Maiden Lane, Westminster

Westminster Council have been digging up Maiden Lane for months now, and laying very expensive-looking granite setts. Below you can see the state it's been in:

On the plus side, the road's been closed to traffic so it's been more peaceful than usual. So what difference has this makeover achieved? Will we see cafe tables out on that widened pavement? Will the road be closed to through traffic, with just the odd bicycle trundling past? Will it be made 2-way for cycles?

Above you can see the old signage hasn't been changed, so cycling west is still prohibited (although interestingly, there is no one-way signs at the other end, so in theory you could walk your bike past the no-entry sign and then cycle west. However I'm sure this is not what Westminster Council intended).

Above you can see that all that incredibly expensive granite sett paving has been used for car parking. So you can't even see where all you're money's gone...except...

...someone's spilt something oily on it thus ruining the natural stone appearance and making it look like an East-End car repair shop, and to boot they've put some makeshift access cover, filled around with tarmac, thus making it a total eyesore.

On the plus side, there's not much traffic going down there yet, but that's because the taxis and van drivers haven't discovered that it's been re-opened yet.

So in summary, Westminster Council have taken a narrow, pedestrian- and cycling-hostile central London rat-run and transformed it into...a narrow, pedestrian- and cycling-hostile central London rat-run. And the cost of this? Well, I can only guess, but they've been working on it for some months so it could be well into 6 figures.

2011 Q1 Road Casualty Statistics

Well, the road casualty stats are out again. Good news if you travel by car, as serious casualties are down 9% year-on-year. If you ride a motorcycle, you were 6% less likely to suffer a KSI (killed or seriously injured). Not such good news if you're a pedestrian - only a 3% reduction for pavement-pounders. The wooden spoon however goes to - guess who - cyclists, with a 10% INCREASE in KSIs.

The Quarter 1 results are even more pronounced: comparing Quarter 1 2011 with Quarter 1 2010, there was a 7% reduction in car-occupant KSIs, but a 4% increase for motorcyclists, 16% increase for pedestrians and a massive 26% increase for cyclists. You can't take one quarter in isolation and extrapolate because there are factors like poor weather that distort the trend, but nevertheless it's alarming and real people did die and were injured - these are not just statistics.

What's more alarming is the trend over the last couple of years. The number of pedal cyclists killed increased by 7 per cent from 104 in 2009 to 111 in 2010. The number seriously injured in accidents reported to the police increased by 2 per cent to 2,660.

If there were a 10% increase in cyclists KSIs every year, and a 10% reduction in KSIs overall every year, it would take about 10 years for the number of cycle casualties to overtake casualties for all other transport modes. Is that unlikely? Perhaps, but if cycling increases in popularity significantly and nothing is done to improve cyclist safety, maybe not.

Some might suggest the 'safety in numbers' effect should reduce the casualty rate per mile cycled. If so, that effect should already be operating in central London, so there may be no further gain to be had. In the countryside however, cyclists are still rarer than spotted zebras, and the roads have people like Rowan Atkinson crashing their cars into trees at high speed, blissfully unaware that there might be a cyclist round the next blind corner.

There's one conclusion that can safely be drawn. Britain's road system (and many of the drivers on it) is woefully under-prepared for an increase in cycling, and it is a national disgrace that the Government is prepared to stand idly by and allow a transfer of risk from the least vulnerable to the most vulnerable road users. It's time to get angry.

Cycling e-petition?

From the Governments re-launched 'e-petitions' website:

e-petitions is an easy way for you to influence government policy in the UK. You can create an e-petition about anything that the government is responsible for and if it gets at least 100,000 signatures, it will be eligible for debate in the House of Commons.

Of course, e-petitions don't guarantee action, but they do guarantee a certain amount of publicity. If your petition gets over the 100,000 threshold, it goes to a cross-party committee which decides whether it is worthy of debate.

Most of the petitions on the website so far are the usual hang 'em and flog 'em type of thing, with a few oddball and niche items mixed in.

This could be a good opportunity to generate some debate and publicity around cycling. I daresay there are 100,000 people interested in cycling who would be prepared to sign a petition. So it is a question of formulating a petition that has broad enough appeal to attract enough signatories, and is likely to get past the cross-party committee. Maybe the LCC leadership can think of something?

Cavendish Road Fatality

A 49-year-old woman is the 11th cyclist to die on London’s streets this year. A van collided with her bicycle at around 11am on Sunday 31^st July, on Cavendish Road in Clapham, part of the South Circular near Clapham Common.

Few reliable details have emerged, but it has been the subject of considerable discussion on various internet forums. The collision seems to have occurred near the junction between Cavendish Road and Poynders Road. The van was travelling south-east away from Clapham Common, but it’s unclear whether the cyclist was travelling in the same direction.

Witnesses writing on the forums give harrowing accounts:

“I am still in severe shock ... I keep thinking about her poor family.”

“To look at his [the driver's] face and see the horror of what he had just did will stay with me, his first reaction was to cover her modesty, by taking off his tshirt and putting it over her, I was touched by this. He looked sooo lost, tears come to my eyes just remembering his moments, some kind lady was sitting down with him and talking to him”

“i was taken in to a house after about 5 mins as i passed out from the shock”

“What we saw will stay with us forever.”

I’m not going to speculate on what happened but as a regular user of this cycle route, I do know that it is hostile for cyclists and there are many hazards. However, this particular stretch, unusually for London, does have an off-carriageway alternative in the form of a cycle path on the north-east pavement between Abbeville Road and the Poynders Road junction. Unfortunately, it’s not very obvious. Approaching from the south you could quite easily cycle past without knowing it was there. From the other direction, there’s a ‘shared path’ sign on the pavement but nothing more obvious. There are a number of separate crossings to negotiate at the Poynders Road junction to get back onto the carriageway, so staying on-carriageway is quite likely quicker and easier in many respects.

