How not to design a junction to benefit cyclists

There was recently thrilling news from Ipswich with the revelation that

£22 Million transport package for Ipswich gets go-ahead 

Norman Baker said: “This innovative scheme will make a huge difference to the way people travel around Ipswich and will be a real boon to the local economy by making new business and housing sites more accessible by public transport. Strong transport infrastructure which helps to tackle congestion and reduce carbon will help the city achieve sustainable economic growth.” 

No it won’t. This new scheme will NOT make “a huge difference to the way people travel around Ipswich” because Ipswich is as car-centric as anywhere else and it’s a contradiction in terms to “tackle congestion” while purporting to discourage car dependency. In particular this scheme will not get anyone out of their car and on to a bicycle because it does nothing to make Ipswich into a town where cyclists are offered safe, direct routes without conflict with motor vehicles.

Back in 1995 cycling modal share in Ipswich was identified as being 6-7 per cent, with a potential for 30 per cent modal share if Dutch design was emulated.

By 2010 modal share had dropped to 4 per cent (“relatively high for the UK” enthused Sustrans, applying the traditional amnesia found in all branches of UK cycle promotion).

And if you want to know why Sustrans joins the long list of UK cycling promotion organisations which are not enablers of mass cycling but massive obstacles to it, look no further than this report, which asserts that “A wide range of practical interventions have been proven to increase cycling levels, and there is a growing body of evidence on the most effective approaches” – which turn out not to be Dutch practice and infrastructure but “notably from the Sustainable Travel Towns (STT) and Cycling Demonstration Towns (CDT) programmes” – where you encounter the usual percentage froth and spin which UK cycle campaigning adores.

Thrill to cycle-speak: “City-wide measures to increase cycling, such as those implemented in the CDTs, deliver substantially positive BCRs” – although sadly, as is acknowledged later on, “Despite the success of targeted interventions, the PTEs have seen limited impact on the overall mode share of cycling.” 

And there’s the rub. UK cycle promotion is always celebrating 40 per cent (or whatever) increases in cycling while in some mysterious alchemical way modal share remains stuck at what it always was, or even declines. This is not surprising when outfits like Sustrans get involved in promoting parochial vehicular cycling solutions with decades of proven failure behind them.

To put it another way Ipswich lost around 35 per cent of its cyclists in the period 1995-2010. This is consistent with the contraction in cycling elsewhere in British towns and cities.

This new £22 million package will do nothing whatever to shift modal share in Ipswich, because Ipswich remains a fundamentally car-centric town with nothing on offer for cyclists but vehicular cycling.

Look carefully at the detail of this new scheme and you will see that it involves the flavour of the month among transport planners, namely widening footways to push cyclists closer to overtaking vehicles and then using the widened footways for parking bays, to add a little extra twist of ‘dooring’ to the cycling experience - as shown here

In time-honoured fashion the local cycling group puts a lot of time and effort into attempting to ameliorate these vehicular cycling solutions and the usual suspects cheer with wild enthusiasm.

And now let’s look at the jewel in the crown of this new scheme, namely the treatment of what is currently a hellish roundabout where the A1022 (Civic Drive and Franciscan Way) meets the B1075 and Princes Street.

The new scheme removes the roundabout and replaces it with a signalled junction, as shown in the projection below (from the perspective of where Princes Street westbound meets the junction with the A1022).

This is not how you design infrastructure for cyclists if you are serious about making cycling a mass means of transport. 

In the first place there is nothing intrinsically wrong with roundabouts and the Dutch know how to design them to benefit cyclists.

And if you have to have a signalled junction you should be designing it like the Dutch do, so that Paths taken by cyclists and drivers do not cross. There is no conflict here at all, and that's why it's safe. 

This Ipswich “improvement” is no improvement at all for cyclists. Advanced Stop Lines and on-road cycle lanes alongside huge volumes of motor vehicles including lorries and buses are ineffective, subjectively and objectively dangerous, fail to prioritise cyclists and often slow them down, and do absolutely nothing to get non-cyclists cycling. It's predictable that when this scheme is built cyclists will be hopping on to the wide paved areas to take short cuts in order to avoid being delayed at the lights (which are there to manage vehicle flow, not assist cyclists) and because it may well be safer to do this than turn at the junction alongside large or carelessly or aggressively driven vehicles.

At a professional level transport planning for cycling in the UK remains suffused with an ignorant parochialism which is not remotely interested in outcomes, aided and abetted by a cycle promotion culture which is collaborationist to its core and which stubbornly refuses to learn from its own long history of failure.

