The role of amnesia in local transport planning

I was clearing out some old files when I came across a now long-forgotten document. I refer to the London Borough of Waltham Forest’s Interim Transport Plan 2000/2001.

Produced at the start of the new millennium, this 114 page document (with additional unpaginated tables) sets out a variety of targets to be achieved in the area of transport over the next decade.

Glancing at it, I was struck by what a fabulous vision lay in prospect for the lucky residents of Waltham Forest. Over the next decade Waltham Forest was on track to be one of the Greenest places in Britain, as far as transport was concerned. Car use by council employees would switch from private cars to council-owned electric cars, and the mileage allowance for “essential” car use would be totally phased out. In addition there would be a massive cut of 20 per cent in the number of motor vehicles on the borough’s roads. What’s more cycling would grow and go on growing, until by 2012 in the London Borough of Waltham Forest ten journeys in every hundred would be made by bike.

Let me quote exactly what the Interim Transport Plan 2000/2001 says on these matters.

On page 36, under Green Transport Plans, it is revealed that:

A scheme at the Waltham Forest Chingford Municipal Offices has been implemented whereby two electric cars are being used by staff in an attempt to switch 10% of “business at work” journeys to electric travel rather than private car use. The scheme will phase out the Essential Car Users’ Allowance and other casual car allowances as the electric car pool expands over the next ten years. 

 On page 37, under Traffic Reduction, it is stated that:

The London Planning Advisory Committee (LPAC) have set a traffic reduction target of 20% for Waltham Forest from 2000 traffic levels by the year 2010. Road traffic reduction is needed because it will produce many benefits including reducing congestion and car dependency, improving bus reliability, improved conditions for walkers and cyclists and better environmental conditions and air quality. 

On page 66, under Cycling, the borough gives its support to a London-wide initiative:

A London Cycling Strategy was launched by LPAC/London Pride Partnership in October 1997, this includes a number of targets, in particular, that by 2012 the number of trips in London made by bicycle should increase from the present two percent to ten percent. The LCN [London Cycle Network] is the key capital investment in taking this strategy forward and meeting the target.

(Elsewhere the Council committed itself to an increase in cycling of at least 80 per cent in the borough in the period 2001-2010)

What happened to those targets? More than a decade later the reality is that not a single one of those targets came even near to being achieved. In fact they all failed in a spectacular fashion.

The interesting thing is that failures like these have no impact whatsoever on subsequent transport planning. Much the same kind of promises are made in document after document, year after year. Yet not a single document refers back to earlier documents, either to acknowledge past failure or to analyse it.

This is what happened.

The two newly purchased electric cars were put on show at council environmental events (I have a dim memory of seeing them years ago on display at the Green Fair or some such event). After some years had passed a whistleblower tipped off the local paper that the two electric cars could be seen rusting and disused, quietly abandoned in a council yard. The great electric car experiment was a dismal failure. The Council has bought no electric cars since.

How did that “traffic reduction target of 20% for Waltham Forest from 2000 traffic levels by the year 2010” work out? I recently enquired, and received this reply:

For a number of years after 2000, the Council did not have the resources to carry out borough wide traffic monitoring. However, this was done between the years 2005 - 2009. The results show that there was generally very little change in the overall traffic levels in the borough (with +/- 1% range) in that 4 year period. It is likely that there has been a fairly minimal change in the overall traffic levels in Waltham Forest between 2000 and the present day. 

So, nothing at all was achieved. There has been no traffic reduction whatever in the borough.

(I am by the way not entirely persuaded by the official reply. The trend of car ownership in the borough has been steadily upward for many years. My belief is that traffic volumes on both major and minor roads are significantly greater than they were a decade ago but in the absence of counts this is impossible to establish.)

And cycling?

Last year’s borough Local Improvement Plan revealed that according to TfL cycling’s modal share in Waltham Forest was below one per cent (nought point eight per cent to be exact). It appears that cycling locally has at best stagnated, and at worst has declined. A ten per cent modal share is nowhere on the horizon.

