Pinch points of Waltham Forest

Why not collect the series? The proliferation of pinch points in the London Borough of Waltham Forest plays a small but important role in suppressing any possibility of mass cycling. This magnificent example can be found on James Lane E11, by the hospital. Ostensibly a 20 mph zone, here the ineffective small rubber speed cushions do nothing to slow down the determined speeder, while encouraging drivers to swerve to avoid passing over them. To add to the fun this pinch point is in a small valley, which means that drivers approach it downhill at speed from both directions – no wonder it’s been demolished on at least one occasion when a driver ‘lost control’.

It is impossible for a cyclist and a car to pass this pinch point at the same time, so for the cyclist it’s a choice between a moment of sheer terror as a driver sees if he can manage it, or for the confident well-trained cyclist the experience of ‘taking the lane’, which is sure to provoke the blaring of a horn and some traditional monosyllabic greetings. Enjoy.

They put up a sign and called it a cycle route

Isn't that blue sign on the left lovely? It designates this cycling-hostile street as a cycle route. Which is a sick joke. The street - Northcote Road E17 - is lined with parked cars on both sides. Which means that a cyclist either has an impatient driver behind them, itching to squeeze past, or is faced by a psychopath driving towards her on the cyclist's side of the road, who doesn't understand that the cyclist has the right of way. To add to the fun there are rubber speed cushions down the middle of the road, encouraging drivers to make erratic swerves to try and avoid them. The London Cycling Campaign gives prizes to the Council for routes like this, part of the award-winning '20 miles of quiet routes'.

Suppressing cycling v. getting more people on bikes

Suppressing cycling on East Avenue E17

Most UK cycling blogs celebrate the good things about cycling and are optimistic about the future of cycling. This blog specialises in crap and aligns itself with full-bodied pessimism.

The point about the sort of crap featured on this blog is that I believe it suppresses cycling. I don’t think cycling is going anywhere in London and I don’t think optimists are doing the prospect of mass cycling any favours. Not as long as the transport infrastructure continues to put the car before the bicycle.

A local example. East Avenue, Walthamstow, shown above. For starters the road is dedicated to parking bays along both sides. This narrows the road so that cyclists are either faced with oncoming traffic coming unpleasantly close, or are overtaken by passing traffic coming unpleasantly close. To make matters even worse, the clowns in the Council’s highway engineering department have laid rubber speed cushions along this road. A basic objection to rubber speed cushions is that they are ineffective traffic calming devices. They are supposed to slow vehicles to 20 mph, but don’t. You can thunder over them in a 4X4 at any speed you want to. But even worse, these car-driving transport planners have laid the cushions in rows of three, with the middle one straddling the dashed white line down the middle of the road. The result? Drivers aim to get their wheels to pass through the gaps between the speed cushions. Which means for a cyclist that drivers come thundering towards you on your side of the road. Few drivers seem to understand that when they veer over into the other lane whoever is using that lane has priority.

The first thing that needs to be done on East Avenue is to strip away those speed cushions. Next adopt the radical approach seen in the Netherlands and Denmark and get rid of all the parking bays on the western side. Then use the space to build a segregated cycle lane on the Dutch model.

Do that and do it elsewhere and you’ll see a genuine surge in cycling. But if you accept the existing condition of streets like East Avenue and simply try and market cycling as cool and sexy, I think the strategy will fail. But then existing strategy seems to have failure built into it, judging by the Mayor’s stunted ambition. As this blogger rightly observes

aiming for cycling to be just 5% modal share of all traffic by 2026 is less like a velorution and more like a wet Wednesay matinee of Les Miserables.

Alas, optimism then seeps in:

2010 does stand to be a record year for cycling in London. Transport for London, under the stewardship of Mayor Johnson, will launch 6000 new bikes onto our streets with the launch of the Zone 1 bike hire scheme. The first two of 12 ‘cycle superhighways’ (essentially existing cycle lanes re-painted and re-branded to raise their awareness) will open to the general public. The cycling budget for the next five years is a fairly hefty £110 million pounds.

There’s nothing wrong with the bike hire scheme in principle, but let’s not get carried away.

The most optimistic estimates of their use say they will each be used 10 times a day. That's 60000 cycle trips per day (and is somewhat optimistic based on the take up of other shared bike schemes).

