Boris Johnson's Cycle KillerHighways

Yesterday the Evening Standard asked me to write a comment piece for them in response to a lorry driver killing (another) female on a bike in London. ES doesn't publish the content online, so here's my edit of what I wrote for them:

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We already know that junctions like Aldgate are incredibly dangerous for cyclists. This is because Boris Johnson has simply put blue paint on the road in the middle of a traffic lane being used by high volumes of heavy, fast moving vehicles, like the lorry that was responsible for the French student’s death. Handing out leaflets about Advance Stop Boxes or trying to put a higher volume of cyclists on the road (Boris’s “solution”) is going to do nothing to make this safer for those on a bike. As the three deaths so far on CS2 show, accidents can, and do, happen. When our roads are designed badly these accidents result in deaths. The humane option, and the one used to make cycling safer world-wide in cities such as New York, Amsterdam and Copenhagen, is to physically segregate lethal motor traffic from cyclists, so that tragic deaths like Friday’s become near-impossible. A physical barrier separating cycle lanes means that it’s simply not possible for HGVs and cyclists to collide with each other. At junctions with large amounts of traffic turning left a second cycle lane for cyclists going straight on can be used to prevent bikes and buses coming into conflict, or a separate cycle-only traffic light phase can be created. Unsurprisingly, 20mph limits also help a great deal, and are the norm in Berlin, Paris and Zurich.

However, all of these measures involve reallocating road-space from motor traffic to cycles-only, leading to the possible contraction or removal of a traffic lane. Similarly, 20mph limits and cycle-only traffic light phases will slightly slow down traffic. Up till now, TfL have prioritized motor traffic capacity and speed over cycle safety (while hypocritically spending large sums of money encouraging Londoners to cycle in unimproved conditions). The result has been an appallingly high number of cycle deaths in our capital – a number which is continually rising – including three deaths on Cycle “SuperHighway” 2 alone.

The question TfL, the boroughs, and Londoners need to ask themselves is are we willing to see a 30 second increase in traffic journey times in order to prevent further tragedy on our streets, where a Darwinian road environment means that those who obey the law are the most likely to die? Are we willing to see a slight reduction in traffic capacity in order to create a city which is unpolluted, quiet, cleaner, greener, and no longer the capital of the fattest nation in Western Europe? Are we willing to partially reduce the number of empty taxis that sit needlessly in traffic choking our streets with exhaust in order to bring London’s road safety up to the mark set by international rivals like New York and Tokyo?

Unfortunately, the current City of London plans for redesigning Aldgate show they are spending £12million to create a mere 70m of segregated cycle lane, despite the fact the average distance between the buildings on either side of the street is 22m. This is not only a colossal waste of money (as the Cycle “SuperHighways” were), but it’s not going to do anything to make this dangerous area safer for cyclists, despite the fact with 22m to play with there is ample room for cycle-only lanes.

Our city planners are stuck in the 1970s, designing inhospitable streets that kill French students. They need to join us in 2013 and make tough decisions about motor traffic capacity in order to create a London that is actually safe to cycle in. Not a London where Boris Johnson tells us we just need to ‘keep our wits about us’ and then Londoner’s like Dr Katherine Giles (killed by an HGV in April) lose their lives on the way to work.

Space for cyclists physically separated from motorised traffic is *not* hard to provide. This photo is from  Heidelberg, Germany. We need this sort of street design all over London. And we need it now.

Article printed as a letter in Tuesday's Evening Standard (9/7/2013)

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On a side note, it is telling how nervous and worried Boris Johnson looks in the video of BBC's recent report on this needless tragedy. Johnson gave the BBC some absolute crap about 'safety in numbers'. Put more cyclists sharing 'general traffic lanes' with HGVs and lorries on Cycle "SuperHighway" 2, and you are going to have even more cycle deaths, not fewer. The Mayor needs to get his act together. He doesn't even look like he believes in what he's saying as he says it...

A woman riding a Boris Bike killed by a lorry on Boris's Cycle "SuperHighway" 2. Paint on the road is not cycle infrastructure; TfL and the local councils need to confront this before even more Londoners are killed.

Last night we heard the tragic news that a woman riding a Boris Bike on one of the Mayor's supposedly top-quality Cycle "SuperHighways" was killed by a collision with a lorry which in all probability drove into her. This is the first time a Boris Bike user has been killed in London, but it isn't the first death along the route of Cycle Superhighway 2 (CS2). Very, very sad.

Photo of the scene via @velorución on Twitter

This recent and shocking death, the first on a Barclays Cycle Hire Bike could be a political catastrophe for the Mayor, Boris Johnson.