All this of course raises the question as to why these three targets were not achieved. Or rather, as far as transport planning in the London Borough of Waltham Forest is concerned, it doesn’t. When it comes to local authority transport targets, amnesia is the order of the day.

Borough transport planning documents appear on a regular basis every year or so, and they always promise to “encourage cycling” and curb car use and promote walking, and none of them is worth a hill of beans because they are just empty words which fail to acknowledge the glaring failure of previous identical commitments. In that regard the borough’s most recent LIP (2011) is as culpable as any.

The stark, blatant, core reality is that cycling and walking are given “encouragement” but only on car-centric terms, and the big money and the serious infrastructure changes are directed at car use and car parking. For example, in the unpaginated tables at the end of Interim Transport Plan 2000/2001, devoted to capital expenditure, it is revealed that the so-called Leyton Relief Road (designed to ease pressure on Leyton High Road) cost £9,372,000.

That’s right, trying to combat congestion by building a new road – a strategy which has rightly been compared to combating obesity by loosening one’s belt – cost over nine million pounds. The road did include off-road cycle tracks but these were cosmetic, since the route is irrelevant to most local cyclists, leading from the car-centric Temple Mills complex in Leyton to the municipal rubbish dump in Walthamstow.

Another page reveals that putting in traffic lights exclusively for drivers at the Crooked Billet roundabout cost £450,000.

And cycling and walking? They get £25,000 to encourage “travel awareness” through “publicity and maps”.

I also believe that the failure of each of the three targets should not be viewed in isolation but that they are intimately connected. The official explanation for the failure of the great electric car innovation is as follows:

Yes - we did purchase two electric Peugeot 106 cars in 2000 and these were used by staff making business trips for a number of years. However, these were the early days of volume electric cars and they proved to be problematic in terms of reliability. In addition, the number of dealers qualified to repair them was very limited and we had problems getting spare parts and getting repairs done. 

The council currently has no electric vehicles. This in itself is of no significance, since the ‘Green’ claims made for electric cars are essentially bogus, ignoring as they do the environmental costs of producing such vehicles, the environmental costs involved in creating the electricity to power such vehicles, and above all the fact that an electric car is still a car – a means of personal mobility which generates a huge range of negative consequences, particularly when used in dense urban areas where much better alternative means of transport are possible.

However, bear in mind that the London Borough of Waltham Forest’s great electric car innovation also promised to “phase out the Essential Car Users’ Allowance and other casual car allowances as the electric car pool expands over the next ten years”. It emerged last year that staff using their own vehicles for “essential” council business (known as the “grey fleet”) was a scheme which had escaped all proper scrutiny and was completely out of control. The council employed a consultancy (the Energy Saving Trust) to review the borough’s grey fleet.

The EST made three fascinating discoveries. Firstly, ‘the Council’s grey fleet emissions relative to the size of its fleet…are high compared to other London Boroughs.’ Secondly, ‘the report concluded that the Borough currently pays very high rates for its grey fleet provision.’ Thirdly, and perhaps most revealingly of all, ‘The grey fleet is not managed; there is insufficient data to address the high costs’.

What is apparently not scrutinised by the report (the council has not made it available to the public) is the concept of “essential” car use. The borough is relatively compact (think of it as a rectangle running north to south, around 10 km in length and 5 km wide). Such distances could, in theory, easily be cycled. However, it emerged that “essential” car use included members of the transport section driving some three kilometres for a meeting with the local cycling group. Or to put it another way, the council’s own transport planners are addicted to fossil fuels and car dependency, and this addiction probably extends to other areas of council employment.

Council employees will often enjoy the perk of reserved parking which has traditionally been free. Add to that the perk of an “essential car user” mileage allowance and other forms of subsidy, and car use is a very attractive option. This fossil fuel dependency inevitably influences the priorities of local planners. The “official” explanation for the council’s abandonment of electric cars is not especially plausible and I strongly suspect that basically none of the officers wanted to give up using their cars or being financially rewarded for doing so.

