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David Arditti's blog

Pageant of motoring

May 22, 2011 by David Arditti

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Report on the Elstree and Stanmore ride, 9 April 2011

April 10, 2011 by David Arditti

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Report on the Thameslink Chiltern Ride 20 June

June 21, 2010 by David Arditti

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Cycling in the snow in The Netherdands

January 10, 2010 by David Arditti

 This (slightly over-long) video shows that they salt the cycle paths in Dutch towns to keep them usable in the snow. Read more... »

The A5, cycle policy and Cycle Highways

July 12, 2009 by David Arditti

Searching my emails,  I came cross this, written by Nick Bell, Barnet Council's transport strategy chief, on 4 August 2004, explaining Barnet's non-participation in the A5 CRISP :

The Council has two main concerns with regard to the proposals for providing
additional cycle facilities on the A5.

Firstly, the road layout and traffic conditions on the A5 do not provide a
particularly good environment for cyclists.  The combination of relatively
fast moving traffic and congestion in alternating stretches, numerous busy
junctions, and high bus and HGV flows make it very challenging to find ways
of improving the route.  Furthermore, as some lengths of the road have town
centre type retail frontage with the accompanying parking and loading
requirements and problems, any additional provision for cyclists is likely
to be both difficult to achieve and potentially create a hazardous situation
for cyclists and/or pedestrians.

With these issues in mind, the Council believes it is very unlikely that a
satisfactory and safe engineering solution can be developed for this section
of the A5, particularly where the route crosses the North Circular Road.  It
is precisely for these reasons that other routes such as Brent Terrace have
been identified in the past.

The second main issue is the proposed regeneration of Cricklewood (& Brent
Cross) and West Hendon.  Both these projects are at a stage where detailed
layouts have not been prepared, however they are sufficiently advanced that
the Council is confident that regeneration will proceed and that the scale
of the work involved will be significant.  This means that there is an
opportunity to provide high quality routes as part of the regeneration
schemes, but also that changes to the existing road layout may mean any
improvements for cyclists made now may have to be removed or altered and
would therefore not be good value for money.  TfLSM are aware of the scale
of the changes necessary in the area around Staples Corner.

Ultimately, as joint Highway Authority for some lengths of the A5, and sole
Highway Authority for one section, the Council would have to satisfy itself
that any changes to the road layout are appropriate, safe and value for
money, prior to implementing them.  From past work and local knowledge, our
belief is that experienced cyclists will not get significant benefits from
comprehensive measures on the A5, and may in fact find them unhelpful.
There is also a risk that novice and inexperienced riders may be attracted
to the A5 by the presence of any new cycle facilities and be given a false
sense of security.  The fact that the A5 offers a direct route when viewed
on a map does not necessarily mean that it is the best or most appropriate
route for all cyclists.

Quite apart from the ludicrous idea in his first paragraph that improving the A5 for cyclists would somehow harm conditions for pedestrians, all this is interesting when read in the context of the letter of 29 May 2009 from Brent Cross Cricklewood to us, where Jonathan Joseph, Development Director, writes of the plans for the development:

At this junction [Staples Corner], the fast commuter can either use the flyover or follow the general traffic route at ground level. The utility cyclist does have a safe route in both directions:
-North to south via the combined pedestrian and cycle bridge, which has cycle ramps at both north and south sides of the A406, and is a two way facility
-South to north via the toucan crossing of the A406.

The leisure cyclist would most probably travel along one of the new segregated north-south routes being provided within the scheme, which connect with the existing designated cycle routes at the perimeter of the regeneration area.
These quotes illustrate the double-bind we always face regarding cycle provision on the A5. On the one hand, the man in charge of these things in Barnet Council tells us, 5 years ago, that the road is not safe for cycling on,  that provision should not be made on the A5 for fear of attracting cyclists to an unsafe and unsuitable road, and that we must wait until the distant future for alternatives to be developed (which have still not come about and clearly will not for many more years).
 
Then, when the long-awaited  plans for the regeneration area are released, which have for so long been used by Barnet and TfL as an excuse to do nothing on the A5 for cyclists, we are suddenly told, well, sorry, actually the routes through here will not be suitable for commuting cyclists, they will be silly, indirect, low-priority, up and down things that will take all day to use (though the initial ludicrous cycle lift idea was later abandoned). So commuting cyclists are effectively being told to get stuffed, we know the A5 is dangerous and being made more so, but we won't do anything about it and you still have to use it.
 
It will be interesting to see how Barnet's transport chiefs react to Boris Johnson's Cycle Highway 11 - supposedly a "safe, direct, continuous, visible and comfortable" high-priority cycle route on the A5. Are they going to continue to argue on the same basis as Nick Bell's letter of 2004 that it should be somewhere else (a somewhere else that is never quite pinned down because it doesn't exist), despite the important words in the Cycle Highway specification direct  and visible? These words means that the policy is, rightly or wrongly, that the Highways should be on exactly this type of road, which Bell thought so unsuitable for cyclists.

 

 

Campaign against the Brent Cross Cricklewood Proposals

July 6, 2009 by David Arditti

We have news that a public meeting will take place from 4-6 pm on Sunday 12th July at the Roman Catholic Church of St Mary and St Andrew, Dollis Hill Lane, NW2, entitled:

Safeguarding Brent's Residents: Campaign against the Brent Cross Cricklewood Development Proposals

It is being organised by Navin Shah, London Assembly Member for Brent & Harrow, and chaired by Cllr. Ann John. The meeting will deal with numerous strategic issues arising out of the development proposals, including the effects on transport, including cycling, in NW London.

