10,000 Londoners take to their bikes and bring Parliament Square to a stand-still but Boris Johnson *still* doesn't get the message.

Don't misunderstand me, I feel Boris Johnson has done a lot for London cycling, particularly in raising it's profile as a viable method of transport that anyone can, and should, use. However, his response to Nick Ferrari's questions during today's LBC Radio phone-in were deeply worrying. When asked about yesterday's London Cycling Campaign #Space4Cycling Protest Ride, the Mayor said that those Londoners taking part (all 10,000 of them) were unreasonably trying to get their own dedicated road space which simply wasn't feasible in London (where everyone knows that 95% of road space must at all costs be dedicated to motor traffic otherwise you're just being selfish).

These Londoners aren't happy sharing the road with HGVs. They want dedicated space for cycling. Boris Johnson needs to embrace this... because they're all going to vote...

The London mayor was talking absolute rubbish. It's completely legitimate not to want to share a 'general traffic lane' while defenceless on a bike with an HGV or a Chelsea Tractor going at 30MPH+. Moreover, there is plenty of space in London for the reallocation of road space, as Boris himself has previously admitted (think Euston Road, Cromwell Road, Park Lane, Vauxhall Bridge Road, etc).

Today on LBC Radio, Boris advocated 'share-the-road', 'mutual-respect', 'everyone-being-more-aware' crap instead, and suggested this was the real solution. Not dedicated space for segregated cycle lanes that didn't mix motor traffic with those on bikes. That would just be plain silly.

This public position from the Mayor of London is incredibly idiotic and demands another Protest Ride to actually bring the message home to him that Londoners are not happy sharing lanes with drivers that kill them every month (14 Londoners were killed while cycling in 2012), and seriously injure them almost twice day (657 Londoners were seriously injured while cycling from A to B in our Olympic year). Humans are not perfect. Therefore drivers are not perfect. Therefore it's idiotic to mix steel motor traffic with humans sitting on bicycles in 'general traffic lanes'. Over 100 MPs recognised this last night when they unanimously passed the recommendations of the Get Britain Cycling report (which includes segregation on main roads). Boris Johnson needs to recognise this.

By all accounts yesterday's #Space4Cycling Protest Ride was a huge success. The weather may have helped...

What is also interesting is that the Mayor's response to the Protest Ride differs completely from that of Andrew Gilligan, London's Cycling Commissioner. What Gilligan essentially said yesterday was that the Mayor's office are already pursuing a policy of segregation (i.e. with the Cycle Superhighway 2 extension in Stratford). The problem with this is that segregating one road in Stratford is not going to make it safe to cycle for the 8 million Londoners who don't live in Stratford. We need the Mayoralty to begin implementing immediate changes (i.e. 20MPH limits, point-closures to remove through-traffic, temporary cycle lanes using cones/bollards) all over London.

However, at least Gilligan is explicitly accepting that segregation and dedicated space for cycling is the way forward for London. His boss, Boris Johnson, isn't. He's still wittering on about 'share-the-road' twaddle, even after 10,000 Londoners in Parliament Square and over 100 MPs in the House of Commons unanimously called yesterday for full segregation of major roads in London, as well as all over the UK (for those interested there is a BBC recording of the entire 4 hour Great Britain Cycling Commons debate available from here).

I recommend another Protest Ride along the roads outside Boris Johnson's house to ram the message home.

Also, a massive well-done and thank you to everyone at the London Cycling Campaign for organising such a well-attended, successful, and trouble-free Protest Ride yesterday evening.

Please note: 10,000 is my personal estimate of the amount of riders who took part yesterday having watched the procession from the front to back.

Parliament Square Protest Ride - Monday 2nd September - 6pm, Jubilee Gardens - Are you coming?

On Monday 2nd September the London Cycling Campaign (LCC) are holding a Protest Ride starting in Jubilee Gardens which will loop around Parliament Square in order to highlight the pitiful state of cycling in this country and this capital.

The LCC have the full details available here on their website. However, in brief, everyone is meeting at Jubilee Gardens (located next to the London Eye) at 6pm for a 6.30pm start on Monday 2nd September in order to coincide with the Parliamentary debate on the Get Britain Cycling report that evening.

