & Kilburn. Having made a name for herself as a passionate, savvy, even sexy climate change activist, she now wants to take on the Man from the inside.
Now read on. Also does kippers and cigars.
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Tube Lines, TfL and the Law
Mar 10th
In case you missed him, here’s Dan Milmo:
Boris Johnson must consider making cuts to London’s public transport network or postponing improvements to one of the capital’s busiest underground lines after he was told to plug a £460m funding gap in a controversial public-private partnership to repair the tube system…In a final ruling today, the arbiter of the PPP contracts, Chris Bolt, said Tube Lines’s work programme over the next seven-and-a-half years should cost £4.46bn. Publicly owned London Underground, which still runs the tube network on a day-to-day basis, must fund the Tube Lines work and has budgeted only £4bn for it – leaving a shortfall of £460m on its already stretched balance sheet.
What happens next? Boris says he’s considering legal action. Amusingly, Ken Livingstone has not only told the BBC he’d do the same, he’s also echoed his nemesis’s observation that the funding gap practically matches the amount stumped up by the tax-payer so Tube Lines could borrow staff from its own parent company. And, of course, both agree that in the first place it’s all Gordon’s fault.
Tube Lines’s response has been more hedged. Their press release says it is “pleased that the Arbiter has been minded to instruct Transport for London (TfL) to fully fund the works,” and adds that, “The [arbiter's] findings are extremely complex and Tube Lines will be carrying out a full assessment to better understand the basis of the judgment and its implications.”
Hmm. A source at TfL murmurs that Tube Lines might try its own legal challenge to the arbiter’s calculations – remember, they had wanted £5.75 billion to finish the job, not a piffling £4.6 billion. But a spokesman for the company demurs. “It’s a price that we can work with,” he tells me, “though there’s a lot of work to do with London Underground. A legal challenge can’t be ruled out, but we’re not thinking that way at this stage.”
Perhaps we should think of it, for now at least, as a few more million saved.
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Is Boris’s ‘cycle revolution’ for real? | Dave Hill
Mar 12th
Posted by Dave Hill in Politics
No comments
Until he takes bolder anti-car measures, Boris Johnson’s plans to promote cycling in London are little more than hype
Here are two versions of the same story. The way the authorities tell it, London’s “cycle revolution” is set to intensify thanks to the brilliant innovations of its mayor, Boris Johnson. May’s completion of two of his promised dozen “cycle superhighways” linking the capital’s suburbs with its core will be followed by the summer launch of his central London bike hire scheme. Mindful that apprehension deters many potential converts to pedal-power, he has just produced a cycle safety plan that firmly asserts that “Cycling levels in London have increased sharply in recent years while the rate of casualties has declined,” and that Johnson wants these parallel trends maintained.
But some of London’s two-wheel travellers relate the tale differently. One has made a video of riding a stretch of one of the superhighways-in-progress and isn’t impressed. It seems to amount to a long, narrow strip of Smurf-blue where there were previously shorter narrow strips of green. I posted the clip here and high-grade comments ensued. All were critical, not least because the lanes aren’t wider or more protected against incursions by motor vehicles. “I’ve yet to hear a single experienced cyclist say anything good about the ’superhighways” wrote JimG, who linked to this critique of Transport for London’s plans. Its author, Dave Hembrow, was born in the UK but lives in the Netherlands. He says they do city cycling much better there.
And then there are the deaths. There were 13 in London last year and 15 in 2008. One took place near Guy’s hospital on Tuesday, coinciding with the cycle safety plan’s appearance. Another happened in Hackney the following day. Both followed collisions with tipper trucks. Lethal contact with large commercial vehicles is cyclists’ greatest safety fear, one Boris Johnson surely shares given his “near-death experience” in Limehouse. The safety plan points out that a “significant growth” in the number of cycle journeys between 2003 and 2008 was accompanied by a relatively small increase in the number of cycling casualties of all kinds, but also acknowledges that collisions involving cyclists are “still one of the most serious challenges to road safety in the capital”. Recorded injuries ranging from fatal to slight totalled 3,409 last year.
Anxiety about safety is a major obstacle to maximising cycling in London. Around half a million journeys are made on a bike each day, double the number in 2000. Yet this is a fraction of the number made by car, and Boris has argued that many of those could be cycle ones instead: a daily 2.4 million in the 12 Outer London boroughs alone – around half. His safety plan lists training courses, better information and education, improved vehicle technology and stronger action against irresponsible road-users as aspirations. His goal is for the present number of cycling journeys to have quadrupled by 2026. He’s obviously working on it, not least by setting a conspicuous example. The London Cycling Campaign seems broadly behind him. But should he be doing more?
As a bus addict I’m unlikely to ever switch to two wheels in a big way, but until London’s roads feel far less hostile to cyclists I remain reluctant to even sample joining their ranks. When commenters at my blog – enjoy their insights here and here – advocate doubling the width of cycle lanes, bold adjustments to road rules, markings and architecture or doing far more to highlight safe routes, it strikes a chord. I start imagining a future in which cars and trucks are minority road transport modes and buses and bicycles dominate. To reach it, though, would require the political will and skill to persuade voters to support bolder measures. The present mayor, mindful that motorists regard him as their friend, seems prepared to go only so far. Until a successor goes much further, the term “cycle revolution” will sound more like hype than reality to me.