Footnote - news just in

IPSWICH Hospital is to slash the price it charges patients to park their cars. 

Bosses at the Ipswich Hospital NHS Trust revealed yesterday that along with introducing lower charges for longer stays, patients will also be able to park free for 30 minutes in drop off areas. Some ticket prices will be reduced by as much as £1.40. 

Jeff Calver, Associate Director of Estate, said the new tariffs were introduced to reflect what patients and visitors have told the hospital in feedback. 

He added: “We’ve listened to what our patients, visitors and staff say about car-parking and hope these new changes will greatly improve people’s experience of using the hospital car-parks.

Obesity rates soar among London’s children

Obesity rates among children are higher than the national average in 30 out of 32 London boroughs.

Westminster has the most severely overweight 10- and 11-year-olds, with almost a third classed as obese, closely followed by Southwark and Newham, with over a quarter

Cycling, St James' Health Centre and the car-sick NHS

The NHS is a diseased organization with extraordinary levels of car dependency among its management and staff.

Commuting and business journeys by NHS staff account for a staggering 0.12% of all carbon emissions in England. (source: NHS Carbon Reduction Strategy, 2008)

As those NHS staff members who do cycle have observed:

so much NHS ‘support’ for cycling is mere lip service. There is no overall promotion of sustainable transport in the NHS and many Trusts neither know nor care what cyclists need.

The NHS has the hypocrisy to run a website extolling the virtues of cycling. When you click on the Cycling Safety Tips link you get crap like this:

On busy or narrow roads don’t cycle next to another person.

[Because after all, you might hold a driver up and that would be intolerable. This isn't Denmark or the Netherlands you know.]

Be visible
Make sure you’re visible to other road users and pedestrians. Keep away from the kerb, wear bright or fluorescent clothing in daylight or poor light.

[Advice to cyclists to wear bright clothing colludes with reckless driving by blaming the victims of criminally inattentive driving.]

Always wear a helmet as this reduces the risk of head injury if you’re in an accident.

[This is advice which would be better applied to the occupants of motor vehicles, who statistically are more at risk. So why this silence on the part of the NHS?]

Legal issues
It's against the law for cyclists to:
Cycle the wrong way up a one-way street, unless there's a sign showing that cyclists can do so.

[One-way streets are designed exclusively to promote the smooth flow of motor vehicles and extensively discriminate against cyclists.]

The NHS colludes with motor danger and the car-centric status quo and demands that cyclists adjust their behaviour to it, not that the source of the danger be removed. Ironically the safety tips website is illustrated with a photo of three cyclists alongside lethal railings. Why isn't the NHS demanding that the street environment be designed to benefit the benign road user groups?

Which brings me to the shabby, depressing and profoundly car-sick St James’ Health Centre in Walthamstow. Just wandering around this building made my spirits sink.

Literacy is not the strong point of these highly paid professionals:

We are a eight doctor practice 3 males and 5 females. We also have a Nurse Practitioner, 2 Practice Nurses and a Health Care Assistant.

The practice is car-sick to its core. It is situated by a train station and a bus station but contains no advice on how to get to it other than by car. It contains no cycle stands at all.

The practice has 23 members of staff

I counted 32 cars in the car park on a weekday last week but perhaps the extra ones were visiting health professionals. How many of these vehicles had been driven distances of less than 5 miles? Probably most of them. How many had been driven less than 2 miles? Quite possibly more than half of them. And why not? Unlimited free car parking is a great incentive to car dependency.

As a diseased institution St James’ Health Centre naturalises car-sickness and infects others:

We are proud to be recognised both as a Teaching Practice for Undergraduate Students from the Royal London and Barts & Royal Free/University College London Medical Schools and as a Post Graduate Training Practice for GP Registrars.































(Below) Visitors arriving with prams or buggies are advised to lock them to a railing outside the entrance. Advice which is unlikely to be followed, since no one I know who pushes a pram or buggy ever carries a padlock and chain around with them. There’s plenty of space by the entrance to the health centre for bike stands, if anyone working here had ever heard of those quaint devices. Naturally the pram parking area has no protection from the rain.


























(Below) Judging by the architecture, this health centre opened in the 1960s. And in all that time no one has done anything about this kerb by the entrance, which presents a major obstacle to anyone in, or pushing, a wheelchair. The management of this practice really is stupefyingly mediocre and the doctors who work here should be ashamed of themselves for their lack of insight into the needs of those with a mobility difficulty, apart from their indifference to anyone who chooses to arrive here by bicycle.