You can interpet the story in many ways, but one of them is surely that of a woman lured by TfL's copious and expensive advertising of 'cycling' into riding one of Boris Johnson's new Barclays bikes, expecting to be safe on Boris Johnson's 'international standard' Cycle Superhighway 2, and then being tragically killed because the Cycle Superhighway is in fact a death trap where cyclists mix freely with aggressive motorists and HGVs that can, and do, kill them all too easily.

This death also comes only a few days after TfL released data showing that the total number of people seriously injured or killed on bikes on London's roads last year was up 60% on the long term average 2005 - 2009.

UK road casualty figures for those not on a bike are at a record low, but this figure masks the fact that cycling road casualties are increasingly sharply.

In fact, cycling fatalities are going up more quickly than the increase in riders on the road. Cyclist deaths rose 10% during 2012, with serious injuries up by 4%, the latter increasing for the eighth consecutive year.

Pic courtesy of @geographyjim

As this graph shows, cyclists are coming to take up an increasingly high percentage of all those killed or seriously injured in London. Motorists and pedestrians are getting safer, but cyclists are getting far more vulnerable.

The main reason for this is London's stunning lack of safe bicycle infrastructure. Segregated tracks like Tavistock Place, or the protected contra-flow on King Street in Hammersmith, are notable for their scarcity. Cycle "Superhighway" 2, like most of the cycle "superhighways", is simply some blue paint on the road where cyclists and heavy traffic mix freely.

Picture of CS2 outside Aldgate (near where this woman died) from June 2013, courtesy of Cyclists in the City. The lorry driver overtook these cyclists on a corner, putting them both in a life-threatening situation, stuck between an iron fence and a 30-tonne vehicle. The driver did this because the road is made up of 'general traffic lanes' that encourage lorry drivers to overtake cyclists with 50cm to spare, putting thousands of lives at risk everyday in our capital. The easy solution is to provide a cycle-only lane that those driving motorised traffic cannot enter.

It is easy to see from the above photo just how dangerous it is to mix cyclists and heavy traffic. Fatalities can, will, and do happen. Enough is enough.

And yet, at the City of London Cycling Forum last Tuesday officials representing the City of London explained their plans to spend over £12 million redeveloping the Aldgate gyratory, and in the process delivering just 70m of segregated bike lane.

That's right, £12 million for 70m of actual protected space in which tragic deaths can no longer occur.

What was just as concerning was that both of the City of London and TfL are using the weasel words - this route is for the 'experienced commuter' - to avoid putting in any decent infrastructure to fatal routes like the CS2. The problem with this type of thinking is that if you don't make cycle routes safe then people die on them. It doesn't matter if they are 'experienced commuters' or 'first-time cyclists'. Mixing humans on bikes with steel-clad HGVs is fatal.

It's not rocket science. This map of collisions in the Aldgate area, shown at City of London Cycle Forum,  shows clearly where proper junctions and segregated infrastructure that prevent cyclists and traffic mixing are desperately needed. You can guess where last night's fatality occurred... (Photo via @nuttyxander)

I pointed out to the City officials that rather than focusing on a hard to understand network of routes for cyclists of 'different abilities', wouldn't the simplest thing to encourage cycling be to make those routes that cyclists currently use much safer than they currently are?

Countless surveys tell us that the primary factor putting people off cycling is that they think it's too dangerous. Deaths, like the one on Boris's Cycle "SuperHighway" last night, are only going to further reinforce this view. Surely the best way to encourage cycling is to take routes that already have heavy cycle traffic, like Cycle "SuperHighway" 2 or London Bridge, and create proper segregated infrastructure that means that needless and avoidable deaths like these can become a thing of the past.

If the woman cycling on a Boris Bike on CS2 last night had been on an actually segregated lane (as pictured here, 9th Avenue New York) the fatal collision with a lorry would have been almost impossible.

And yet, instead we find local officials planning 'Quiteways' along roads that continue to contain dangerously and intimidatingly large volumes of through traffic. And, there are no immediate plans to put proper protection for cyclists onto extremely busy cycle routes like Waterloo Bridge where in rush hour over 40% of the vehicles are bikes.

Waterloo Bridge has a cycle lane but it's actually a car park (can you see the outline under all those parked cars?). This is why we need segregated, physically separated cycle lanes on these busy routes. And we need them now before more Londoners die. Photo courtesy Cyclists in the City.

Appalling. Simply appalling.

TfL and London's Councils need to put their heads together and sort all the already busy cycle routes in London, making them subjectively and objectively safe. If they spend their precious time elsewhere they're only going to have more deaths on their hands on heavily cycled routes that are supposed to be safe. Like CS2. Like CS7. Like London Bridge.

And those working in transport planning in London should be forced to get on a bike and cycle our 'Superhighways' like the deadly, fatal CS2, before they come up with schemes that cost £12 million and deliver a laughable 70m of segregated cycle track.