It is vitally important that as many people come as possible. Politicians are only going to act to make cycling safer if they think there are votes in it; if they can see big public support for making cycling safer and easier to do. The way to convince them of this is for 10,000 people to take over Parliament Square on their bikes, creating ample video and photo opportunities which will ensure widespread press coverage of not only the protest, but also, and more importantly, the reasons behind it. This protest perhaps changes little in and of itself, but it does provide a platform for the very real dangers inherent in cycling around London (and the rather straightforward solutions that cycling advocates want to fix them with) to be rang out loud and clear in the local and national media.

This is why everyone needs to come along on Monday 2nd September. Would you rate your chances of survival if you were regularly cycling around the King's Cross gyratory, where this ghost bike is placed to remember the life of Min Joo Lee who was killed here in 2011? I wouldn't. These gyratories need to be removed from London, and we need to show politicians that it will be politically advantageous to give us real, safer changes to our street design, not just empty promises.

Moreover, I will be leading a 'feeder ride' from St John's Church on Ladbroke Grove in Notting Hill Gate and it would be fantastic to meet as many fellow cycling enthusiasts as possible. A map of the various feeder rides being organised is available here. If there's one departing from near where you live/work then why not join it? And if there isn't, why not email the LCC and volunteer to guide your own? It's always safer (and more pleasant!) to cycle in a group with other people rather than by yourself.

Gilligan Gets It Wrong

Andrew Gilligan wrote last week in the Evening Standard that, 'there's something about cycling that seem's to destroy people's sense of proportion'.

He then directly compared the fact that 6 cyclists have been killed already this year (i.e. in 8 months), with the fact that 9 pedestrians were seriously injured last year (i.e. in 12 months), and argued essentially that both were low figures. This juggling of the numbers by Gilligan is designed to do exactly what he excoriates others for: destroy your sense of proportion.

For a start, only one of these figures is an annual total, the other - the number of cyclists killed this year - could well rise significantly before the end of 2013. For another, the number of cyclists killed each year of London's roads is too low a figure to be statistically reliable (as Gilligan himself admits later in the article). Two far better statistics to compere would be these:

Number of pedestrians serious injured by cyclists in London in 2012: 9
Number of cyclists seriously injured by motorists in London in 2012: 657 (an 18% increase on the previous year)

These are far more proportionate figures to compare, and they tell a very different story to Gilligan's spin. They show that someone on a bike in London is more than 70 times more likely to be seriously injured by a motorist than to seriously injure a pedestrian. Now we can see clearly that those ranting about the dangers cycling possesses to pedestrians are indeed stark, raving mad. Those with a 'sense of proportion' are, like The London Cycling Campaign and The Cycling Embassy of Great Britain, bravely seeking to address the very real, and often fatal, dangers that mixing motor traffic and cycling poses to those on bikes. Andrew Gilligan is trying to blind the public to this danger with mismatching figures, rather than face up to the reality, and enormity, of the challenge facing him as London's Cycling Commissioner as he attempts to reverse an 18% yearly increase in the number of those on bikes maimed by drivers in Britain's capital.

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Postscript: Gilligan also repeats in this article what he had said elsewhere, namely that:

we can’t do what some in the cycling community want, and rush through in a few weeks the cycle changes we’re planning. Have no doubt, those changes will be major — and you’ll start seeing the first fruits in about two months — but they have to work for both cyclists and pedestrians, and if they’re not thought through, they mightn’t be safe for either.

Well, again, this is, to quote Gilligan's 'boss', baloney (or twaddle). There is are at least two changes that could be rushed through immediately and would categorically work for both cyclists and pedestrians:

1. An immediate London-wide 20 MPH limit excluding certain major roads. And, this was even recommended by Boris Johnson's own Roads Task Force, back in July this year. Still being ignored by Gilligan though. That needs to change. 20 MPH limits are the norm in Amsterdam, Berlin, Zurich, Copenhagen, Paris, and Munich. They could very quickly become the norm in London too.
2. The instant removal of motorised through-traffic from a huge number of residential streets by simple measures such as bollards or a gate placed at one end of the road. This is usually called 'filtered permeability' (i.e. the roads are permeable to those on foot or bike, but not to those trying to rat-run in cars) and is already being used by the councils of Hackney, Camden and Islington to make their streets both objectively and subjectively safe.

Andrew Gilligan is clearly working very hard to make cycling in London safer, but masking the extent of the problem by pretending cycle safety advocates lack 'a sense of proportion' is not going to make his job any easier.