This may sound impressive, but the greater London area has around 8 million residents. In most places, people make an average of around 2.5 "trips" by all modes each day, so that's around 20 million trips per day in total. If we assume that the bike hire scheme really does reach the number of trips that its proponents say, this means it has a capacity to replace one in 400 trips. 0.3% of the total. And that's the best case if they complete the scheme.

i.e. on average these bikes will account for just 0.002 trips per person per day.

That's tiny. Barely a start, in fact. Where people really cycle they use their bikes an awful lot more than that.

As for the Cycle Superhighways. Painting 1.5 metre cycle lanes blue is not going to get non-cycling Londoners rushing to try out cycling.

And as for £110 million for cycling in Greater London over five years, that’s not a “fairly hefty” budget, it’s peanuts. And how much of that money will go on infrastructure, and how much will be drained away by futile promotions and marketing stunts?

Cycle lanes of Grove Green Road

In 2006, the London Cycling Campaign handed its prestigious London Cycling Award to the London Borough of Waltham Forest.

Waltham Forest was declared the winner for its innovative and extensive cycling facilities, which includes a 40-mile network of cycle lanes and quiet routes in the Borough.

The Council regards cycling as an important mode of transport and almost all main roads in the borough now have cycle lanes.

And as this blog works its way around Waltham Forest’s magnificent cycling infrastructure, here’s the latest impressive example. The cycle lanes on Grove Green Road E11, a.k.a. the A106. All photos taken yesterday.

My first photo shows the superb off-road cycle lane on the eastern side. Distinctly marked out in pink, this generously wide cycle lane on the Dutch model allows the entire family to leave the car behind and go cycling as a group or, in the case of very thin companions, side by side. Double-yellow lines ensure that no driver would ever dream of abusing this vital contribution to safe cycling. For drivers heading south, the removal of cyclists from the carriageway ensures that no one need be troubled by that frustrating and oppressive 30 mph speed limit.

On the western side (below) the start of the cycle lane provides a valuable character-building exercise, as cyclists test their nerve by being forced out into the path of high speed traffic approaching from the rear. Once again note the generous width of the cycle lane (as the Council proudly acknowledges on its website the vast majority of its cycle lanes are a fabulous 1 to 1.2 metres wide - but sometimes of course they just can't help being less than that).


























The proximity of parking bays and the lack of any restriction on the size of vehicle which drivers can park there helps cyclists to strengthen their powers of mental alertness as they guard against being ‘doored’ while simultaneously being overtaken. Of course you could choose to cycle outside the cycle lane but this will be perceived by drivers as a wilful attempt to slow them down, and you can expect to hear the hooting of horns and the loud screaming of obscenities. If a road rage driver does decide to run you down, the headline in the local paper will, of course, read: ACCIDENT ON GROVE GREEN ROAD. CYCLIST COLLIDES WITH CAR.

In a hilarious final touch, the council has installed rubber speed cushions. These dismally fail to slow down speeding drivers, instead provoking them into swerving erratically to get through the gaps. This includes swerving into the cycle lane on the west side, or over into the opposite carriageway, even when a cyclist is approaching.

Enjoy.

Bleak prospect

from the website of The Waltham Forest Cycling Campaign

Speed Cushions
The council has said it will not use speed cushions in future traffic calming schemes. We have long campaigned against their use and are pleased that sustained pressure from us has resulted in this change of policy.

Except that there has been no change of policy and the Council continues to install speed cushions, like these brand new ones on Prospect Hill E17.

Speed cushions simply encourage drivers to swerve round them. For cyclists, this means you constantly have boy racers and taxi drivers driving at you head on.

However, as can be seen here, a narrow cycle lane has been provided to allow cyclists to by-pass the chicane. (Putting it right next to street furniture was an inspired touch.)

Who could possibly doubt that this traffic calming has resulted in extra convenience and safety for cyclists?

Patching

West Avenue, E17. A panel of the rubber speed cushion has gone walkabout, so instead of replacing it the Council had it 'patched' - to the professional standards one would expect in this borough...

New cycle trap tested

This innovative cycle trap is cleverly camouflaged as a rubber speed cushion. Placed in the middle of the road between two rows of parked cars it incorporates a number of surprise features to catch out the inattentive cyclist. Highly recommended by Jeremy Clarkson.

The council is currently testing this model in Lorne Road E17.