Nurse killed cyclist

A NURSE has been banned from driving for a year and fined £300 after causing the death of a Lincolnshire pensioner.

Wendy Walmsley, 39, was attempting to turn right on to the A159 North Street in Gainsborough, at around 8.35am on May 17, when she failed to see 68-year-old cyclist Derek Vickers and drove into him.

Mr Vickers, who was wearing a bright orange reflective jacket, but no helmet, was thrown from his bike and suffered serious head injuries, dying later that day in hospital.

But handing down the sentence, District Judge Richard Blake said Walmsley had shown only "momentary inattention" and the case "was one of those tragic accidents that anyone could find themselves involved in".

This last remark confirms all my feelings about the car supremacist British judiciary, just as the risible punishment confirms all my feelings about the system’s indifference to the main cause of violent death and injury in our society and the continuing massacre of pedestrians and cyclists by criminally negligent motorists.

In the wider context, of course, there’s the reality that the NHS is a sick, diseased institution run by drug addicts hooked on fossil fuel dependency.

Some London hospitals even actively hinder cycling

NHS car dependency and cycle parking

What’s the biggest car park in the London Borough of Waltham Forest? My own extensive researches suggest it is ‘Whipps Cross Hospital’, a magnificent car park with 400 bays for visitors and 700 bays for NHS employees.

This fabulous car park also comes with several buildings devoted to health care.

Should you wish to cycle to the hospital, forget it. There are just 16 cycle stands, all grouped in one place (above). There are no signs to help you find these stands, which are of the kind designed by the Spanish Inquisition – the same kind which proved a major turn-off at the Walthamstow Bike Shed and outside Blackhorse Road tube station, where they had to be replaced by Sheffield stands. Luckily in those instances the local paper never found out about yet another example of council incompetence and financial waste!

The Whipps Cross Hospital website supplies an inaccurate cycling map which has obviously been created by someone who doesn’t cycle locally and which gives absolutely no information about cycle parking.

No surprise really, since Whipps Cross University Hospital is a diseased institution run by fossil-fuel addicts.

Another Waltham Forest cycling blogger draws some similarly acerbic conclusions after discovering that no cycle stands are supplied at either the St James Health Centre or the Forest Road Medical Centre.

To the Grumpy Cyclist’s two examples should be added the Penrhyn Surgery, Oliver Road Polyclinic, Chingford Health Centre and Leyton Green Clinic.

The NHS boasts lazy, car dependent staff like Dr Stanley Yu as well as unidentified lazy, lawless drivers

Meanwhile elsewhere in London the land overlooking the River Thames at St Thomas’s Hospital is devoted to car parking, even though it forms part of what should be an attractive route for walking and cycling.

And now other news.

One of Britain's most-recognised medics

who

uses the internet to promote public health

has had a little spot of bother.

Whipps Cross NHS fossil fuel news

Some marvellous news from our local car-sick, car-dependent, drug-addicted Primary Healthcare Trust!

PARAMEDICS will use motorcycles in an attempt to get to patients quicker, as part of a trial in Waltham Forest.

[This is a symptom of how congested and vehicle-choked the London Borough of Waltham Forest is becoming.]

The Motorcycle Response Unit will be stationed in the borough every day until the Spring, between 7am and 7pm.

Motorcyclists can easily manoeuvre through heavy traffic and the unit has proved effective in central London.

It’s such a shame there isn’t a more environmentally-friendly way of manoeuvring through heavy traffic in London.

Westminster’s petrolhead Tories exposed again

Dr Helen Walters, the new director of public health for Westminster, has written to council chiefs, urging them to reopen the case for bringing the speed limit down to 20mph on residential roads.

Dr Walters said a lower limit would also help the fight against soaring child obesity levels in Westminster, where more than a quarter of 11-year-olds are putting their health at risk.

Opposition leaders have seized on Dr Walters’s comments, saying the council can no longer ignore the weight of medical evidence that supports the scheme.

In a letter accompanying the latest child health profile for the borough, Dr Walters wrote: “The profile rightly highlights our high child obesity rates and poor oral health. It also highlights the high rates of road traffic accidents.

There’s always something new at a Waltham Forest cycle stand

All part of the rich tapestry of life in the London Borough of Waltham Forest. A figure slumped behind the cycle stands in the Town Square by the children’s playground, being attended to by the emergency services. A male in his twenties. Apparently not shot or stabbed, displaying the symptoms of being conscious but unable to stand. Saturday. No police turned up, so evidently not the aftermath of a crime.