BBC Newsnight excellent reporting on cycling in Holland + #cyclesafe + #space4cycling; a few crucial points they missed.

For those that missed it, a couple of days ago BBC Newsnight did a rather excellent report on cycling in Holland. Here's a copy of it on YouTube; very well worth a watch:


However, there were a few crucial points that the programme either skimmed over, or missed entirely, and deserve far more substantial coverage.

1. Massive NHS saving potential from cycling, due to obesity etc. (~£7Bn/yr) [we're the fattest country in Western Europe]
2. Saving to individuals from cycling, due to high cost of transport in London (£,000's/yr)
3. Studies have shown that 'one mile on a bike is a $.42 economic gain to society, one mile driving is a $.20 loss.'
4. Putting in cycling lanes instead of car-parking significantly increases the amount spent in local shops, thus boosting the local economy. This has been proved in New York where there was a 49% increase in retail sales following the installation of a properly segregated cycle lane.
5. As Danny Williams writing in the Cyclists in the City blog has pointed out, humans cannot adapt the roads they are forced to use to how they want to cycle, but they can adapt how they cycle to the road that they are forced to use . It's all very well for Boris Johnson to say that the Dutch cycle culture is far less aggressive and more inclusive than London currently is. But this culture is simply a reflection of the roads that Londoners and Hollanders find themselves on. An advertisement campaign is going to have no effect on this. People cycle aggressively in London because Boris Johnson himself is forcing them to navigate four-lane gyratories (mostly TfL owned) like the one in Holborn that killed Alan Neve. Dutch people have a much more relaxed 'mentality about cycling' (to quote Boris Johnson) because they have a system of segregated cycle lanes and are not being forced to have to gamble their lives at impossibly dangerous junctions like Bow Roundabout where both Brian Dorling and Svitlana Tereschenko were killed by motor traffic in 2011.
6. Andrew Gilligan is wrong. There is plenty of road-space in London for Amsterdam-level cycling facilities. It's simply that at the moment we're choosing to use that road space for the aforementioned multi-lane killer-gyratories such as Holborn, Swiss Cottage, Elephant and Castle, Victoria (where Dr Katherine Giles was killed in 2013), Aldgate (where Philippine De Gerin-Ricard was killed in 2013), and Archway (where Dr Clive Richards was killed in 2013). Or we're choosing to use that road space on super-scary roundabouts such as Parliament Square (which Ken Livingstone was going to pedestrianise before Boris Johnson came to power in 2008 and crassly cancelled the scheme), Hyde Park Corner, Elephant and Castle, Old Street, Marble Arch, Charing Cross, and Shepherds Bush. Or we're choosing to use that road space on urban motorways like Euston Road, Park Lane, the Westway, and Vauxhall Bridge Road. Or we're choosing to use that road space on idiotic road-narrowing schemes such as Cheapside, Pall Mall and the new Aldgate and Haymarket plans. [these lists are in no way comprehensive]
7. A key part of 'Going Dutch' is having 19 mph (30 kph) limits as default. This isn't just the case in Holland. You also find 19 mph limits as default in Paris, Berlin, Zurich, Bern, Basel, Copenhagen, Tokyo, and Munich. 20 mph limits in London are currently seen as abnormal, aberrant, and sometimes abhorrent. They need to become default, as Boris Johnson's own Roads Task Force recommended. These means 20 mph becoming the standard speed-limit in London which can be lowered and adjusted as circumstances warrant (e.g. the Euston Road might be retained at 30 mph if a completely segregated Cycle Superhighway was built alongside the motor-traffic lanes). It should be intuitive to anyone with half a brain that if you lower the speed limits to 19 mph, Londoners will feel much less threatened by motor traffic close-passing them at 30 mph and adjust their cycling habits accordingly.
8. 'Presumed Liability', as proposed recently by the Lib Dems, would also be a good idea. This puts the puts the burden of proof on the insurance company of the driver in all civil claims involving a cyclist or a pedestrian. While not affecting criminal law's 'innocent until proven guilty', it would provide a financial incentive to drivers and insurance companies to reduce the appallingly high number of Brits on bikes killed or seriously maimed by motorists on our roads every year (3,222 in 2012). The UK is one of only 5 countries in the EU – along with the notably bike-friendly countries of Romania, Cyprus, Ireland and Malta –  not to have some form of this law already. Appalling.