Cycling suppressant

Clare Road E11. This is the classically stupid lay-out of speed cushions in the London Borough of Waltham Forest (and probably everywhere else). The objections are twofold. Firstly, these cheapskate rubber cushions do not hold vehicle speeds down to 20 mph. You can thunder over them at speeds well in excess of that. Secondly, they encourage erratic and dangerous driving behaviour, because most drivers swerve into the middle of the road to get their wheels to pass through the gaps.

Sometimes there is just a single cushion in the centre of the carriageway. In some situations this encourages drivers to swerve over to the other side of the road to get past.

When these rubber speed cushions first started appearing on local streets I rang up the Town Hall and finally got through to the highway engineer in charge. I explained that as a cyclist I did not enjoy the new experience of drivers coming right at me on my side of the road just because they were swerving to get round the cushions. Because he wasn't a cyclist he had no idea what I was talking about. He explained that there was no need for drivers to swerve round these lovely soft friendly cushions. Maybe not, I replied, but THEY DO. He then said that there were installed according to Department of Transport guidelines. Perfectly true. And what the DoT knows about cycling could be written on the back of a postage stamp. Finally he said he would monitor 'road accident statistics' to see if the cushions resulted in collisions with cyclists. The problem with that response is that road injury stats are not a true index of danger. Probably only a very few cyclists have ever been hit by a vehicle swerving to avoid a speed cushion. The problem is that the experience of cycling is rendered more unpleasant by having drivers race directly at you on streets with cushions arranged like this. The fact that they swerve back on to their side of the road at the last moment is small consolation.

Needless to say, many of the projected Sustrans North East London 'Olympic Greenways' networks incorporate 'quiet' routes with rubber speed cushions on them.

These rubber speed cushions have been a disaster. Every single one of them needs tearing up. I would rather have no traffic calming at all than crap like this.

The last time I rang up the highway engineers to talk about rubber speed cushions I was informed that the Borough had no plans at all to replace any of them. But that turns out not to be true. I'm interested to see that the Langham Road area (E11) proposed 20 mph zone consultation includes removing three sets of speed cushions - albeit the much rarer stone variety - on Hall Road and replacing them with speed humps. A tacit admission of failure and a welcome one. I hope that Waltham Forest Cycling Campaign respond to the consultation and fervently support this aspect of the proposed scheme.

Chris Boardman on cycling in London

THE mastermind of Britain's cycling gold medal haul today called for a complete overhaul of London's roads. Chris Boardman told the Evening Standard he wants to see roads transformed to make them safe for cyclists.

Boardman, 40, said: "In order to make cycling in London viable Boris Johnson really needs to make some ballsy decisions, and now is the time to do it. At the moment cars have priority and that has to change." Boardman has proposed re-painting road markings to give cyclists more room and giving them two-way access on one-way roads.

Kensington and Chelsea council is already testing a scheme for cyclists to be exempt from one-way road restrictions after hundreds of cyclists were found to be flouting the rules. Boardman wants to see an expansion of this kind of scheme across London.He said: "People just do not feel safe on the roads. We need to completely rethink the allocation of road space, and it is more than making cycle lanes wider.

The fundamental problem is car dependency: the number of cars on the roads, the priority they receive in transport planning, and the reckless, lawless and aggressive way many of them are driven. Unless these matters are addressed, mass cycling in London is going nowhere.

Locally, one simple practical thing which the council could do which would help me as a cyclist would be to get rid of those disastrously failed rubber speed cushions. They fail to slow the speeding driver and all they do is to encourage many drivers to swerve round them, which for a cyclist means you have cars coming towards you on your side of the road. Unfortunately the council has no plans whatsoever to do anything about them, and so they are going to be around for years, deterring some people from cycling and adding to the danger and unpleasantness for those of us who do.

How was £450,000 spent?

According to the officer’s report to tomorrow’s meeting of the London Borough of Waltham Forest’s Transport Liaison Consultative Group

This year we have received £450,000 for cycling facilities in the borough from Transport for London.

The report is anonymous (why?) but I would guess it was written by the borough’s cycling officer, Gina Harkell.

Where did that money go?

Most of the work will improve existing cycle lanes usually by widening them where they have been deemed too narrow and not up to the safety standard now required by Transport for London’s Cycling Centre for Excellence.