Cycle lane improved on High Road Leyton!

Resurfacing the cycle lane in pink asphalt and refreshing the white cycle logo has really made all the difference to the pedalling environment, wouldn’t you say?

And that new advertising panel on the footway really ties it all together, does it not? A year ago this was just wasted space, full of pedestrians. Now it generates income.

But, hey! It's about creating an environment in which people can make healthier choices.

The car-sick Penrhyn Surgery

All local organs of the National Health Service are diseased, and the NHS locally is comprehensively in the hands of drug addicts hooked on fossil fuels and hostile to walking and cycling. Here’s the latest example. The Penrhyn Surgery, which has four reserved parking spaces for the doctors, no cycle stand provision and most of the footway outside the surgery reserved for car parking.

René Magritte’s ‘This is not a Waltham Forest NHS vehicle’

It wasn’t long after I opened my final email from Whipps Cross University Hospital NHS Trust, giving me the brush-off over this complaint, that I spotted the above vehicle, parked on double yellow lines (‘no waiting at any time’) on William Street, Leyton E10 on 2nd July at 11.25 am. Reg. E002 DYJ.

The email reaffirmed that a local NHS vehicle with AMBULANCE across the back, driven by a local driver and covered with NHS livery, was nuffink to do with the local NHS:

There is no central database which lists the numbers of vehicles used across the NHS and therefore this member of staff could be from any of the 32 local authorities or any NHS or private hospital and it would be impossible to establish exactly who employs this person without contacting every organisation.

Therefore I can only suggest that if you wish to pursue this matter further then you could contact the DVLA or the local Police.

Both the DVLA and the police of course, would, like the NHS, tell me to fuck off, since the registration details of vehicles are confidential and not available to members of the public, and in any case parking offences have been decriminalised and are not the responsibility of the police.

Plainly there is no point in me sending another complaint to the NHS. For example, the crap NHS Direct driver who put two wheels on the kerb cannot possibly have been anything to do with NHS Direct. Likewise, the van shown above, whose driver nipped off to do a spot of shopping, was plainly nothing at all to do with Whipps Cross University Hospital NHS Trust, even though that’s what it said on the vehicle’s side panel. The driver was almost certainly an irresponsible representative of the NHS (‘Norwegian Housing Society’), servicing Leyton’s famously large Norwegian population.

Please do not get the impression that the local health trust is the kind of organisation where even internal whistleblowers are concerned about

inappropriate use of a vehicle

or that abuses are tolerated:

“It was reported to senior management who dealt with it locally and swept it under the carpet.

Please don’t clog up the email box of Dr Lucy Moore, Chief Executive, Whipps Cross University Hospital NHS Trust by asking her if she is satisfied with the standards of local NHS drivers, or bothering her with questions about cycle parking at Whipps Cross Hospital or at the new Leyton Polyclinic. Please don’t pester her with annoying demands to know why Chingford Health Centre (sic) has a lovely car park but not a single cycle stand for staff or visitors. Please don’t email her with the accusation that Whipps Cross University Hospital is a car-sick institution with a drug-addicted administration and staff.

Dr Moore’s email address is

lucy.moore@whippsx.nhs.uk

Please do not trouble this busy woman with trifles like these, I beseech you.


Footnote

Everything is so different in Bristol.

How the NHS protects its bad drivers

It’s now exactly 14 days since I emailed this complaint to NHS Direct, Waltham Forest


Complaint re- the driver of NHS vehicle LK09 BDU (a small white van with NHS markings and the word ‘ambulance’ on the back, although not a conventional size ambulance).

Today I watched as the male driver (on the large size) stopped this vehicle on NO PARKING AT ANY TIME markings beside the signalled pedestrian crossing on St James’s Street, Walthamstow, by the junction with High Street. He crossed the road and went into the Apollo dry cleaners, from where he emerged some minutes later with some dry cleaning. The time was around 11.30-11.35 am .

To park at this location is an offence and irresponsible and the driver is plainly someone prepared to abuse his position as the driver of an NHS vehicle in order to use it for private purposes.

NHS Direct Waltham Forest replied:

The Ambulance Service in Waltham Forest is managed by the London Ambulance Service, so the concerns that you have raised would need to be investigated and responded to by London Ambulance Services Complaints Department.