Meanwhile the official explanation for the massive failure of the traffic reduction target is as follows:

Since 2000, the Council’s planning and transport policies have tried to reduce reliance on the private car by encouraging more people to walk, cycle or use public transport. In addition, our land use planning policies have tried to promote ways of reducing the need to travel. However, a substantial traffic reduction target such as 20% would only have been achieved by a combination of ‘carrot and stick’ approaches. For example, the London Mayor's congestion charging scheme was introduced in 2003 in central London which made a big difference in that area but traffic restraint schemes have not been rolled out in the rest of London. 

There is of course a grain of truth in the argument that some things are outside the council’s control. Some of the roads in the borough come under the remit of Transport for London, others under the Highways Agency. Waltham Forest Council is not, for example, empowered to restrain traffic on the M11 motorway or the North Circular Road. However, these are the exception rather than the rule. It is also the case that on some occasions the council seeks to restrain car ownership by, for example, introducing a clause into some new developments in a Controlled Parking Zone that forbids residents to apply for a car parking permit. However, these are also very much the exception rather than the rule.

The overwhelming thrust of council policy since 2000 has been to promote increased car ownership and use by a variety of inducements. These include halving the cost of CPZ permits, changing the CPZ permit charging regime in favour of owners of bigger cars, massive subsidies for free new on-street parking bays, the continuing reallocation of space on footways from pedestrians to drivers, a refusal to crack down in any way on blue badge fraud (arguably out of control in this borough), a disinclination to ban drivers from parking in cycle lanes, inadequate cycle parking, traffic light phasing which prioritises motor vehicle flow over pedestrian flow, and the view that the health of the local economy is dependent upon prioritising shoppers who arrive by car, who should be encouraged by free or very-low cost on-street car parking.

However apart from these parochial symptoms of a council which is fundamentally car-centric in its policies there are two broader aspects of council policy which are also relevant: infrastructure spending is heavily weighted in favour of motor vehicles, and the purpose of transport infrastructure is perceived to be smooth traffic flow, i.e. the convenience of drivers.

The council is not generally in favour of making the use of the private car inconvenient and the number of road closures in the borough appears to be minimal. (The council is unable to say how many road closures there are: I used FOI to ask and it turns out that the council doesn't even know how many roads there are in the borough, let alone how many are closed to motor vehicles. The amateurism of supposed professionals is truly extraordinary.)

Policies which favour walking and cycling are acceptable but are always qualified by the proviso “where possible”, a qualification which defines possibility not in terms of technical possibility but rather as meaning “which does not seriously impede smooth traffic flow or prevent on-street car parking”.

In short, the claim that the council’s failure to meet its commitment to a 20 per cent traffic reduction was due to outside forces is almost entirely bogus. The council has promoted the ownership and use of the private car in the borough, and the consequences of that are visible on every car-choked street.

Lastly, why did the borough’s cycling target fail?

That’s an easy one to answer. The policy engine was vehicular cycling, a transport strategy which has demonstrably failed. Its concrete expression was the LCN:

The LCN [London Cycle Network]] is the key capital investment in taking this strategy forward and meeting the target. The aim of the LCN is to provide a network of safe, convenient and conspicuous cycle routes…suitable for use by cyclists of all age groups” 

And this is how the LCN worked out in practice on the A112, the central north-south communication spine in the borough.

Elsewhere, in Leyton, the council allows unlimited free car parking in the LCN, with the result shown here.

Statistics which count individual cycling trips on particular roads in isolation from driver trips need to acknowledge (but never do) that any upward trend might be expected from a borough where the population is increasing in number.

Or to put it at its most basic, “encouraging cycling and walking” involves a light scattering of sugared words over a determined and unyielding car-centric agenda.

But, hey, why brood over the past? Let’s apply the traditional amnesia and all cheer loudly as we embrace another glorious future.

cycling crime hotspot – can you help?

There is evidence of serious fraud at the Town Hall (no, I’m not referring to the vanishing poor fund, because as we know that was simply an error in the minutes).