I’ve searched the net in vain to find out what that “safety standard” actually is. The fact that I can’t find it, and that TfL’s ‘Cycling Centre for Excellence’ doesn’t seem to have a website immediately tells me something. However, I can tell from personal experience what this “safety standard” is. And it’s crap:




















The only cycle lane in the borough which I’ve come across this year which has been widened is the one shown above – a short section of Hoe Street between Forest Road and the junction with St Mary Road. Plainly the white lining involved could only have cost a tiny fraction of £450,000. So where did the rest of the money go? Could we have a list of the other roads in the borough where the cycle lanes have been widened?

Alarm bells start to ring when I read the next sentence:

Sometimes cycle funds are added to a local safety scheme where the cycle networks cover the same roads.

Fascinating. ‘Local safety schemes’ may involve incidental benefits for cyclists (such as road humps which slow traffic) but they also involve benefits for pedestrians (pavement buildouts, pedestrian crossings) and benefits for motor traffic (new yellow line parking restrictions designed to prevent congestion and speed up traffic flow). It seems to me quite wrong that money which is supposed to be spent on cycling is siphoned off in this way. Sometimes ‘local safety schemes’ even make cycling more unpleasant and dangerous, as in the case of the borough’s disastrous programme of speed cushions.

So how much of that £450,000 was really spent on dedicated cycling facilities? The report to the Transport Liaison Consultative Group doesn’t say. Studious vagueness is the order of the day.

Officers should not be allowed to get away with reports like this. But in the London Borough of Waltham Forest anything goes. And if money supposed to be spent on cycling is being siphoned off and spent elsewhere in the transport budget that might explain why in a supposedly progressive cycling authority four out of ten local libraries have no cycle parking, and cycle stand provision is patchy, incoherent and grossly inadequate. Not to mention a zillion other ways in which cycling is marginalized and suppressed.

What's wrong with speed cushions?

What’s wrong with speed cushions? Four things, basically.

Firstly, they are far less effective than road humps at reducing vehicle speeds and can easily be driven over at speeds greater than 20 mph. This is of some considerable significance when you bear in mind that 10 per cent of pedestrians die when hit by a car at 20mph compared with 50 per cent at 30mph. Camden Cycling Campaign noted that on one local road supposedly 'calmed' in this way speed surveys indicate that even in the presence of the speed cushions 15% of drivers are exceeding 27.6 mph on this stretch of road.

Secondly, they actively encourage drivers to drive in an erratic fashion. If there is a single speed cushion and no car parked at the side some drivers swerve either to the kerb or into the opposite lane to avoid passing over the cushion. More commonly drivers change direction in order to get both sets of wheels in the gaps between the cushions. Usually this involves drivers steering into the centre of two lanes, with the result that they approach cyclists coming towards them head on. The danger to cyclists is well known: Speed cushions are likely to be shallower than road humps with gently tapering sides and by straddling the cushion, or crossing it with only two wheels, cars may reduce its traffic calming effect. As cyclists may be expected to bypass the speed cushions by using the space between kerb and cushion this potential abuse by cars is likely to have a detrimental impact on the safety of cyclists.




















The 'three in a row' pattern, with a motorist driving down the centre of the carriageway in order to get both sets of wheels in the gaps. Speed cushions encourage drivers to continue down the middle of the road, to the detriment of cyclists coming in the opposite direction.

Thirdly, speed cushions cannot be used at pedestrian crossing places because they can constitute a trip hazard.

These cushions (below, on Grove Road E17) are stupidly sited at a pedestrian crossing point between Beulah Path and College Road - just the place where drivers ought not to be encouraged to swerve erratically in order to drive through the gaps.




















Fourthly, the rubber ones (which, like those in the photographs above, are the ones mostly used in Waltham Forest) are slippery in wet weather.

Cyclists and cycle campaign groups do not like speed cushions. Thus Southwark Cyclists say (pdf download): We do not regard speed cushions as effective forms of traffic calming. Traffic may veer to avoid them, moving into the centre of the road. Cyclists are forced into vulnerable positions on the road, either right in the gutter or in the centre of the road, potentially into the on-coming traffic. Alternatively, vehicles with wider axles are able to ignore them.

There is anecdotal evidence of how individual cyclists dislike them. In the Comments after this news item: I used to cycle a lot around these lanes, and as a cyclist I found the speed cushions actually increased the risk to cyclists, as drivers were distracted with the effort to centre their cars over the humps so did not pay proper attention to other road users, and because the cars are centred over the humps they are often travelling to close when passing cyclists.

So: speed cushions don’t cut speed and actually make roads more dangerous for cyclists. Why, then, do local authorities continue to install them?