London Ambulance Service replied:

I have checked with our Fleet Manager, and this vehicle is not registered with the London Ambulance Service. The majority of NHS hospitals have their own ambulance fleets, with very similar livery to the London Ambulance Service, typically to transport patients to and from home or to convey to other hospitals and there are few private ambulance services in London, so I can only suggest that this ambulance came from a hospital or other healthcare centre nearby.

I went back to NHS Direct Waltham Forest. The response, one week ago, was this:

Waltham Forest PCT do not own any ambulances or indeed any vehicles, which is why [name withheld] would have believed that it was owned by the London Ambulance Service.

I am forwarding your email to the complaints team at Whipps Cross to see if they can identify this vehicle and driver, as I am aware that they do have a collection service which operates within the local community.

Unfortunately, there is no central database which lists the numbers of vehicles used across the NHS and therefore this member of staff could be from any of the 32 local authorities or any NHS or private hospital and it would be impossible to establish exactly who employs this person without contacting every organisation.

Since then, silence.

So there you are. A vehicle which is covered in NHS livery, and which bears the word AMBULANCE on the back, and which is plainly a local Waltham Forest vehicle, cannot be identified by the local NHS primary healthcare trust.

Child health in London: spot the connection

The number of children cycling to school in London has declined massively over the past ten years.

More and more children are being driven to school.

More and more pavements in London are being turned over to car parking bays, a process which is continuing in all the London boroughs, year after year.

More and more advertising panels are being located in pavements, obstructing pedestrian flow, degrading the walking environment, and often advertising junk food.

and

One in nine children starting school in London is now obese, the highest level in the country, official figures reveal today.

By the end of primary school, London children are still by far the fattest in the country, with 21 per cent of 10 and 11-year-olds classed as obese.

A doctor writes…

The car skidded and I ran into both of them. The child flew through the air, caught in the beam of my headlights. I didn't see the adult.

Traffic stopped behind me and on the other side of the road ahead of me. For a few seconds everything was still. The child, who looked about three years old, was crying in a heap a few yards in front of my car; the adult had been thrown further.

So what has this experience done to me? Suddenly, a few speeding points on my licence don't seem quite so innocent. If you have any, you should also feel ashamed. It is easy to exceed the speed limit and, thankfully, on this occasion, I wasn't. Nor was I fiddling with my mobile phone, sat-nav, or CD player, all of which I have done before.

I think I was going at 20mph at the point of impact, and maybe now you will agree with me that that should be the speed limit in built-up areas.

Dr Nick Foreman is a GP from Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire. This article is published in this week's British Medical Journal

Well top marks to Dr Foreman for owning up and writing about his experience. But let me enter some caveats.

His emphasis is on reconstructing the urban environment to curb the lawless and reckless behaviour of drivers - behaviour he himself admits to engaging in. His emphasis is not on deterring bad driving in other ways, for example by taking away a driver's licence. At present speeding and using a mobile phone are treated by the judicial system as mere trifles, meriting three penalty points and a small fine. Professionals such as doctors and police officers are permitted to clock up motoring convictions without anyone regarding them as fundamentally irresponsible.

Had the doctor's collision taken place in a 20 mph zone, what difference would it have made? The crash would still have occurred.

He ‘thinks’ he was doing 20 mph but doesn’t really know and admits he has convictions for speeding. If by law his car had been fitted with a black box we’d know his precise speed. Technology has, potentially, a very big part to play in reducing road carnage but the core reality is that all governments regard the catastrophic extent of driver violence as perfectly acceptable, to be ameliorated only in the most peripheral ways. The road and car lobby continue to shape the parameters of that ineffectual blood-drenched ideology known as ‘road safety’.

UK road casualty figures decline overall only because fewer and fewer people are walking and cycling, more and more people are driving, cars now offer massive protection to their occupants (airbags, rigid steel safety cages) and modern medicine is much more efficient at saving the lives of badly injured people.

The medical profession is deeply implicated in road carnage. It has never taken any serious steps to combat what is an epidemic and the NHS itself is in the hands of drug addicts in thrall to fossil fuel. The extent of car dependency at all local NHS sites in Waltham Forest is phenomenal, matched by a contempt and institutional hostility to cycling and walking. I laugh hollowly when the latest cycling froth from Transport for London talks about working in partnership with the NHS. Instead of more leaflets telling people to ride bicycles, the NHS needs to address its own serious car sickness.

If Dr Foreman had been suspended as a doctor when he was convicted of speeding he might well have become a much safer driver. But doctors, like police officers, can clock up motoring convictions and continue with their work.