At the beginning of the new millennium the Greenest council in Outer London made this grand commitment:

The aim of Waltham Forest Council policy is to meet the LAPC target of increasing the number of cycle trips from 2% to 10% by 2012.

The number of cycle trips in the borough currently stands at 0.8%, so if anything the council has achieved a reduction in cycling, not an increase. But not to worry – nobody talks about this kind of stuff. You just forget it and invent a new figure.

Meanwhile the officers responsible for marginalising cycling have done a very good job of rewarding their own car dependency. Council offices, incidentally, are concentrated in an area roughly four miles in length and two miles wide. Which is obviously far too great a distance to be cycled.

Cycling and the Waltham Forest ‘grey fleet’ scandal (Part 2)

Horror strikes at Waltham Forest council offices on High Road Leyton...




























The reasons for the very low rate of cycling in Outer London aren’t simply a matter of the barriers to cycling. They are also connected to the attractiveness of car travel. Part of that attraction is perceived low cost. Free workplace parking makes car use for short journeys very attractive. If, in addition, your use of a car for work purposes is regarded as ‘essential’ and you are financially rewarded for using a car, why on earth would you want to cycle? After all, Transport for London’s ‘Network Assurance’ traffic modelling is all about ‘smoothing traffic flow’ at the expense of safe and convenient cycling and walking.

The local paper is on to the Council about its ‘grey fleet’ profligacy. The Council still refuses to admit how much it has been spending on subsidising staff using their private cars. Simply switching Waltham Forest mileage allowances to the standard rates allowed by the Inland Revenue will save the borough half a million pounds, which is remarkable when it now emerges that in the London Borough of Havering during the 2009/10 financial year the total paid out to 'grey fleet' council staff was £380,600. So it seems entirely possible that Waltham Forest council officers have been rewarding themselves for their car use by well over £1 million a year – perhaps even as much as £3 million. We really won’t know until the officers can be forced to disgorge the figures, which at present they appear very reluctant to do.

The case for the ‘grey fleet’ was put by one commenter on the local paper website:

I have regular dealings with a number of council officers who are run off their feet with the amount of work they are having to do because staff have already been cut. Many of them have several appointments at all four corners of the borough virtually every day.

I believe it would be totally impractical for them to keep appointments using public transport and, as for cycling, they are not all super-fit people capable of all that cycling every day.

Is it really the case that council officers are engaged in this kind of urgent travel? I have my doubts. Let’s have some transparency – who is using their cars, where, for what purpose, how often.

The London Borough of Waltham Forest is a relatively compact neighbourhood, some 6 miles from north to south, and 3½ miles from east to west, roughly oblong-shaped. But those figures are misleading in so far as tracts of the borough are woodland, parkland and a tranche of the Lea Valley. The urban areas where council offices are located are concentrated in a much smaller area than might be indicated by the borough boundaries.

You hardly have to be ‘super-fit’ to cycle from the Town Hall to Leyton or Chingford. And the borough is well served by bus routes: 20, 34, 48, 55, 56, 58, 66, 69, 97, 123, 145, 158, 179, 212, 215, 230, 257, 275, 308, 313, 357, 379, 385, 397, 444, W11, W12, W13, W14, W15, W16, W19, plus a few others.

Gerhard Weiss of the Waltham Forest Cycling Campaign is not convinced:














This sums up everything that’s wrong about Waltham Forest Council and cycling. Its own officers responsible for highways matters prefer to drive the ridiculously short distance from their offices on South Access Road to the Town Hall – a distance of about a mile and a half – to discuss cycling matters with local activists. And their fossil fuel addiction is subsidised as ‘essential car use’.

One recent cycling employee of Waltham Forest Council is less than pleased to learn about the existence of the ‘grey fleet’ subsidy. Step forward local blogger Julian Beere:

I have worked for the Community Learning and Skills Service (LBWF) and so I can give an (ex)employee's response. I worked part-time on a sessional basis at several of the service's learning centres and used my bike to commute. One of the centres, Chestnut House, has no proper facility for securing bicycles. Indeed (cycling) staff and learners used to lock bicycles to a fire escape.