Transport planners need to have ridden a bike on London's busy streets before they create computerised animations (as the City of London team did at the most recent Cycling Forum) that show computerised HGVs turning left over computerised cyclists, and computerised cyclists calming filtering through a 0.5m gap between a stationary bus and a stack of cars waiting at a red light. It is not safe for cyclists to be driven over by HGVs or filter through 0.5m gaps. It is ridiculous that anyone could think in this way.

Yet this is how local transport officials still plan for cycle use. Hence only 70m of segregated space in a £12 million redevelopment.

Appalling. Simply appalling.

Philippine De Gerin-Ricard, a 20 year old French student, was killed by a lorry driver while riding a Boris Bike along one of Boris Johnson's Cycle "SuperHighways" that is now being investigated by police for being of a criminally poor design. Photo courtesy Evening Standard.

Kate Hoey MP is a complete disgrace

Given the news today (that was even lauded in the Daily Mail!!!) of how forward-thinking politicians like Boris Johnson (supported by his ever impressive 'Cycling Czar' Andrew Gilligan) are making ground-breaking advances in terms of cycling policy, I thought it might be a good time to reflect on those politicians that are at the other end of the spectrum.

Kate Hoey, Labour MP for Vauxhall, is an absolute disgrace, and I would urge anyone who is her constituent or has any contact with her to let her know this in writing.

Kate Hoey has been dangerously cycle-toxic for all of her 14 years as MP for Vauxhall

Danny from Cyclists in the City has previously written about her cretinous attitude towards cycling.

However, her latest piece of idiocy has been to block the installation of a large Cycle Hire Docking Station on Cornwall Road, SE1, in order to preserve car-parking bays.

It is completely ridiculous to block the installation of 35 bike hire racks that can be used by hundreds people during the course of a day in order to preserve 3 on-street car parking spaces.

Moreover, SE1 a part of London that, located so close to Waterloo and the South Bank, is already extremely congested and busy, and therefore unsuitable for heavy on-street car-use.

What especially annoys be about Kate Hoey's despicable actions is the amount of grief that TfL and the Mayor sustain for problems with the Boris Bike system, when it is politicians like Hoey (and the Westminster and Kensington & Chelsea councils that won't let TfL move Boris Bikes around in the early morning) that are actively preventing improvements to the Cycle Hire Scheme.

Mark Field, Conservative MP for Westminster, does exactly the same thing in his constituency.

Those who like cycling to get from A to B should be ever aware that often it is not TfL that are the problem, but idiotic politicians like Kate Hoey and Mark Field who are deliberately disrupting and retarding TfL's efforts to improve cycling in London.

Doubling of Boris Bike Fares from 2 January 2013 - DISASTROUS move by Boris Johnson and TfL

EDIT (25/4/13) - As predicted... Boris Bike rentals drop by a third in the first three months of 2013 (and that's despite an overall increase in the total number of journeys made by bike in London, and large amounts of 'cycling publicity' caused by our new Cycling Commisioner)

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From 2 January 2013 daily access to the London Cycle Hire Scheme will double from £1 to £2, weekly access from £5 to £10, and yearly access from £45 to £90.

This is an absolutely atrocious move by Boris Johnson and TfL at just the point when cycling in London generally, and usage of the Boris Bikes, seems to be on the rise.

As this blog has previously argued, one of the principle advantages of the London Cycle Hire Scheme (if not the principal advantage) is the low cost of renting a Boris Bike, making it in almost all situations the cheapest way of getting around London short of walking.

Increasing the charge for access fees by 100% - while bus and tube fares rise by only 4.2% - will completely destroy London Cycle Hire's position as the cheapest form of transport in London, and make single bus and tube journeys, in certain situations, a cheaper way for a Londoner to get from A to B than renting a Boris Bike.

Similarly, raising the price of annual subscriptions will make it much harder to woo new members to the scheme and may convince many existing customers (like myself) to choose not to renew their membership next year.

Yearly membership to London Cycle Hire to double from £45 to £90 from January 2nd 2013.

While their might be a very slight uptake is usage from certain sections of the upper-middle classes that will inevitably see a more expensive product as worth buying simply on account of its higher price, the overall and unavoidable effect of this price hike will be to further to cement an image of cycling that is centered on the rich, white, middle class.

This is exactly what cycling shouldn't be.

Cycling is the cheapest, greenest, and healthiest mode of transport known to man. It should therefore be associated with all social groups, especially lower-income segments of the population.

Instead Boris Johnson and TfL's latest decision will only further entrench a completely unnecessary and invalid view of cycling that is restricted to 'lyrca-louts' and 'arsehole-bankers'.

Moreover, if the doubling of rental costs results in a dip in Boris Bike usage, this fare increase could very well lead to an increase in cycling deaths and fatalities in London.

