20mph speed limit for Waterloo Roundabout and approach roads

EDIT (10/5/13) -  TfL have just confirmed they are going ahead with these scheme after 97% of respondents supported it. This is massive news. First 20mph limit ever on TfL roads.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

TfL are now consulting on their plans to introduce a 20mph speed limit for Waterloo Roundabout and it's approach roads.

https://consultations.tfl.gov.uk/betterjunctions/20mph-waterloo-roundabout

Anyone interesting in improving cycling conditions in London should click the above link and do the 'Online Survey', giving full support to this initiative, before 28 February 2013.

Waterloo Roundabout: a 1970s urban planner's heaven; a cyclist's hell.

A 20mph limit might not sound like much but it is actually, in my opinion, rather momentous.

This is a (unique) example of TfL prioritising the safety of the 5,500 cyclists that use this roundabout every weekday over the motorists who see a decline in the average speed of 34mph on the Waterloo Bridge and Stamford Street approaches.

Time and again, good infrastructure for cyclists has not been implemented in London because of TfL being afraid to curb the excessive speed of London's motor traffic; politics of road use are far more important in deciding the quality of cycle infrastructure we have in London than either funding or expertise (though of course, we still have much to learn from Dutch and Danish town planners).

However, here, in early 2013, we can see, for perhaps the first time, TfL explicitly putting the safety of cyclists first.

You can see how controversial this move is to many motoring groups from the fact that this is having to be implemented as '6-month experiment'.

In Holland or Germany this would be a no-brainer. In Britain it is an 'experiment'; like burning magnesium in GCSE chemistry. I wonder what will happen? Will all the cars explode because they're driving at 20mph? No. Less people will die. Surely you can accept that as a good thing?

I am quietly hopeful this experiment will succeed. A 20mph limit on the roundabout and approach roads will almost certainly lead to a significant increase in cyclists, especially with summer approaching, and with even more cyclists using the roundabout it will then be extremely difficult come September/October for TfL to remove the 20mph limit; especially since you're almost 10 times more likely to die when hit by a car at 30mph, than at 20mph.

Who knows, this might be the first step towards to the taming of the disgustingly dangerous gyratories that plague Central London; I'm thinking: Hyde Park Corner, Marble Arch, Vauxhall, King's Cross, Bow Roundabout, Parliament Square, Old Street Roundabout, Elephant and Castle, Hammersmith Broadway, Swiss Cottage.

Imagine if 20mph limits became the norm for all Central London's roundabouts and gyratories...

TfL might, ever so slowly, be coming round to the common sense opinion that if you want to drive fast, you don't drive in Central London. We've got motorways for that.

If you want to go somewhere quickly in London, take public transport or cycle. Don't drive.

This has to be the message TfL, Boris Johnson, and Andrew Gilligan, bring to the London of the 21st century.

(otherwise they're idiots)

So do the 'Online Survey' now!

Why the BBC's 'War on Britain's Roads' was complete rubbish

Many people have criticised the BBC's recent 'War on Britain's Roads' programme so I know I'm hardly the first person to be saying these things. Yet, the programme was so infuriatingly banal that say them I must.

While being an hour of reasonably well-produced television, 'War on Britain's Roads' was brutally misinformed as to the real reasons that cyclists and motorists come into conflict on our streets. The programme went for the 'human-angle', interviewing both cyclists and motorists involved in incidents and eventually implicitly concluding that we should all get along better and perhaps lorries should have more mirrors and sensors on them.

A taxi driver very dangerously cuts up a cyclist. Rather than this just being condoned out-of-hand so we can all move on, we are interested treated by the BBC to 'both sides of the story'. This is bullshit. The taxi driver was at fault. He shouldn't have passed the cyclist so close. He could have killed the cyclist. Why can't this just be accepted as a fact?
If the cyclist can knock his frame to tell him he's too close, then he's too close. There shouldn't be any debate over this.

This is all 'true'. But it's also the sort of trite rubbish that a child could come up with simply by imagining a road that's being used by a cyclist, a motorist, and an HGV.

There is no pathological, eugenic difference between Britons and Hollanders.

The reason Dutch people do not have a 'War' on their roads is that Dutch roads are designed so that cyclists and motorists can both use the roads safely.

This is done in many ways. One of these is putting in cycle lanes on most roads where cars are doing 30mph or more which prevents motorists becoming angry about cyclists slowing them down when they want to drive at 30mph or above.

Do the BBC recommend implementing more and better cycle lanes, even implicitly? 

No. They seem to imply instead that motorists should perhaps maybe calm down a bit if they don't have space to overtake, and cyclists should maybe just bite the bullet if they get hit because they're 'taking control of the road'. (and on that note, can you think of a more idiotic and unnecessarily inflammatory way to describe cycling in the primary position?)

Similarly, after focusing on the tragic story of a young woman who was killed by a left-turning lorry, did the narrator draw the conclusion that enforcing a London-wide ban on HGVs that lack industry-standard mirrors and motion sensors would be a good idea?

No. It was simply left to the woman's bereaved mother to pursue her solo-campaign with the lorry companies that still fill our streets with dangerously ill-equipped vehicles. But why should this be one woman's responsibility? Anyone can get killed by a left-turning lorry. It's everyone's responsibility. Yet the BBC's opinion seems to be that people who (idiotically?) choose to cycle are some 'other tribe' that need to fend for themselves and don't come in for the basic rights of government-led safety that any normal citizen is entitled to.

How many of these cyclists have a head-cam? None. The BBC failed to mention that the agressive head-cam footage used for the programme was completely unrepresentative of both the cycling style and experience of the majority of Britain's cyclists who rather surprisingly don't choose to cycle on road-bikes at 30mph.

I could go on all day about the problems with the programme, but I'll end with a final thought:

Throughout we were treated to a fair range of clips of motorists behaving badly, then cyclists behaving badly, in what I presume was an attempt to give a 'balanced view' of the situation. Yet, did the narrator mention that in the case of motorists behaving badly cyclists die (119 so far in 2012; a five-year high). And did the narrator mention how many motorists have been killed by cyclists jumping red lights? I confess I don't know the exact figure off the top of my head but I imagine it's somewhere around zero.

Don't misunderstand me, I'm not condoning red-light-jumpers for a second. But there is, at least for my money, a complete difference both in degree and consequence between the crimes of bad driving and bad cycling.

I would have preferred it if BBC's 'War on Britain's Roads' could have pointed this fact out. Or if one of the cyclists interviewed had had the presence of mind to do so when confronted with the extreme footage of a messenger race at the end of the programme, instead of blithely suggesting that a "punch in the face" was the solution to the 'everyday' problem of a bicycle courier competition held for a cash-prize 6 years ago.

--------

If you'd like to make a complaint about the programme you can do so in about 2 minutes here. (The BBC do at least have a very quick and easy online complaint-making system in place...)

For two much more thorough and better researched pieces on the same subject please also see:

- As Easy As Riding A Bike's excellent recent article: That 'war' on Britain's roads - the statistics
- Peter Walker's latest piece in The Guardian: BBC's War on Britain's Roads: even more fake than we feared