At another centre, Friday Hill House, there was no cycle stand either. I used to lock my bike to a drain pipe close to the car park at the side. I worried that it did not seem too challenging an opportunity for a cycle thief to engage with and so I imagine other cyclists might have been effectively discouraged.

I cycled to and from there (and other centres) frequently heavily loaded with tools and materials for group arts and crafts activities. I did not mind doing this; the point I am getting to is that at no time was this contribution to the service recognised and encouraged let alone 'rewarded'.

I have put in some very specific Freedom of Information requests to the council about its ‘grey fleet’.

To be continued…

Bringing diversity to footway obstruction

Visit The London Borough of Waltham Forest to encounter illegal obstruction of the footway in all community languages. (High Road Leytonstone)

The number of shopkeepers prosecuted by this crap council for illegal obstruction of the footway by ‘A’ boards in the past year: nil.

Waltham Forest Council only enforces with extreme reluctance laws to protect pedestrians, and then only minimally. It turns a blind eye to footway obstruction on a spectacular scale. It’s a car-sick council run by grey fleet officers who cycle nowhere and who can just about manage to waddle from their reserved parking bays to their offices. Bah!

Waltham Forest council: the ‘grey fleet’ scandal and the suppression of cycling

"And it was all grey..." The view from the Transport Planning department at the Town Hall, Walthamstow.

Let’s ignore for now the reasons why most people in Britain won’t cycle. Let’s look at the other side of the coin: the reasons why people prefer to drive. These are numerous and variable but obviously include comfort and convenience plus infrastructure (all of which are signally lacking for cyclists in Britain).

Under ‘infrastructure’ you’d need to include car parking. For many workers (teachers, for example) workplace parking is free and generally exceeds demand.

There’s also perceived cost. Once you’ve bought a car it makes sense to use it. Buses are slow and often follow circuitous routes. Cycling is widely perceived as unattractive and unsafe. Train fares are notoriously high in the UK. Travel by car often seems more convenient and attractive, sometimes just as quick, and, on the face of it, very much cheaper. And apart from perceived cost, driving is, by any objective measurement, getting cheaper, with the current total cost now only around 85% of its 1997 level.

What’s more

the costs to society of motoring exceed the costs to the individual, which will lead to a level of motoring that is both inefficiently high and inefficiently cheap from a social perspective. The [fuel] duty is therefore a way of forcing the private motorist to take account of these social costs.

(That said, international variations in cycling rates have nothing at all to do with the price of petrol.)

One consequence of mass motoring in Britain is, as we know, the suppression of cycling. Everybody agrees that there is a massive suppressed demand for cycling, even if traditional U.K. cycling campaigning has demonstrably failed to unlock that potential. Part of that reason is the cycle campaign establishment’s disinclination to adopt a holistic approach to cycling. If you believe that the bicycle is a vehicle which belongs on the road and that cyclists must adapt to vehicular cycling, then the volume of cars on the road and issues like car parking become irrelevant. Let me once again cite Dave Horton’s observation that We’ve got a cycling promotion industry in the UK which refuses to contemplate the act of deterring driving. It’s always promoting cycling around the edges, not seeking to dismantle the central system of mobility in the UK, which is the car.

Today I want to consider two aspects of how driving by employees of the London Borough of Waltham Forest is encouraged by the Council both financially and through the availability of car parking.

These reflections are prompted by a couple of revelatory passages in the council’s newly-published Waltham Forest Local Implementation Plan (LIP). At present this still seems to be unavailable on-line; the one currently available on the internet is only the 2005 LIP. So much for transparency (the new LIP is dated December 2010, it is now February, and responses must be in by 25 February). Luckily Freewheeler has contacts and has obtained a rare hard copy. Mind you, I can see why the council wouldn’t want pesky, troublesome people like journalists or bloggers reading it, as it does contain some illuminating raw data. But now let’s cut to the chase and the scandal of the ‘grey fleet’. And bear in mind that these issues apply to all local authorities, so if you care about them it’s well worth using the Freedom of Information Act (FOI) to extract the facts from your own local council.