Amongst a distinguished line of speakers, including Dawn Butler MP, will be Brent Cyclists coordinator Ben Tansley, who will be explaining why Brent and Barnet Cyclists are opposing the plans. Amongst many disastrous transport features of the proposals are changes to the A5 which will make it much harder to use that road to cycle from Brent and Barnet into central London, completely against the stated policy of the Mayor of London, who wants the A5 to be a high-priority "Cycle Highway".

If you care about the issues, please come along and support us. This is a major campaign across a large number of Brent and Barnet's community and environmental groups, with a huge groundswell of support. Brent, Camden and Harrow Councils are all opposing the plans, and the more support the campaign gets, the more chance we have of getting Barnet Council or the Mayor to reject them.

Lord Adonis on cycle parking at stations

June 25, 2009 by David Arditti

Here's a better piece of news, from The London Paper, 24 June:

"The Transport Secretary today criticised London's rail stations for their poor cycle facilities. Lord Adonis said Londoners were being let down by the lack of secure storage and shortage of bike racks. He said "I think we can do a lot better. There is a big job to be done but I am determined to see improvements in facilities at our stations." The minister cycled to six stations where he found crowded racks, which were often badly signposted. At London Bridge he discovered that the safest place to chain a cycle was to barbed wire. He found racks at Liverpool Street were nearly full on a Sunday and overspill facilities at Bishopsgate Piazza took him 20 minutes to locate."

Good news because it suggests we at last have a Transport Secretary (not just a junior minister with responsibility for cycling) who is going to take the subject seriously, and is prepared to cycle around London to discover the problems we all know about.

Cycle promotion: putting the cart before the horse

June 24, 2009 by David Arditti

It's striking how much cycle promotion there is around London these days. You can't get on a tube or bus without seeing posters exhorting you to cycle.

And lots of people do want to cycle. But then come the practicalities. A question we just received on our Yahoo! group was: "What is a good way to cycle from Dollis Hill to Stanmore?" This cyclist has been on the TfL journey planner, and selected "bike only", and got the suggestion to go up the A5 and over the 50mph (in practice 70mph) Staples Corner flyover with it's terrifying motorway-style slip roads. And one has to answer his question, sorry, but it isn't actually possible to cycle from Dollis Hill to Stanmore by an acceptably direct route without going through feasome motorway-style junctions, or breaking the law and riding on pedestrian bridges and pavements. Brent south of the A406 North Circular road is completely cut off from north Brent and the outer suburbs, that is the way it is, and no-one in government seems to have a clue how to address that problem, or even to understand what a problem it is.

So, there's a fundamental problem with cycle promotion in this country. It's all upside-down, cart before horse. Government keeps telling people to cycle before the facilities are put in place to make it feasable, safe, and attractive - and, in fact, without there ever being a serious intention to make it so. We keep having cycling festivals and this and that cuddly thing, without ever having done the hard stuff, without having actually built the routes. The so-called soft and hard measures are in the wrong order, which will never work. Logically, it is completely crazy. Translated to another form of transport, it is as if we were railway promoters spending all our budget on advertising our wonderful railway, telling people to use it, but we don't build it, it just doesn't exist. It's just nuts.

Well, maybe as a nation we can't afford to buid proper cycle routes. But it seems we can afford to do the promotion. And advertising doesn't come cheap. Advertising budgets are measured in millions. The cost of, say, a cycle bridge across the North Circular would be millions too. But that would be millions well-spent, it would be a permanent piece of cycle promotion which would not disappear when the poster boards are resurfaced. And if it worked, it would continue working indefinitely - what an investment.

The sad truth is that the cynical, but realistic reply to the qustion about cycling from Dollis Hill to Stanmore is that the best way to do that is to take a folding bike on the tube and cycle the last bit from the station, or, leave a cheap bike permanently at the far end. The tube and railways are how most sensible Londoners without cars cross the North Circular barrier. Just imagine if the tube lines stopped at the North Circular, how divided London would be. That's what we have in cycling terms. We don't have the network, and we are wasting money telling people to use a mode of transport that is not practical.

Eventually that message must sink in, and either the authorities will give up on cycle promotion, or get serious about cycling. I don't see much sign of that happening during Boris Johnson's tenure as Mayor of London.

 

The Cycle Hire Scheme

June 20, 2009 by David Arditti

 Camden Cycling Campaign have a very interesting critique of the London cycle hire proposals on their site.

http://www.camdencyclists.org.uk/info/tforum/London%20Velib%20study%20cr...

Their analysis seems sensible and the bottom line conclusion significant:

"The differences in demographics between the London and Paris areas studied are immense...It seems intuitively unlikely that an area with so few residents will generate the required number of hire cycle journeys. Travelcard Zone 2 or a substantial part of it seem much more likely to support a successful deployment."

I agree there is a serious risk the London scheme could fail, not only because of the lack of residents in zone 1, but because of the perceived hostility of the environment by those who do not cycle already, linked to the lack of effective facilities in London. I observed the start of the Paris scheme, and noted how at that time there were far more segregated cycle facilities in central Paris than in central London, and how the hire stations had been planned to take advantage of these. These facts seem to have been generally overlooked by British commentators on the Paris experience.

If the hire scheme fails it could be disastrous for cycling in London, over and beyond the failure of the specific scheme itself, because it would send a message to politicians that cycling doesn't work in London and is not worth investing in.

 

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