Over the past few years large numbers of Boris Bikes in Central London have helped to calm traffic and make the streets safer for everyone. This benefit to all Londoners that choose to cycle (or walk) will be lost if Cycle Hire usage declines.

This blog has championed Boris Johnson's efforts in the past, but this fare increase is idiotic, incompetent.

Worse, it will in any case be ineffectual, since too few Londoners use the Boris Bike scheme to contribute anywhere near the billions of pounds needed for the continuing tube upgrade (and £180 million which the new routemasters cost). The fiscal burden should instead be borne by the tax payer, and tube and bus users themselves.

If you believe that the planned price rises are ridiculous and cretinous, please feel free to drop Barclays Cycle Hire, Boris Johnson, and TfL an email and let them know your thoughts.

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Please see also similar responses from The Evening Standard, I love Boris Bikes, and The Telegraph on this issue.

TfL / Royal Parks: Bring Boris Bikes to the Mall

Back in July 2009 TfL, led by our cycle-friendly Mayor Boris Johnson, proposed installing a large 38-bike Cycle Hire Docking Station on the Mall as part of the initial 2010 implementation of the Boris Bike scheme. (For those interested the full details of the refused planning application can be found here.)

There is currently a massive glut of Cycle Hire Docking Stations in the Mall Area. See for yourself on this map.

Among those idiotically opposed to the Docking Station was the Conservative MP for Westminster, Mark Field, and the proposed site on the Mall was eventually rejected on the grounds of:

"impact on streetscape"  (!)

Yes, installing a Docking Station here would clearly change the large pavement area on the North side of the Mall in some small, minor and purely cosmetic way. But as has been shown with other public events like the Notting Hill Carnival and the Olympic Games, the Cycle Hire bikes can be quickly and easily removed during busier periods to prevent excess congestion. When this is done all one is left with is a few stands barely waist height. There really is no logical reason not to extent the Cycle Hire Scheme to comprehensively cover the Mall/Constitution Hill area.

Moreover, if there is one part of Central London where the roads are wide and empty enough to accomodate large amounts of cycle traffic it is the Mall. The entire network of roads around Buckingham Palace are almost comically large and this whole area could really become a very pleasant place to cycle around in the near future.

This is something devoutly to be wished, since a higher numbers of cyclists (instead of cars and taxis) on these streets would make the whole neighbourhood:

1. Cleaner

2. Less polluted

3. Quieter

4. Safer (no one can argue that even the most irresponsible cyclist in London is a fraction as dangerous as a car going at 30mph or more)

5. Less congested (cyclists take up far less road space than the equivalent amount of passengers using cars, taxis, or even buses)
6. Safer cycling (since as cyclist numbers increase political support for tough decisions in favour of cyclists - e.g. reallocating road space in cyclists' favour, cycle-only traffic signals, adequate cycle parking in urban centres - will become ever greater)

The Mall's proximity to the wonderful off-road East-West cycle routes available through Hyde Park also mean that it is (comparatively) very pleasant to travel to and from by bike meaning a Docking Station there would be very well popular with both tourists and locals alike.

From the official Westminster Council planning application. Space for a Docking Station here? YES YES YES. Boris Bike racks have been squeezed into far smaller spaces in the more cycle-friendly boroughs of London.

As I've argued before in this blog, Cycle Hire schemes function as a highly effective 'gateway drug' to much higher levels of cycling by all portions of the population, not just on cycle-hire bikes. This is one reason why cycling rates in London have risen so markedly in the last two years despite the amount of safe cycle infrastructure in the city, and the statistical risk to cyclists, remaining relatively static from 2010 to 2012.

Therefore, it is clearly in the interest of everyone interested in cycling in London to improve the currently woeful lack of Cycle Hire Docking Stations in the Mall area. How can this be done?

The Mall as it is now. Full of (mostly empty) taxis and not a single cyclist in sight.

Well, fortunately I've been informed by TfL that they are now re-applying for planning permission for a Docking Station on the Mall as part of the 2013/2014 Phase 3 expansion of the Boris Bike scheme which will (hopefully) include substantial intensification of the scheme in Central London. This intensification is needed to help accomodate increased commuter flow of bikes from the South-West areas of London which are being brought into the area covered by the scheme.

Therefore, if you want to help support TfL's, and the Mayor's, efforts to gradually tame Westminster and make it that little bit less cycle-toxic, please sign this petition by I Love Boris Bikes to bring the Cycle Hire Scheme to the Mall.

http://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/tfl-royal-parks-bring-boris-bikes-to-the-mall-3

If TfL can show evidence of widespread support for a Docking Station here they are much more likely to get a successful planning application for it.

Furthermore, if you are a resident in the Borough of Westminster please consider writing personally to your local councillors and Mark Field MP, as letters from personal constituents can often be more effective than large scale campaigns.