A couple of final thoughts:

Just reading the witness accounts is profoundly disturbing, and really brings home the horror of a fatal collision. I wish that Boris Johnson and TfL would read the testimony and perhaps they’d give more thought to whether a couple of seconds on journey times are a worthwhile tradeoff for compromised safety and its inevitable consequence: more bereavement, more wrecked lives, more traumatized witnesses. It’s also worth sparing a thought for the paramedics and police who, unlike the witnesses, have to deal with this kind of scene on a regular basis.

Do bear in mind though that any death is a terrible trauma. There are on average only around 120 fatal cycle collisions every year in the UK, whereas there are 111,000 heart attacks (not all fatal, but those that aren't  often have life-altering consequences). By cycling, you are massively reducing some of the biggest risks you face (fatal illness as a result of a sedentary lifestyle) and only marginally increasing your chance of dying on the roads.

#1 Hero and Hardman of Cycling

Eddy Merckx? Bernard Hinault?

No, it's Arturas Zuokas.

The Mayor of Vilnius. In Lithuania.

Cycalogical salutes you!

Norman Baker is telling Londoners to ‘travel differently’ during next year’s Olympics, by which he means walking and cycling (and in London, cycling really is different). Why this sudden love affair with sustainable transport? The tubes and trains will be chock full of sports fans. The roads will be totally unable to cope, their capacity being reduced by the ‘Zil lanes’ which will ferry corporate sponsors and assorted 'big cheeses' and expense-account Games hangers-on from their five-star central London hotels. And of course the buses will crawling along on those super-saturated roads trying to handle the overspill from other forms of transport.

It’s a shame that this Government and its predecessor didn’t start to get the sustainable options into some sort of usable (let alone attractive) state so that asking people to use them wouldn’t come as such a shock. For the majority of people – people who can cross the road safely and drive a car, but aren’t skilled in the arcane arts of vehicular cycling - asking them to cycle to work in London is like asking them to eat cabbage soup. They may know it’s good for them but it doesn’t look very appealing and if you try it, it can leave a nasty taste in the mouth. In fact it can be so unpleasant that it can put you off for life.

So what are the Government going to do to make cycling attractive during the Olympics. Are they going to set up special ‘Olympic cycle lanes’ so that people can get through central London with confidence, knowing they aren’t going to be battling with HGVs and aggressive motorists to get round Piccadilly Circus, Parliament Square or Trafalgar Square? No, thought not. They're just going to allow the other options on the transport menu to be so unpalatable that cabbage soup is the most appealing.

Debt, Deficit, Pensions, Tuition Fees and Other Stuff

The US Government has finally agreed to lift the federal debt ceiling. All over the developed world, the recovery is looking more and more anaemic. Historically, countries have been able to run a deficit in perpetuity on the basis that economic growth would keep the total sovereign debt at a manageable proportion of GDP. Is that about to change?

Note that despite the increasingly pessimistic growth forecasts for western economies, and despite the IEA's release of emergency oil reserves, after a brief dip the (Brent crude) oil price is hovering near the $120/bbl level again.

The big problem with economic growth is that it's linked to increased energy - and therefore oil - consumption. Increased oil consumption will feed through to an increased oil price, which will act as a brake on economic growth. This negative feedback loop that means that economic growth is unsustainable without a major shift towards renewables - that's without considering the imperative of addressing climate change. Meanwhile in China and India, a middle class is developing that aspires to own cars, air conditioners and all manner of energy-consuming appliances, adding to the upward pressure on oil prices.

Meanwhile in the UK, we have a generation of young people who will be entering the world of work with a £80,000 student debt on their shoulders. They'll also be paying top whack for housing. If they do get on the housing ladder it looks unlikely they'll be enjoying the kind of house price growth we've seen over the past couple of decades. Then they'll be supporting an increasing population of older people. On top of all that, they'll have to save for their retirement, and unlike previous generations, their savings won't be growing unless the economy does - which right now it ain't, and it doesn't look like it will for some time.

It may be a message no-one wants to hear, but it seems increasingly likely that we've seen the peak of living standards in this country. We've been on a decade-long consumer binge, running up our private and state credit cards and using up the oil. Now, quite literally, it's payback time - unfortunately the generation who had been drinking champagne all night have left their children with the bar tab.

What has all this musing about economics and the 'jilted generation' got to do with cycling? Well, if we don't 'green' the economy, there won't be any growth. Without growth, fewer and fewer people, particularly of the younger generation, will be able to afford to run cars. If we do 'green' the economy, a switch from private motor transport has to be a part of that process. So either way, cycling being the cheapest and greenest form of transport, has to figure pretty large.

On the face of it, we don't need to invest a penny in cycling. That's the marvellous thing about it - cycling can take place on existing infrastructure that was designed for motor vehicles. However, the danger is that while the current barriers to cycling exist - mainly fear of traffic - people will have to get pretty desperate before they try it. And while people stay in their cars, we'll be stuck with an economy that will function a little worse every year as an escalating oil price eats into disposable incomes, business margins and competetiveness.

That's not to say that cycling is going to save the economy. It's only a small part of a massive program that has to involve energy efficiency, renewable energy, electric vehicles, public transport, a switch from air travel to surface transport, and lots of other shifts. But I suspect that the day the Government finally acknowleges cycling as a transport mode will be the day it finally accepts there's a new economic paradigm and lets go of the idea that we can simply carry on as we did before.