Basically because both bus companies and the emergency services don’t like road humps. They make for a bumpy bus ride. And they slow down fire engines, police cars and ambulances. Whereas speed cushions can be driven over at much faster speeds, without so much vibration.

The London Ambulance Service has always been the most vocal critic of road humps (and is frequently quoted on petrolhead websites like the self-styled ‘Association of British Drivers’). The London Ambulance Service has claimed that the 30,000 humps on the capital’s roads cause up to 500 deaths a year because its crews suffer delays in reaching victims of cardiac arrest. That suspiciously neat statistic needs to be regarded with scepticism. It appears to have no support from other health professionals.

It is also the case that the London Ambulance Service is conspicuously silent about road deaths as a health issue.

In fact slowing down ambulances may not always be a bad thing, bearing in mind that London ambulances are involved in an average of more than four crashes a day. These crashes cost more than £300,000 a month in compensation, legal fees and repair bills.

If the London Ambulance Service is so concerned about issues of life and death it is remarkable that it is utterly indifferent about identifying how many people die or are injured in ambulance crashes: An LAS spokeswoman insisted all accidents involving its vehicles were investigated but said the service does not hold data on the number of people injured or killed in such crashes.

The other obvious point is that the biggest thing slowing down emergency vehicles is not road humps but congestion. The average central London traffic speed is just 10mph. The Bristol average is worst at 16.8mph, followed by 16.9mph for the whole of London. The next-slowest cities were Glasgow - 17.3mph - followed by Southampton and Liverpool, both 17.8mph, and then Manchester with 18.8mph.

Road humps are a very crude way of slowing down vehicles. The technology exists to fit every motor vehicle with a device which would automatically reduce speed to match the speed limit. This is opposed by the motor lobby, which even resists ‘black box’ technology, which would record vehicle speed at the time of a collision.

Ironically such technology was developed to research airbags inflating when drivers went over road humps and is now fitted to luxury cars as an incidental accessory:

Singh's trial used evidence from a device fitted to the airbag system of his Range Rover - the first time such technology has played a role in a British court. The Event Data Recorder, similar to an aircraft's black box, was used to establish that a force equivalent to 42mph was lost in one fifth of a second in the crash. This helped police put the defendant's speed at around 72mph.

Data recorders in airbags can record a car's speed and deceleration and other information such as the pressure on a brake pedal at the time of a crash. Car manufacturers began installing them in vehicles in the 1990s to test airbag performance - early airbags often wrongly deployed in cars being driven over bumps.

Road humps, for all their crudity, have a track record of success in reducing casualties. Speed cushions, by contrast, are irrational, ineffective and potentially dangerous to cyclists and pedestrians. Instead of making the roads safer they are more likely to deter cycling by agitating traffic, not calming it.

But they continue to be installed, and the London Borough of Waltham Forest has no plans to get rid of the ones which now exist on scores (hundreds?) of local streets. As always, so-called ‘road safety’ is determined by politics rather than science and rationality.

And it is characteristically dishonest of this Council to claim that speed cushions ‘are preferred by…cyclists’ to road humps. They aren’t.

Just fancy that!

From the website of the Waltham Forest Cycling Campaign:

Speed Cushions
The council has said it will not use speed cushions in future traffic calming schemes. We have long campaigned against their use and are pleased that sustained pressure from us has resulted in this change of policy.

Just released by the Council:

Public Consultation 20 mph zone Church Hill Area
Speed cushions reduce vehicle speeds. Speed cushions are different from ‘road humps’ as they do not extend across the entire road width and for this reason are preferred by the emergency services, cyclists and bus operators.

This scheme proposes to install ten speed cushions between Hoe Street and Shernhall Street on Church Hill and Prospect Hill.

(LBWF consultation document March 2008)

Note. Church Hill and Prospect Hill are marked as a recommended cycling route on TfL's London Cycling Guide 4. They form part of the London Cycle Network 'quiet route' to Redbridge.

And now for something completely different:





















This is the London Cycle Network sign on Folkestone Road, telling cyclists to turn right on to Woodbury Road. Too bad that whoever designed the proposed Church Hill Area scheme forgot to take into account that this is a designated cycling route, as the proposal is to make this turn into Woodbury Road NO ENTRY. Oops!

And just for the record, 'Folkestone Road' is not spelt correctly in the consultation document. Oops!