The problem with 20 mph zones is that they rarely keep speeds down to that level. It depends on the kind of traffic calming employed, which has very variable results. If you want to do 40 mph in Walthamstow’s Church Hill 20 mph zone there is nothing to stop you, other than a driver ahead who is going slower.

20 mph zones are effective in cutting fatalities and serious injuries but do not in themselves make streets pedestrian and cycling friendly. Waltham Forest has a number of 20 mph zones but cycling in them is not a pleasant experience because you are basically cycling down a metal canyon lined on both sides with parked cars. This brings you into conflict with approaching drivers, who rarely give way when they are on the cyclist’s side of the middle white line, or puts you into conflict with aggressive and impatient drivers determined to pass a cyclist, even though you are cycling at 20 mph.

Dr Foreman ought to try cycling. His consciousness has developed but, as it used to say on my skool reports, there is room for improvement.

Sick London

What is 'Well London'? It seems to be one of those lavishly funded health initiatives which doesn't really add up to very much. I'm sick of wishy-washy health initiatives in a capital city which can't even provide basic bicycle parking and where primary healthcare trusts are run by drug addicts in thrall to fossil fuel car dependency.

I laughed derisively at the goal of Promoting access to open spaces and increasing physical activity, since this local 'Well London' initiative on The Drive, situated in the local primary school, has based itself in a car-sick landscape. The pavement outside St Mary Primary School has been turned into a car park. It's yet another of those streets where a segregated cycle path on the Dutch model would be perfecly possible, if the vision and political will was there, which of course it isn't.

























(Below) It's just the same in the other direction. The car dominates and car dependency is promoted by the crap council, which can't think of any other use for a pavement except as a car park or for advertising.


























(Below) More health advice on the side of this phone booth. How to recognise symptoms of a stroke.


























(Below) This notice urges anyone encountering someone with slurred speech to dial 999. Yeah, right...

crap 'NHS Direct' van driver

I wouldn't normally bother with with white van man sticking two wheels on the kerb. I see it everywhere, and sometimes so do the borough's parking attendants, and they slap a ticket on. The only unusual feature of this van driver was that he or she was working for NHS Direct

You'd expect higher standards from NHS Direct, wouldn't you?

Nah, probably not. The NHS is a diseased institution, hostile to walking and cycling, and run by addicts in thrall to fossil fuels.

Tower Hamlets Road E17, 8 March.

Reg. AV59 OLK.

Car dependency and the NHS

HOSPITAL car park charges are set to be scrapped for thousands of patients after the Government admitted they cause "great resentment". Health Secretary Andy Burnham yesterday began an eight-week consultation to decide who should be exempt from fees

He admitted the NHS had not given the issue "the attention it deserves".

On the contrary, the NHS has turned just about every hospital site in Britain into a vast car park, while at the same time blatantly neglecting walking and cycling. The NHS is a car-sick body run by fossil-fuel addicts.

Unfit children

Only one in eight youngsters is getting the recommended 60 minutes of physical activity a day, according to the British Heart Foundation (BHF).

Hardly surprising, with ‘the school run’ and some schools banning children from cycling. Not to mention the car dependency of the teaching profession and the medical profession. But naturally these factors are excluded from this news story.

Physician heal thyself

"Doctors are still seen as respected and independent, largely trusted by their patients and the societies in which they practise ... As leaders of physicians across many countries, we call on doctors to demand that their politicians listen to the clear facts that have been identified in relation to climate change and act now to implement strategies that will benefit the health of communities worldwide."

This blog calls on doctors to shut up lecturing others about climate catastrophe and start addressing their own car dependency and diseased car-sick cycling-indifferent institutions.

Priorities

Another picture from the cycle lane outside Leyton Green Clinic (which lacks even one cycle stand). This picture just about sums it up, I think. London is a city which puts the interests of this 4X4 driver over that of cyclists. And while the media froths about young people carrying knives, it is perfectly relaxed (as are the police) about murderous bull bar attachments, suitable for killing child pedestrians at even less than 20 mph. But then I would not be particularly surprised if this vehicle belonged to an NHS worker or a police officer (or a teacher, or a magistrate, or a Crown Prosecution Service lawyer).

All these drivers are quite legally parked in the cycle lane, which forms part of 'The London Cycle Network' and which here exists as nothing more than a token and wholly meaningless gesture towards cycling. And allows the Council to claim it has spent money on cycling, when in reality it has done no such thing.