On p. 82 I learned that transport accounts for 28% of the council’s overall emissions and that

staff commuting levels and use of its grey fleet are significant sources of its transport-related emissions of 385 tonnes in 2009/10.

What’s a council’s ‘grey fleet’? This is the term used for staff using their own private cars while on council business and being financially rewarded for doing so. What's defined as 'essential car use', which can either be full-time or 'casual'.

This hidden can of worms is only opened-up for scrutiny some thirteen pages later, in section 4.3.5

Here it is revealed that the council employed a consultancy (the Energy Saving Trust) to review the borough’s grey fleet. The EST made three fascinating discoveries.

Firstly, ‘the Council’s grey fleet emissions relative to the size of its fleet…are high compared to other London Boroughs.’

Secondly, ‘the report concluded that the Borough currently pays very high rates for its grey fleet provision.’

Thirdly, and perhaps most revealingly of all, ‘The grey fleet is not managed; there is insufficient data to address the high costs’

The deficiencies in the existing operation of the grey fleet (which has presumably been in this state for years, perhaps even decades) are underlined by the EST recommendations, which include

Setting a grey fleet management system

Consolidating all grey fleet related information into a single, frequently updated database from which a full profile of individual staff travel, including car details, insurance information, driver licence verification, miles travelled, costs of claims, can be established and monitored.

The LIP fails to supply any financial figures, even though the EST report will undoubtedly have contained some, so plainly there is scope for a variety of FOI requests, number one being: what is the total annual cost of the operation of the London Borough of Waltham Forest’s ‘grey fleet’?

And how many officers enjoy the luxury of 'essential' car use?

What has been exposed is plainly a form of car dependency run on behalf of council officers, by council officers, which has been allowed to get completely out of control, with apparently lavish sums being squandered on car travel, without even rudimentary checks on whether or not drivers have a licence, are insured, genuinely need to use cars for their journeys, or are putting in false or exaggerated mileage claims. Scrutiny of this swamp of officer self-interest by the elected members seems to have been non-existent; it has only been dragged out into the light of day by the council’s need to cut its spending.

The EST also recommended

Moving from National Joint Council rates to HMRC’s Authorised Mileage Allowance Payments, making a short term saving of over £500,000.

I assume this figure applies to an annual saving. And this very substantial figure will result simply by switching Waltham Forest mileage allowances from the standard local authority rate for ‘essential users’ of 50.5p per mile for the first 8,500 miles for a car of 1200-1450cc (topped up with an annual lump sum of £1,239) and 65p a mile for ‘casual users’ [source] to the lower approved mileage rates used by the inland revenue, namely 40p a mile for the first 10,000 business miles (as outlined here). (Incidentally why is the public sector enjoying more preferential car mileage rates than the private sector - isn't this something any Conservative opposition at a local level would want to be pursuing?)

The EST gets to the rotten heart of the Council bureaucracy’s car-dependency when it recommends

Establishing a travel hierarchy where use of a private vehicle is used only after more cost effective and less polluting [modes] have been considered. This would provide the Borough with a template for codifying how staff travels.

Yes, yes, yes. The whole question of ‘essential car use’ by council employees needs to be dragged out into the open and rigorously scrutinised. The London Borough of Waltham Forest is relatively compact and there seems no reason why almost all journeys within it should not be made by bicycle. Of course any car user will bluster that their journey is essential (important papers to carry, couldn’t take a laptop on a bicycle, and other nonsense).

Definitions of what genuinely constitutes 'essential' car journeys need to be made by people other than fossil-fuel-addicts, for whom car travel is as essential and natural as a daily bottle of gin or whisky is to an alcoholic.

Not that I am optimistic that the Council is capable of seriously addressing its grey fleet scandal. We are told only that the Council is ‘considering’ the EST’s recommendations, of which only ‘some’ are ‘likely’ to be implemented ‘in the short to medium term’. Which is all delightfully vague. The officers are plainly not going to remove their snouts from their troughs of oil and petrol if this can be avoided (and many bureaucrats are experts in obfuscation, delay, procrastination and policy evaporation).

The LIP also contains some evasive blather about the Council ‘consolidating its workplace estate on fewer sites thereby minimizing travel between sites’, even though it is perfectly possible to cycle between ALL the council sites in the borough quite easily and quickly.

There is, naturally, also lots of blather about ‘encouraging the use of electric vehicles’, which will plainly be the travel mode of choice for the next generation of non-cycling well-paid workers. No doubt there will be extra advantageous mileage rates and other financial incentives for those whose ‘essential’ journeys are in future made by environmentally-friendly electric cars.

The other side of the coin is car parking for Council workers, which is usually either free or, when there’s a charge, very inexpensive. Take a look at the scenes below: Waltham Forest Town Hall is basically a vast car park containing some council offices.

The final bleak irony is the absence of cycle parking. There are half a dozen over-subscribed stands by the Town Hall entrance and that’s it. No other visitor cycle parking is supplied. And the LIP itself is issued by the Transport Planning department, which is situated in Sycamore House to the rear of the main Town Hall building. This building is open to the public but contains no cycle stands for visitors. Which symbolizes everything I have ever said about this Council and its bogus credentials as a Green, cycling-friendly local authority.

(Below) More scenes from the Town Hall, Walthamstow. There are some special reserved bays for ‘Green Badge’ users, who, judging by the flash cars, are management. You know, the people in charge of sustainability and stuff like that.









































And now, for just one example out of many, let us cycle off to Gainsford Road E17, not all that far away (but doubtless a car would be 'essential' for many LBWF officers making this journey). Here there are council offices shared with the NHS. I’m always coming across tosh like this in documents about ‘encouraging cycling’:

Working in partnership with NHS London and local healthcare providers to promote cycling in Outer London can contribute to a more active and healthier local population.

Yet the NHS in Waltham Forest is car-sick, with extensive car parking at local NHS sites and cycle parking either non-existent or inadequate.

It's no surprise at all to learn that

The NHS produces nearly as much carbon dioxide annually as Croatia

But not to worry – its fossil-fuel-addicted management has come up with some marvellous Green ideas, none of which involves cutting back on car dependency by the NHS’s car-sick workforce. For example

older patients with leg ulcers will be sent to flower arranging classes - improving their mobility and helping them heal faster, saving on carbon emissions for travel to hospitals.


























Here at these joint NHS and London Borough of Waltham Forest offices on Gainsford Road there are no signs indicating any cycle parking, and presumably there isn’t any as I couldn’t see any bike stands at all. But there is extensive free car parking for NHS employees, council employees and visitors. At least three of the vehicles parked here are 4X4s and one has a child-killing bull bar attached to the front.

The probability is that most of the drivers parked here will have driven less than two miles, and almost all less than five miles. If drivers were charged £10 a day to park here they would suddenly find the costs of motoring too great. They would be unable to park on local streets because this building is surrounded by Controlled Parking Zones. These drivers would then be forced to consider other transport modes – walking, buses or yes, even cycling.

But as long as the NHS and Waltham Forest Council supply free parking to their employees car use becomes attractive for short journeys. And everyone who has driven to this building has helped to deter cycling. Two out of every three drivers here will, on average, never have cycled, and their driving standards in proximity to a cyclist may well be intimidating, reckless or careless. And some of these drivers (for all I know, most of them) will be getting paid 50p – 65p a mile for their car use, topped up by an annual payment of £1,239 for depreciation/wear and tear.

The Council issues grand documents about ‘sustainability’ and ‘encouraging walking and cycling’ but it is itself, along with the NHS, actively involved in promoting car dependency, subsidising car dependency, and discouraging and deterring cycling. In this it is probably no different to any other local authority in Britain.